Sundays with Stretchy Pants

She’s addicted to the self-scan checkout thing at the library, which is fine, but I don’t have a truck with which to haul her freshly-scanned books home. She walks into the library, card in hand, and randomly grabs and tosses books at me to shove in the library bag as if the bag is like a magic, bottomless bag that can never be filled to capacity. There are usually 3-4 other people who need to shove books into the bag, too, but she hogs it up all for herself. And then I strain my shoulder trying to carry it. And then I take her home and force her to listen to every single book over and over until she cries. I’m passive-aggressive that way.

Maya isn’t the only one who got a new card; all of the girls updated their cards to the fancy new color ones and we got my niece all signed up with one of her very own, too. I really don’t mind lugging home a giant bag of books. I do mind the fact that each child has her very own library bag, but they all claim their bags are “toooooo heeeeaaavvvvyyyyy” *whine, stomp* and when I make them carry their own, they check out books based on weight and ease of carrying. Not cool.

You might have noticed by how rarely I update my sidebar that It takes me forever to finish a book, but that doesn’t stop me from adding books to my pile. I’m a fast reader, but I really only have time to read my own stuff at bedtime. If I’m reading during the day, it’s kid stuff. You know, to the kids. Or toilet stuff, like magazines. You know, on the toilet. (What? Is that TMI? But Everyone Poops. It’s no big deal.)

We usually have a family book going at all times and I used to let Lena and Liberty read ahead if they wanted to, but that got too annoying and hard to keep track of and then they would fight over who got to read it first and I like to have them not fighting and not annoying me at all times, so now they can’t read ahead in the family book, which makes them a little desperate. If I sit down on my own bed, behind closed doors and start to read my own book, it’s only a matter of a few minutes before somebody comes in and says, “Oh, you’re reading? Then you won’t mind reading this to us,” as if my piteous life has no purpose unless I’m serving them in some capacity. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

I long for the days when I had a breastfeeding infant/toddler/pre-schooler and I could retire to my bed with just that wee little one and, under the guise of trying to get the baby to sleep, just read and read and read to my heart’s content, only to emerge from the bedroom hours later with a shrug for Bryan that said, “Whaddya gonna do? Darn baby didn’t wanna sleep. What’s for dinner?” Now the darn baby has her own library card and, even worse, if I tried to take her to bed and put her down for a nap, her mouth wouldn’t stop running long enough for me to read a sentence. Darn baby with her fancy new library card.

Related posts

• Oh, Children (10)
• Lest I Be Misunderstood (8)
• Well, it sounded big. (8)
• Well, fine. Whatever. (2)
• Weekend Fun (5)

My mom gets uncomfortable when I do things differently than she did. This is unfortunate because most of the things that I have ever done differently are all related to parenting, and this parenting thing is going to last the rest of my life. That’s a long time for her to be uncomfortable with me. To be fair, I probably made her uncomfortable right at birth, coming out looking exactly like my dad while her older daughter had the good sense to look exactly like her. I also made her uncomfortable when I didn’t become homecoming queen. She was queen 40 years ago and, let me tell you, when you meet her for the first time it will come up in conversation. I’m a huge disappointment in so many ways, not just as a parent to her granddaughters.

My mom doesn’t come right out and say that she has a problem with my breastfeeding, co-sleeping, homebirthing, and homeschooling. She does other things like write in the Grandmother’s Book of Memories that I gave her:

“Dear Lena and Liberty, It sucks that I didn’t get to bond with you more because I didn’t get to feed you. Your mom is so hateful for hogging up the feeding. Love, Grandma. P.S. I didn’t nurse her and she turned out fine. Except for the hateful part.”

That’s a paraphrase, but I definitely captured the spirit of the sentiment. I know that these choices I’ve made have left her feeling insecure and I know better than to bring up homeschooling, breastfeeding, and co-sleeping, but those are on-going things so I can understand some on-going touchiness. Maya’s homebirth was just a one-time thing so I didn’t know it carried the emotional triggers for her until I was chatting on the phone with her the other day.

I called her just to chat and after a little bit our chit chat turned to the subject of movies. I told her we took the kids to see Horton Hears a Who, and she said, “I wanna see Baby Mama so bad!” and I told her how funny I think Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are. She especially agreed about Amy and said she just loved her in that tv series, what was it?

Me: Saturday Night Live?

Mom: No, she’s not in that. It’s the one about the pregnant people. Something about Underbelly.

Me: Oh, I know who you’re talking about; that’s Rachael Harris. I love her! She is not in enough stuff.

Mom: That’s right, I get them confused. I just saw Rachael Harris in a Lifetime movie with Ricki Lake.

