In which I reflect upon my arrogance

The self-feeding thing is going so well, but holy shit is it messy. I only hate myself about a trillion times a day for suggesting my workplace buy me a giant, padded, nook-and-crannied, way-over-engineered high chair for a baby gift. A piece of equipment that I came to hate the first time around and which I have grown no more affection for this second time. Even the smallest snack for Cormac takes me about ten minutes to clean up with all those creases and folds and grooves and what-not, and I spend the entire time cursing myself and that chair while I do it. I don’t have any excuse for this foolishness, I heard the advice before I made my choice – don’t buy big fancy high chairs, just get the simple, cheap, easy-to-clean ones. But nooooo.

All this cursing leads me to start cutting corners and to feed Cormac on the floor. It can’t be any messier and the floor being a flat surface it is at least easier to clean. But then the baby doesn’t want to eat alone on the floor so now I have taken to eating on the floor too. And Lauca will be damned if she will sit up at the table while we’re eating on the floor, and out the window (wherever that is, I can’t possibly see it from way down here on the floor) goes my dreams of being the kind of nice family who shares a conversation and a meal together at the table.

Speaking of feeding your children, boy are my intuitive eating ideas for Lauca contentious with some parents. Words like ‘permissive’ get thrown around, to which I respond with words like ’self-regulation’, but I still come away feeling completely misunderstood. Apart from anything it is rude to get on your high horse and deliver a lecture about your whole parenting philosophy when it calls into question someone else’s parenting ideas, so I don’t, even though that means I have to overlook a lot of mutterings about certain children being recklessly unsupervised in their consumption of chocolate biscuits.

I feel mean and petty instead, only just restraining myself from seizing upon their children’s fussy moments with some reflections of my own – see, Lauca can choose for herself how many chocolate biscuits she feels like eating right now and she does the same when she is eating fucking vegetables, and you can see that she loves them both, which is more than I can say for your children who seem to need to be tricked into eating their vegies with your fucking Seinfeld book!

Still, they would have the upper hand if they ever saw the way I serve lunch on the floor. Permissive doesn’t cover it.

Something from my inbox

If you live in Toronto, which I don’t:

Demeter Press invites you to join editors, May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte

to celebrate the publication of their new book:Mothering and Blogging
The Radical Art of the MommyBlog

Friday, February 26, 2010
Toronto Women’s Bookstore
7pm
73 Harbord Avenue, Toronto
(Harbord/Spadina)

I laughed

This from Daddy Dialectic.

And this from Bitch PhD. (The unexpected ending).

All things bathing

• You probably can’t tell from the photo just how much stupidity occurs during bath time, but for one, Cormac spends almost the entire time standing up.. and he is a slippery baby who can’t yet walk.

• This bathroom is pure chaos, but somehow I have ended up with the other bathroom entirely to myself, so frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn about this one… Anyway, the purpose of this photo was to try to get a shot of Lauca’s drawing on the wall, it is a tree house. Can you see it? It has been there for over a year and is far too lovely for us to wash off.

• I have started making shampoo and conditioner, the hippy way. “You’re something of a flip-flopper,” my partner said. For the past two years I have bought the most expensive shampoo and conditioner a certain French cosmetics company can sell in a pretentious hair salon. I had decided that if there was one thing we could really improve about ourselves it was our hair. “Not entirely flip-flopping,” I assured him. “I will continue to use the luxury haircare products, but the rest of you can try the baking soda and vinegar versions”.

• They have only just started their hippy hair experiment so no results yet, although I can tell you that four year olds find it most novel to see their mothers making shampoo and conditioner in the kitchen.

Nine months

Cormac has now been out for as long as he was in.

Sweet, yet edgy

Image from here: Norah Cyrus, looking “sweet, yet edgy” (?) standing against a wall of advertising for toys.

A bunch of people are saying that Norah Cyrus and Emily Grace (two Disney stars, I think) are putting out a line of lingerie for young girls. Norah is nine years old and Emily is eight years old. Ooh! La, La! Couture are suggesting that their joint collection with the girls will be clothing rather than lingerie but none the less they are describing it as “sweet, yet edgy”, which you know, is a term kind of like ’sassy’ that has always led to such good things when it comes to products for young girls. So, can hardly wait.

