Pigs Have Rights Too...

Right around the time that a brouhaha on breastfeeding in public was brewing on BlogHer, I went to the California State Fair. And saw this poor pig. She can't move in this contraption they've got her in. She has to just lie there while the piglets roam over her body at will. That gets my dander up a tad more than whether or not humans breastfeeding in public is a godgiven right. How come humans get agency and pigs don't, I ask you. I'm of the mind that as you treat your animals, so you treat yourselves.

I tried to get a picture of her face while all this was going on, but the damn bars which prevent her from moving got in the way. Still, I couldn't resist giving her a bit of a boost--lipstick and eyeshadow. This wa purely for the pig's sake and should in no way be considered by anyone at all ever a political statement.

On Being A Mother - Why I'm Not:: Part Two

I promised you this post way back here when I wrote Part One. I didn't intend to get into this today. No, I had a far more intellectual post I want to write for BlogRhet, but epiphanies being what they will, this is what you're getting.

I just watched Leahpeah's interview, now on Alpha Mom, with Amy Storch of amalah.com--and I had an Aha Moment. Amy was telling Leah about the day when she first started working at home full-time and she got so furious with her infant son that she wanted to shake him. She didn't, but the depth of her feeling so scared her that she realized she needed to put him down and leave the room for a minute to calm down. Then she realized that whatever other mom's could or could not do regarding the number of children they could effortlessly handle while still chopping wood and pumping gas, she had met her limit. The solution for her was to get childcare. Amy wrote about it on her blog and the response from women who had felt the same and what they did was overwhelming, she says.

So, here's another response from a woman who felt the same.

The backstory: Miss B, my niece, had the wisdom to be born right in the middle of December, just in time for Christmas vacation. Thus, entire village--namely, my mother, my father, and me--was there in situ during the early weeks of her life. Holding her, feeding her, diapering her; you know, all that stuff. When it was my turn to do the middle of the night feedings, they wheeled her bassinet into the den where I was sleeping on the sofa bed. Now, I am the baby of the family, of all the cousins, in fact, so I had never really spent a lot of time with a newborn in the middle of the night. Certainly I was a dab hand at babysitting, and I prided myself on how I could calm my crying charges. But this middle of the night thing--well, really, how hard could it be.

Let me tell you, short and sharp. Hard.

Miss B was a pacifier baby, which was all to the good as long as she was sucking away. But when she'd fall asleep, those little cheeks would go slack, and, plop, the pacifier would fall out of her mouth. Which would wake her up and cause her to wah wah wah, where's my paci in that relentless way that only a newborn can do. This interfered, as you might imagine, with my sleep. And by dawn of the morning, I was ready to kill her. I tried to think of a way of attaching the pacifier to her mouth. When I was a kid, I had a doll whose hair bow was stuck into her polyvinyl head with a straightpin. I couldn't pin the pacifier to Miss B's cheek. I couldn't do anything. Everytime I'd lie down and start to fall asleep again, she'd be all wah, wah, where's my paci. I remember getting up for the umpteenth time, and standing over her cradle, filled with such, such--a strong desire to shut her up any way possible. I remember the feeling in my arms as I held them by my side with my fists balled. I was shaking with the repressed urge to pick her up and--what? shake her? swing her against the wall? hit her?

In that instant I knew, viscerally knew, how moms end up hurting their kids. I had walked half a block in their shoes, and I was wise enough to know that it was the fact that I had choices, that enabled my repressing that urge. I did not have a house full of other kids. I was not the only one responsible for the baby. I was not post-partum. I did not have a husband nagging and bills waiting. I could, and did, say to my sister and my mom, "nope, not for me. The middle of the nights are yours."

I also did not think, specifically, directly, consciously--ooooh, better not have one of my own that I can't hand off to someone else. I don't even know that I suspected how that night might have played a part in why I just never got around to having kids. Until today. Until I heard Amy tell a similar story about her baby. Until I heard her say that this was a common experience. Then, I realized that I had not known it was common. My mother never expressed such frustration; nor had my sister. I thought I alone was the uncommon woman. I thought, I guess, that I was unnatural, deeply flawed, not Mother Material. So I protected my unborn children in the only way I knew: by not having them.

To Tell The Truth...

...about the bold-faced lies.

