Tag Archives: parenting

This shit is hard.

12 Monday Mar 2018

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Before I had kids, I read a blog post about a woman who had three kids (singletons, its worth noting) and she talked about how intimidated she was by the prospect of taking all three out by herself. And I thought, in my infinite childfree wisdom, ‘why would you have three kids if you couldn’t cope with it?’

And then in the midst of the UK version of Snowmageddon last week (it snowed, like, a quarter of an inch. Everybody freak out), nursery was closed, I was home with three kids, and I just…couldn’t. In the end, a very kind friend brought her kids over because their nursery was closed too, and I had to admit that I couldn’t handle the prospect of hauling three kids out for a playdate at 4 pm. Or maybe, more broadly, I was kind of at my threshold, in terms of my ability to successfully parent three children at the same time.

Lately I’ve been making a real effort to parent more intensively, especially with the littles (I’m less worried about Theo. He had three years as an only kid). I’m trying to stay off my phone, verbalise more, focus on each girl individually, be a more present parent in general. And I’ve been proud of myself, because I’m succeeding. Bu I saw something on Facebook a couple months ago that really resonated with me. It was a meme that said ‘I’ve been dieting ALL DAY, am I skinny yet?!’

That’s how I feel about parenting babies. I can do a bang-up job for about thirty minutes at a time, and then what I want most in the world is to dick around on my phone. Or drink coffee in silence. Or fold laundry. I want to do anything but sing ‘zoom zoom we’re going to the moon’ for the 37th time that morning.

I also vividly remember watching ‘Master of None’ when I first brought the girls home (pre-Aziz Ansari sexual harassment drams). At one point in the show, the central character is feeling lovelorn and confused and he goes for a walk around New York. I saw him do that and thought ‘Efffffffff YOU! You just leave the house whenever you want. What’s that like?’

There is a reason that babies generally come in ones and parents usually come in twos (at least to start). The reason is: babies are a crap-ton of work, and multiple babies are more than double that. It is relentless and hard, and man oh man do I love my kids, but I would also love to see a little less of them.

So, to the mum of three on the internet whom I judged when I was pregnant, I apologise. I still think having three on purpose is kind of nuts, but I understand how great they are once they’re here, and I also understand how, some days, leaving the house just isn’t happening.

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International Women’s Day!

08 Thursday Mar 2018

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No gender normative toys here!

When my first kid was born, a friend sent me a message that said ‘hurray for feminist boys!’

And that was the first time I’d thought about my feminist responsibility in really specific terms. I had birthed five pounds of feminist baby. This was happening.

As the big kid gets bigger, it is becoming more clear-cut, if not exactly easier. I have age-appropriate conversations with him about consent almost….constantly. When he says ‘don’t kiss me, mummy!’ I do my best to listen, and respond. And then, when he treats me like a climbing frame, I can remind him that I respect his body, and he needs to respect mine. I am confident this strategy will pay off eventually. Dear lord I hope it does.

There have been a few occasions where I have had to re-examine bits of my childhood I had been excited to share with my children. For example: Green Eggs and Ham: he said no! No means no! The lesson about trying new things seems less pertinent to the current #metoo moment than, ffs, leave the poor guy alone. Who wants to eat green ham? Can you blame him?

Or The Little Mermaid….have you ever thought about the lyrics to ‘Kiss the Girl’? In case you are less steeped in Disney than I am, here is a sample lyric:

Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
It’s possible she wants you too
There’s one way to ask her

So. That’s gross.

With the babies, it is harder. About a year ago, a friend told me about some friends of hers who had avoided using gendered pronouns with their child, a boy with a gender-neutral name. Everyone at the table scoffed a bit. One woman said ‘I mean. My child is a boy, so I’m not going to stop calling him one. If he decides at some point that he isn’t, well, I will deal with it then.’

I thought that seemed like a fair perspective. But then. For the next couple of days, I noted all the occasions I referred to my children by gender, and I was shocked. Spoiler alert: it was constant. Phrases like ‘clever boy,’ ‘brave boy,’ and ‘strong boy’ had permeated my vocabulary. I have since read that, as innocuous as that might seem, it reinforces gender boundaries for children, who figure their boyhood/girlhood must be essential, since adults refer to it all the time.

