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The other day, Ben had just returned from his Cross Vegas adventure, so he was still asleep when Sophie woke up. She looked at him groaning in bed, then toddled into the living room and hurried back carrying Ben’s favorite toy: a Bicycling magazine. She burbled as she handed it to him, then toddled away again to fetch him her favorite toy, too, which at the moment is handfuls of practice golf balls. I was so impressed. She’s sixteen months old and she already has empathy, she already has strategies for attempting to cheer up her dad, she’s already got truly astounding social skills.
I can’t claim much credit. I think that daycare taught her to share toys like that. When I drop her off in the mornings, the other children usually rush up to her, each with a toy in their hands, eager to be the first to get to pass a toy to Sophie. Sharing toys, waiting turns, accepting not being the center of attention: these are all skills that Sophie has, all skills that are astounding for her age, and all skills that we don’t really teach at home. She learned them at daycare. I can’t believe that I still sometimes feel guilty for leaving her at daycare three days a week.
Daycare has not only taught Sophie to be a decent human being: it’s also at daycare that she usually eats her most nutritious meal of the day, since Daycare Teacher somehow not only watches five toddlers all at once, she also cooks them hot meals for lunch, turkey stew and vegetable casserole and other foods far beyond Sophie’s at-home diet, when sometimes all she’ll eat are frozen mangoes, plain yogurt, and toast. Daycare is cleaner than home (I don’t know how Daycare Teacher does it), surrounded with lush greenery and a sense of calm, and when I come to pick Sophie up, they’re often deeply enthralled by some engaging task: counting stuffed monkeys or singing a song about tortillas or learning to throw balls to each other or even just getting their hair brushed, lovingly.
Really, it’s the perfect daycare. We looked a long time before we found it. Still, I feel guilty leaving her there. Work has been particularly busy lately, so Soph has been in daycare four days each week for the past two weeks, and they’re long days, too, 7:30 am to 5 pm. I feel like I’m missing out on Sophie time.
So here’s a list of Sophie’s recent skills, the ones that I’m almost-missing and want to hold on to:
- Sitting in a grown-up chair at restaurants, not a high-chair
- Dancing to country music, or any Prairie-Home-Companion-style music, in an awkwardly-cute arm-flapping way.
- Going down the scary-fast tunnel-slide at the park.
- Growing a mullet . When is it time to cut a baby’s hair?, I wonder. When she grows a mullet, I would have answered before this month, but I swear that Sophie’s mullet is cute and curled and will grow out soon.
- Climbing onto the couch herself. Also the parent-bed and the top of her Lil Tikes picnic table. Fortunately, so far, she also knows how to climb down safely. I realize that “She hasn’t hurt herself yet” is a particularly stupid way of thinking, but I keep thinking it.
- Saying “shoes,” “uh-oh,” “yes,” and a babbly version of “all done,” “I love you,” and a couple others, in addition to her stalwarts of “momma,” “daddy,” “hi,” “bye-bye,” “cat,” and “ball.”
- Telling me what shoes she thinks I should wear. She wanted me to wear my crocs, because she was wearing hers. I thought I had another decade before I’d be getting fashion-advice from my daughter, but I thought wrong.
- Giggling even more than she used to.
- Hearing her dad come home almost before I do, and running to the door, squealing.
- And, as already mentioned: bringing her dad his magazine in bed.
Here is Sophie at the kids’ part of last weekend’s cyclocross race. Sophie is the littlest one, in the pink helmet – the only one who still needs to be pushed on her bike, but she is only 16 months old, after all. The best part about this photo is that Sophie’s friend Olivia (the big girl on the far right) taught her that if she wants to ride her bike, she has to wear her helmet. Now I just need to convince her dad of that same rule for when Sophie wants to ride HIS bike. It’s hard to stop them, though, when they look so cute.
There’s this Mo’ Babies Challenge 
where mom-bloggers are supposed to help out some interesting new moms by reminiscing about those first few days home with a baby.
Those days, for me, are mostly a haze, but here’s what I remember: Sophie was nursing. Sophie was always nursing, then, it seems. And even though it was challenging to sit there for so many hours of every day, nursing her, it was also miraculous. No one will ever trust me this completely again, I thought. No one will ever even smell this marvellous again. Ben called her Lil Stick of Butter, because she smelled like sweet cream (she sometimes still does – but now when I lean in to inhale the back of her neck, she gives me a funny look and starts tickling me). Back then, she fit along our forearms, she just rested there, blithely living her life as one big trust fall.
