Judgment November 29, 2008

So, my mom’s family, whom we’re visiting now, is every which kind of crazy. There is a lot of alcoholism and other dysfunction, so when everyone gets together, we’re never sure what to expect. Our branch of the family and one other branch are considered the “hoity toity” ones that “have money.” Jasper and I are not wealthy (I mean, in the American sense), but we are educated and have jobs and bank accounts, which puts us way ahead of some of them.

One of my aunts in particular is using drugs and is nasty to everyone. She has a son who is 25 and barely wants to be associated with her, and she’s very self-conscious about how everyone knows that she has been a pretty bad mother. Anyway, she was at our Thanksgiving dinner tonight and observing Mavis, who was behaving well but squirmily, as a two year will do. She wasn’t noisy or bothering anyone, but my aunt needed to take the opportunity to cut us down to make herself feel better (it’s so obvious that this is what she’s doing, even though it’s really a cliche to say so). So she leaned over to my cousin, who is a nurse, and said, “Do you think she’s so hyper because they don’t let her have any sugar?”

I love the logic on this one. First, we do let her have sugar, but not candy on demand. Secondly, wouldn’t she be hyper if she had sugar? My cousin said, “Well, she doesn’t seem hyper to me–she seems two.” My aunt then baked up some story about how sometimes Ritalin has a reverse affect on children, riling them up more than it focuses them. How this analogy works, even in theory, was so baffling that my cousin and I got a good laugh out of it.

Later, laughing over this story as I retold it to my mom, my mom informed me that my aunt had also criticized me and Jasper for encouraging Mavis to say “please” and “thank you” when gifts were given to her last night. Later she also reacted to Mavis’ good vocabulary by saying, “well, living with two teachers, you know everything is letters and numbers for her,” in a snarky voice that suggested we just drill our toddler endlessly. It couldn’t be, you know, that Mavis is just a smart cookie.

My aunt is a crack addict who was also drinking tonight and has no real authority on anything, so I’m not hurt by these comments, especially based on the approximately two hours that she saw Mavis. But they do remind me of how quick we sometimes are to judgment from minimal facts, how soon we want to draw conclusions about other people’s parenting skills when we’re unsure of our own. I think my aunt is just an extreme example.

Tonight Jasper and I went out to a movie with my cousin and siblings while my mom watched over a sleeping Mavis. After the movie, Jasper and I stopped at a grocery store that is open 24 hours to get some snacks for our return trip tomorrow. On the way out, in 27-degree air and at midnight, was a young mom bringing her sleeping toddler into the store. I felt myself rush to judgment–why isn’t that baby in bed?!–and then stopped myself and felt, instead, some sympathy for whatever it was that made that mother have to haul her child into a grocery store at midnight, by herself.  Whatever the reason was, it had nothing to do with me.

50/50? November 27, 2008

I hesitated last night when I typed that Jasper and I share the parenting load 50/50.  Because some days, I know, it seems a lot more like 65/35, with Jasper spending more time with Mavis than I do.  I feel inordinately guilty about these days, even though I do spend 1.5 days a week with her by myself every week, which evens out the time he spends with her on the weekends while I catch up on work.  He does more of taking her to the playground and even takes her to more of her doctor’s appointments than I have.  He toured a preschool without me.  Once he even took her to a birthday party without me–which we didn’t think much of, but birthday parties are kind of mom zones.

Jasper doesn’t complain about our arrangement; in fact, he thinks I do in fact give 50%.  It’s been hard for me to feel like that because it just seems like the maternal default position is something like 80% or even higher.  But I was thinking this morning, as I was choosing what toys and clothes to bring with us on her trip and getting a bit frazzled, about the other things I do for Mavis that don’t always get recognized.  I do a lot more of the behind-the-scenes parenting for her.  Sure, we both clean up after her after bedtime.  Jasper makes sure her preschool bill is paid and sometimes collects advice about things like good preschools or pediatricians from his colleagues at school.  But I do a lot more:  buying all her clothes, choosing them each day (she just knows that he puts them on her), buying all her gifts (for herself and for her friends and teachers), planning and throwing her birthday parties, keeping photographs organized, keeping her history through a blog (though you could argue that’s not solely for Mavis, of course) that helps her stay close with her grandparents, who all live far away.  I always pack for her for all of our travels.  I build the traditions. I write Christmas cards with her pictures in them. I pack her lunches and plan for snack when it’s our week at school.  I spearhead research on everything: adoption issues, parenting issues, where to send her to school, whether X weird potential health thing is to worry over, what classes I could enroll her in.  I weed out clothing and other stuff she doesn’t need anymore and tend to her keepsakes.  I wrote and published her lifebook.

