how to raise a girl.

I’ve had this pervasive feeling ever since the instant I knew I was pregnant that I was the mother of a daughter… and not just one daughter, but only daughters. Henry was convinced I was crazy, that the hormones had gotten to my brain and caused some sort of hormonal meningitis.  Then, around 16 weeks in, the ultrasound tech and I got antsy one slow Saturday at work and decided to take a look… and, oddly it looked like a boy.  (full disclosure: he was flamboyantly gay and prone to see penis’s where there are none.)  I was shocked, Henry felt his diagnosis of me (CRAZY, CERTIFIED) was substantiated, and my poor dad got all excited about finally having another Y chromosome in the family.

Two weeks later we went to the proper 20-week ultrasound and were solemnly assured by the ultrasound tech that if there were boy body parts, we’d have seen them.  And she was right.  Cora is undoubtedly a girl.  And now we have to figure out how to raise her in these somewhat frightening times.

I grew up thinking that feminism was a bad thing (and that Bill and Hilary were the devil), but was also raised in a house without barbies and TV and full of national geographic and books about girls like Anne (with an E) and Nancy Drew and Emily of New Moon who were imaginative and brave and adventurous.  I was profoundly lucky to grow up at a huge camp out in the sticks in east texas where there were forests to build forts in, horse pastures, swimming pools, a lake, and enough space to generally run wild.  My mom was careful to teach us the basics of how to iron a shirt, balance a checkbook, cook dinner, fold laundry, and be gracious to guests in our home, but I didn’t get the sense that we were only doing that because we were girls.  (My dad did get waited on hand and foot a little bit, but I quit begrudging him that when he pointed out last year that he had purchased six or seven cars in the last decade and none of them were for him.)  Mainly it just seemed like those were life skills we would need as adults and mom felt responsible to send us out of the house properly equipped to be functional adults in society.

And now I find myself in a world full of pink and purple princessy toys that don’t jive with anything I thought was cool as a kid, and I wonder why that is.  I don’t think the pressure was on in the 80’s to act like tiny beauty queens, and I definitely don’t think marketing to little girls was as sexualized as it is today.  We are making a big effort to keep Cora’s environment as gender-neutral as possible and let her figure out the differences between men and women by watching how Henry and I behave.

I also don’t think feminism is such a dirty term anymore.  It is a dismaying thing to feel that your opinion is less valuable, or that your work is worth less, or your rights less important because of your gender or your race.  I fervently hope that Cora will never feel limited by her gender, that she will feel that she can do whatever it is her future holds without hesitation about what she “ought” to want or do as a woman.

And I’m wondering, you blog readers, what do you think?  How do you successfully steer a kid through the gauntlet the media and our consumer culture has laid in her path to adulthood?  I’m curious.

ah, also:  vintage LEGO ad via sociological images, and picture torn from a feminist coloring book at girlsnotchicks.com.

existential crises and other drama

well, I’m back.

I had sort of abandoned the blog in a fit of self-consciousness–after all, blogging (outside the realm of posting pictures of your kids for your family) is pretty much an exercise in narcissism regardless of how you angle it, not to mention a major cliche of sorts.  There is a nervous part of me that doesn’t want to be one of the arty mom bloggers.  And I had a good old fashioned August Funk in the middle of the winter that left me with a profound feeling of What’s The Point and an general attitude of Eff It All.  Poor Henry has been quite the patient and long-suffering spouse over the last few weeks, and is figuring out that my usually sunny disposition comes with a dark streak.

But, I’m feeling better! (I’m not dead yet!) I had a rough couple of weeks at work which made me feel that if I never darkened the door of another hospital IT WOULD BE TOO SOON, and the delicate balance I’d been maintaining of parenting being a break from working and vice versa got all screwed up.  Then I had a (very minor!) scooter wreck on Monday evening that made me feel breathlessly glad to be alive, the weather cleared up, and a tiny boy at our church fell out his second story bedroom window onto his head, which cost me a night of sleep thinking about how utterly horrifying it would be to have my child in that ICU bed hanging onto her life by a thread… to be sitting there wondering what disabilities she would have to deal with, to wonder if she would ever talk or walk or laugh again.

I had a little visit with myself and concluded that life is fragile and tenuous, God is inexplicably good to us in spite of our dreadful behavior, and it would be a crime to continue having a crappy attitude.   And also that anything can take on a narcissistic hue if you’re narcissistic enough.  (I blame Henry for even thinking about this; Narcissism was not in my working vocabulary prior to meeting him.  dang psychologists.)  Blogging is/can be a good exercise for me in expressing my thoughts and venting and keeping track of what Cora is up to so I don’t forget… thus the return to the blog.

