A Four Block Radius...

A while back, I mentioned that I wanted to post something about children in public. Well, several friends have recently posted a link to this story about a couple in a Toronto Neighbourhood who want a municipal bi-law to make a 4 block radius around their home child free.

I can empathize with this in some sense. I frankly like my own kid, love her even, but would be perfectly happy to avoid most other children most of the time.

Here's the thing. On both sides of this, there is being a good neighbour and there's being an a**hole. For the childless, being a good neighbour might include occasionally tolerating that your neighbours who have reproduced might bring their children with them to a dinner out, because like you, we have made the conscious choice not to cook and to translate some of our hard-won economic capital (money) into a yummy dinner that someone delivers to us. Just because we have children does not mean we should feel obligated to settle for the sub-par fare served at establishments such as Jack Astor's or Chili's. My foodie tendencies didn't disappear with my ability to sleep through sneezes. It might also mean that sometimes, getting an injured, hungry, or sleepy child in the house quickly might trump immediately hiding away all evidence that a child lives within.

However, out of respect for those who do not share my absolute entrancement for a noise that the Bug makes that I choose to call a squeal, but might more accurately be described as a shriek, I do the following when we go out: in addition to giving her free reign over the breadbasket and any crackers that may be on the table, I bring along quiet toys, food I know she will eat (bunny crackers and milk, generally) and an overall sense of flexibility. I also bring the willingness to ditch the whole venture and get my meal to go, should all go terribly, terribly awry.

 Around my home, I rather expect my neighbours to adhere to basic standards of cleanliness and safety, as well as the local noise ordinances. I expect them to look both ways when driving on the street, put away their bikes and lawn equipment and so on. From the front of my home, the only sign that a child lives within is that there is a wee garden chair between the larger ones on our porch. Because we put away our crap when we're done with it. We have a neighbour whose older children (between the ages of 6 and about 9) run in the streets and leave their stuff everywhere, and it makes me nuts, not in the least because it makes the rest of us with kids look bad. (Also because the little jerks have kicked a ball against my garage door and somehow damaged it.) That said, I understand that sometimes we don't get our stuff away right away. We do our best.

*** (Added 18 September 2011) Upon further inspection of the radio show's website, I discovered that the CBC radio program 'This is That' is, it turns out, sort of like the Daily Show for Canadian radio. Nonetheless, they have fairly succinctly summed up the nexus of conflict between people with children and the vehemently childless.

What Would You Do?

You are already running late and while stuffing gently putting your toddler daughter's shoes on, you smell it. You know, you rather suspect your charming and well-behaved offspring has made a poopy. You are taking her to a caregiver and have packed more than enough extra diapers for the day. What do you do?

1. You immediately change her diaper. It isn't hygienic for her to have poop on her bottom for longer than a second.
2. You swear under your breath (and pretend later, when she repeats that word cheerfully to your significant other that you have no idea where she could have learned it), then change the diaper.
3. You leave everything exactly as it is. It's only a 3 minute drive after all, it isn't that bad. Pampers are really absorbent, right? There's rash cream in the bag. You can pretend when you get to the caregiver that the sweet little dear did it in the car and act all hurried, so they'll get the hint and change the diaper for you.
4. You would never ever be one of those parents who is always late because of the pressures of toddler-wrangling. You also wouldn't find yourself questioning if you had brushed your teeth while in the car on the way there.

So I know what I did (I'll give you hint, it wasn't #4). I also know which thoughts passed through my head in the interim.

Mom Knowledge

As the owner of an unreliable brain, as I like to call it, I write things down all the time so I don't forget them. If I don't, I forget far too much, and the results can be comic or they can be semi-disastrous. On top of that, I have the added burden, it turns out, of being a Motherless Mother, which, according to Hope Edelmann, makes me even more likely to take 1,000 steps just in case something happens to me. (Although I actually didn't loose my mom until I was 27 years old, so I should probably try to let these fears go at least until the Bug is potty trained.)

So. In a few days, the Bug will be staying with her grandparents without me. I'll be in a whole different country. I'm a little freaked out by this. I know she'll have a great time and I will have a super productive time at the conference, and my dad and step-mom are going to have a super time with the Bug, but I'm still a little freaked out. I'm going to be in a WHOLE DIFFERENT COUNTRY.

In addition to making sure I have everything I need to take the Bug on a plane without DH, I've created a document called "stuff to know about the Bug" that I'm going to print out and give to my folks. They will almost certainly tell me I'm being silly, and maybe they'll have a point. It is chock-full of practical details like how to get in touch with her pediatrician,  her dosages of a couple different fever reducers, and her bedtime routine, all tidily in one place.