Some of this stuff is day-to-day operations that she just doesn’t see.  It happens mostly when she’s asleep or I’m at work or whatever.  But a lot of it is about tending to her past and to her future.  Jasper’s maybe more of our go-to man on the day-to-day, but I’m doing a lot more of shaping the bigger picture (not, of course, that those are really separable).  And really, I’m not complaining at all: I like doing almost everything I listed above.  But I think they sort of don’t get noticed or counted in the scheme of “parenting” sometimes–by me, especially.  Maybe I’m just rationalizing here, but it strikes me that these things I do for Mavis behind the scenes–things she doesn’t necessarily know about–oughta count too, in the constant accounting I do to make sure I convince myself I do enough.

Thankful November 26, 2008

I got my first hand-turkey from Mavis (via her teachers), declaring her “thankful for Mama.”  As my Facebook status reads right now, tonight I’m feeling mostly thankful for her 7 pm bedtime.  But there are a few other things, too, besides the obvious “friends and family” answer:

• my husband, who shares this parenting business with me 50/50
• the election of a clear-headed president whose values and actions seem to align
• the fact that I only have one more semester after this one of PhD coursework–I’ve been at this since 2003, and it is pretty old
• one friend in particular who, though he is not a mushy type, has really been a huge support to me in work/school this year and whom I think I failed until recently to recognize as being as good a friend as he is
• a group of cool women at work, even though I don’t get to spend a lot of time with them
• most of my students, most of the time–I spend more time with them some days than with my friends, so it’s nice to have good ones
• my family’s seeming embrace of a simpler Christmas this year, including their agreeing to come here instead of us having to go to my sister’s, which never goes off without an argument
• the exciting stuff that’s happening at work, even if it also freaks me out equally if not more
• a trip to Mexico planned for March and funded by Jasper’s aunt–this should help me get through the misery of January and February
• the births of my friend’s twin daughters, who came after a long time trying
• Facebook’s reuniting me with a ton of people I haven’t talked to in ages–I’m a ridiculously nostalgic person, so this has been really lovely for me
• for Mavis, who daily this fall has picked up the biggest leaf she can find, remarked how pretty it was, and decided who she wanted to share it with.  She’s exhausting, but she’s a good little egg and she’s mine.

Jasper, Mavis, and I will be packing up the car in the morning and driving 8 hours to see my grandmother, who doesn’t know we’re coming.  My siblings and mother are all coming too–all of us from out of town.  We’ll stay about 48 hours and turn around and drive home.  It’ll be exhausting, but that is how it goes.  I’ll try to keep up with the November posts while we’re away, but forgive me in advance if I miss a day!

Happy Thanksgiving!  I’m thankful to you readers and especially to you, Lulu–you’re a great friend, especially for someone I’ve only ever spent a few days with.

Culture November 25, 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Mavis is starting to come into culture.  I mean, of course, we are always in culture, but lately I really notice that Mavis is accessing ideas and stories that are bigger than what I can regulate.  It’s mostly little stuff: her learning the term “Native American” at school and then asking me, “What do Native Americans do?”–as a teacher of culture studies, this question was way too dense for me to unpack!  But other things, too.  Her increasing awareness that there are “girl” and “boy” things to do.  Her recent (and, I’m proud to say, late) coming into knowledge of princesses.  My recognition that to allow her to watch the movie Shrek, which she saw on a shelf in the video store and wanted to see, meant that I would have to explain a whole slew of cultural references she didn’t understand.   Her love of The Backyardigans, which actually draws on all kinds of cultural myths and narratives (cowboys, clowns, samurai, professors in the jungle, the Orient Express, pirates, Tarzan, etc.).

