Tag Archives: kids

How to tell if you’re “mom enough”

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So, TIME Magazine decided to kick over a tracker jacker-level nest this week by putting an extended breastfeeding (EBF) mom and her 3 year old ds on the cover. With him breastfeeding. While standing on a toddler chair. [The article can be read in print or, if you can unlock, you can read it on their web site. More links – unlocked – here and here.] The basic premise is that it’s fun to star a holy war amongst moms during a year when we’re already talking about a “War on Women”.

Oh TIME, you are so awful sometimes.

My first reaction to seeing a mom EBF her 3yo was shock. It wasn’t that I was repulsed by the idea of a woman bf’ing her son; far from it, I think that’s fantastic. That she’s also incredibly beautiful and has a slammin’ body only made it seem crueller. She’s pretty, she’s got a great bod, and she makes bf’ing look like it’s so fricking easy (when I know for a fact that this is NOT the case for everybody). Ultimately, what bothered me about it is that her child shouldn’t need breastmilk at this stage of his development.

Over the course of a breastfeeding cycle, from when your colostrum first starts to come in all the way through weaning, your milk is constantly changing its composition to meet the nutritional needs of your child. By the time your child is starting to get onto solid foods, your milk is nowhere near as thick or heavy in nutrients because your body just knows that other stuff is going into their system to handle that. So it seems rather odd that anyone would *need* to breastfeed that long…the milk can’t possibly be any better, nutritionally, than what they’d get from a dairy or grocery store. If anything, it may not be as good for you, since it will have less vitamin D and calcium – requiring the child to need to lean more heavily on vitamins or foods rich in the appropriate, otherwise lacking, nutrients.

So, it is mostly me shaking my head say, “This makes no sense.”

I also have a co-worker whose sister just gave birth to an overdue child who has lost a little too much weight since birth. The rule of thumb is that if a child loses more than 10% of their birth weight, they need to be fed more frequently, potentially be supplemented with formula, etc. while the pediatrician monitors more closely. We went through this with dd when my milk didn’t come in well, so hearing that my co-worker’s sister was going through this, too, was giving me flashbacks to my crying fits in the hospital when the milk just wasn’t there and dd was screaming out in hunger until I finally relented and let formula take the place of what I thought only I should provide. Apparently, my co-worker’s sister is taking this in better stride than I did with dd, so good for her. She’s also using a syringe (for those not in the know, this involves a very thin tube that you can strap to your breast so the child is mimicking the comfort of being held close without potentially getting nipple confusion from a bottle). So, she’s better positioning herself for being able to continue bf’ing once she’s gotten the weight issues under control.

As you fast-forward in life, there seem to be no end of times when you compare yourself to other moms. I look around and see moms who appear to be more capable, more patient, better financed, fitter, happier…just generally BETTER. And then I think about my own mom, who’s a superhero to me even more every day as I learn about what it takes to be what I consider a “good mom”. She was epic during my childhood – working full-time, often in managerial roles, being a full-time mom and primary caregiver, cooking dinner every night, keeping the house together and clean…she never seemed to lose it.

And thus I come back to how I feel about my momming. I was “single-momming it” this week, as dh spent the majority of the week out of town for a work trip. Each night, I was on the hook to get the kids from daycare on time, get them home safely and make dinner. I was the only one to put them both to bed, and I was the only one to clean up. On the night when one of them couldn’t sleep well without a parent, I was the only parent who could be woken, and I still had to get up on time the next morning and find a way to shower so that I wouldn’t go into work anything less than clean. I managed. Actually, I did a bit better than managing – I somehow convinced the kids after that first awful night that they should stay in bed all night, and both of them did. Evenings were well-coordinated and everyone played their part, and they ate and slept well for me. I got hot showers 4 out of 4 days that I was on my own. And each day, the kids were happy, got play time, got relaxing time, ate square meals, slept for the required amount of hours, and went to school looking as though we were still a two-parent household all week. Oh, and I managed to get all of my work done at work and then some.

So, then we circle back around to this notion of being “enough” of a mom. In my mind, if you’re trying to do as much as possible within your power (and within the limits of reason) to make/keep your children happy and healthy, then the answer is yes. There’s a lot of stuff that we can’t control, but there is a good bit that we can control, too. Parenting is all about jumping off a cliff not knowing whether the bungee, parachute or other flotation devices are going to work. And, on your way down (or up), you keep experimenting because what worked 5 minutes ago no longer flies, so to speak. You don’t need to EBF to be a good mom. You don’t need to buy the most expensive clothes or toys for your kids to be a good mom. You don’t need to be model-pretty and model-slender to be a good mom.

There’s a big difference between being able to have a child and being a parent. When you decide to BE a mom and devote time and effort to that, then you’re mom enough. Setting up unnecessary fights and agitating an already on-edge population just seems mean-spirited. Shame on TIME for fueling a fire that just needs to burn out, already. I don’t need a magazine to tell me whether I’m “mom enough”. I can figure that out on my own.

