Seriously, this book is changing my life

More thoughts on Perfect Madness presented in stream-of-consciousness form, because there are so many thoughts whirling around and because my own mother liked the last entry I wrote on it.

Judith Warner is doing an excellent job not just of pinning down the anxiety of motherhood today, the all-encompassing terror of being responsible for a new life, for the physical and emotional and mental needs of your baby, but also of couching the entire phenomenon in historical and social context. Today’s militant attachment parenting proponents are just as militant as yesterday’s “don’t smother, don’t hover” parenting experts. Ideas on the “right” way to do motherhood have spun a hundred and eighty degrees in the last two generations, from “spare the rod” to “never an unteachable moment.”

I’m sorry that I can’t remember it now, but in the last week I visited a mommyblog that perfectly explained what made me so uncomfortable about attachment parenting: the utter and total sacrifice a mother must make in order to do it correctly. She must give up sleep, and the use of her arms, and any — ANY — time to herself, because a baby must be breastfed (and only breastfed) on demand, never allowed to cry, and must be physically attached to the mother as often as humanly possible. It’s like having a miniature poodle which you must never let bark and whose feet must never touch the ground. Oh, and the poodle has to sleep in the bed with you. Careful, don’t let the poodle fall! Don’t feed the poodle anything non-organic! And you must never, EVER, put the poodle in a crate! Ever! Don’t you know that putting your poodle in a crate is the exact same thing as tossing it underhanded into a Romanian orphanage, never to be seen again?

Because it is.

Well, let me tell you. My own little poodle, Owen, never learned to suck properly. “Nursing” quickly turned into a bloody blistered mess (for me, anyway). I attempted to wear him, but seeing as I had to make my sling out of an old bedsheet, it didn’t quite work correctly. Attempting to sleep with him in the same bed was a perfect way to make sure I went through the night sleeping fifteen minutes at a time. I think that’s what they do to people at Git-mo, force them to co-sleep with leggy four-month-olds — the deprivation on top of the scratches would certainly convince me to confess to crimes I didn’t commit.

Mothers today are expect to adhere to a strict regime of self-sacrifice, lest they risk being labeled “unfit.” Think back to dooce’s “sleep-training” post and the number of trolls who equated an infant sleeping on his own in a crib to child abuse. A mother who would let her baby cry for even a second is, in the cultural mind, guilty of cruelty and neglect.

These are the types of dogmatic thinking that today are considered “normal.” It’s normal to never have time for yourself. It’s normal to think that staying home with your child and being on duty for him around the mother-effing clock is best. It’s normal to think that anything you may want, or need, or feel inclined to do is automatically wrong and bad unless it’s specifically intended to be in your child’s best interest.

Therefore: Working: Wrong. Shopping: Wrong, unless done for organic produce which you will later mash and stew into homemade baby food. Working out: Wrong, because why work out if you have a toddler? That should be exercise enough, right? Reading a book, working on a quilt, doing sudoku puzzles — unless these are done while the child is napping (and AFTER the laundry/dishes/vacuuming/housekeeping/errands have been done).

Today I deliberately set out to do whatever I felt like doing. With Iain’s cooperation, I woke up late (10 a.m., bitches). I talked to my mother long-distance for 100 minutes (thanks, new Verizon long-distance plan!). I welcomed my friend Rachel and her dog to the house, and I convinced Owen to take a three-hour nap. I’m not really sure how that last one happened — just luck, I guess, but what luck it was!

I read my book while Owen played. I brought him and Iain to the The Book Thing and got some more books. I looked through the fabric scraps Rachel brought over as Owen watched TV.

Basically, I told myself I wasn’t going to feel guilty about anything — not even feeding Owen coffee cake for breakfast.

You know what? Today was a really good day. Even when Owen knocked over my soda, sending Pepsi skimming far and wide over the coffee table and dripping onto the carpet, I didn’t care. I just stuck him in his playpen and mopped it up. I didn’t see it as a failure to parent correctly, as evidence that I’m the most horrible, undeserving person in the world. I just thanked my lucky stars that all our furniture is second- and third-hand and that Stanley Steemer will one future day make a house call.

I was calm. I was happy. I was very thankful that Iain is such a hands-on Dad, but I refused to let myself feel guilty over “making him” watch the baby. Know what? It’s his baby, too.

I’ve dog-eared about twenty more pages, each having a particularly soul-stopping passage that I want to highlight and share and put in blockquote tags right here. But instead I’m just going to read some more and let the whole thing marinate in my brain a little longer.

April 29, 2006 | Filed Under auto-categorized, motherhood

Comments

9 Responses to “Seriously, this book is changing my life”

Rachael on April 30th, 2006 6:39 am

Good Lord, society has gone overboard with this attachment parenting stuff. Our generation survived without organic foods, sleeping in bed with mom, being coddled to death, and entertained 24-7. I remember playing in the backyard for hours as a kid with my plastic farm animals in the oh-so-toxic dirt with my mother hollaring out the window once an hour “stay out of trouble!”

