independence: you crave it, and then you don't

In many ways, this has been our big summer of independence for us. Sure, I've been more with Lilly than I was this spring. What with my healing journey and taking time off from work to be with her. Time we've spent mostly at the pool or at the beach. In the glorious sun and heat we've been blessed with this year.

But she turned four this summer in June. And she had her very first sleepover at a friend's house while Leighton and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary in July, going out on our very first full date night out ever, all previous "date nights" having been arranged early in the evening with her at a play date, meaning we'd pick her up and put her to bed after our date (read: anticlimactic). And she hosted a sleepover for that same friend later on. And she spent three nights with grandpa and grandma while Leighton and I got our very first couple's only vacation, on which we had a blast, by the way.

So she turned 4. And she wanted goggles for her birthday. It was a Friday. It was an overcast weekend. The sun returned that Monday, so we resumed our afternoons at the pool: first thing there, she dove under water. She'd been wanting to do that for so long! Her jumping grew steadily more adventuresome. Soon she was jumping far out, swimming 8 feet and more doggy style, scooping up pool water with her arms as if it were ice cream, to get back to the edge of the pool.

By August, she joined the big kids at the diving board. Jumping and jumping, oh so gleefully, her mama (ME!) cheering her on with the true and amazed and triumphant joy and glee of someone high on stunned pride.

free to be you and me

What my first couple's only vacation since becoming a parent gave me was the opportunity to simply be free to be you and me. "We're off on our 'first romantic getaway,'" I wrote a couple of weeks ago, but that really didn't put the right spin on things at all. There's something so awfully 1950s about the term. Like she dresses up for him and he courts her, and they live happily ever after.

Our experience was nothing like that at all. What I found was the chance to drop our roles as both parents and husband-wife and simply have a lot of honest, sexy fun together. We both went giddy wild consignment shopping together for a whole afternoon, after which we drenched our thirst with local beer at one of the many brewery pubs in Fort Collins. We dressed up and dined at all the recommended restaurants I'd tracked down in Denver, but our conversations weren't dressed up. They were the kinds of conversation shared by best friends and lovers, fellow travel through life companions and soul mates. Lounging on roof top decks and court yard patios, surrounded by the nighttime fireworks of thunder and lightning, we not so much gazed lovingly at each other as we gave ourselves and took each other in completely with our words and eyes.

quizzical mama's feminist vision at the mamafesto

Quizzical mama aka Anne G. Sabo

I was proud to be featured at The Mamafesto's "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" series this week. In case you missed it, here's a link to it. And below is a brief excerpt.

At least here in the US, I see working for more comprehensive, paid parental leave as one of the most pressing items on the agenda for feminism. With only 6 to 12 weeks of maternity leave, many new moms opt to sacrifice their careers to stay home with their children, and for good reasons too, breastfeeding being one of them. This pattern will continue to reinforce traditional gender roles to the detriment of women and men. Cut to Norway, where political groups are now lobbing for an even more equal division of the one-year parental leave between the parents, lest the women lag behind in the workforce in terms of promotion and retirement plans.

french parenting is not for me

Pamela Druckerman: wannabe French

I got interested in Pamela Druckerman's memoir Bringing up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting based on a couple of reviews that suggested I had some things in common with French moms. As it turns out, we got just about nothing in common. Nor do I care much for their approach to parenting.

Druckerman, on the other hand, does. Druckerman is practically drooling in awe over French moms' approach to parenting, from how they get their kids to sleep, eat, and behave so well, to their attention to adult time and sassy looks.

Of course, all these things sound great. But then take a minute to pause as Druckerman learns to do the French way with her children and consider this: practicing the pause in terms of (not) checking on their babies when they are learning to "do their nights" when only a few days or weeks old (and at least by three months) is the same as Ferberizing or even crying it out at a very young age. It only has a different name and since "everyone" in France practices it, nobody worries about it either.

look at these two girls' swimwear and tell me which one is "improper"

What Lilly wears in the below picture is what was judged "improper swimwear" at our city pool last summer:

Lilly flanked by her grandpa and papa

This, on the other hand, would have passed as "proper:"

when all men are potential pedophiles: the park & rec board weighs in on "proper swimwear"

The hostility punched me in my gut as I entered the meeting room last night. I was there to talk about this summer's "pool attire" incident when I was told to put a top on my three-year-old daughter. I explained as I've already done to the pool manager and the pool manager's supervisor, that I find the request offensive in its sexualization of little girls. I also see the matter as beyond the pool staff's area of jurisdiction, which when you look at the pool rules has everything to to with the sanitariness and proper functioning of the pool water (swim diapers required for children not potty trained; no street wear like "cut-offs" and "t-shirts" whose fibers can clog pool filters; no spitting or blowing nose in the pool water; no infectious disease), and the physical safety of the pool patrons (no running, pushing, or alcohol; diving only in designated areas; and diving board and climbing walls only allowed for "good swimmers"). Otherwise, the safety of the child is the parent's responsibility: "children 8 years of age and under must be accompanied and supervised (within arms reach at all times) by responsible person 15 years of age or older." In other words, whether to have my daughter wear a top or not is my decision, which I make based on my child's level of comfort, and mine, and whatever other factor I deem wise to take into consideration.

