about halfasecond after andy and i got married, people started asking us when we were going to have children. poor little nosy souls… they were forced to wait for six whole years for us to fit quaintly into their definition of family. there was a lightness about those years (probably the sheer absence of diaper bags and clinging children) but people sort of regarded us lightly too. i didn’t notice this, of course, until my life became full of baby love, it’s accompanying luggage, and the sudden respect i received just for having a small human being in my charge. seemingly overnight, members of our community began respecting our decisions to bow out early from a parties, to let the answering machine field our calls, and to decline “invitations” to chaperon church lock-ins. this regard for our boundaries has been a lovely, unexpected parenting perk.

for me, six years was long enough to be married without children; it felt too long, in fact. but what about those who simply choose not to become parents? my friends who have opted out of the parenting thing report that they feel left out, at best, and badgered and disrespected, at worst. 

elizabeth gilbert has recently brought this phenomenon to light in her book committed. she writes of the questions and judgements imposed upon her and others who have chosen not to have children. but she also points out that our society is actually better for having “aunties” and “(s)parents.” she writes,

“Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world — an ambassador auntie —who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. There are people I’ve been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist’s bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.”

my children have several “aunties” and “(s)parents” in their lives. the glee with which the monkey and bird approach our friends, ruth, martha, hope, sarah, and phil (just to name a few) is second only to the relief i feel when someone with renewed energy and delight in toddler antics enters my front door. i hear these “aunties” and “(s)parents laugh at my kids’ jokes. i watch them join my children for an afternoon of porch swinging and story telling. i see them get down on the floor and immerse themselves in legoland and the enterprise of space-ship-building. and then, when these friends leave, i am able to see my children more for the funny little wonders that they are and less for the little tornadic wind storms that they can be.

so to all of the “aunties” and “(s)parents” of the world, i say THANK YOU. i respect your place in life, and i am thankful for it. there really are “many ways to foster life.” and to those who foster life here at our house, i am so, so grateful.

[the elizabeth gilbert quote is from https://www.babble.com/elizabeth-gilbert-committed-marriage/.]

[this is the first in a series of guest posts written by jennifer harrison, who was perhaps the only other person in my high school english classes who joined me in gleeful celebration when called up on to diagram sentences. jennifer’s posts will highlight how her vocation as an elementary school teacher informs her parenting, and vice-versa. her bio is located at the conclusion of her wise words.] 

I’m not a math person but I have recently been throwing together some numbers. The upcoming school year marks my tenth as a classroom teacher. Each year, I’ve taught about 20 kids. This means that in all, I’ve worked with roughly 200 students, not to mention about 400 parents. So, long before I began raising my own daughter, Elizabeth, I was introduced to the wonderful, complicated, emotional, and consuming business of parenting.

While I will begin this school year and its requisite parent partnerships with a good chunk of experience under my belt, I nonetheless approach my tenth class with new eyes: the eyes of a new mother, who fiercely loves her daughter and only wants the best for her. I know that each first grade parent I will meet next week was once just like I am now: constantly chasing after a toddler; looking at a little face and wondering what kind of person this small being will become; and hoping that a cheerful, babbling child will always know a happy and abundant life.

Throughout my years as a teacher, I have come to believe that there is one essential truth about parenting. All parents, no matter whether they are overbearing, laid-back, or somewhere in between, absolutely love their children. The way in which this love manifests itself is wildly different from parent to parent. Some parents wring their hands in fretful anxiety about what I, as a teacher, know is a minor bump in the road (if it’s even a bump at all!). Others celebrate every victory and milestone with endless flashes of the camera and small notes in lunchboxes. Still others occupy themselves with very demanding careers so that they can provide their children with a vast array of creature comforts and material things. Regardless of how hands-on or hands-off a parent may appear to be, their common fuel is their deep and abiding love of sons and daughters.

” Too often, we critically declare that this mother works too much, this father hovers around the school too frequently, or this couple places too many demands on their child.”