I’m no mom but I can tell you what messed me up from my childhood- when my mother tried to over-do. I went through a phase where I was in dance, voice, theatre, acting, and almost any other lesson out there available to little girls. That’s where the need for perfectionism came from. I remember being 12 years old and just wishing my mom would leave me alone in the backyard for the afternoon.

Have we, as a society, forgotten how resilient children are? Have we forgotten that parents are people with identities too, not just so-and-so’s mom or dad? I’m not underplaying the importance of caring for a child, but I bet at 25 Owen will sit down on the sofa with you and say, “remember lazy Sundays where we’d eat junk food for breakfast and laugh at stupid television? That was cool.”

Granted I’ve only seen you in action twice, but I think you’ve got it down. And I bet your own mom gives better advice than any of those ridiculous parenting books. Kids will cry, scrape their knees, learn the hard way many times over, and maybe pierce a couple things on the way to adulthood, but if the parents are caring and responsible individuals with good values then they will turn out just fine… we did, didn’t we?

I’ve always wondered where and when society came up with this organic, attachment, paranoid, “let’s be perfect parents” stuff? Brush that crap off like the stray dog hair you’re going to find on everything in two years and take “me” days at least once a month, it’s important!

***
And it’s always a joy to visit your place because you guys are such REAL people!
supa on April 30th, 2006 7:02 am

A quick point before I run to get some coffee: I don’t have a problem with attachment parenting per se, especially as applied to newborns, and I don’t think Judith Warner does, either — the problem lies in the presentation by “experts” and society at large that there should be no other option than AP — which happens to be the most self-sacrificing form of modern parenthood out there.

It’s a style that certainly doesn’t suit me and my beliefs, but I do know there are people who have taken to it like a duck to water. To each her own.
supa on April 30th, 2006 9:27 am

OK! Back from coffee. Thanks for all the support, Rachael! And the fabric swatches. Owen is LOVING them.
Rachael on April 30th, 2006 11:03 am

Glad the fabric went over well, I’m trying to feng shui my area as we speak now that it’s partially de-cluttered!!

Oy, this AP stuff freaks me out, didn’t mean to project. I know a couple people who are really into it. One has a five year old daughter who is not yet potty trained, and all of these kids can’t seem to deal with the word “no.” Why do the experts see this as the only acceptable means of parenting? It boggles me.
supa on April 30th, 2006 11:27 am

De-cluttering sounds like a reeeeally good idea to me right now *scanning room*

Personally, I don’t like the whole AP thing. I do know one mom who does it very well, and who seems to get a lot of fulfillment out of it. But for me and, I suspect, a lot of other people it just doesn’t work as a method, and then we feel like shit because the A.P. experts are not-so-subtly saying that our babies will be sad and depressed and detached and miserable because we have “failed” at following the tenets of A.P. And I think that is just such manipulative bullshit.
Ty on May 1st, 2006 8:53 am

As a not-a-mom, and therefore giving unexpert-like opinions, it would seem to me (and I believe I have read this somewhere) that a calm, happy mother would produce a calm, happy child. If the mother is wound up like a top, trying to do everything every second and in the process, driving herself crazy with exhaustion, and children learn by example, how is that not going to produce a frazzled, uncontent, spoiled child? AP seems like a way to create mothers who yell. Determined to do what is “right” they get frustrated when they can’t physically keep up with the books, and eventually snap when the pepsi can goes skidding across the coffee table, instead of remembering Stanley Steamer. Then no one is happy. It just seems like a vicious cycle to me.

From the videos and pics, it sure looks like Owen is a happy baby, and in the end, that is what will make him a well adjusted person. Not whether or not you attach him to your person like a leech.
supa on May 1st, 2006 10:12 am

Thanks, Ty. I keep struggling to remember that (as we can see through my blog archives, it’s an ongoing struggle). There is just so much pressure in our culture to be perfect and to raise perfect children. And that comes out in the mommy-blogosphere, too. I think very few of us intend to make sweeping judgments (like, did I just make sweeping judgments of AP parents?) but it happens, and the pressure increases.
Ty on May 1st, 2006 3:42 pm

I’m sure you did, and so did I. But we also make sweeping judgements of Democrats, and Republicans, and tree-huggers, and immigrants, and terrorists…it’s human nature. We have to catagorize things to understand them. Just because you found a subculture you don’t want to be a member of, it doesn’t mean you have to worry about what they think of your opinion out of PC-ness…You didn’t call them names, or say anything rude or insulting, so just know that that culture isn’t for you, just like perhaps the Rave scene or say, the neo-nazis aren’t your cup of tea…

The reason there are so many books out there on how to raise a child is because there are really that many ways to raise a child. None of them are entirely wrong, and none of them are entirely right.

And believe me, even if he makes it to 18 “perfect,” once he is out of your hands, he will find his own ways to screw himself up!! Just think back to college!

On the other hand, no matter how he turns out, he will always be perfect to you. And that’s all that really matters.
supa on May 1st, 2006 4:14 pm

Hmmm. Thinking back to college …

You have a point.

You know what would be a good idea? Having Owen stay home and do correspondence courses with his mama. Yes, I think that would be best