5. My athleticism is such that I could be a professional swimmer if only it didn't require my getting wet.
This is my problem with all swimming, be it pool or ocean, mighty flail or dip of toe: it's the wetness factor. I don't like it. Because it's--wet. What can I say? Maybe my mother bathed me too often as a baby. Maybe I was a harpooned whale in another life. Whatever, I avoid it at all costs when it takes place outside the boundaries of my toilette. Even as a child, I wasn't partial to the water. I didn't avoid it then as I do now, but once in, I was never quite sure what to do. Was there any pleasure in mindlessly churning up and down and aisle? Noooooooooooo. So what else was there to do? Once in high school and college, there were some other interesting things to do, provided a person with a penis was present. But beyond that, and now past that, what's the point?

The real lie, however, is in the first clause, the one about my athleticism. Ha! And double ha!

8. I am a neat-freak who would rather clean than do anything else.
Let's put it this way: I feel about cleaning as I do about getting wet. What's the point? The endless, endless monotony of it. O, whine whine mighty whine. Thus, I have cherished several adages told to me by women in the know. My first mother-in-law once said, "Tidy little people have tidy little minds." And my own mother insisted, "I didn't bring my daughters up to be maids." I didn't know what she meant until I realized that most mothers had their daughters doing Saturday morning KP as a regular stint, to teach them how to clean, for chrissakes, to instruct them in the humble but worthy arts of housewifery. Mine didn't.

9. I have been pregnant three times.
With laughter, as my mother would say. But not with baby, fetus, or even a lowly zygote. I've written about this before. It wasn't intentional and I do keep my eye on those oldest mom in the world stories. I've still got some time to go, I figure, if the upper limit is 6o-something. But to date, no: never had a bun in the oven.

So there you have it, the truth about my bold-faced lies. Ten tales, only four are false. That leaves 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 11 as the truth. The facts, m'am (and you sirs as well), just the facts.....

On Being A Mother - Why I'm Not

I never set out not to be a mother. I always assumed I would have kids, along with the obligatory husband, 2 car garage and white picket fence. That’s what people did, wasn’t it.

When H & I were in college, before we were married, we planned on having six children. I don’t know why six. I do know that one of them was to be called Megan; the other five were name- and genderless, I suppose. I recall sitting at dinner in the dorm cafeteria one night and he/we were playing house with our imaginary six kids. Suddenly, I don’t know how, he had all six of them in league against me. About what? I don’t know. I just remember the searing feeling of injustice, of being odd man out, without a recourse. It’s interesting to me now that I can only recall that emotion, the strength and taste of it, but no other details of that night. When I say ‘interesting’, I mean ‘telling.’ It’s telling isn’t it that all I can remember is the feeling and not the facts.

When H and I got married, the time for kids never seemed right. First he was in drama school and then a lowly rep actor. I supported us with a variety of secretarial jobs, menial labor of the female sort. We lived in furnished digs, bedsitters where we shared a bathroom with sometimes fifteen others, none of whom ever washed the tub, some of whom refused to even pull the plug after they’d bathed. I couldn’t imagine bringing a baby into that; it was so antithetical to my understanding of motherhood as to be beyond belief.

When we finally got a real flat with real furniture, albeit 2^nd hand, there was a real mother with two real kids who lived downstairs. She was my role model for what not to be. Her life was an endless cycle of lugging huge garbage bags crammed full of dirty towels and peed-on sheets, kids clothes stained with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and her husband’s work clothes to the Laundromat down the street, bringing them home still damp, hanging them out to dry in whatever-weather-London-was-offering and then starting all over again the next day. It was her oldest son, the six year old, who nightly wet the bed. The three year old was potty-trained, but exhibiting what I now recognize as symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (that’s the one that often leads to sociopaths). His mother, who had become my friend, was his captive slave, running after him endlessly to right the death and destruction that went in his wake. “There’s a good boy, Peter,” she whined endlessly, uselessly, feebly.

In the six years that I was married to H., I don’t believe the subject of children ever really came up between us. Friends started having kids and I would say, when they get Pampers in England, I’ll get pregnant. Maybe they already had them. Maybe it was just an excuse because I knew that this was not a marriage in which to create a family.

When H and I finally split up and I moved back to America, I brought with me my prescription for birth control pills. I was a single woman now, and this was---hey, hey, hey! The Seventies! And The Eighties! But somewhere along the way, I stopped taking the pills. I was in a Long Term Relationship that I Thought Was Going to End in Marriage. Maybe I thought getting pregnant would make that day happen sooner. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could. I couldn’t, it didn’t, and when D and I got together, I just didn’t bother with birth control. Que sera sera, was my mantra.

