crooked house

At The Beach

The kids, in one of my favourite places on this planet.

Book Alphabet

Books are made up of letters -- these letters are made up of books. Via @kirstinbutler.

There Is No "I" In Vllage

I've been meaning to take a photo of this sign on the edge of town for ages. Once, as we drove past it, David intoned, "There is no 'I' in 'village.'" And I can't pass it now without thinking of that. Or, er, we can't.

Mothers: Do You Have More In Common With Other Moms Than You Do With Childless Women?

Although it's been almost two years since my second child Sylvie was born, I recently started reading Life After Birth: What Even Your Friends Won't Tell You About Motherhood by Kate Figes with Jean Zimmerman. It was published in 1998 and was the first of a small number of books that address the incredible changes a woman must face after having a child. There are a lot of books on pregnancy and childbirth and a lot of books on parenting and child development but there are not many at all on this particular subject. While I was pregnant with Luke, my first, six years ago, Andi Buchanan was kind enough to send me a copy of her excellent collection of personal essays, Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It, and I think that it is the only book I read at the time that addressed what might happen to me, physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially, after I gave birth.

Of course, the things that happen to you after you give birth and take your new baby home are the kinds of thing you have to experience in order to even begin to fully understand them. It is one thing to read that breastfeeding might be difficult and another for your breasts to blow up to the size of balloons and hurt so much you're tempted to prick them with a pin, to see if relief might come with the pop. It is one thing to be told that you will be exhausted and another to actually feel so tired you could lie down on the dirty floor of a busy grocery store and fall asleep immediately. It is one thing to read you might not be very interested in sex again for some time and another to feel as if you might scream if your partner even touches the back of your hand with the tip of his little finger. It is one thing to be told that you have never before felt such love as the love you'll have for your baby and it is another to be taken hostage by an emotion so powerful, intense, and daunting that "love" isn't a strong enough word for it   -- or, worse yet and not uncommonly, to feel nothing much at all, at least in the beginning. 

In Life After Birth, Kate Figes contends that these kinds of intense experiences mean that mothers have more in common with one another than they do with other childless women who have similar backgrounds and interests. In almost an aside, she writes:

Motherhood is a great leveler. The most privileged mother has far more in common with a socially and financially deprived mother than with a childless woman from the same social background. As I searched for differences among mothers I became acutely aware of the fact that their experiences felt uncannily similar. Money, education, and expectations inevitably affect the way that women manage motherhood, but the essence of the experience is essentially the same. The experience of childbirth differs from woman to woman depending on her physical makeup, her state of mind, the position and size of the baby, and the environment she gives birth in, but the physical rite of passage of giving birth is the same for every woman. It is an extraordinarily powerful event that can be enjoyable or nightmarish, but either way it is a landmark memory.

She points out that almost almost all mothers share a sense of wonder at the miracle of procreation; sooner or later feel frighteningly intense maternal love; find it difficult to manage the demands of work and motherhood; undergo mental and physical difficulties related to pregnancy and labour and often don't have time to recover; and find that their relationships with their friends, families and, most importantly, their partners, have changed in unexpected and unpleasant ways.

I agree with all of this, yes, but I found myself taken aback by the assertion that I have more in common with other mothers than I do with, say, my childless friends who share my background and interests. What does this even mean, to say you have more in common with one person than another? After all, having "things in common" isn't something you can objectively measure. Certainly being a mother is now a central aspect of my identity, perhaps even the most important, but I am still the person I was before I had my children. Do I now have more in common with, say, an impoverished fifteen-year-old mother of four in an African village, someone who doesn't even speak the same language I do, than one of my good friends, a lawyer by training, an avid reader, and a writer of my age and social class, who also happens to be a woman who hasn't given birth?

Although it's true that I have perhaps a better understanding of that other mother's emotions and concerns than I ever would've before, and more compassion for her, I still can't possibly understand the challenges she faces in her day-to-day life and, in fact, wouldn't be able to survive them with my sanity intact were we to somehow change places. And, having spent a lot of time with other stay-at-home mothers over the last five years or so, many of whom are much younger than I am and who don't share my interests or educational background, I must say that I think I might've gone crazy long before if I hadn't been able to talk about anything other than motherhood and childrearing with like-minded (and yes, childless!) friends every now and then.

What do you think? Are you, by virtue of having given birth, a member of a new sort of tribe that transcends class, social, and economic boundaries? Do you have more in common with other mothers than you do with any other childless women? Or does that kind of thinking marginalize mothers even further?

 

Friday Night

I can hear Sylvie and Luke giggling maniacally upstairs. Then I can hear them thundering down the hall. Suddenly there is a loud thud and Sylvie begins to wail.

David: LUKE! What are you doing?!

Luke: Playing...

David: That's not playing! That's throwing your sister on the floor!

Oh, I wish I could sneak out to a movie or something, instead of having to go up there.

Tellus Nursery School

This is the sky as seen from the courtyard of the Tellus nursery school in Stockholm. Click through for more photos. Via Evan Sharp on Pinterest.

Things That Caught My Eye This Week

An interesting interview with Paula Fox in which she calls her granddaughter Courtney Love a psychopath.