This is proper swimwear (at the beach in Norway in June.)

In reality, I think the issue is moot. There is at this point not an upper age limit for toplessness stipulated in the rules at our local pool, and it's not like you're seeing girls or women strut around topfree over there when the pool's open. In our culture, a girl wants to wear a top. As many have said chiming in on this issue, any girl will require a top herself by the time she turns five. Even my Lilly wants to wear a top (to my dismay) because she wants to look like me. It's just that the top feels so uncomfortable, so she'll take if off (to my relief). But as she grows older, she'll want even more to look like her peers. And what they wear is limited by what's available in stores, much of which is made for kids to emulate pop stars. For heavens sake; they make bikinis with tops for babies a mere months old.

hair power

I've been feeling my parenting status dwindle. First, the power of the boob went up in smoke. And then I found myself cold in bed alone at night.

For a moment I felt desperate. I've felt sad.

But then there's hair.

My hair. -- If the breast is empty, at least there's still a head full of hair.

One of the mamas I interviewed for my sleep question book told me that all it took for one of her kids to fall asleep, was holding on to "a wad of hair." It could be hers or her husbands, and eventually even the child's own hair, soothing himself to sleep.

This is where I find my power these days: in my hair. Be it before nap or after, it's the hair she holds on to. In the morning, still in that vulnerable not quite awake state, it's the hair she needs. And even if she can't hold onto it as I brew that coffee I so desperately need to wake up; she needs to see it there. In fact, I cause a scene if I put my hair up to avoid getting any in my food. The important thing is to let it all out.

Many parents can relate to their little ones' clutching at their hair, like baby monkeys. But this feels different. This is hair adoration; all she wants to do is run her fingers through my hair.

I do get her thing with hair; I love hers just as much.

equally shared parenting hurts

As a feminist and equal rights advocate, I was surprised and slightly disgruntled to experience how hard it was to let go of my position as the "primary-parent." I'd been with Lilly 24 -7 that first year of her life so you'd think I'd be ready for a break. Which I craved, but the transition still took some time. And arguing.

Equally shared parenting. It's actually a term and now there's a book for it too. In it, the authors stress that moms must relinquish "primary-parent status:"

If you want lasting and happy equal childraising with your partner, you will need to:

1. Stop thinking of babies and children as your territory.
2. Quit taking on more than half the childraising work and responsibility.
3. Give up the right to be your child's most important parent. (60)

And that second year of Lilly's life, we did it, Leighton and I, sharing our days writing and being with her, playing, cleaning, shopping, cooking.

Correction: the sharing was never equal. I still nursed her day and night. And up until only a couple of weeks ago, I've been the one sharing my bed with her with her body next to me / on top of me.

I am still slightly resentful for how Leighton and I stuck to a schedule where we'd each get a couple of mornings to write (seeing that's the preferred writing time for both of us). On the days when it was my turn to write in the afternoon, I'd still linger after lunch, trying to nurse her down for nap. Which would ultimately eat up half my writing time, leaving me brainless for the rest of it.

I don't know why we held on to that arrangement for so long. The idealism of it. Why I could never suggest we change things up a bit.

"proper swimwear:" why sexualize and discriminate against little girls?

Why can't this be "proper swimwear"?
Mail Online

I've been pretty worked up this week since we were told at the city pool last Sunday that Lilly, who just turned three, had to put a top on. The pool manager has since clarified that "proper swimwear" requires a top for girls from when they are at least of school age, which I'm still not happy about. I asked her to bring it up with her supervisor and City Council, and am working on a letter to our local newspaper.

I am also working on a longer article about this for the Sexy Mama column at Good Vibrations Magazine; stay tune for that. In the meantime, I'd like to hear what you think about this. -- What message is this giving young girls? Does it seem reasonable to you to require girls as young as five to cover up? Or might you consider this sexualizing girls as young as five or six. A gender discriminating issue, in fact, allowing boys--and men--to swim, play, and roam naked from the waist up while the female sex, be they five or fifty, are asked to cover up their breasts, -- be they there or not.