I think it is unfortunately too easy for so many of us — teachers, fellow parents, and the casual observers of society — to quickly, harshly judge parents. Too often, we critically declare that this mother works too much, this father hovers around the school too frequently, or this couple places too many demands on their child. It helps to remember that all of those parents once held a moments-old newborn in their arms. They have all become enraptured, as I have, with the enormity and the wonder of a life that is, as a friend so wisely put it, pure potential. That moment is the tie that binds us all together as parents. It is a tie that I now share with the 36 parents who will soon receive a letter from me in the mail. I now understand the eyes with which those parents will read that letter. This fresh perspective has renewed my commitment to my career, and it has reminded me of all that I hope Elizabeth and I will grow to be as mother and daughter.

jennifer harrison earned her bachelors and masters degrees at vanderbilt and has taught in public and private schools since 1999. she currently enjoys chicago city life with her ER nurse husband, 13-month-old daughter elizabeth, and dog rowdy. when jennifer is not parenting or teaching, she enjoys reading, photography, travel, and the quest for the perfect latte.

ode to silly bands:a tragic misuse of iambic pentameter

 they are but rubber rings of glee displayed

on  sweaty preschool children’s legs and arms.

each birthday party’s now a place to  trade,

a golden sun for an emerald lucky charm.

“you’ve let them plunge headlong into this trend?”

said a friend to me with much disdain and gall,

that my children’s elbows no longer bend

and no pink skin peeks through the loops at all.

so as to keep this killjoy grump at bay

i didn’t speak the merits of the strands:

fine motor work and interactive play

employed to chain and share those silly bands.

what’s not to like about this market niche?

but that i’m not the one who’s getting rich!

• where is the monkey going to school next year?
• where do you live?
• do you work outside of the home?

these are just examples of the myriad questions moms encounter weekly in conversation with one another, all of which require nothing more than a one to two word answer. but far be it from me to offer up a curt couple of words and move on. i find myself launching into laborious explanations about why i have made particular choices; acknowledging the negative associations with the institutions, locales, and lifestyles at hand; and making careful assertions that i am not a summation of my child’s school, my neighborhood, and my mode of working.

but why do i do this?

apparently i am not alone. ayelet waldman, author of bad mother, recounts a conversation she had with a complete stranger in line at a local bakery. waldman is feeding her six-week-old baby with a bottle, and the stranger chides, “breast is best!” waldman then tearfully recites the litany of her breast-feeding woes, not the least of which is caused by her baby’s palate abnormality:

“all this i told the woman standing in line behind me at the cafe. i told her how i had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; i showed her that the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple from the gentian violet i’d been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. to establish my breast-feeding bona fides, i even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that i’d successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years” (61).

sometimes i gush forth with too much information because i am trying to convince myself that i’ve taken the better path. sometimes i over-speak because i feel as if it is my obligation to give a thorough answer so as not to appear dismissive. and sometimes i simply want to be known on a deeper level than one can glean from the categories offered by our world.

but no matter what my reasons are, my explanations are a bit ridiculous.  it exhausts me to speak them, so listening to them probably makes people wish they could will themselves into a coma.

in the next few months, i’m going to enter into a little experiment. i’m going to try to resist the urge to insert words where there should be silence. i’m going to try not to control how i am perceived by others. i am going to allow for a little mystery to surround me where there was once a tumultuous sea of language.

if you see me in line at the bakery, babbling on to a stranger about how i’m not going to explain myself because i have given up the tedium of explaining myself, you have my permission to shove a baguette between my poor, jabbering jaws.

[the images displayed above are “wordles” created of the onslaught of language people encounter when they ask me simple questions.]

[the source for this post can be found in the bibliography page located on the sidebar to your right.]

in her 2009 book, bad mother, ayelet waldman opens with this line: “we are always watching: the bad mother police force, in a perpetual state of alert-level orange” (5).

how true this is. i flashed my bad mother police badge long before i even had kids, as i scoffed at those parents who were so driven by their children’s schedules that they forgot about their own lives. since then, i’ve eaten those words and MANY others uttered in expert tones. what is it about parenthood that invites such judgment?

i’ve examined this judgment in other posts , and i’ve read the accounts of many women who have reluctantly added “other mothers” to the long list of challenging people in their lives. i’ve also addressed the widespread and ridiculous standards that serve as the backdrop for our parenting. i am just one person in a progressively expanding army of unsatisfied mothers who are joining forces to institute a healthier culture.

but the complaints about judgement and the frustration with standards seem to exist in these discussions as two parallel but unrelated realities. waldman begins the important work of connecting the dots between them. basically, she says, when we judge ourselves against the impossible standard of “the good mother,” we feel so deficient that we are compelled to console ourselves by comparing our own ways with those of “the heinous bad mother” (15). we judge others in order to recover from judging ourselves.

i love this bit of insight! quashing the “bad mother police” just feels like an impossibly overwhelming task. but adjusting my self-standards actually feels do-able. it’s exciting to think that by doing some good internal work, we can each help to create an environment that is supportive, and not “alert-level orange”.