Anyway.  I will have some good chatty posts about The Kid and Other Stuff sometime soon.

the full purse theory of life management

It is generally true that, whatever size your purse is, it is always full.  I am trying to decide how big the metaphorical purse in my life actually is.  Do I want to go to med school or (ultimately just settle for) nurse practitioner school? Do we plan to go live in Another Country to be missionaries (in the traditional sense), or are we called to stay here in the US?  Am I the kind of person that will enjoy being a mom more or less part-time and having a big career too?  Is it possible that I could enjoy staying at home full-time?  How much flexibility do I actually need in my work life, and do I even want to stay in medicine? Will I always regret it if I walk away from medical school?  Will I hate being away from Cora and Henry so much if I do go to medical school?  Can we even afford it?

I’m down to brass-tacks, theorizing mostly aside.  I told myself I would wait and have the baby before trying to make any decisions, and now here I am, having to fend off questions from folks at work about what I plan to do next, and not having any answers.

I will say, I’m happy to have the luxury of choosing, and of being married to a guy that is willing to flex his career however he needs to keep all my options open.

why I’m voting for Obama, in a nutshell.

sorry for a longish post, but I have a little ranting and raving to do.

Lately, we’ve had a few heated discussions with people over why we aren’t voting for McCain.

With Christians, the topic centers on abortion– and my feeling is that after twenty-plus years of trying to make it illegal, it is fairly obvious that even if we succeed, the problem isn’t going away.  Obama (and Hillary, for that matter, and Howard Dean*!) all concede that abortion is by any definition a terrible tragedy for all involved… and they are interested in trying to rectify some of the social ills that make it so rampant.  Which is more than McCain is willing to do, or even talk about.  And more than the vast majority of the church is doing. Furthermore, I am really tired of this being the first topic Christians bring up when talking about presidential politics… Why does it have to polarize our discussion of politics so completely?  There is so much more involved in being president and running the United States than this issue.  Why aren’t Christians talking about Iraq (which, at the moment, may be costing more lives than abortions do) or the environment or the dismal state of education or the disastrous incapacity of many people to pay for healthcare?

With others, the topic centers on money, and specifically taxes.  Certain members of my family (who will go unnamed) refer to Obama as “the tax-man” and talk about how they are going to get hit financially if he gets elected.  This remark then segues into a discussion about how poor people don’t deserve the government “handouts” that their hard-earned tax dollars would then pay for.  There are a lot of problems with this line of reasoning… first of all, one of the biggest drains on the American budget at the moment is Iraq, which was something most of the same people supported.  I think it’s a bit near-sighted to think we should get to continue to enjoy the tax-cuts Bush put in place when we chose to purchase this $10-billion-a-month war in Iraq.  Second, Obama’s plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts only applies to incomes over $250,000… and the revenue generated from the roll-back would pay for his health care plan.  But my biggest issue is, don’t presume to know how or why poor people are poor and what is best for them when you are making an income ten times greater than the poverty line.  Welfare reform is a great thing, it’s true, but making blanket statements about the moral standing of people needing welfare is fairly ridiculous, particularly coming from the mouths of Christians.

I could go on (and on and on)… but I won’t.  I’m just ready for a changing of the guard.  Another sector of my family recently got to chuckling about all the young folks that are supporting Obama and how green they are, how little experience they presumably have in electing good leaders.  My retort was, well, seems like you older folks haven’t done the hottest job and now it’s our turn… and a lot of the younger evangelical crowd is feeling the same way.

ok fine.

well, sorry it’s been a week or so… I got all hung up on some “research” last week about shared parenting and the history of working moms and feminism and and and… then that segued into a lot more “research” on cloth diapering and how to have a kid in a leave-no-trace kind of way, which led to an argument with a girl at work who just had a baby 4 months ago and told me I’d be crazy to use cloth diapers… the problem is, I get all heated up about this stuff and can’t tell whether or not I’m being rational.  I haven’t been that emotional with this pregnancy, but the volume does seem to be turned up on all my opinions and big ideas.  And I’m trying to be judicious about when to crack that over the blogosphere’s head, and when to just keep it between me and Henry, who, bless his heart, has been extremely long-suffering with my high-volume opinions over the last couple of months.

someone should fine me for the number of run-on sentences I just wrote.  sorry.