Also, feel free to contribute to the discussion about this on Facebook, here or here.

Update Sat. July 23: My article on this at Good Vibrations Magazine: "Proper Swimwear" for a Toddler Girl Includes a Top?! 

Update Wed. July 27: After today's publication of my letter about this incident to our local newspaper, the pool manager's supervisor, which would be the head of the Park and Recreation Advisory Board, finally called. She told me the board had discussed the "pool attire" incident at last week's meeting and concluded that for girls, "proper swimwear" implies tops for girls age five and up. I am not done pursuing this matter. Please; I'd like to hear from more of you what you think about this.

sleep baby, sleep

My husband's not a jerk or an old-fashioned dude. When his response to my announcement that I am ready--and think Lilly is ready-- to sleep in her own bed at night is "so does this mean I will be tired too now?" it does not mean that he is not a devoted co-parent. Far from it. If you know Leighton, you know this is just his bemused way of thinking each step through. If you step back a little, you might even find it amusing (unless you're the spouse; in particular one who's been on edge).

In fact, it was I who asked Leighton to leave the family bed when I was about to nighttime wean Lilly. Sure, the bed had felt way too hot and crowded for quite a while up until then. But I was so wanting her to self-wean. She was nineteen months, and I figured her constant requests for the boob would soon dwindle. Except it didn't. And then when I started driving through red stop signs, I knew it was time.

But Leighton has a kind, sensitive heart, and I knew I couldn't worry about him lying there aching for Lilly while I was having my own hard time with the weaning issue; so I asked him to sleep in her bed.

should we deny little girls their princess pink?

Lisa Bloom, author of Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World, recently wrote about how she squelched herself from squealing to the five-year-old daughter of some friends; "Maya, you're so cute! Look at you! Turn around and model that pretty ruffled gown, you gorgeous thing!" Explains Bloom:

"Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23. As our cultural imperative for girls to be hot 24/7 has become the new normal, American women have become increasingly unhappy. What's missing? A life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments."

Bloom continues with a description of how she instead chooses to talk to kids in a matter-of-fact way; in this case about books, seeing that Maya was carrying one around.

Bloom's article gives food for thought. -- We've done our best to protect Lilly from the gender stereotyping so common in our culture that begins with the little pink and blue baby onesies. Instead I got many in green and yellow for her at my baby shower, and then a lot of baby blue hand-me-down clothes from friends with sons after she was born.

As a result, strangers have for the longest assumed Lilly's a boy, even after her curly locks started to grow.

We were a little surprised this bugged us so much (we sort of like to identify ourselves with a growing movement of ending the obsession with gender and undoing gender stereotypes), but in the end we caved in and got her some pink clothes -- and she loved it. She loves the feel of dancing in a dress, and she loves to be told that she's so cute and pretty.

claim your mama body

Did you know that girls as young as ten are requesting labiaplasty? I feel the urgent responsibility to provide my toddler daughter with positive and accurate images and texts to empower her to take pride in her growing body.

This morning, I took her to see the art exhibit EveryBody! at Carleton College where we got to see realistic images of women examining their genitals and their cervices with the use of a speculum, a large red soft sculpture of the vulva, historic editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and much more.

Most empowering for Lilly and me was the interactive art station where we could each color our own vulva.

I will write a more comprehensive post about this exhibit at LOVE, SEX, AND FAMILY. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit the exhibit, which runs through May 8th.

EveryBody! presents work by artists and activists engaged with the women’s health movement, inaugurated by feminists in the later 1960s and 70s and continuing up to the present day. Featuring advocacy posters and self-education publications, polemical paintings, descriptive drawings, poetic artists’ books and a provocative performance sculpture, this exhibition provides visual evidence of the struggle to define health care as a human right, and every body as beautiful.

toddlers' obsession with sex

Free to Be You & me

This isn't about the toddler's interest in exploring her genitals that I've posted about earlier; this is about the toddler's obsession with identifying and categorizing everyone around her according to their sex. As I'm eager to nurture a new generation of little women and men breaking out of conservative and confining gender roles, I often pause to think about how best to respond to Lilly's repetitive "she's a girl and he's a boy and mama's a woman and papa's a man." 

When I brought this up in a conversation with some mama friends of mine, one said her mother, who ran a daycare for a number of years, had said that the boy-girl topic was the most prominent of all among the children she'd cared for over the years.

Sex educator Debra W. Haffner, author of From Diapers to Dating, seconds the significance of this topic. By as early as six months of age, babies can pick out male and female voices, and children learn to divide the world into "male" and "female" before they reach the age of two. Depending on the behaviors they see in their homes and preschools, they will identify certain behaviors as male or female.

