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This Slate article on children sharing caught my attention because I have been annoyed at the parental hypervigilance and — dare I say — interference in children’s interactions with each other. You know, a parent swooping in and demanding that little Bobby share the Play-Dough with little Susie, who sidled over and grabbed it from Bobby’s hands. Of course until now, sharing hasn’t been an issue in this house, as only yesterday my kid was able to actually let go of the block he put into my hand, so my opinions are far more theoretical at this point. But the article brings up important questions: at what point do we step in to help our children learn to share, and at what point do we sit back and let them figure it out? Where is the balance between being polite and being interfering with it comes to other people’s kids? What age is modeling going to work, and what do we/I do until then?
I surely don’t know, but I guess I use this as a warning shot, of sorts, that I am more likely to sit back and let my child figure things out for himself amongst his peers. Obviously I would step in to prevent injury or to deescalate a bad fight, but I like the idea of kids experiencing gain and loss, of struggling to understand their own power. But you know what? This view of parenting may make my child incompatible with other kids (or, more likely, it may make me incompatible with their parents). He may be seen as a bully or a jerk and I might be seen as a Bad Parent if I take this tack. But I strongly believe that we learn better through experience, not verbal remonstration. Teaching when they’re ripe for it, not green, as the article discusses.
It’s going to be like trying to find firm footing in a marsh, this theory of letting my kid understand power via experience. I suppose the best thing that I can do is ask other parents, Do you want me to step in, or can we let them figure this out? But parents I see on the playground are so quick to jump in before other parents, almost as if they’re competing to see who can be Most Involved, as if that makes them a better parent, so I can’t imagine they will respond well to my approach. And I certainly don’t argue the opposite, that neglect produces “better” or more creative children. I just want to find that middle, somewhat squishy ground where my kid can develop his understanding of power naturally, operate within the parameters of a semi-polite society, but where we his parents serve as guides, not dictators or interventionists. That balance just seems incredibly tricky, if not impossible, to find.
I know this blog isn’t a hotbed for discussion, but I would welcome thoughts and experience on this topic, as it’s one I’m just beginning to contemplate.
Let’s say there are two political parties whose symbols are, for example, skunks and porcupines — both indigenous to North America, both with few predators save the occasional lost mama grizzly bear wandering down from Alaska. Now say you used to think the Skunk party was the one that was True and Good and Right and that Porcupines were gnawing apart the Fabric of Society, but evidence and experience and, well, logic led you, in the end, to actually prefer the spiny side. Say you marry and your husband — who dabbled in Red Fox philosophy for a bit in college — has had a similar experience: Both of you come from families of hardcore Skunks, and both families don’t quite understand why you prefer the herbivorous rodent philosophy to its odiferous counterpart.
You have nothing against Skunks, per se; you think some of their ideas are okay, although they seem a bit too black and white for your taste (you believe the quill is mightier than the anal gland, for example), but the Skunks you grew up with were wonderful people and you bear none of them any personal ill will. In the end, both are trying to coexist in the same general habitat even though they have quite different ways of expressing themselves.
So would you be at all suspicious when your families keep giving your child textiles with skunks on them? Bath towels, blankets, and shirts? Is this some sneaky rhetorical persuasion they’re attempting? Or do porcupines simply not have the same childish appeal and family values as their symbolic counterparts?
My mom likes to tell a story to illustrate the personalities of my siblings and me growing up. If we were not doing as she asked, one of her parenting methods was to count to five, and if we didn’t do it by five, then there were Consequences.
My sister is the eldest. Mom only had to threaten to count and my sister would dissolve into tears. “Don’t count, Mommy! Don’t count! I’ll do it!” And after the drama subsided, she would run along. That’s probably why she practiced her music so diligently, later earning medal after medal at music festivals in preparation for a successful career in music, and why she never got suspended from boarding high school.
My brother was the middle child, and he discovered that Mom was soft enough to use fractions: “One. Two. Three. Four. Four and a half. Four and three-quarters.” Probably when Mom broke out the sixteenths, he’d go do whatever it was he was supposed to do, knowing that she’d lose her patience as the math got progressively harder. This early scientific probing into the limits of possibility combined with the mathematical education it offered is likely what propelled him to medical school and beyond.
And then there’s me. The way the story goes, my mom only tried counting with me the one time. She put a hand on her hip and held up a finger: “One.” And then I piped up, “Two! Three! Four! Five! Hmph!” and planted both hands on my hips and glared back at her, Consequences be damned. (This from the same child who cried when she wasn’t allowed to leave the table before eating her lima beans and finally, an hour later, still sitting at the table, took her dad up on his offer to “give you something to really cry about.”) My utter lack of concern for profitable outcomes sufficiently explains, I think, why I majored in English.