What would be was zip, nada, not even a smidgeon of a pregnancy scare. In the back of my mind, I always kept an eye out for telltale signs: the swollen breasts, the darkening line down the belly. Nope. Not for me. And so it went until it was past the point of no return. Until it was, as they say in Yiddish, fahfallen, which is what they say to a bald man who is hoping for hair.

And now here I am, lo these many years later, a woman with no children. A non-mother. I’m ambivalent about that fact, and maybe I always will be. I don’t know what I’ve missed; I only know what other people say when they wax eloquent about their children. I started this as a post with the subhead, Why I'm Not & How I Feel About It. But I don’t really know. I would have to stutter and explain and maybe wave my hands a lot. And that seems to me to deserve a post of its own. So consider this Part I and Part II will be, even as my progeny were not, forthcoming.

So I'm Back...

...and you'd think I'd have a lot to say. Which I do, but I also have one of them chest things going on--you know, a cold or pneumonia or The Influenza. I'm not sure which, but I'll let you know as it brews. I think there's a bell curve for this sort of illness (well, any sort I guess), and I'm won't know where I am in the ascent until I hit the top of the bell. This makes absolutely perfect sense to me, and seems quite pithy, but that may be the fever....

I'm supposed to leave for LA tomorrow for the second leg of my Nanny Trips. I will be taking my computer this time, so I should be better at posting. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.....

I'll leave you with a photo, one of many. A reader asked for photos of hands and feet. This bud's for you, Lady Lisa....

Leavin' On A Jet Plane....

...a Jet Blue plane, to be exact. I am still one of their loyal customers, who can't see what all the angst is about, but then I didn't have to sit on a plane for ten hours. And hopefully I won't tomorrow night either, when I take the Red Eye from Sac to JFK. I hate the Red Eye, but it's the only direct flight.

I'm going to see Miss B and her boys and help her with them for a week. It is a working week, as I shall be channeling my mother and doing the cooking, etc. Miss B never got the Libby Treatment after giving birth. Her older sister did; in fact, my mother was in the delivery room when her great granddaughter was born. I feel badly that Miss B missed out, so I shall try in my own way to duplicate the Jewish mother thing that my mom did so well. She was always there when you needed her (and sometimes when you didn't!) and she just did, without asking how to or why or when. I think it was part of her sure sense that she always knew what was best for you.

I have spent much time and money in therapy working to get rid of such narcissitic tendencies, so my boundaries are clearer, which may or may not be helpful. We shall see.

Roe v Wade: You've made it to 34...may you go on forever!

Today is the 34th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade, that ensured a woman's right to choose what does or does not happen to her body. Bloggers are honoring and celebrating and shouting that fact from the virtual rooftops by writing about why we each are for choice. Here are my reasons:

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm an American who honors the Constitution and all the Founders sought to create of this country. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--it's the second word that's salient here. Liberty: just another way of saying free to chose.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I was around before Roe v Wade. I've had friends who have given birth and had back-room abortions. I remember one who told of pulling wads of packing from her vagina in the Greyhound bus on the way back to Pittsburgh from West Virginia, where she could find someone to abort her. I've stood and rubbed another's back while she delivered a daughter, who was pulled from between her legs, wrapped up and hustled off to the nursery before she even got to hold her. I remember how missing your period felt like a harbinger of doom--and for some it literally was.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I've worked for the Movement and I know the statistics, and I've seen the pictures of what happened when abortions were illegal. I'll never forget one photo in particular, NARAL had it on a brochure I think. It was a woman with short dark hair, lying on her stomach with her arms outstretched and her legs drawn up the way a baby lies in its crib belly down. Except she was lying in a pool of her own blood, and she was dead. To me, that photo was the most eloquent visual possible, and I wanted to blow it up and throw it on all the desks of legislators after the Anti-Choice people delivered their photos of fetuses.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I value what is over what may be. The real here-and-now woman is far more important to me than the potential of any child she may or may not bear.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I don't believe my religion or any religion, which are after all man-made, should have the right of dominion. You say potahto, I say potato--both words get to the same vegetable, after all.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I don't want some goddam man who has never had his legs in the stirrups telling me what I may or may not do. It's burns my chaps and frosts my hide that the Anti-Choice movement is the province of men. Who the fuck are they to have even an iota of say in the lives of women they are not related to? Get another hobby-horse, buddy. If your life lacks meaning, find some other passion to make you feel important.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm Pro-Family, Pro-Kids, Pro-Loving Relationships.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm an intelligent woman and I don't see how I could be anything else.

Population explosion

My cousin Ratphooey had her baby boy this morning. Now if only MissB would pop hers out, my family would be all present and accounted for.