In the last few weeks I have made a real attempt to stop gendering my infant children. It is hard. I’m not 100% successful – Daphne is wearing a pink floral romper this morning. I chose it, I love it, I think she looks beautiful. My convictions only extend so far (Fiona is wearing gender neutral clothing, though, and she’s no less cute for it). I am not sure how sustainable it is, not least because they will self-identify as girls soon enough. It’s just – I try not to call them ‘the twins,’ though that’s a separate thing – and now I try not to call them ‘the girls.’ Calling them by their names is a six-syllable mouthful and calling them ‘Fi and D’ is twee and grating. It’s a work in progress.

None of this is the end of the world, of course. But I do think it’s important to begin as I mean to go on. So I want to set a tone, for myself as well as for my children. I want them to know that their parents are are feminists and I want them to be feminists too: I want a desire for gender equality completely baked into their psyche.

It has been a humbling experience. It has given me new respect for my mother, who seemed to do it effortlessly. Even more, it’s given me appreciation for the extent to which raising feminist kids is a two-parent endeavour, much as I hate to e reminded I don’t have a monopoly on the Feminist Perspective in our household. On one memorable occasion last year, my partner completely schooled me in the art of feminist parenting. Theo asked me about penises, and I told him that he and Daddy both had one; that men have penises and women had vaginas. Just as I was feeling a bit smug, my husband chimed in: ‘most men have penises and most women have vaginas,’ he said.

Mic drop, husband.

I don’t want to end my Women’s Day post with a fawning anecdote about my husband, so I will end here instead: I want to explain sexism to my children the same way I explained landline phones to my son last week. It is something that still exists, but is indisputably on its way out.

So this blog has an Instagram account now.

04 Sunday Mar 2018

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I love Instagram. It is my social media drug of choice. But I try to be judicious about how much I post because, you know, everyone has That One Person who is always clogging up your feed with pictures of their baby in every conceivable holiday getup. We don’t need to see your baby in a four-leaf clover onesie, alright? I got the gist after New Years, MLK Day, Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day. Just be cool, ffs.

I don’t want to be that person.

But I do kind of want to be internet famous.

It turns out I don’t really have the stamina – I started this blog in 2011, dropped it in in 2013, started again in 2017 and this is my first post in 2018 – but that also there is some sort of magic ingredient in monetizing your social media presence that I haven’t figured out. There’s one blog I read, which was part of my inspiration for returning to blogging, and its just her talking about her boring suburban life. Seriously. Kids, pets, house on a cul de sac and not much else. And yet I read it – along with thousands of other people. She’s wrangled free holidays out of it!

Anyway, I’m at it again. I started an Instagram account – @snacksandadventure – to match my mummy blog. This evening I’ve been going back through my photo archives and posting my favourites from the girls’ first year, which was kind of cathartic. I carried so much anxiety home with me from the hospital, and through that summer. I can’t remember if I’ve written about it before, but when Daphne was five weeks and six days old, she smiled. The entire week before that, I was a wreck. At one point I had her in my arms while I sobbed into her peach fuzz, whispering ‘I just want you to be ok!’

Going through the pictures and posting them on the internet was much more fun than actually living through it, for the most part. And since this Instagram feed is specifically public-facing, for people who want to see pictures of twins, I can post every day if I want to and I won’t piss anyone off.

But I also feel a little…well.  Greasy, maybe? I don’t know exactly what my goals are for this project, but I certainly wouldn’t hate it if I ended up with thousands of followers. Its not purely catharsis, or an online cache of the best pics I took in the last year.

So I’m grappling with the question of what is appropriate. The internet is full of mummy blogs, full of stories of NICU survivors and full of people peddling twinhood in one fashion or another (for example: @trendy_twincess is an actual Instagram account with 5,219 followers. The kids are gorgeous but I can’t even.) It wasn’t gross when I did a #thisgirlcan photo shoot while I was pregnant; I had no compunction about that, though you could argue I was monetizing my pregnancy. And it certainly doesn’t feel gross to suggest that being a parent has given me new skills that are applicable to the job market (just because our society doesn’t value caregiving doesn’t mean it hasn’t taught me a whole bunch of shit), or that I would take a job offered to me through a parent network. Buuuuut…I know there is something a little yucky about actually pursuing notoriety. Its gross if you do it on your own and its worse if you do it with your kids. I know because I follow celebrities and I judge them for their own ambition and judge them worse when they use their babies to bolster their own fame.