(Screw you guys, I am not googling that shit to find a link for you because, not only do I not care what Lifetime movie that would be, I would also be embarrassed for google to see me googling that. And that’s saying something because I google a lot of weird shit.)

Then she went on about how much she likes that Ricki Lake and she saw her on The View and she’s just so sweet and lovely and whatnot. And I’m rollin’ with the conversation and my brain’s trying to focus on keeping the happy vibe going and the closest thing to my brain’s surface about Ricki Lake is that documentary she just made, so I said, “Yeah, she has a documentary out that I want to see called The Business of Being Born.”

“Oh, I know! You know, she had her baby in a bathtub,” she said with what I interpreted as a good-for-her type tone.

I replied, “Not only in a bathtub, but in a bathtub at home!” In my own good-for-her tone, with an underlying tone that said, “You love Ricki Lake and she had a homebirth. You can love me in spite of my homebirth. Right Mommy? Right?”

Silence.

Silence.

“Yeah, well, now she’s a single mother.”

Aaaaand we’re back. There’s that flat, curt tone I’m used to! Let me just snuggle up to it…Mmm…that’s one sharp blankie. Feels like home.

*sigh*

It’s just so rare that we have an actual conversation that feels like 2 grown-ups talking to each other, so I was seduced by the normalcy and I forgot to never, ever, ever bring up anything that is in any way related to the myriad ways in which I slap her in the face with my different choices. Having a normal conversation with her just makes me feel like we’re grown-ups, you know? With different ideas and just different differences that don’t have anything to do with how we feel about each other or what we think about each other. Because we’re mother and daughter. And normal conversation makes me feel like we know that we’re mother and daughter and that’s pretty important, and no differences of opinion or action or dreams can ever change all that. And then when it turns ugly out of the blue, I’m lost again. And I stay lost for a bit because I like to beat myself up over it and wonder when I will learn.

She has told me before that I never remember anything good, but the truth is, I remember the good. I remember because there is nothing like the joy of connecting with this all-important person and then having that awful panic set in when you know that the connection is lost because of some unforseen change in her mood. I remember the good being constantly besieged by the bad. I remember the eggshells and I remember exactly how it felt when they cracked under my feet.

Related posts

• Lest I Be Misunderstood (8)
• TGIThursday! And Other Stuff For Which I Am Un-Thankful (6)
• Sick. Need Peach Hi-C. (6)
• Oh, Children (10)
• Yeah, Yeah, I Need to Blog (4)

Maya was crying really hard last night because she wants to be a baby again, “Yena and Yiberty were nice to me when I yas a baaaayyyybeeeeee!” *sob* I’m going to stop letting her watch home videos. Or, I should make her watch recent home videos where it appears that Lena and Liberty are much nicer to her than they are in real life. She doesn’t quite understand that I learned from my sister to turn the video camera off before all hell breaks loose. That way, when the kids are grown and they have complaints I can say, “Let’s go to the tape!” and they won’t be able to prove anything. For the record, Lena and Liberty are plenty nice to her as it is. I’m not really sure what that was all about last night, but I’m sure there’s some 4 1/2 year old thing going on. It did come on the heels of a park day where Maya played with some friends for about 2 hours without ever checking in with me. Or, maybe it’s because I suggested she could wipe her own butt from time to time. I don’t know. Anyway, we cuddled and cuddled and looked at her baby book while she pointed to all the things that she misses about being a baby. These things include, but are not limited to: being born, having Daddy cut her umbilical cord, floating in the midwife’s lovely herbal bath, being dressed in her first outfit, being carried in a sling, wearing a diaper, eating pureed carrots, and of course nursing. She also mentioned with contempt that nobody ever helps her get dressed. I resisted the urge to point out that the only time she ever allowed me to help her get dressed was when her brain was more comparable to a slug’s. Once she found out that she had control over her own arms and legs, if I so much as came into the room where she was getting dressed, she would screech at me in such a way that there was no mistaking that if I tried to help her, she would find a way to kill me. So we cuddled, she slept in my bed (as usual, but without first falling asleep in the bedroom that she shares with her sisters), I rubbed her back, and I didn’t point out all of the things she can do now that she’s big because it seemed like she needed to vent and it didn’t seem like I would be able to convince her that it’s better to be big because, really, it probably isn’t. *sigh*

Lena and Liberty also had a little flash of, “Hey, why don’t you mother us better?” yesterday. Thursday was homeschool gym day and I look at homeschool gym as a class, not a spectator event, so I don’t go into the loud, loud, poorly lit gym to watch. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t just because I like to talk to my friends out in the halls. It’s also because it’s a class. I don’t watch them do their beading class. Or pottery. Or art. I was informed yesterday at dinner that this is unjust and will not be tolerated any longer. Fine. Fine! I said it was fine. I will watch homeschool gym (sporadically) from now on, I promise.