In any case, here is a synopsis of my thoughts on the two above-topics:  First, I have been veerrry agravated by the number of people that have asked me the following questions– Do you plan to go back to work after having the baby? and Do you still want to go to med school? and How do you plan to juggle being a doctor and a mom?  Particularly in light of the fact that not a single person has posed those questions to Henry.  He has a doctoral degree, a “big” career, and is just as guilty of creating this little bundle of a new person as I am, but I seem to be the one that is expected to hang it all up and make (at the very least) major changes to my career/extra-familial life.  This is in no small part propagated by the Church at large, and I am frustrated that there seems to be so little literature about godly parenting aimed in the dad-direction.  And I know I’m taking on a whole history of gender roles and Proverbs 31 and whatnot, but I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that maybe parenting should be more intentionally shared between the mom and dad, that the career/family/kid integration changes that have to happen should be expected to happen on both fronts.  And that being a godly mom/wife/citizen of this world is just as important as being a godly dad/husband/etc.  (On a similar note, I really really wonder why American baby showers have to exclude men.  Apparently in Peru the men are expected to be there.) Luckily, Henry is one hundred percent on board with me on this and thought I was crazy to suggest either not going to med school or him not getting to be home some of the time with our kids.  He has been fascinated by the baby registry on amazon, and has done just as much research as me on all the “stuff” we need to get… OK, mainly on the hiking kid-carrier which we won’t even use probably until next summer, but still.  I appreciate his involvement and interest.  He is a peach.

Item number two:  We (actually I– Henry, it turns out, has never changed a diaper and doesn’t know the difference) made the monumental decision to use cloth diapers for a myriad of reasons, cost and environmental concerns being at the top of the list.  My reasons follow:  From a cost perspective, according to consumer reports (and backed up by a lot of anecdotal research), we can expect to spend $1500-$2000 on disposable diapers until Cora is potty trained, whereas cloth diapering her will cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $500-$700 plus a small bump in our water bill.  Furthermore, each kid diapered in disposables exclusively produces on average 1 ton of garbage that doesn’t biodegrade for about 500 years. I find that staggering, especially considering that the only hills in the Miami area are landfills.  Places like Hawaii are literally out of landfill space… it is just ridiculous.  There is no need to produce that much trash.  The new and improved cloth diapers that are out are incredibly simple and easy to use (i.e. there are no safety pins or plastic drawers to put over the cloth diapers), are made of cotton and not full of the chemical nastiness in disposable diapers that can encourage rashes and uti’s.  It seems so revolutionary to me, this cool new green idea… until I talk to my mom on the phone who laughed and said, well that’s all we used and we managed just fine.  Everything old is new again. (which is what she said after I brought home my cool new Earth shoes last year, and my Clarks Wallabees a few years before that.)

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here are some links to the articles that kept me up at night last week… and the cloth diapering website that I really love.  If anyone is jonesing to buy us diapers, we want the BumGenius 3.0 All-in-ones, mainly in white/pink/blue.

that is all.

NYTimes: When Mom And Dad Share It All,

WashingtonPost: The Feminine Mistake

,

TheAtlantic: I Choose My Choice!,

Slate: The Green Lantern on Cloth Diapers

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CottonBabies.com

urban farming

I’ve been predictably consumed by the Nesting Urge (pardon the pun…) over the last few months, brooding (heheheh) about the kind of environment we want to bring this kid into. Given my checkered history of grandiose plans, this has sparked everything from research about how we can move to Italy (down to the licensing requirements for psychologists, which, alas, are ridiculously stringent even for Italian citizens) to plans for an open-air house on a farm in Hawaii (by the time Henry got up at 6 am, I had found jobs for both of us and was looking at real-estate on-line). In light of all that, I think my latest Big Idea actually has the trappings of feasibility.

Anyway, I want to raise chickens. In the city, or wherever we live next year. Admittedly, this would be hard in our yard-free condo, and I’m fairly sure the neighbors would not be happy with a handful of hens clucking around the pool and laying eggs in the bougainvillea, but if we move back to Portland…

Seriously, though, consider the benefits: Fresh eggs with properly-hued yolks that taste like eggs are supposed to taste, fresh chicken free of hormones/antibiotics or whatever other crap Tyson is pumping into the birds these days, a great chore for Cora to grow into (OK, admittedly, half of this is fueled by the idea of a cute little girl feeding chickens in the back yard) and a realistic view of the way the food-chain works for her to grow up around. It smacks nicely of keeping house, and I think is probably relatively cost-efficient. All of ten minutes of research on-line yielded a wealth of websites and blogs about all things Chicken, and, frankly, it just doesn’t seem that hard. And I’m actually pretty good with an ax.

Predictably, Henry is skeptical. He gave me his best stern look a few minutes ago and said, “We are not raising chickens.” To which I replied, Not yet anyway. He has become more comfortable with my Big Ideas over the last couple of years, but hasn’t yet figured out that adversity only increases my resolve. I’m sure he’ll come around.