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SO with all of that said, if you want to see a bunch of cute baby pics, check out @snacksandadventure on Instagram.

I Hate Santa.

22 Friday Dec 2017

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My paternal grandmother invented the Elf on the Shelf about sixty years before you ever heard of it. She didn’t profit from it – but she created a household elf, McGiffiny, who would come to Shorewood, Wisconsin around Thanksgiving, spy on my dad and aunt and uncle, and have little tete-a-tetes with my grandmother about her children’s behaviour. To say she cultivated a belief in Santa would be an understatement. When my dad found out the whole thing was an adult fabrication – from a friend of his older brother’s – he felt duped and betrayed. And while he’s not exactly losing sleep over it at age 67, it was sufficiently unpleasant that he and my mother went out of their way never to endorse Santa mythology to me or to my sister.

When I was in first grade, I asked my mother where presents came from if Santa didn’t bring them. And she told me. I have been grateful since then that my parents never tried to bullshit me about Santa or about various other imaginary creatures – the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, etc.

Now that my son is old enough to understand the narrative about Santa, I appreciate more than ever the way my parents never endorsed the myth. Because it is a difficult fricking line to walk. This year, Santa has made appearances at nursery and my husband’s office do, and my son is a firm believer despite the fact that my husband and I have gone out of our way to avoid encouraging him.

And so we find ourselves hamstrung: when Theo met Santa last week, he looked completely star-struck. There is no doubt in his mind, despite the fact that he met two different Santas on two consecutive days, that the whole shebang is real. If, come the 25th, there aren’t presents from Santa under the tree, we will have to have a reckoning. But if there are, we are playing into this weird fantasy about a fat man who breaks into people’s houses every year that is perpetuated by adults for their own amusement. I know some people argue that its fun to believe, but I don’t think anyone enjoys learning that they have been lied to. Stop deceiving your children because you think its cute!

And McGiffiny notwithstanding, don’t even get me started on that damn elf on the shelf. Creepy AF.

Poop.

14 Tuesday Nov 2017

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Theo has discovered toilet humour. So that’s awesome.

He’s actually a little late to the poop party – most kids discover it around the time they get toilet trained.

I understand. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman and I love a good fart joke. But most of the time, I don’t want to listen to a preschooler sing ‘poop poop poop!’ at the dinner table. Some of the parents and carers I know are really keen to shut it down, but to be honest, I’ve been surprised by how little I care.

What I HAVE been surprised by, on the other hand, is how vehemently I care about my kids’ ability to read the room. I don’t mind if he talks about poop. But my line has been ‘I’m not interested in talking about poo, Theo, so let’s please talk about something else.’

It turns out toilet talk isn’t an issue for me, but instilling in my kid the sensitivity to change the subject definitely is – in fact, it is one of my Core Parenting Values. Talk about poop with your friends, kid. Don’t talk about it with me.

Most of my revelations about parenting have come that way: I establish a policy about a fairly prosaic part of everyday life, only to realise that it stems from something deeply held. For example: you can go up the slide instead of down, but not if someone wants to use it properly. Not because I care about slide etiquette, per se, but I care about having a child who is aware of other people and will be respectful of other playground users.

Broadly speaking, I came to parenting with my Core Parenting Values fully fledged: I want my child to be kind. I want my child to be respectful. I want my child to be feminist and generally anti-discriminatory. And there were a few specific things I felt strongly about, mostly drawn from my own childhood: I wanted girls to have my name, for example, because I have my mother’s. I felt strongly about not propagating ideas about Santa Claus, because duping children for the amusement of adults seems gross to me. I didn’t want my son to have clothes with cars on them, because I think that’s weird, sexist, outdated and unfortunate: I hate cars (I’m an urban planner).