She was one of those few things that you can look at for hours and not get bored. A campfire, ocean waves, and newborn babies: that is it, those are the only things that I can happily look at for hours like that.
IMG_4477, originally uploaded by Ben Love.
Oh, those little eyes, that head, that nose. I can still stare at this photo for far too long.
But here’s my story: Sophie was nursing, and Ben was out surfing or diaper-shopping or something, and the doorbell rang. I figured it was one of our friends who kept stopping by to give us wonderful food and then leave. So I just picked up Sophie and walked her to the door. She held on, still nursing.
It was a delivery-man on the other side of the door. Our birth-class teacher had told us that it’s natural to lose all modesty in the later stages of birth, and I didn’t have much modesty to begin with — but at this point, a week or so after the birth, even I should have known that it’s not great to answer the door to a stranger with your boobs hanging out. The delivery-guy did look at my bare breasts, but he quickly pulled his eyes up to mine and — God bless him – sincerely announced, “You have a new baby! That’s wonderful.”
So that’s what I remember. No matter how goofily I acted, the world celebrated my baby.
This morning, Sophie managed to turn the plastic base to our blender into a bracelet for herself – then insisted on wearing it to daycare. She also turns her stacking circles into bracelets. Also, you know those loose plastic rings that hook together for fastening toys onto strollers? Those, too, are bracelets to Sophie. She turned our camping compass into her necklace (it’s on a lanyard). She can’t even talk yet, but she points to the clothes she wants to wear, and already shows a flair for interesting colors and varied accessories.
I, on the other hand, went so long without wearing jewelery that the holes in my pierced ears closed up.
I’m not sure how to raise a girly-girl.
I know that I’ll keep encouraging her to do all the things she likes doing: vrooming her toy cars around the floor, hurling her small balls in a game that loosely resembles catch, chasing the cats, exploring her legos, climbing on everything. Not all of her hobbies are ultra-feminine. But she does like to pretend to put on lipstick, and this is astounding, considering that she really has no model to emulate. The closest I get to wearing lipstick is chapstick. My friend S has already informed Sophie that S will be teaching her how to actually wear makeup, when the time comes — because it’s not a skill I have.
My colleague C has prepared me with her own family’s strategy for dealing with the overabundance of pop-culture princess references that will soon start trying to influence little Sophie. In C’s family, a “princess” means someone who is strong. “Take a princess bite of that food” means to take a big bite. Instead of banning all froufrou princessness and turning it into tantalizing forbidden fruit, this family has simply worked with the princess tidal wave, gently pushing it into a deeper feminist model.
I like this idea. I plan to use it myself.
But yesterday on our evening walk, we stopped to chat with a neighbor and Sophie managed to charm that neighbor into giving her a beaded bracelet.
Maybe I’m thinking about this a lot because, the day before yesterday, at a college alumni party, I had a typical conversation that took an unexpected turn:
“Your baby is adorable.”
“Thanks. I actually worry that she’s dangerously adorable. Soon she’ll discover that she can get anything she wants just by batting her eyelashes, you know? She recently persuaded me to buy her a plastic ball that I didn’t even want to buy, just by holding that stupid ball and giggling so adorably. It’s scary that she can already manipulate me, before she can even talk.”
“You know, that’s a real skill. You should help her develop it. The ability to make sales is going to help her later in life. Not just for salespeople, either. Your baby has management skills.”
“You think I should help my baby learn to manipulate me more?”
“Oh, yeah. Raise the stakes of what it takes to get you to buy a ball. Give her different challenges. Let her work on her sales and management skills. If she showed some unusual skill at throwing a ball, you would develop it. You’ve gotta do the same thing here.”
I don’t know. I’m not yet ready to give her eyelash-batting lessons.
I think she’s going to figure it out on her own.
Sarah Palin terrifies me. It’s not just that she’s a liar about the Bridge to Nowhere story, or that she’s probably guilty of abusing her power to get her former brother-in-law fired. It’s not just that she’s stupid about Creationism, Global Warming, and Abstinence-only sex-ed. It’s also that she’s self-righteous in her stupidity, trying to impose her beliefs on others, convinced that she’s right, despite all evidence to the contrary. She’s Dick Cheney and George Bush, again.
A wonderful new drug hits the market: the Republican Party.
The “warnings” at the end are the best part.
I’ve been thinking about mommyblogging ever since I read this post on Mom-101. She’d just returned from the BlogHer conference and felt a division between women who blog and women who mommyblog. She writes it best herself:
I still have a knee-jerk response to allign myself with the one gal in the circle not able to contribute an opinion about the Wiggles or a light little anecdote about mucus plugs….