I bring this up because we’ve reached the end of the pregnancy countdown: The baby is forty weeks today (“Thirty-eight,” Matt would say), and I fully expected to have him by now. But it seems that he has a little bit of me in him, as just right now he’s doing a headstand on my bladder and, instead of counting contractions, he’s keeping score of his kicks to my spleen: “Two, three, four, five, hmph!”
It’s been almost 24 hours since I slipped on the ice heading to my swim class last night. Nothing dramatic — just enough to tweak my back bad enough to land me in bed/on the couch all day today with a heated pad, a snoozing bulldog on the floor beside me, and Veronica Mars on DVD. In these 24 hours I have contemplated (1) that I can handle pain, but (2) why the hell should I handle pain when pain relief is possible; (3) speaking of which, why does anyone buy Tylenol? it’s the most useless shit; and (4) I hope I don’t go into labor with back pain like this; hmm, also (5) if I don’t get a hospital suite with a jetted tub, so help me god I’ll walk to St. Mary’s and check in there instead, and if they’re full up, well, the Marcus Whitman’s honeymoon suite is only another couple blocks away.
Me, exasperated, five minutes ago: Ugh. I’m just going to throw my clothes on the floor, step into them, and have you pull them up. [throws pants on floor]
Matt, leaning down to help tug up my pants: Y’know, I enjoy taking your pants off a lot more….
Yesterday I came across an online discussion about episiotomies,* one that culminated in me spending precious football time researching peer-reviewed journal articles about the procedure’s necessity and efficacy. This rabbit-holed into reviewing methods of natural labor induction and labor positions and techniques; by the end of the evening, I’d probably spent a good few hours on Academic Search Premier, something I wouldn’t've dreamed of doing back when I took research writing. It’s also something I wouldn’t've dreamed of doing when there’s football to be watched, but yesterday’s games roundly sucked and, well, it was actually kind of fun to learn stuff.
Anyway, when I returned to the forum to see how the episiotomy discussion had progressed, I discovered that these particular pregnant women were far more interested in the bandwagon approach to pregnancy decisions, and an immoderate number of women voiced their decision to avoid an episiotomy “at all costs” because they’d “heard it’s easier to heal if you tear naturally.”
Yeah, well, I hear that ninety percent of bad decisions are based on hearsay.
I don’t say this because episiotomies are a good idea; I just think having a categorical refusal to have one is ignorant (have you read about anal fissures**? NOT FUN), and I’m kind of alarmed at how these women made healthcare decisions — based on not evidence, but on what they’ve heard. Perhaps a great deal of the blame falls on the medical community for not educating patients as to evidence-based medicine (and, in some cases, not performing evidence-based medicine), but as patients I think we need to step up and educate ourselves. And by that I don’t mean the first Google search result or polling other pregnant women in an online forum.
* I assume I lost nearly half my potential readers at this point; oops.
** And I probably lost the other half here.
Today marks thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy. Oddly, what that number means is the number of weeks since I began my last period; the fetus itself, and therefore, technically, the pregnancy, is about thirty-six weeks old.
Oh, sorry, should I have put a TMI warning there? Well, you read this regularly — you should really know by now.
But that’s what the number means. It drives Matt crazy, that numbering system. If we’re talking about how far along I am, he has to pause to do mathematical gymnastics to figure out how old the baby actually is. To him, that precision is Important; I just want to flick his forehead. I’m not the one who made this system; it’s Science. (Normally I’m the one who rolls my eyes when that authority is flung in my face, but it is kind of sweet vengeance to be able to do it to him. Also, when your pregnant wife yells at you and bursts into tears during what shall henceforth be referred to as The Noodle Incident, that’s Science, too.)
At any rate — or rather, at the Scientific rate of thirty-eight weeks, twenty-one hours and some minutes — we’re pretty much ready to go. The carseat is in the car (trunk, actually), the baby’s room is relatively set up, the birth plan is filled out, the goes-to-hospital pile intact; most important, we have diapers and blankets and family with cell phones next to beds on standby, so, yeah, I think we’re ready.
[This is where all you Established Parents are welcome to snort with laughter at our naivete; go on. You know you want to.]
Except…the snow and my doctor’s vacation plans are putting a mild kink in my plans: I had originally intended to begin exercising and the consumption of spicy foods in the hopes of ejecting the 38-week-old parasite (“36,” Matt would say after a calculating pause), but since my doctor has the audacity to go, like, on vacation, I find myself taking it easy instead. Probably because it’s hard to work up the energy to exercise or cook spicy food WHEN I HAVEN’T BLOODY SLEPT IN A WEEK.