[the source for this post can be found on the bibliography page located in the sidebar. the photo in this post is from http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3575/3464797518_c40f36fd3a.jpg.]

dear readers,

i think that you and i are familiar enough with one another now that i can really show you the ropes. this makeshift parenting thing is serious business, and you can either hold your life together with a ladder, an old shoe, a cardboard chimney, an art frame, and some plastic bags, or you can bind up the chaos in a neat little package, held together by guilt and ridiculous expectations. choose wisely because it’s a matter of survival.

a year and a half ago, our family moved into our current home. in our previous home, all of the bedrooms were upstairs. in this home, the master bedroom is downstairs and the kids’ rooms are upstairs. this floor plan will be ideal in ten years, but for right now it presents some challenges.

one such challenge became an issue about a year ago, when the monkey learned how to hurl himself from his crib and onto the floor. we quickly moved him to a toddler bed, which was kind of like moving a child from a prison cell to a candy store. suddenly, the monkey was bouncing off the walls in his room during nap time, and it wasn’t long before he was spotted fondling pins and needles in my sewing nook and teetering dangerously down the stairs!

many parents would take these as signs that the two-and-a-half year old had grown out of his need for naps. but i wasn’t ready to face this notion.

then, one sunday morning, i preached a really crazy sermon on the good samaritan that involved costumes. after googling “samaritan” and discerning that a blue miss america-style banner was needed to clad this particular character, i fashioned such an accessory and schlepped it off to church with the other props. and then, as i was in the middle of proclaiming the text, i gazed over at the church member who was playing the part of the samaritan, and an idea came to me. it was a simple solution, really, and one that has drastically enhanced our quality of life.

before you dial the number to child protective services, you should know that the doorknob is tied to the railing with a slip knot. one pull of the end of the stole (if you will), results in instant freedom for the monkey — in case of a fire, for example.

judge me if you want to. i think this makeshifting idea was a sign from god.

i’ll admit that the first time i ventured a glance at a mother who clutched tightly to her child by way of a leash, i was overtaken by a single emotion: JUDGEMENT. and then, after i ranted to my pre-motherhood self about the fact that children are not animals, i made fun of this crazy, leash-toting mama, and all such mamas of her kind.

fate is a conniving little justice-seeker though, and many years after i unleashed this harsh judgement, i gave birth to… a bolter. here is the technical definition of a bolter for those who are not familiar:

bolter: noun, a recalcitrant toddler prone to sudden dashes, runs, flights, or escapes, commonly in areas of high vehicle traffic such as parking lots.

i diagnosed the monkey with this condition when i was no less than eight months pregnant with the bird and on modified bed rest. a leisurely outing to the cupcake bakery turned quickly into a 100-yard-dash across the black asphalt. the monkey was laughing. i was crying, partly because the event scared me to death, and partly because some aspect of me must have known that the purchase of a leash could be in my future.

when i was pregnant with my first son, a wise mama told me that being a mom would make me feel like my heart was living outside of my body. this turned out to be an accurate description. as psychologist janna malamud smith puts is, “there is an enlarged sense of vulnerability…created by becoming a mother — and accepting the intimate mission of keeping a dependent being alive.”

as writer francine prose describes, “all at once, we realize what hostages to fortune we are, how fragile and precious life is — our own lives, and those of our children. even the bravest of us may find ourselves transformed almost beyond recognition into skittish, nervous versions of our former selves.”

i’m thinking about purchasing the above-pictured leash for the monkey. (it’s perfect for him, right?) i’m certain that i’ll be on the receiving end of the kind of judgment i dished out so naively before… before my wild and reckless heart was living outside of my body… before i wanted to tie a string around it and never let it go.

[sources for this post can be found on the bibliography page on the sidebar to your right.]

[don’t forget to enter the billboard bag GIVEAWAY found in saturday’s post.]