Oh I love a pious non-parent’s thoughts on parenting. Blah, blah, blah, I’d never do this, and all you need to do is that, and why can’t she see it, when I’m around her kids I just do this and they always co-operate, she is just making problems for herself, stupid parents.
Hey, I’m not going to judge you too harshly for your judging, non-parents. I did a bit of that judging myself before I was a parent and truth be told I still do from time to time. But when we do, you should know that you and I are speaking out of our arses. Really, out of our arses. Becoming a parent is a humbling experience, I’m sure there are other ways to be taken down a peg or two but few with such rapid results spring to mind.
One day you will find yourself creeping back to some mother’s door when she is sick and tired of you and your kid to plead with her to leave what she is doing to help you find a bottle cap somewhere in the bomb site that is her house after your children’s playdate. And you will be saying, could you please check your bins, could you have thrown it out? Yeah, I’m serious, I know you’ve got dinner to cook and stuff but please stick your hands in your rubbish bins and swirl them around in there to look for a bottle cap, a fairly small bottle cap come to think of it.
I’ll come back to this later.
The first “we’ll never” to be broken as parents for us was our “we’ll never use baby dummies/pacifiers”. Pre-parenthood we both thought dummies were a bad thing to bring into the spectrum – stupid parents, but a few weeks into it with our colicky baby and my bleeding nipples we were reduced to a hysterical argument over dummies (nb. that’s an argument of hysterics and not a funny argument), held over the din of our crying baby. He remained opposed to dummies for much of the argument as only someone with intact nipples can be – blah, blah, blah, talking out his arse. But a further ten minutes of our baby howling and he was all ok, where’s a dummy.
And this is what you may never experience as a pious non-parent, if you never cross over to the darkside of parenthood. You may never feel the wondeful bewilderment of doing something that you think is a terrible idea because if it works you are solving an even more terrible problem. You may also never get the opportunity to realise that you were actually dead-set wrong on something, that it wasn’t so straight-forward after all. To think to yourself – huh, fancy that, I actually knew nothing, not even about myself.
We tried and we tried. We poked that dummy in, we nudged it in, we snuck it in, we held it in, we forced it in, and our daughter hated that thing. Who knew an infant baby has such tongue manipulation, but that tiny tongue came in every direction to dislodge that damn dummy from her mouth? We gave up. Never mind, to this day we are breaking parenting “we’ll never’s”.
So our daughter never really understood dummies. She never even noticed dummies until quite recently. I’m sure I remember Lauca asking about dummies and I thought I remembered providing sensible explanations too, but somehow she has come to know them as ‘baby whistles’. I quite like the thought of her reality; where there is something so essential to a baby’s ability to communicate and entertain itself that we parents are always stuffing them into their mouths, to be at the ready for the baby’s whistling tweet. The tweet never comes, but we all wait and hope for the day that a baby decides to actually use its whistle.
When Lauca started playing earnestly with dolls she realised that her doll was missing something vital to its integrity, something that all babies seem to have – a dummy in its mouth. One day being the ultimate recycler that kids are, she secured a quite distinctive flat bottle cap from somewhere (I don’t know where so its irreplacable) and proclaimed it her doll’s ‘baby whistle’. How she loves that bit of plastic, its so important to her doll because you know how babies feel about their whistles, and how she misplaces that beloved bit of plastic crap all the freakin’ time.
And so this is how I have come to find myself at mothers’ houses, that have been upended by a couple of hours of toddler play, pleading with the mother to help me find a bottle cap, like a needle in a haystack, this very precious bottle cap.
Credit for the images – the first image is of a chandelier of baby dummies (interesting huh?) featured in freshread and the second image is from simple stock shots.
I have been feeding my beautiful baby for three and half weeks with a few breaks for food, water, alcohol and sleep. I am exhausted and no longer able to think clearly or react unemotionally to the smallest thing. Your lovely, humourous, clear thinking posts are like a breath of fresh air. I could become addicted.
those tiny pieces of plastic! Yesterday I tore strips off my poor bewildered ex who was about to set off to the shops with our girl and a small plastic fairy called ‘damily.’ dear god – didnt he realise the consequences of LOSING damily? obviously not – the 2am sobbing session for lost toys is in my basket….