Covers of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle through the years. Via Pickle Me This.

Over at the Nameberry blog, Elisabeth Wilborn puts a spin on the top 100 names for girls. She chooses a name for each that sounds or feels similar but isn't as popular. I remember reading that this is the way these lists evolve -- people want to name their baby something different but not too different. "Sylvie" is listed as an alternative for "Sophie" and I think she's got that one spot on. A number of people have misheard "Sophie" when I tell them Sylvie's name. And I've noticed more and more new baby Sylvies online. I hope the name doesn't get too popular too quickly.

Illustrations of the world in the year 2000, drawn in 1910. Flying policeman, radium heating, motorized roller skates and more. Via hitsong.

My favourite writing teacher Thaisa Frank muses about language and the moon.

When you choose not to vaccinate your children, you are affecting the health of other children whose families haven't made that choice:

Eighty-nine percent of all reported cases [of measles] have been in people who've been unvaccinated. Almost 20 percent of that figure is made up of children who were less than a year old. That means they were too young to have received the first dose of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is given once between the ages of twelve and fifteen months and again when a child is between four and six years old. Another twenty percent of the total number of reported infections were in children between the ages of one and four.

 Very strange shoes: teva stilettos. Via the hairpin.

One Story's list of the top ten short stories.

Jewelry made out of bits of coloured pencils -- gorgeous. Via d. sharp journal.

The Perfume Diet. It's funny -- I really started to get into perfume when I was on a strict diet. I suppose I was replacing one sensory pleasure with another.

Could conjoined twins share a mind?

Another Child Art Prodigy?

I hope that paint is non-toxic. Four-year-old Aelita Andre is about to have her first solo show in New York. Reminds me of Marla Olmstead. Via boingboing.

Moment of Contemplation

Vivi this morning in her brother's jean jacket, her new straw hat, and her ubiquitous golden slippers. She's not wearing mascara, I swear.

Inspired By A Children's Book, Parents Keep Child's Gender Secret

Inspired by a picture book, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, a couple in Toronto, are keeping secret the gender of their third child, four-month-old Storm. They have two older children, Jazz and Kio, both boys, who've felt pressured to look masculine and behave that way:

“When I was pregnant, it was really this intense time around Jazz having experiences with gender and I was feeling like I needed some good parenting skills to support him through that,” says Witterick.

It began as a offhand remark. “Hey, what if we just didn’t tell?” And then Stocker found a book in his school library called X, A Fabulous Child's Story  by Lois Gould. The book, published in 1978, is about raising not a boy or a girl, but X. There’s a happy ending here. Little X — who loved to play football and weave baskets — faces the taunting head on, proving that X is the most well-adjusted child ever examined by “an impartial team of Xperts.”

“It became so compelling it was almost like, How could we not?” says Witterick.

There are days when their decisions are tiring, shackling even. “We spend more time than we should providing explanations for why we do things this way,” says Witterick. “I regret that (Jazz) has to discuss his gender before people ask him meaningful questions about what he does and sees in this world, but I don't think I am responsible for that — the culture that narrowly defines what he should do, wear and look like is.”

I can imagine that'd be exhausting to try to hide the gender of your baby, yes, because it is almost the first question anyone asks. I sympathize with the couple to some extent -- it's true, as a culture we do expect very different things from boys and girls, some of us more than others. And even when you're aware of this and try not to impose silly and arbitrary expectations on your kids, you're still a product of your own social conditioning. You're also, however, a product of your biology. In the 70s, some sociologists believed that gender is completely elastic, totally a result of social conditioning, which led to the tragedy of David Reimer, whose penis was accidentally cut off during his circumcision as an infant. The doctors recommended he be raised as a girl. He was never told he wasn't a girl, he never felt like one, and he committed suicide as an adult. His story is told in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Of course, there are many equally tragic stories of transgendered people who feel as if they're born in the wrong bodies -- and happily, more and more ones of transition.

I've been thinking a lot about gender lately as it's so interesting to see how it unfolds in the kids. I like to think that the Gender Fairy Godmother has bestowed the supposedly feminine gift of sensitivity on Luke and the supposedly masculine gift of an iron will on Sylvie. On a more superficial level, I'm amazed by Sylvie's preoccupation with her brother's dinky cars. He has oodles that he almost never plays with. She has never been given one and she plays with them almost every day. (As I'm typing this she's asking, "Play cars, Mama? Play cars?") In many other ways, they both remain true to stereotype. Luke loves playfighting and has a bit of a preoccupation with conflict and death and Sylvie tends to be more nurturing. She'll leap up in horror crying, "You okay?" when a toy falls off a table, and she loves to wander around holding her dolls, rocking, and feeding them in a way Luke only rarely does.

I found the story of baby Storm via Rona Maynard, on facebook, who remarked the story reads "like the outline of a darkly satirical novel." Yes! Wouldn't it make a great one? And, although there's something that makes me feel deeply uneasy about using one's child to make a political statement, I'm betting little Storm's gender will remain a secret only until (s)he's able to announce it to the world him or herself, which means only another year or two.

This post is also featured on the BlogHer site.