Haffner encourages parents to stimulate non-traditional gender roles by positive gender equal role modeling. But as she also points out, even children in less traditional homes will still divide the world by gender based on the models they see. Raising her children in the spirit of Free to Be You and Me, Haffner nonetheless remembers how her two-year-old son told her one that that he wished he could be a doctor, but he knew he couldn't. When Haffner asked him why, he, "thinking of his own woman pediatrician, said, 'Mom, only ladies can be doctors!'"

happy international women's day!

It's a day to celebrate:

• Women Keep House (and Maybe Senate?) Better Than Men (New York Times)
  "In honor of International Women’s Day: A new study finds that  Congressional representatives who are women outperform their male counterparts, perhaps because the bar is higher for them to get elected in the first place."

• International Women's Day (Homepage)
  "2011 year marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. The day was commemorated for the first time on 19 March 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, following its establishment during the Socialist International meeting the prior year. More than one million women and men attended rallies on that first commemoration.
  
  In 1975, during International Women's Year, the United Nations began celebrating 8 March as International Women's Day. Two years later, in December 1977, the General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace to be observed on any day of the year by Member States, in accordance with their historical and national traditions. The Day is traditionally marked with a message from the Secretary-General."
  
• 100 years of empowering international women (The Telegraph)
  "Figures released to coincide with the 100th annual International Women's Day (IWD) show there is still a considerable gender pay gap across the globe."
  

sexual brain

Boys and girls are different, but not as different as cultural stereotypes would have us think. Moreover, differences caused by genes  and hormones can be compensated for by encouraging appropriate games and activities to kids. That's the gist of Pink Brain, Blue Brain (2009) by neuroscientist Lise Eliot. Eliot takes the reader from the womb through infancy, toddler years, preschool, and the beginning of formal schooling, so her book might be particularly interesting to parents of children in those age groups.

Lilly's now 28 1/2 months, so I found Eliot's recommended toys and activities for toddler girls in particularly interesting:

-       vetstibular stimulation (spinning, swinging, jumping, cartwheeling) "because girls, while they don’t lag behind boys in gross motor skills during the first year, are slower and weaker from the preschool years onward."

-       ball games (balls, darts, paper airplanes) "because girls begin to fall behind boys in certain spatial skills by end of the preschool period."

-       sports (peewee gymnastics, soccer, T-ball, running, kicking, batting) for spatial skills and hand-eye coordination, gross motor skills and mind-body wellness.

-       puzzles, mazes and other visuospatial games (jigsaw puzzles, the refrigerator magnet toy called Gear-a-tion that allows kids to experiment with gear movement in the kitchen while the adult cooks) to encourage spatial and mental rotation tasks.

-       building toys ("many girls love these, but the themes and colors are often not marketed to appeal to them. Look for more gender neutral LEGOs, Lincoln Logs, Marble Works, K’NEX, old fashioned wooden blocks. Translating a series of instructional diagrams into a three-dimensional structure provide excellent practice at the kind of visuospatial skill that is linked to higher mathematic achievement.")

-       hand her a tool and "moms need to tackle more of the mechanical jobs around the house too for good role modeling."

-       visuospatial computer games (particularly those involving spatial manipulations involving three-dimensional objects and virtual navigation) "because this kind of spatial ability shows the largest sex difference of any cognitive skill."

-       music keyboard training (piano or electric keyboard or a xylophone) "which increases spatiotemporal reasoning skills in preschool-age children. Because the musical scale is experienced as a visual pattern on a piano or a xylophone, learning to play such instruments may train the brain to recognize patterns in both space and time, which may be helpful for mastering mathetmatical concepts such as fractions, proportionality, and geometry."

For toddler boys, Eliot recommends:

-       language and literacy enrichment ("boys need lots of verbal interaction to boost their vocabulary and other language skills. Reading to them is probably the best way to do this. Boys often have a strong interest in nonfiction books about vehicles, sports, animals, outer space, etc. Another boy-friendly way of increasing literary exposure is having them listen to books on tape or on CD. It’s amazing how adding Play and Pause buttons and headphones can entice some boys to sit still and follow a story.")

-       ABCs and letter sounds (to improve independent reading skills later). Reading ABC books to them, emphasizing letter sounds, playing games involving rhyming and alliteration, encouraging them to practice printing their names and other words.

-       Preliteracy computer games ("computer time should be limited, but boys are often drawn to them and they can be powerful learning tools, including for practicing learning letters, sounds (phonics), rhyming, and other reading-readiness skills.")