I often feel the need to offer a disclaimer. “I have a parenting blog, but…”
But…it’s funny.
But…I can also discuss Bush’s heinous disregard for the Kyoto treaty and the potential impact for generations to come.
But…hey, do you like Journey? Wait til you hear my new ringtone!
Saying “while I write about my child, I think really what I do is look at social issues, politics, pop culture, and my own feelings about work and the world through the eyes of a new mother” is a wee bit verbose in most contexts. Mommyblogger it is. Blech.
It’s not that blogging about our children is such a horrible thing. I mean, Dooce can make washing a bottle more interesting than most women could make a menage-a-trois with George Clooney and Johnny Depp. But in my opinion, the diminutive, mommy, automatically demeans whatever it is the author has to say. That no matter how many degrees she holds, how many times she uses words like ostensibly and onomatopoeia, she’s still writing something trivial.
Mom-101 concludes that she thinks of herself as a writer first, not a mommy. She wants to be a blogger, not a mommyblogger. She wants the widest possible audience, and now she’s got me thinking.
I think this helps me figure out some of my own issues with mommying in general. The very word “mommy” implies triviality, as Mom-101 points out. “Mom jeans” means “uncool jeans.” Mom characters are never the heroes of movies – unless they’re moms who are insane & acting out, like Thelma & Louise, or Elaine in The Graduate or I guess the Stepford Wives: hardly heroes, really. These moms always seem far older than I feel. Moms in pop-culture are self-sacrificing and a bit clueless, fading nobly into the background, always shutting the kids’ bedroom door and disappearing, oblivious to what the kids are really up to. If they have interests of their own, their hobbies are mocked.
Recent feminists like this have made craftsiness cool, even knitting, but I don’t yet feel any coolness to mommying.
I don’t know how to be a mom, I realized, let alone a mommyblogger. I don’t have any cultural models that don’t trivialize the role — even while sometimes putting it on a pedestal, if that makes any sense. Up on a pedestal, there’s no room to move around, to be human, you know?
Long ago, in college, I loved Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, where she argues that we write our lives before living them. We write our lives in our minds, planning out possible narratives — and so it’s very dangerous to read stories that consistently end, “And then they got married and lived happily ever after.”
Life doesn’t end at the altar. There’s a whole lot of stories to tell about the choices women make after they turn 30, altar or no altar. There’s choices about careers and love and community and solitude and exploration and nesting and aging and, yes, mommying.
So I read mommyblogs. I read Dooce and ponder what to think of her bossiness. I read Girl in a Party Hat even though I don’t have a five-year-old with Down Syndrome, or a seven-year-old, or a career as a journalist: I just like her attitude and admire her choices. I read the blog of a former friend I haven’t spoken to in years because I love these stories, and need them. And I suspect I might be a better mommy, or just a better 30-something-year-old, if I had discovered these mommyblogs earler. Because we’re all writing a woman’s life.
It was one of the best weekends in a long time, although we didn’t do anything particularly special — except spend most of the weekend outdoors, enjoying the family.
Saturday morning, while Ben biked with the B&L speedsters, Sophie and I explored the ocean-bluff-top gardens of the Self-Realization Fellowship. The SRF is a giant compound near us, topped with a glitzy gold dome which looks far too cult-ish even for new-agey me. But I kept hearing good things about their gardens, which are free and beautiful, so Sophie and I went for a stroll. She loved the stairs, the koi-pond, the sand-pit near the meditators (you try meditating next to a giggly baby throwing sand – I was impressed that the SRF folk maintained their equanimity), and the birds & butterflies & waves crashing far below us. Everyone just kept smiling at Sophie. We both left in a calmer mood.
Then I bought a new road-bike. Technically, it’s a cross-bike, because Ben and the Cowbell family think I’m going to race cyclocross. We bought it used from one of their teammates. It’s a better bike than I deserve, filled with pro-level parts that I can’t name, I can just say they’re smoooooth. The wheelset alone is worth $1000 new, Ben says, but he took the wheels off (for his own racing bike) and gave me another set. My favorite thing about my new bike is that it’s orange, it’s named Salsa, and it fits me beautifully. Oh, and the seat is a Terry women’s seat: so perfectly comfortable that I don’t think I’ll ever go back to any other kind of seat.