My little miss came to ‘dummy consciousness’ late too, when she was big enough to notice ‘other babies’. As a result, Teddy frequently wears the top of a palmolive dishwashing liquid bottle wedged firmly onto his snout…I keep spares!.
I pleaded with my partner, with no success, pre-baby. I said “Don’t slag off the parents who give their kids dummies, it’ll make us look stupid when we try one”. I’m glad I knew enough about babies to know that I’d Try Anything. He had it, it helped sometimes, and then he got addicted to it after a few months and I took it away again. He started screaming for us to put it back in every two hours. Frankly, despite the few days of crying with Dummy Withdrawal, giving it to him in the first place was worth it.
Hang in there LadyBird, it gets easier. Soon, I promise. It just feels like forever. And if you need to sleep, earplugs are good (so long as you have someone else to look after the baby while you catch up on the zzzs)
we call them “plugs.” because they’re for “plugging up” the baby. A__ used to be a plug junkie. oh how i wish she still was. i would gladly pop a plug in her mouth at 3am, but no, she’ll have none of it. mama’s nipples are much nicer, thank you very much.
on the other hand, since there is no longer a plug obsession, there is also yet to be a lovey obsession. i’m hoping she never develops one.
What a lovely ode. Ours was called cork (as in, “put a cork in it”) and yes, I thought we’d never stoop so low. He probably used it longer than the pediatritions and attachment parenting ‘perts would have liked, but oh, how we all loved that cork. Come to think of it, maybe we waited just long enough to wean because he did that like a pro. Now he’s onto obsessions . . . dinosaurs, superheroes and all things space. It’s more fun when you go with the flow. Thanks for being such a lovely writer. Coming here is like a trip to the spa.
Cheers,
Theresa
I think this is one of my favorite posts of yours.
We call them binkies? I’m not actually sure because we call a lot of things that. My son never really took to them, but occasionally they worked.
Never mind all that. The writing was so fun, swirling hands in the rubbish, as only someone with intact nipples can be…to paraphrase a few of my favorite phrases.
I would say that statistic mirrors real life. 70% of all the violence, harrassment, death threats, ugly appearance attacks occur against women in real life too.
It’s a problem.
Tracee Sioux
So Sioux Me
Empower Your Self
Empower Your Daughter
http://www.sosiouxme.com
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I was one of those pious non-parents once, so sure I’d never bottle feed or use a disposable nappy! The first two weeks of motherhood knocked that out of me, thankgoodness..
p.s. keep up the good work, I am in awe of your honesty and considered thinking – it’s a service to motherhood.
Thank you for such charming comments. And so, so nice to have you here Ladybird.
Great post. I’ve been good about the ‘nevers’. Didn’t claim too many and held to the ones I did- no itchy dresses or tights on adorable daughter no matter how cute they are in holiday photos.
I remember a moment though when I realized that I had been a complete backside a year before children even entered our minds.
My sister-in-law had given birth 3 months prior and still took me out for my birthday to my favorite Thai restaurant. She brought baby and all to the busy crowded restaurant and quietly, subtly nursed standing in the not-so-nice bathroom. She was nothing but gracious and never complained. It didn’t occur to me what a huge sacrifice to her sanity that must have been just to celebrate my birthday.
Though I was appreciative, I didn’t know how much until I had a child of my own.
Not a parent yet, but my mum has a few nevers I like (never cook pre-made food, like tinned soup! hahaha so hilarious), as well as some things I think are totally common sense and don’t understand why people get upset over these thigns. My mum is a fan of dummies – the reasoning being kids would probably otherwise suck their thumbs and ‘you can take the dummy away when they’re old enough’. So I’ve never understood why some people hate dummies so much – can someone enlighten me?
Additionally, I have never understood the awful breast vs. bottle debate. My mum breastfed me; my brother was completely uninterested in breastfeeding. Not her fault. But even if she had decided she didn’t want to breastfeed her second child… holy jeez, it is your own choice.
Oh, and my dummy didn’t give me buck teeth, and I don’t think bottle feeding affected my brother’s IQ.
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