But there is this whole other set of knowledge I'm not sure I can write down or that I'll even remember. It is one thing to say that she takes 1.2 mL of infant tylenol, but what about her preference for emptying laundry baskets, or carrying her stuffed monkey around her neck? What about how she most of the time likes to sleep with her head touching something silky or something soft? What about all of the spots where she is ticklish or the fact that she'll mostly be still to have her nails trimmed during Dirt Girl World, but not during Thomas the Tank Engine? This is the short version of the list. In fact, I'm willing to bet that I don't know the whole list myself.

I guess all of this is what I'll call Mom Knowledge. The 1,000 little things that I know as her mom that no one else knows. I've been the one most intimately with her on a day-to-day basis, and so I know her quirks, I know her likes, I know her dislikes. These are things that other people just don't know, and I'm not even aware of them, I just respond to them, deal with them, live with them. These aren't the sort of things that I learn in an e-mail from BabyCenter. It's just stuff I know, stuff I do, stuff I've stored in muscle memory, where cognition can't mess with it.

I'll bet she'll be more fine than I will. She's younger, and far more adaptable than me.

Part-Time Everything

At the moment, I'm in a week off between the madness. (I was asked at the last minute to teach a summer session course.)

I've been reflecting a lot on all of the junk that is on my plate that never seems to get off said plate. I think it comes down to being a part-time worker, a part-time SAHM, and never feeling 100% like I'm in the right place, doing the right things.

When I'm at work, I'm checking my phone for text messages about the Bug. When I'm at home, I'm looking at the same phone for e-mails from students and/or administrators regarding work stuff. If I was a full-time SAHM, sure I'd be looking at mother's day out programs, but so I could go knit or run, or take a spin class and shower in peace. Instead, I'm looking at these programs in order to have a day or two per week to work on writing my dissertation. I haven't been to the yarn shop in ages, and the last time I was there, I basically bought 2 balls of yarn I needed desperately, then talked for about 20 minutes while knitting a total of 2 rows and keeping the Bug out of the cashmere. (They have a strict you-drool-on-it-you-buy-it policy. I have 2 balls of merino sock yarn on account of this policy. I can't afford cashmere. I do think it is a little unfair that the cashmere laceweight is almost exactly at Bug height.)

I know there are plenty of full time working moms and stay-at-home moms who are jealous. The full-time mommies are jealous because of the time I get to spend with the Bug, the SAHMs are jealous because I get to talk to grown ups and I'm mostly able to remember not to talk about poopy. (Well, except when I have a fresh, steaming pile of student research papers.)

But. There's that old saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." I feel like that's where I am. Because every time I forgo some educational game with the Bug in favour of marking papers while she plays with the army of plastic toys that have taken over our home and Sprout plays on the TV, I feel like a bad mom. Every time I don't clean my kitchen and take the Bug for a run and then some swinging at the tot lot, I feel like a bad wife. Every time I hold onto a pile of student papers for an extra couple of days because I went grocery shopping instead of mark them, I feel like a bad professor.

I feel like I'm stretched in 1000 different directions.  I feel like I don't do anything as well as I could, and then (evidence of my crazy) when someone offers to help, I have trouble accepting because I feel like by accepting because I'm afraid that it might make me some sort of failure. Because I feel like I'm not living up to any of my roles 100%, I feel like I screw up a lot. Of course, I already felt like I screw up a lot. As the owner of what I will call an unreliable brain, I've spent most of my life internalizing the message that my brain fails me all the time, and from there, I often conflate events to "it is all my fault and I'm a hopeless screw-up."

Feminism sold us a bill of goods. It was quickly transformed from "women should be able to choose their role in the household" to "women should be able to do it all." Somehow, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I learned from Martha Stewart that I should be able to manage my household perfectly, while also running my multi-million dollar empire and wearing pearls. I've gotta let that go.

Usually I Don't Judge Other People, But...

Okay, so that isn't 100% true. I do enjoy sitting in judgment of other people. But usually I try to keep my hands off other people's crazy-pants parenting notions, and certainly don't use my public forum to advertise that I think it is a crazy-pants notion. Because I understand that what works for my family might not be what works for someone else's family.

But this morning, I stumbled upon the weirdest parenting trend I've ever heard of. I would be thrilled if the Bug potty trains on the early side of the normal window. Diapers are bloody inconvenient and expensive. Even cloth diapering, which costs less in the long run, is not without a large share of handling another person's poop. But this Elimination Communication movement is nutty. It is a set of ideas that you can actually start reading your baby's signs and put them on a potty at the age of 4 months, and go largely diaper-free.

The principles of EC include some the basics of attachment parenting: listening to your baby's signals, paying attention to their habits and behaviour, and so on. It also suggests helping Baby to associate a certain sound with the different potty events, so that if you put your baby on the pot and make a particular sound, they will ... um... respond, as it were.