I had had a steel bianchi, and I liked the steel (retro, shock-absorbing) but not the fit, so I just wasn’t ever riding here as much as I used to back in Connecticut. where the Devil’s Gear kept me sane through grad-school. Really, Matthew’s insanity saved my sanity and my insanity. ElmCityCycling became most of my social life. They gave us a parade when we left. Even more than that: I wasn’t certain about dating Ben until I introduced him to the Lulu Sunday ride crowd. (They approved him, partly because he brewed his own beer, but mostly because he beat arrogant Spinning Andy at hill-climbs. Ben was on a cheap fixie that day, while Andy was on the most expensive bike there, and Andy was so shamed that he stayed away for a month. Ben got nicknamed Saint Ben. I got confirmation that I’d found a good man.)
Back then, I biked more than Ben. Then out here, the high-way-like feel of even back-roads, the steep sandy downhills (because it hardly ever rains – but steep sandy downhills scare me), the packs of people on $5000 bikes seemingly looking down their noses at everyone else, and the sheer repetition of biking up and down the old 101 kept me from being as passionate about biking as I used to be. Oh, yeah, and pregnancy. I still rode around town on my beater, even on my due-date, but I wasn’t going hundreds of miles a week. I wasn’t feeling the joy.
Ben decided I just needed to sell my Bianchi and get a new bike. So he sold the Bianchi for me and found me this Salsa, and then on Saturday, while Soph-a-loaf napped, I biked inland, away from the 101, around Rancho Santa Fe, which is as close to recreating New England backroads as I can find here.
It was glorious. Ben said I glowed for the rest of the day.
Then there was a nice barbecue at D&R’s house-warming party, and that ended a great Saturday.
Sunday, we skipped our usual heavy eggs-or-pancake breakfast places and instead went to Swami’s, where I had an acai bowl that felt wonderful. We walked on the beach. Then Ben went riding while Soph and I went to our UU fellowship.
That was the least-sustaining part of the weekend. The choir wasn’t wonderful. The sermon didn’t make me think. The seats were hot. The coffee-hour conversations were lackluster. I’m terrible at ending friendships, especially a friendship with a religious congregation — but I’ve decided I’m going to stay away from UU for a while. I agree with all the principles, but the problem is that I just haven’t actually found community there, not the kind of community that I’ve enjoyed in the past at churches that I don’t intellectually agree with. I keep thinking that it’s me. If only I joined more committees, maybe I’d feel better about belonging — but I’m working full-time and raising a baby three-quarters time and really just don’t have time to commit to any committee, and I resent the pressure to volunteer. If only I reached out more, maybe I’d feel the community that this UU fellowship is always talking about — but actually, I don’t think that many people feel it, they just talk about it. I’ve been a member of this fellowship for a year-and-a-half now, and it’s been one of the most stressful years-and-a-half of my life, mostly because of adjusting to parenthood. And all the fellowship does is add stress. It’s too bad. We did meet B&C there, and M&M. Those are friendships I treasure, but those are friendships that can continue outside the fellowship.
Sunday afternoon was better. We spent hours at the park with the Cowbell family. The grown-ups practiced jumping over barriers with their bikes, taking turns watching the kids play. Parks are so much more fun with other adults. Afterwards, the Cowbells came over for pizza and more kids-playing in our backyard, but Sophie was so exhausted that she actually went into her room, pulled her blankets through the slats in her crib, and lay down on the floor to sleep. It was a good weekend.
I can’t stop thinking about Sarah Palin. I realize that Barack Obama believes quite nobly that families shouldn’t be discussed in political campaigns – but I still think that families are political. I realize that many Palin-defenders claim she’s being subject to an unfeminist double-standard that overanalyzes her personal choices, when feminsm should be all about women’s rights to make choices — but I think that someone whose politics include imposing her choices on others (against abortion, against full sex-ed) doesn’t get to also hide behind the mantle of free choice. And so I still keep wondering:
- How can someone support abstinence-only education, when the evidence shows it doesn’t work AND her own teenage daughter shows it doesn’t work?
- How can someone be pro-life when she apparently boarded a plane while in labor, endangering the life of her special-needs baby? How can someone go back to work 3 days after that special-needs baby is born? What will Palin’s politics about parental leave be? momsrising.org actually has a petition you can sign, asking Palin where she stands on issues like parental leave and healthcare for kids, since no one really knows her stance on these mom-crucial political issues.
- How can anyone run a national campaign with a 5-month-old?
- How can anyone seriously believe that creationism should be taught, that humans don’t cause global warming, and that Hillary supporters will support her?