-       Fine motor skills, which are essential for pencil-and-paper tasks in grade school (cutting, stamping, building with small construction toys, painting or drawing standing at easels, typing, clip-boarding as in walking around tallying or charting objects in the environment)

-       More physical movement indoors and outside.

-       Rough-and-tumble time.

-       Focus on feelings ("books like Thomas the Tank Engine stories with trains that have animated personalities and feelings about their jobs and one another can help boys distinguish and give voice to a range of broader their feelings from a young age").

-       Pet care (to teach nurturing skills).

my family

According to my toddler daughter Lilly, this is a replica of us:

I'm the gazelle to the left, with Lilly next to me, and then her papa Leighton to the right. She's way into dinosaurs (to the delight of her papa, who in addition to wolves and monkeys, also LOVES dinosaurs, as witnessed professionally here and more privately here ).

Now, we all have horns of some sort. But I, big mama, am the gazelle. The most graceful? Beautiful? BIG? As in big presence in her life (as a stay-at-home mom)? Or as the firmest disciplinarian? (apparently I'm not the GC but the BC in this family, according to this post and my response).

angry housewives eating bon bons

Lilly's resistance to naps has been overcome by sickness. At first, she'd wake up from a cough or congestion after less than half an hour. She still has a fierce cough and an endless stream of snot, but she will nap and often around two hours. It's an amazing feeling. And so needed. Especially now that I'm also sick. So as soon as she's asleep in her bed, I take refuge in my bed to rest and read: Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (2003). It's so good! I love it. Set in the late sixties - early seventies, it's about the growing friendship between five women. From different parts of the country, they get to know each other when they end up living on the same street in a residential neighborhood of Minneapolis. They are all mothers of young children, so there's much to identify with, and compare and contrast, about friendship, gender roles, motherhood, parenting, and more; attitudes to race, homosexuality, war.

These are not the trapped housewives critiqued by Beddy Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963). They are stay-at-home moms, just as I am, with a knowledge of the lack of gender equality. One is a highly politically active demonstrator and feminist: her husband is the one who helps out the most with the kids, but she's also the one who's fought most for gender equality. Another finds out she's cheated on by her husband. A third feels she lives a secret as she keeps covering up--even to her husband--for her dysfunctional upbringing by a non-existent father and an alcoholic mother. A fourth became a widow at young age. And the fifth is the daughter of a pastor (who verbally abused her), married to a doctor (who verbally and physically assaults her); she has a growing awareness that she is indeed angry and most certainly the victim of unfair treatment. And not just from her husband.

The book takes its title from this husband's derogatory remark about the book club the women found, and it's through this book club they bond. The book is told from the different women's perspectives, each taking turn to host book club meetings (they skip "hostess" in favor of "host," convinced by the activist's argument about the discriminating implications of such gendered terms, though one member takes offense against the feminist turn against the semantics and the feminine). Here they talk, about the book and their lives, while they drink martinis, smoke cigarettes, and eat savory food that they all contribute to, potluck style. They share lots of good laughs and some cries. They find community and a sense of belonging; they find themselves. 

I'm not even halfway done yet, and so while Lilly's still napping, I'm going to go curl up in bed now with my book! Check it out; it's worth it!

personality types affect women's approach to childbirth

Susan Maushart, author of The Mask of Motherhood, discusses how women who delay motherhood may have a harder time adjusting than their younger peers. As a first-time mom at the age of 35, I can relate to this. I landed a tenure track position when I was 26, completed my Ph.D. when I was 27, obtained tenure and promotion before I turned 32, and had my first sabbatical the following year. I was able to accomplish many things, yet I always complained that there wasn't enough time in the day to do all the stuff I wanted.

As a new mom to an infant, I discovered the brutal reality of no time in the day to do anything for me by myself.

But now a new study reported here by the guardian.co.uk, suggests it wasn't just my age and the time I had had to pursue a career and get comfortable with my own space and routines that made motherhood hard for me; my personality type also seems to have something to do with it.

Apparently, high levels of "extroversion," "agreeableness" and "neuroticism" seem to accelerate the desire of a woman to have a child. Conversely, high "conscientiousness" and "openness" are associated with delaying childbirth.

(Photo: Alamy)

As someone who valued being well-organized and self-disciplined to get where I got, and who vowed never to let traditional gender roles confine me, I can see how I fit this study's findings:

"Those who scored highly on conscientiousness tended to follow the rules, to be reliable, well-organised and self-disciplined. Openness reflected an individual's tendency to unconventionality and intellect. Open-minded women tend to enjoy being unattached, free, not tied to people, places, or obligations – and may be rebellious."