Data collection and your baby

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{aside: YES, I KNOW I said I’d post a recipe for the Carolina-style bbq chicken. I still will…I just haven’t gotten to it yet. Work, exercise, tired, parent, work, tired, parent, exercise…you get the drift}

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So, dh decided to interrupt my Angry Birds Space/me time with a copy of the most recent Atlantic magazine. It seems that there was a piece written called “The Data-Driven Parent”, all about how parents are turning to technology to help them track their infants’ behavior, feedings, etc., in order to bring some order into the chaos. On many levels, I SO GET this.

Flashback to nearly 5-1/2 years ago when, recovering from my c-section for dd, I suddenly realize that A) breastfeeding is WAY harder than I thought it would be, B) I don’t appear to be getting the hang of it and neither is she, and C) I have a supply of breastmilk that’s directly inverse to the size of my breasts, which turned into porn-sized bazooms by day 3 post-delivery. With my child losing too much weight in the hospital from lack of nutrition, I tearfully turned to formula and, pretty much immediately upon arriving home, a Medela Pump-in-Style. I pumped, really I did, but I was producing half-ounces at a time. Meantime, my friends from the online birth group were producing gallons, it seemed. Self-esteem, meet the toilet.

Because dd’s weight was such an issue, I tracked everything about her eating and her diapering. We were actually told to do this for a few weeks, and then we continued long after the doctor told us it wasn’t necessary. Pages and pages of double-sided log sheets were completed until we had finally gotten to the point where I was willing to back away from the spreadsheets that I’d used not just to track the feedings but to draw charts with trendlines. {Yes, I’m THAT person. I’m willing to acknowledge it.}

With ds, my supply was better, but breastfeeding was still no better of an option. He and I never clicked, and while I was in the hospital, he actually gnawed me to the point where dh had to run out to a nearby compounding apothecary to get me super-special healing salve. I won’t get into all the gory details, but suffice to say that I wanted to hug and kiss the LC who managed to get me a Medela Freestyle breast pump from our insurer as a fully covered benefit the LAST DAY that they offered it, which coincided with the day I said, “Screw this, I’m jumping on the pump.” {Also side note: Ladies, health care reform is brilliant and some pumps are now going to be fully covered benefits. If you’ve ever pumped or plan to, VOTE OBAMA this November. #thatisall}

I leaned on the spreadsheets I had from dd’s infancy and just made a copy for ds, tracking his feedings and (Oh Dear Lord) comparing his intake to hers. He got significantly more milk than she did, although I did have to supplement with him anyway. But he had whole days where he got nothing but milk. It’s amazing. It’s victory. It’s probably completely incomprehensible that this was a BIG DEAL to me if you never had an issue with feedings yourself.

And this all does have a relationship to the Atlantic article – which talked about how parents are turning to technology to do pretty much what I did, only they’re going quite a bit farther. The parents interviewed for the article are turning to mobile and tablet apps to do their tracking (“Back in my day,” she wheezed, “We used EXCEL and we made those formulas BY HAND! GET OFF MY LAWN!“).

I have no issue with them doing this, but when they get to the point where folks like Belkin are going to enable – nay, encourage – parents who own their tech to share their results with each other so that you can compare and contrast your infant with some other random infant, that’s where I bristle. In my mind, checking the kiddos up the street for “what’s normal” isn’t always your best bet, since that’s a sample that’s often less than statistically significant. Really, if you want to know “what’s normal”, check with your pediatrician. They know this stuff. They went to school for this stuff. They can talk you down off the ledge about how some kids will be 99th percentile because – and I know this is a hard concept to grasp – when you have a scale, SOMEBODY is gonna be at the top of it and SOMEBODY ELSE will be at the bottom of it. That’s why it’s a range. Or a scale. Else they’d change the scale.

What worries me about this is that, instead of enabling parents to do the tracking that makes them feel more secure by having knowledge at their fingertips, it will actually encourage them to worry more, to get even more irrational by going all Dr. Google on their infants about what’s normal and what’s not normal for a 4-week-old baby.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but it seems to me that data collection and productivity apps are cool, and things that encourage panic and contextually-insensitive faux diagnoses are uncool.

Maybe I should just get back to Angry Birds Space; I was a LOT less cranky then.

Is “childism” real?

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Hanging out Sunday night, I happened across this piece – ‘Childist’ Nation: Does America Hate Kids? by Judith Warner. The concept is interesting: we, as a nation, seem to have swung back in some crazy-ass direction where now people are all okay for stifling the creativity, joie de vivre, and very safety of children in the country. Hmm. I think I beg to differ. I think it’s been around for a lot longer and is far more ingrained than any ‘ism’ can possibly express.

Sure enough, things like No Child Left Behind do little to show that we’re trying to handle the immense variation in children’s learning development, but standardized tests were around decades ago and didn’t seem to derail children from having useful and prosperous futures back then. (I had to pass four state-level standardized tests just to be eligible to graduate from high school, and somehow I managed to do that without ending up in a padded cell.)