At the same time, I have been talking a lot with one of my students, a young woman, who is convinced that she is unattractive and ugly and will never attract a decent boyfriend.  She is a smart, funny, and attractive. This attitude is out of character for her.  Yet fresh off her latest rejection by a boy looking for more of a bimbo, she is upset, and I just feel angry for her.  What in our culture gave his rejection the power to make her feel so disqualified from love?  Almost all women, I think, have some part of themselves they find hard to love.  How did that happen?

Lately Mavis has fallen in love with a series of books that I also loved as a child.  It’s not particularly high quality literature, but she loves the characters and the stories.  I loved them too, so its pleasurable for me to share them with her.  Yet as I read them this time, I recognize the way the gender roles are quite stereotypical.  I also think about how the Backyardigans are such a mega-brand–not quite as pervasive as Dora, but getting there.  I have never wanted Mavis to become a dupe of marketing.  Yet it’s fun seeing her enjoy these characters and their imaginative adventures (I like the fact that the show has no pretense to being “educational,” which is a big twitch of mine).  And I like showing her those old books.  I also tend to think of most parental cultural micromanagement as parenting that a) shows silly over-obsessiveness and b) reflects a desire to promote an aesthetic that signals a certain class-based notion of taste. In short, I think it’s mostly about allaying parental fears and/or cultivating a parental image that, usually, is just materialism of a different stripe.  Parenting by art direction, I once heard it called.

And how much do my books or the Backyardigans really ruin Mavis?  I read Babar the elephant, say, when I was a kid, and I don’t think I’ve become an imperialist.  Despite my reading these gender-stereotypical books when I was a kid, I have a very egalitarian marriage and before I met Jasper never did have a romantic relationship where I felt any kind of negative gender expectations.  I already have with Mavis those kinds of conversations about media sources where we critique whether it’s real or really like that or whether it should be like that.  Maybe she’s better off learning this kind of stuff–princesses, etc.–with my voice gentley questioning it along the way than learning it later when it seems new and exciting.

But I don’t know.  Despite being raised by a feminist, despite never having been told, ever, that I was less than for having been born a girl, despite having had wonderful teachers and always having had women role models, I had some of those hang-ups that my student has.  I cringe at myself in the mirror.  I remember thinking, in fourth grade, that math was for boys (no one ever told me that, ever).  In college, even though I was often one of the smartest in the room, I never spoke in class.  Something had to have taught me this.  My hunch is that the culture taught me this–where? I don’t know, really.  But there was a cumulative effect.  One way or the other, I learned these things–along other things like prejudices, no doubt–from the culture all around me.  I was thinking about this as I viewed, last week, a museum exhibit of popular culture images of racism, sexism, and other -isms.  The exhibit made me realize how casually these ideologies get inserted into the culture.  Sometimes I wonder if I should be more judicious in what I let Mavis see.  Then again, it’s pretty much inevitable that she’s going to learn these stories that are our cultural heritage one way or the other, as she grows.  Shrek is so interesting because it’s a positive message, but it totally relies on its viewers’ familiarity with the conventions of fairy tales, that you have an established sense of beauty that, well, pretty much sucks.

So, I don’t know.  I’ve typed a lot to say not very much here, except, I guess, that sometimes it’s interesting to talk to my students and cast their issues onto my parenting choices.  I’m pretty sure the middle course is the best way to go here, of course.  But it’s crazy how much I feel like I’m always juggling when I just read a simple story or turn on the TV.  I wonder so much what she’s really hearing.

Where do we go from here? November 21, 2008

OK, I was pretty encouraged to see five responses to Coco’s future of Octomama post.  It certainly isn’t about whining for comments, really.  We just envisioned the site as less blog and more discussion forum.  Sometimes, it has been that, and it has helped me a lot on a few topics.

So, what next?  What would you, our lovely few readers, like to see this site become?  Is it a question of more promotion, like Cate mentioned?  Is it rethinking the overall purpose/content of the site?  Is it finding more contributors?

Do you go to blogs anymore?  I really do, but often just to check up on friends, and like Coco, I don’t comment much.  But my other blog has really become a true mommy-blog, so it has been nice to have this site as well. A large part of me would hate to see it end.

Sound off — what do you think?  Where should we go from here?