No matter, I’m still riding high on the wave of pride induced by the fact that after gym yesterday, Lena and Liberty were looking through a box of freebies that another homeschool mom brought in for all of us to go through. There were some books and a bunch of VHS tapes, but Lena and Liberty both grabbed for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail tape. In my family, we enjoy this kind of thing, so seeing them fight over that tape was akin to the pride I feel when I’m told they look like me. They watched that movie once a long time ago and they remembered the black night saying “It’s just a flesh wound,” after losing his arms, and the fact that everybody’s running around pretending to ride horses. I’m pretty sure a little tear fell from eye when I overheard their reminiscing. Watching it this time, though, was a whole new thing for them because they couldn’t read the first time they watched it. The opening credits had them rolling with laughter. “A moose once bit my sister,” hahahahahaha! Again, I say *sigh*

Related posts

• Lest I Be Misunderstood (8)
• Nine Years (9)
• We’re Supposed to do Things Right? (10)
• Things I’ve Smiled About Today (7)
• Sick. Need Peach Hi-C. (6)

Hurry and check out this post over at One-of-Those-Women (thanks Dawn). If my telling you to go look at it isn’t enough to make you do it (don’t you trust me?), here’s a quote from it:

As I signalled in an earlier post, the Male Gaze is problematic for mothers of breastfeeding babies: they use their body in a way that’s culturally challenging: they feed their hungry babies in daylight, not hidden in the shadows! One element I’ve always felt caused more reaction than not, was that mothers in photos of with their breastfeeding babies, always tend to look to the baby, excluding the onlooker. None of these sparky mothers are looking at the baby! Some are looking directly at you, is a powerful and obvious challenge. This is totally not the scenario of weakness and ‘being looked at’ in most glamour and fashion photography (and soft core pornography).

There are lots of interesting things in the post, what with the whole feminists with make-up on?!? (*gasp*) thing, but what I love the most is that she pointed out that these mothers are not looking at the nurslings. There they are, looking fashionable and gorgeous, nursing their babies, and they’re all staring right at you pervy onlookers like, “Yeah, I’m nursing a baby. With my breasts. Grow up you idiot.”

Indeed, I have lots of pictures of me breastfeeding and I could only find one where I’m looking at the camera. It was taken when Lena and Liberty were 5 months old and I’m nursing them both. They’re sleeping with their legs all intertwined under a blanket and I remember looking at them and just getting all giddy and wanting a picture of that moment. It was not too long before that that we were still struggling with all kinds of premie issues and birth defect issues that scared the hell out of us for many months. It had been a whirlwind and everything had finally been a-ok for more than a couple of weeks at a time, and that happiness just washed all over me (thank you oxycontin oxytocin) and I wanted a picture of the preciousness. I remember taking great care to make sure the blanket covered every. bit. of. skin. before Bryan snapped it because I didn’t want the film developer at Frank’s Supermarket (Chesaning’s number one grocer!) to turn me in for indecent photographs.

Yeah, um, well done.

And out in public? For as much as I knew that if anyone ever came up to me and asked me to leave because of breastfeeding my baby/toddler/pre-schooler I would say, “No, thank you,” I was certainly very quick to turn away from any spectator, thus avoiding giving off any bring-it-bitch vibes. My vibe was more of a “Yes, I’m using my dirty pillows out in public, but I don’t want any trouble. Look at how I’m looking lovingly at my baby. Aren’t we precious? Please just keep walking, just keep walking, just keep walking.” *sigh* That post makes me want to borrow somebody’s nursling (or two) so I can run about breastfeeding in public and staring down the gapers with my new and improved grow-up-you-idiot vibe. I love the internet. I wish it would’ve been alive when I was little.

Related posts

• Weekend Fun (5)
• Pac-Man Fever (6)
• Oh, Children (10)
• Lest I Be Misunderstood (8)
• Is There Something on My Face? (6)

I love my life. I’m doing exactly what I always wanted to do. I love my husband. I love my kids. I love staying home with them and I especially love homeschooling. I loved breastfeeding long enough for the weaning stories to include lines like, “Your milk’s all gone, Mama. It went down the drain in your nipple.” I love co-sleeping and I love gentle discipline. However, I’m fully aware that in doing all of these attach-y type things, it is part of an effort to re-do my childhood. I was raised by people who didn’t have very good childhoods. I believe both of my parents have attachment disorders. I believe I have an attachment disorder. And I believe I didn’t know what love was until that first day that I walked out of the hospital and left Lena and Liberty there because they were too premature to come home with me. I further believe that if I hadn’t co-slept and breastfed these girls on demand, I would not have been able to take that fierce mama love and translate it into attachment. I believe my parents love me, but attachment is a whole different thing.