Okay, so far we've seen the part that made me go, "hmmm... interesting, but not for me." Here's the part that made me think "this is bat s&%^ crazy, I have to blog about this." They suggest that as one becomes attuned to one's child's urges, one will be able to rely on intuition to figure out when baby needs to "go." Here are some of the ways they mention that one might feel the tug of elimination-related intuition:

• a sudden thought along the lines of "She needs to pee."
• wondering or questioning, "Does he need to go?"
• "seeing" or "hearing" the word "pee" or cueing sound (see below)
• "just knowing" that your baby needs to pee
• feeling the urge to pee yourself
• feeling a warm wet spreading over your lap or other area while baby is dry

(From "Getting Started" on diaperfree.org)
Apparently, though this method, one can become so attuned to Baby's bathroom habits that they can just psychically know when to put Baby on the pot.

Even if this works, no thank you. I really don't want to be that attuned to any other being's bathroom habits. I would like to, at least bathroom habit wise, return to the part of DH and I's relationship wherein we both pretended we didn't do that sort of thing.

Conversations from MommyLand

So the Bug has been sick, so she's been an unhappy little person and her sleep schedule has been off. Also, on Monday, she had a fever, so she wasn't able to go to the sitter's house for the day. Our backup plan, although a bit complicated, worked quite well: morning with Nana, DH came home to wrangle for an extended lunch, then I came home early from work and she and I headed off to the Baby Doctor's office.

The only problem with this is that it totally screwed up my usual work flow. I couldn't do my normal prep work Monday afternoon, as that was eaten up by the trip to the doctor's, and on Tuesday, where I usually get some work done during the Bug's naps, I wasn't able to, because my dear sweet girl wouldn't sleep unless she was no further from me than 2 inches. Further, rather than playing independently for a chunk of the day, she elected to spend most of the day with double fistfuls of my shirt and her face buried in my shirt. I did a bit while she slept on our bed next to me, but I could only do so much that way.

So when DH got home from work, I was rather counting on him to baby wrangle so I could have a few hours to finish my prep. He seemed a bit put out by this, which got my mom guilt going, but I had to get my work done.

When it was all said and done, and the Bug had finally settled to sleep, DH was watching some stupid Sci Fi show via Netflix, and when it was over (at around 11pm), he says "Well, finally, I got something done today," as though the entire rest of the day had been a royal pain in the arse and watching an entire TV show was a major victory.

I bit my tongue and went to bed. I did this because I didn't feel like having a stupid fight at 11pm. Because what I wanted to say was this:

Stop whining, you oversized baby. You think you got nothing done today? You're concerned about just one freakin' day. Try aiming to complete things every day and failing. Try getting to lunch time and realizing you probalby won't get a shower in because the has already gotten irretrievably away from you. Try not being able to do anything but cuddle a poor sick little person because there is nothing else you can do. I went to Costco today because I knew I could finish that, even with her strapped to me. I have crap on my todo list from August. So this one day things didn't go the way you meant them to? Then your wife wanted you to watch after your own off-spring instead of finish watching something that will still be there tomorrow? Yeah. Good luck with the pity party, 'cause I'm RSVPing with a big, fat no.

I didn't say any of this because the ensuing fight wouldn't have been worth it, and because the net result would be him telling all his buddies at work what a crazy bitch his wife has become since the Bug was born. I didn't want to give him that satisfaction.

Balance?!?!? WTF Was I Thinking?

So I'm working Mom now. 3 days a week, I venture out in the wee hours of the morning and impart wisdom on young minds. I teach them important things, although the recent batch of tests may make that statement appear to be untrue. At least, I stand at the front of a room and say important things. If they're not listening it isn't my fault.

And my life has swung wildly out of balance. I'm on the crazy-swing-ride that lands right in the middle of crazy town. I had finally found some sort of rhythm to the stay-at-home mama thing... I could balance most of what I wanted to do with the needs of the Bug and my DH's inertia. I'm doing all sorts of things I never used to do in my working life or my mom life. I'm letting the Bug watch TV to keep her busy, I'm not exercising, I'm eating fast food more frequently than I care to admit.  (I recognize that some of these are only contributing to the problem of lack of balance.) I'm burning the candle at both ends, and things are getting kind of toasty here in the middle, too. I get up at 5:30am, but I don't go to bed until midnight. I do work on weekends, and I'm fantasizing about a pedicure that I never seem to have time for.

In other words, this is hard, trying to be a good mom, while also trying to be a good adjunct lecturer. Both are hard by themselves. Together, I feel like the whole thing is held together with string, scotch tape and baling wire, and this is without making the time I need to get my research back on track.