File Under: Things I Am Not Prepared For November 21, 2008

1. My mother getting older.

My mom sent a weird email to me and my siblings tonight in which she informed us in a completely unconvincingly cheerful tone that she had had a “silent heart attack.” It happened over a month ago and she has known for a while but hasn’t told us. It doesn’t look like the effects were as damaging as they could have been, but she’ll know more soon. Then she proceeded to discuss our plans for Christmas. I got it right before bed, so now of course I’m up late, not sleeping and not able to talk to anyone.

I’m really shaken, in part because I have two chronic diseases that put me at a risk for heart issues. it is a sobering wakeup call. I am also scared for my mom and, selfishly, kind of angry that she presented this information this way because it puts us at such a loss for how to respond. I know she doesn’t want to worry us, but revealing it like this is more worrisome than if she had just mentioned it along the way. So if we act worried, we disappoint her and make her feel guilty, but I can tell she’s scared, too, so how do I reach out? I did ask her, in a reply, to please never withhold that information from us again, because it just seems scarier when she reveals it as a former secret.

My grandmother, her mother, also had a “mini stroke” a couple of months ago. In addition to being afraid for my own health and their health, I’m not at all prepared for my grandmother to pass away, even though I know that at my age I’m lucky to still have a relationship with my grandmother at all. And I’m even less ready for my mother–a work horse, a fighter, a tough one–to start getting sick with the illnesses associated with age. For all her hard work and sacrifice over the years, she has little to no retirement savings. She lives alone. It’s very hard for me to imagine anyone but her taking care of her. We have absolutely no plan for handling this in the future.

But I’m not ready, either, emotionally. Do you ever look at your life and just wonder when you stopped being a child? When you stopped being a teenager? When you stopped wanting to get older? I marvel at it all the time. But these kinds of concerns–the feelings of vulnerability they uncover: wow. I’m not ready, sometimes, to be a grown up. I’m sad and scared.

Future of Octomama November 20, 2008

Well, we’re about two thirds through the blog month, and I have to confess that writing more hasn’t exactly primed the pumps toward my writing any better or with more interest.  I thought I might do this in part to try to revive our faltering little blog here, but it doesn’t really seem to be, err, taking off.

It’s strange how difficult blogging seems because it was such a part of my life before we adopted Mavis.  I read and communicated through blogs and blog-related message groups a lot and garnered an awful lot of whatever wisdom I have about parenting and especially transracial parenting through them.  On this blog I thought I might be able to put the “working parent” spin on those kinds of blogs that helped me along the way, since I’ve noticed, in the group of blogs I read, a real paucity of working mothers who blogged, and my sense is that my job–its demands but also my real commitment to it–shapes a lot about how I can or want to mother. 

But of course the obvious reason it’s hard to do a working mother blog is that, um, I’m always working.  I just can’t keep up with it.  It’s also hard, in my case, to maintain my anonymity while talking in any detail about my job’s somewhat particular demands. 

More than that, though: I’m wondering if blogs have just sort of jumped the shark.  I don’t read nearly as many blogs as I once did, and I seldom, if ever, comment–which is one major way one builds up blog readerships, of course.  I have shifted almost all of my online socializing onto Facebook, where I find it so much easier to swap short ideas, bits of encouragement, and so on in a way that doesn’t have me continually fearing I’m going to offend someone.  Sure, I don’t get into as many deep discussions and certainly learn less.  But it’s something I can do more in the interstices–moments of time between my classes, or while I’m grading papers, or whatever.  Not to mention, of course, that many of my favorite blogs–and even my favorite bloggy community list–have folded in the last year or two.   Blogs seem, now, kind of–old-fashioned.  From a different period in my life.  Maybe I should start reading–and writing–blogs about other stuff, instead. 

So I guess I’m pretty ambivalent about the future of this place.  I don’t know what we can do with it or even what we’d like to.  One problem I have is that I tend to only want to write something here when i can complain about something, which doesn’t make for uplifting reading.  I’m thinking we might need a grand reopening, a new concept altogether, or just, you know, to go read some books, for cripe’s sake. 

Meanwhile,  we have November to finish.