Oh, have I mentioned the Insomnia?
Internets, this last week was hell. No longer do I think sleep deprivation is an ethically acceptable form of torture or coercion; the fact is, it sucks and it makes you want to give up on everything you could possibly care about. Add that sense of utter desolation to a patient whose doctor won’t give her sleeping medication and you end up with a raging, inconsolable, unbalanced lunatic who realizes, through her hazy perception of reality, that hurrying the baby’s arrival will only prolong the insomnia.
So I apologize for any unnecessary moodiness or snappishness to those who may have encountered me this past week; I apologize to Lucy for the lack of walks, my in-laws for the unclean house they’re soon to arrive at, my sister for my lethargic phone conversations, and Matt for The Noodle Incident. It’s not any one of you; no, I blame Science.
As the end of the pregnancy approaches, there’s not room for a whole lot in my mind. It’s like Patrick McManus’s worry box theory — you have a box with only enough room for so many worries, so when a big one comes along, it scatters all others and makes itself at home until you find some way of ousting it. These days, my worry is labor. I haven’t even gotten to the much larger and beastier worry of Raising a Child, or even the worry of Letting My Husband Touch Me Ever Again; no, for now I’m stuck on Getting a Person out of My Person.
Now, my idea of a perfect labor is a natural, medication-free experience where I spend most of my time in a jetted tub with cooling compresses and sips of apple juice, joking with my husband and awing the nurses with my cool, calm, collected nature until my perfect baby makes its pain-free appearance with one or two light pushes. I may make a low moan, but only once.
However, simply knowing that this is a fantasy stirs up my fear, which is much closer to reality, and that is that labor is going to involve me screaming, writhing, begging for it all to be over, and yelling at people to JUST GET IT OUT ALREADY, FOR THE LOVE OF DONKEYS. And as much as I do spend my Sundays yelling at the television (yesterday’s Broncos game is certainly no exception, although I did blush a little when I mistook a Chiefs player for a Broncos player and my screaming was something along the lines of, “Run, run, run! …Wait, no…break his leg! His leg! BREAK HIS FUCKING LEG!”), I rarely yell at other people, especially people like nurses who are there to help, or my doctor, a master of various Looks that are the most concise way of answering stupid pregnant-woman questions (Me: “Braxton-Hicks contractions don’t really hurt; will the real ones feel different?” Her: The Look. Me: “Um, that’s what I thought. Mega pain. Right-o.”), or even my husband, although that’s just ’cause he’s perfected the puppy-dog eyes and fuck all if that doesn’t still work on me even after lo these nine years. Suffice it to say, I worry that the god-awful pain is going to turn me into a person I have never been and that everyone is going to hate me and I’ll end up delivering this child by myself onto a cold, concrete floor, and then some brave rescuer-type will come into the room and snatch the baby to be raised with Humans and not the depraved soul who gave birth to it, who has finally lost her voice from all the yelling and whose limp form is now being circled by wild dogs….
This is yet another installment in the this-pregnancy-is-flying-by-and-I-want-to-remember-the-highlights posts; skip as necessary.
Today our baby is 36 weeks old, which will totally not count toward anything when he’s born, except for developed lungs and so forth. But still. That’s pretty cool. One more week and he’s full-term. One more week and I start eating spicy food and jogging and doing anything in my power to GET IT OUT, GET IT OUT NOW.
Speaking of which, I don’t think I’m alone in readiness to be done — the kid is, too. I swear he’s going to come out with running shoes and and race straight out the labor and delivery door, which is just to say that OH MY GOD HE KICKS SO MUCH. I mean, I want him to play in the NFL, but I’m not sure he needs to start working on his field goal skills now. However, he seems athletically versatile: just now as we were watching the end of the Cowboys-Packers game, he was doing a pretty good flutter-kick imitation and, if I do say so myself, generating some serious forward momentum (more than the Cowboys, har har). I really hope that skill shows up at the delivery. Swim, baby, swim.
I hereby reserve the right to stick my head in the sand and cry “La la la la!” every time I hear something I don’t agree with. At least for the next five weeks, because apparently SOMEONE’S blood pressure is a little too high and that’s a bad thing, yessirree.
So I have an excuse for my ignorance; what’s the rest of the country’s?
Oh, and if anyone tells me to stop watching football in order to lower said blood pressure, I will commence head-in-sand activities. Broncos are on a bye this week anyway, so…la la la….
Thinking of ordering matching t-shirts for the husband and I to wear during labor. Mine would say “misery,” and his would say “company.”
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