While I am on the topic, this is a great post from One Good Thing on the deliberate misuse of Lolita.

First-time mother, veteran feminist

I confess to having seen Geek.Anachronism around the Internet for like, ever, and yet when I dropped by to read her response to my 10 questions about your feminist motherhood I suddenly realised I had never been to her blog before. Somehow I have missed Lucy completely. And I don’t know how that happened, because reading her blog I remembered how much I like her outlook, her analysis and her style of writing. Also, as a bonus, her photos are beautiful.

Anyway, go read about Lucy’s feminist motherhood. She has a 7 month old baby, her first. Her response is all good but I particularly loved her feminist dissection of attachment parenting:

9. If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?

I kind of attachment parent – I babywear (sometimes) and I breastfeed (exclusively til 6mth and now shared with solids), I cloth nappy (from about 2 months onwards and part-time) and I co-sleep (all the time). I don’t like a lot of the politics around AP though – the anti-science stuff around vaccination for example. I really don’t like a lot of the AP communities either – the assumption that I will never ever ever work and that’s the only way to do it is rife. The assumption that Wolfman (my DH *sigh* heteronormative and marriage-assumptive much?) goes along with it and that I am the emotional centre of my family. I find I am as awkward and outsider there as I am in most mothering communities. It’s something I’ve begun to accept as pretty normal and certainly OK, but I find it challenging as a person.

The assumption that I will sacrifice everything for whatever I’ve just been told (sold?) as the best for my child isn’t unique to AP. Same with the heteronormativity, the assumption of SAHMing and even the consumerist parts (if you think AP isn’t as consumerist as any other parenting philosophy, check out babywearing communities). I find all of these things fuck with my feminist ways – even though I know AP isn’t heteronormative it does make the assumption of a stay at home parent and socially that often relies on the gendering of the workforce to create the male = breadwinner default. The consumerism gets me – the derision aimed at parents with fancy strollers, at yummy mummies in SUVs, at those crappy welfare parents not buying organic, while lauding the latest handloomed SPOC wrap from Czechoslovakia, single-origin chocolate, organic coffee and green cars. Consumerist behaviour is very effective at convincing large swathes of people that their life isn’t good enough. Motherhood is hard enough without the added pressure of “buy this way or you suck as a mother”.

(You can find all the many other responses in this series here. If you’d like to respond to these questions yourself you can either email me your answers and I’ll put them on blue milk as a guest post or you can post them elsewhere and let me know and I’ll link to them).

Mothering in poverty

I get these updates from the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) and frequently mean to post on them and don’t get around to it, which is basically the story of my life right now. (Hello to all those feminist carnivals that I keep missing). Anyway, if you are ever looking for something a bit academic around motherhood then might I suggest joining ARM, tis well worth it.

This latest publication caught my eye. The twentieth issue of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering covers Mothering and Poverty and here are some of the articles:

*Poor Mother? A Critical Review of Current Measures of Maternal Poverty and their Limitations
*Just Breaks My Heart: A Mother’s Narrative
*Do Workers Think We Don’t Have a Brain in Our Heads? Qualitative Study About Mothers’ and their Social Workers’      Perspectives About Social Services
*Child Welfare Intervention in Visible Minority Immigrant Families: The Role of Poverty and the Mothering Discourse
*Avoiding the “Doomed to Poverty” Narrative: Words of Wisdom from Teenage Single Mothers
*Children’s Birthday Parties: Welfare and Constructions of Motherhood in the United States
*Don’t Blame Low-Income Mothers! Understanding Low-Income Mothers’ Socio-ecological Circumstances in Relation to Health Status
*Blue-Collar Mother / White-Collar Daughter: A Perspective on U.S. Policies Toward Working Mothers
*A Part of the Community: Conceputalizing Shelter Design for Young, Pregnant, Homeless Women
*Empowered Mothering Among Poor Latina Women in Abusive Relationships
*Productive” Reproducers: The Political Identity of Mothering in Contemporary India

For more information see their website here.

A picture of us adoring the baby

We adore and adore, and adore some more. Except for late this afternoon when I was fed up with adoring.

The inner life of a four year old

You know you are living with a four year old when you find mysterious teeny tiny stickers in obscure locations around your house. Truth be told I actually quite like the secrecy involved in the claiming of space for art, but I wouldn’t admit that to her of course.