Anyway, I’m putting this out there because, while I would not trade my life for anything, sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard. And sometimes I write about it with a derisive style and I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. I don’t tell my kids that I think they are black holes of need. That would be mean. I try to meet their needs and then I meet my needs by drinking. Just kidding! I try to meet their needs and it is impossible. Because they’re children. This impossibility and my inadequacy as a mother weigh on me and I deal with it, like I deal with most things, with sarcasm. Self-preservation can be ugly. I’m just trying to make it a little bit funny. The end.

Related posts

• Oh, Children (10)
• Sick. Need Peach Hi-C. (6)
• Well, fine. Whatever. (2)
• We’re Supposed to do Things Right? (10)
• Things I’ve Smiled About Today (7)

Breastfeeding is legal? In Public? But, but, there are breasts and feeding involved. Offensive.Ha ha on you, Fossil, Inc. I’m glad that this case went beyond your typical staged nurse-in with media coverage. I’m glad this mom threatened to sue and I’m glad she walked away with a little bit of compensation from Fossil. It does get me wondering, though, if this kind of thing will stop happening any time soon. Every time there is a publicized case like this, I tend to think, “There, now we’re done with that nonsense.” Um, rose-colored glasses anybody? In my many, many years of baring my breasts for the purpose of sustaining life or, quite frankly, to get a kid to just be quiet for a minute, I was never asked to leave anywhere and I never even endured any mean looks or comments (well, except maybe from family and/or friends and/or other people in the privacy of my own and/or their own home, but that’s to be expected. Ahem). And more than half of my breastfeeding years were spent in a very small town where that kind of thing is just not typical. It’s a little bit shocking to me that this particular case happened in a Manhattan show room. I would think a big city would be the last place a breastfeeding mother would have to endure that kind of harrassment. Small towns, excuse me, some small towns are not typically tolerant of people who do things a little bit differently. Maybe that’s the difference. A small town might have its hands full bitching at the librarian for asking if it would be a problem if she put the award-winning book And Tango Makes Three on the shelf*, so they wouldn’t have time to wig out about public breastfeeding. I wonder if there is a master list somewhere that ranks the wig-out worthiness of these offensive things. Maybe I was never harrassed for breastfeeding at, say, the library in my hometown because the people who would have harrassed me were too busy scouring the shelves for gay penquin porn. GASP! “There’s that Aldrich girl breastfeeding one of her toddlers right here in the library! I’m gonna give her a whatfor. Wait, let me look at the list:
1. Gays
2. Protestants
3. Breastfeeding mothers
4. Murderers”

Who knows? Maybe I was saved by that list on more than one occasion.

*Last time I was visiting family, I attended the hometown book club with my very special friend Mechelle and the librarian asked us what we thought about having that book on the shelf. It’s pretty sad that she had to ask, but it’s super extra sad that one mother (speaking for the majority there) said with a shudder, “I wouldn’t want to explain that to my 4 year old!” Irony of ironies, the book we were actually discussing at the book club was Maus. Well, I thought it was ironic anyway and I had lots of trouble restraining myself from drawing comparisons between this mom’s ideology and that of Hitler’s. It was tough, but I held back. I want it noted that I held back even after she implied that the fact that I don’t have a problem with homosexuality is because my mom is, um, more active socially** than her saintly mother. Huh? I know, it was hard for me to follow too. And it was hard for me to not stand up and say, “Oh, you did not just bring my mama into this!” and stuff. That would’ve been very Jerry Springer of me and that is where I draw the line.

**In this case I’m using the phrase “active socially” with a wink and a nudge. I’m not talking about volunteerism and stuff like that. Just wanted to clear that up.

ETA: If this story leaves you with an overwhelming urge to donate a copy of And Tango Makes Three to this library, do not hesitate to contact me and I will get you the info. I’m donating a copy with a bookplate inside that says “In honor of God and The Holy Spirit who, with the help of their surrogate, Mary, were able to become fathers to their beloved baby Jesus. Amen.”

Related posts

• For the Sake of the Children (9)
• Ugh. (4)
• Tongueless (2)
• Things I Love So F*cking Much (2)
• Some Good TV (6)