And while the terrible tragedy of a young girl being run to death for having lied about eating a candy bar is just that – a terrible tragedy – it’s not like there weren’t screwed up parents for pretty much the entire history of, well, parenthood.

It seems like a week can’t go by without hearing some horrifying story of what someone’s done to a child: sexual assault (I’m looking right at you, Jerry Sandusky, and it makes me want to puke), physical abuse, emotional abuse…the list just goes on and on. It’s to the point where you almost have to go numb if you want to be able to listen to, watch or read the news; otherwise, you might lose your nut listening to the filth and bile that humankind seems to heap on itself, especially its most vulnerable population.

But, I’d like to point out that there’s more to it than that. Sure enough, Warner does point out that America’s lack of support for affordable, high-quality child care is part of the problem, and I agree 100% with her. I’d also like to note that it shouldn’t take Beyonce whipping out a boob in a New York restaurant to get people to agree that breastfeeding is okay in public. As far as I can tell, the only people who think bf’ing in public is offensive are those who see breasts as “tits” only. Au contraire – boobs can sometimes be breasts, sometimes be tits, sometimes even be BODACIOUS TA-TAS… – and whatever they are, it’s none of anyone else’s business. Feeding your child should be okay in a restaurant. People go to restaurants to eat, right? OK. (nods)

And setting aside the Tiger Moms and the Parisian Moms, and whatever other form of Titled Mom you want to come up with, kids need structure. They need boundaries. They need freedom to run while simultaneously being able to know that there’s a home to come back to. That’s why I get so completely annoyed when I hear about how we need to make sure that everybody gets a trophy whenever there’s a competition. No, they don’t. Whoever wins should get a trophy, and maybe the next 2 or so other kids. Everybody else just gets to see the trophies. Sounds harsh? Well, which is harsher – letting kids think that everybody always wins or teaching them that winning has to have some value to it or else it’s not really winning? I think of this exchange from the movie, The Incredibles, where the mother (Helen) is trying to make sure that her son, Dash, understands why his superpowers might be too much for competitive sports. She tells him that “everybody’s special”, which prompts his grumbling retort: “Which is another way of saying no one is.” We’re not all Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, or {pick the really fast/gifted athlete of your choice}. Doesn’t mean we can’t strive for it, but doesn’t mean we’ll all get there. Teaching kids otherwise is actually crueller than giving them some dose of reality, in my opinion.

Where else do we fall down? All over the place. We medicate kids early and often when it’s not always clear that they need it. We leave parents of autistic children to fend for themselves all too often, when it’s clear that they need access to MORE assistance, not less. We actually debate whether or not dads should have access to paternity leave. We fill the shelves of grocery stores with countless boxes, jars, cans, and plastic cups of foods targeted to kids that are filled to the gills with high fructose corn syrup, chemicals and other crrrrap that growing bodies (or even fully-grown bodies) just don’t need.

Oh, I could just go on and on.

I’m not saying that kids don’t need to be separated from adults at times. I like having some free time to myself when no one is hanging on my leg, asking me whether they can watch “Wiggly Wiggly Christmas” for the umpteenth time, or jumping off the couch when I expressly forbade that not two minutes prior. But, the thing is: these are my kids. I take them as our responsibility. It’s up to me and dh to decide how to civilize these wild creatures who were brought into this world as a way for us to extend our family tree one more generation. I’ll do everything in my power to protect them from the stupid and mean people, but I know there will be a point when my reach won’t be good enough. At that point, I have to rely on them to be able to take care of themselves to some extent and call me in when they recognize that they need help. So I have to do what I can to prepare them for that eventuality, and the stupid and mean people keep coming up with new and exciting ways in which they can be awful to kids (and their parents, which has a trickle-down effect on the kids), so it seems to make the life of a parent that much more challenging.

Of course, no one put a gun to my head and made me have kids. And it seems like every generation has some point when parent A turns to parent B and says, “Are we really doing the right thing, bringing kids into {this} world?” (where {this} is always punctuation for some really awful thing, like nuclear proliferation, homophobia, or the rampant spread of reality TV). So maybe it’s just a never-ending cycle. On the other hand, there is somewhat of an antidote to this. If parents all over the place said, “I won’t be like that” and then actually WEREN’T that parent, and if employers, school superintendents, politicians, and everyone else went about their day trying not to be that guy, maybe we’d get somewhere.

As I’ve said to dd on more than one occasion, “Politeness costs you nothing.” I really do consider that to be true. It costs you nothing to be nice to someone, to do the right thing, to smooth the path for the person behind you. But it seems to cost you your very soul (if not various other possessions) when you deviate from that. Quoth Wil Wheaton, “Don’t be a dick”. Oh that more people could live their lives with this in their hearts. Kids – and adults – everywhere would rejoice.