Like any parent, many of my strongly held beliefs have disintegrated in the face of, well, reality. My daughters DO have my name, but Santa Claus is a losing battle: I haven’t endorsed the myth, but Santa made appearances at nursery, at my husband’s office party, the Christmas market, and pretty much everywhere else, too. And cars – well, yeah. That didn’t happen, either. I’m hardly the first parent to give birth to a kid thinking I can control some aspect of their life, only to find myself proven fundamentally, laughably wrong about five minutes after the kid was born.

And as someone parenting a preschool boy and baby girls, I find myself navigating new territory in terms of gender expression and identity. The onslaught of sweet frilly things has proven way harder to resist than I expected, because it turns out I like sweet frilly things way more than I expected and I like NEW frilly things even more than that. I thought that putting my kids in gender neutral clothing would be an expression of Core Parenting Values – but actually it turns out, what I care about is that my children not feel oppressed or constrained by their gender, or frame their sense of self-worth in terms of their private parts. I don’t think the adorable pink overalls I inherited from a friend are going to factor in, long term.

I let this post marinate for a while now – I started it back in October – because, you know, who cares, right? In parenting, you learn by doing. Shocking surprise twist. But I think the takeaway for me is that in parenting, the personal is political, in that everything is a proxy for a more deeply held belief that I often have not thought to articulate until it is expressed via a stupid or seemingly trivial rule.

Don’t talk to me about poop, kid. Talk about it with your friends.

 

 

So we’re sleep training now.

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

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September has been a rough month: the girls went from being pretty solid sleepers to, well, the opposite. I felt like they were trying to break me (and a couple times, I think my husband would say they succeeded).

I don’t remember being this tired the first time around, although I’m sure I was – in fact, I had undiagnosed Graves’ Disease, so from months 4-6 I had brutal insomnia most nights and ended up taking long naps in the morning to try to get to a point where I could function. This time, though, the morning naps haven’t happened; the girls’ daytime sleep hasn’t aligned well enough.

Sleep deprivation isn’t a good look on anyone, but I’ve had a couple of weirdly unhinged moments – like once when I got so frustrated I threw my giant feeding cushion across the room, or another time when I ended up lying on my stomach on my bed and kicking my feet like a tantruming toddler. Most of my symptoms have been more prosaic, though – incidents when I’m so tired that I can’t remember a word, or I start a sentence, forget where I’m going, and then think ‘oh eff it, nevermind, I can’t be bothered to formulate that thought after all.’

So we decided to start sleep training. We used Ferber with Theo and it worked so well that we are trying it, with some trepidation, on the girls. They feel too young. It seems too soon. But I am damn near catatonic, so last night I gave Daphne extra squeezes and lots of apologies, put her in bed, and walked away.

And….she just stayed asleep. I’d let her fall asleep on the boob, like an amateur. Fiona, on the other hand, started squawking almost immediately. With Ferber, which is a method of controlled cry-it-out, you go in every few minutes to reassure the baby. But it doesn’t calm them down at all; I just felt crummy for failing to comfort my child, and in the end I ceded as much of it to Ian as I could.

With both girls, their first experience of being left to self-soothe lasted about 25 minutes. The second took about ten. And then I fell asleep feeding Daphne and screwed it up AGAIN. But still. We have begun. We are on our way.

I am a sleep-training evangelist. I know the internet (and the world) is full of people who say ‘oh but I just couldn’t.’ And that makes me angry. I appreciate that sleep training is not for everyone, but it is not something I take lightly. When we did it with Theo, it was by far the hardest thing I had done as a parent, and it was 100% the right thing for all of us. When people say ‘oh, I can’t,’ what they are implying is that they are more sensitive or empathetic or more devoted to their children’s wellbeing than I am. And maybe they are, but if so, it has nothing to do with their willingness to engage in sleep training. I believe in sleep training as one of my core parenting values, because I will parent better if I can formulate complete sentences and deal with frustration without throwing things (even cushions) across the room.

So we’re sleep training now. It was a little sooner than we meant to, but it turns out its time. Wish us luck.