Twofer November 19, 2008

Here’s my working parent complaint of the day: a VIP day at Mavis’ preschool that is for parents or other “special friends” to join the class during the day for an hour and a half.  We don’t have any local family to fill in for us, and the hour and a half in question are right during the time when I teach.  So does Jasper.   We only had a week’s notice to declare who would be coming.  It really is bizarre to me how sometimes organizations like these forget that some of us actually require their services and aren’t just sending their children there for a little respite.  It’s a very outmoded sense of what preschool is about.  I know my mom used to tell me that she would go down to a restaurant a friend owned down the street from my preschool to hang out while I was having my social time there.  It’s not the same when you work and really need this. Sometimes you can tell that the school thinks of itself more in the sense that my mom considered preschool, and I think it is really unfortunate.

So of course, I found a way to be there, because I didn’t want Mavis to be the odd kid out.  But they could’ve given me some lead time.  Gah.

Tired November 16, 2008

I have not too much to say tonight except that I don’t recommend trying to finish a PhD, have a toddler and a spouse, and do a job that requires a lot of intensive personal effort toward a large variety of people.   If you do in fact make this mistake and try all three, I recommend your not having a house with anything beyond a pillow for brief catnaps, an internet connection, a laptop, and a spork.  Also, please do not try to have friends.  And I hope you don’t like the s-e-x, either.

That is my public service announcement, #24/7.

Preschool November 14, 2008

Right now Mavis is in her second year of a pre-school program for students aged 1 through 3 (there are two separate age-grouped classes).  The program is relatively cheap, even though it’s housed at a slightly swanky (though not seriously snobby) private school.  It’s been great for us for a lot of reasons, including its being only a block away from where I work.  But this is the last year it remains cheap.  The school starts “pre-kindergarten” at age 3 for two years.  It’s a full-day program, 8:30-3:30 (which seems excessive to me, but I’m increasingly needing to use almost that much care anyway, and it would certainly make my work/life balance stuff easier, and it seems all the local private school preschools are full-day).  It costs a lot more than what we’re paying now.

But Mavis is popular at her school (I do sense that among some who don’t really know her she is popular just because she is a cute Chinese girl, but others last night recognized her as the one fierce on the tricycles, for instance, which I liked), and it’s cheaper than other local schools.  We figure that because she is well known and loved, she’s more likely to get financial aid than at another school.  We also keep thinking of the convenience of the location and of the fact that keeping her there would mean continuity for her, with a building and people with whom she’s familiar and happy.  It’s a small and homey place.

So last night we went to their open house, and I loved it even more.  I really felt like the classrooms were places I’d like to hang out myself. Little known fact (weird even to me): I started out in college as an elementary education major (thank God a kind English professor saved me from that fate).  But the point is that rooms like the ones we saw last night were the reason I wanted to teach little kids.  I also like the philosophy of the school and its educational orientation.  Mavis was also totally at home there.  It was all a powerful argument.

This place has a diverse student body (about representative of the state), but not nearly as diverse as the other place where she’s on the waiting list.  The other place is impressive too, but seems more structured and school-like–and we’d like her experiences at this age to be as open-ended and play-based as possible.  The other big thing is that her current school can tell us by March whether she’s been accepted and what the financial aid picture would be, whereas the More Diverse Place just calls you up when there is an opening, and you have to take it right then, a decidedly less convenient option.  Diverse Place is also in a less convenient location to our jobs, which could be annoying on a hectic day (we have a lot of those).  However, Diverse Place would allow us to send Mavis there for summer months, whereas her current school wouldn’t (or at least not with the funds covered by the tuition).  In theory, we shouldn’t care about summer since we’re both teachers and home in the summer, but  we still want a little bit of a break some days in the summer to get our prep and other work done.  We are unlikely to get any financial aid at Diverse Place because we are toward the upper end of their average family income, so Current Place might actually end up being cheaper (without aid, CP is about $1500 more expensive than DP).

We basically chose our school district for its diverse racial composition.  Once she gets into regular Kindergarten, she will be in a very diverse environment.  But I’m struggling now whether to privilege the diversity stuff or the general environment and educational philosophy at this point.

Not to mention how hard it is to swallow the price tag at almost any place we can find.   I still kind of can’t believe how ridiculous it is that this country hasn’t coughed up some high-quality early childhood education for all families.  It’s a huge burden for us, who are pretty middle class.  We weren’t going for some kind of snooty preschool experience, and we’re not worried about Mavis’ college prospects at this point.  But I still feel like I’m caught up in the yuppie race for the Best! Preschool! just because all the quality options seem to be so pricey.  So frustrating.