Right now it's so easy to be a heroine in mu daughter's eyes. We go to the playground and I run in circles around her as she stands there giggling, or I start skipping, or climb up on the big blue plastic hippo. She thinks I'm hilarious. She admires me because I always have the solution to every problem - I can disentangle the strings, find the right hole for each shape in her puzzle, and even tie my own shoes. In just a few years, maybe she'll think I'm dumb and out of touch. She will notice things like, my shoes have holes in them and are the same pair I've been wearing since 2002.
If only, someday when she's a teenager, I can win her back by capering a few laps around the playground.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Bellyaching
If I see one more banner ad with a 19-year-old model who has never been pregnant looking down at her perfect concave stomach in mock surprise and delight as she holds up the ends of a measuring tape (as though it measured any different from the last time or the time before that)... it'll be one banner too many.
Alas, here we are many, many months after the baby and even after I finished breast-feeding (after which, I promised myself, I would go on a strict diet and get back my girlish figure). I've been doing crunches almost nightly since April, and recently started running again. I'm a few pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight (the same weight that I was all through college and my twenties). My breasts are nearly nonexistent. But I still have a belly that looks like I'm about 3 months pregnant. Why, oh why, is my body hoarding fat there? I have exactly one pair of pants that is comfortable and that I wear continually up until the moment I must leave the house, when I put on a pair of pants that cut into my stomach. I don't understand why most women find it so easy to get back their flat stomachs after the first pregnancy (the second one, though, seems to be a different story) - but apparently this hasn't happened for me. When I run, I can feel my belly wagging slightly from side to side in front of me. Ugh.
I guess part of this angst is just my unwillingness to accept that I am getting older. I don't want to admit that I can no longer blend in on a college campus, and wear all the same clothes with the same ease that I did back then. I want to present an appearance to the world (as some women are capable of doing, and real women, too, not just celebrities) that says, "Child-bearing didn't change me. Here I am, still the same lithe and beautiful person as ever." But, clearly, child-bearing did change me. I have the marks of it all over my body - more stuff sags, more stuff is stretched out, there are pale, feathery marks all over my flanks. I wanted to manage the whole biological event with the utmost of grace. Instead, I have daily reminders that I am mortal.
Alas, here we are many, many months after the baby and even after I finished breast-feeding (after which, I promised myself, I would go on a strict diet and get back my girlish figure). I've been doing crunches almost nightly since April, and recently started running again. I'm a few pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight (the same weight that I was all through college and my twenties). My breasts are nearly nonexistent. But I still have a belly that looks like I'm about 3 months pregnant. Why, oh why, is my body hoarding fat there? I have exactly one pair of pants that is comfortable and that I wear continually up until the moment I must leave the house, when I put on a pair of pants that cut into my stomach. I don't understand why most women find it so easy to get back their flat stomachs after the first pregnancy (the second one, though, seems to be a different story) - but apparently this hasn't happened for me. When I run, I can feel my belly wagging slightly from side to side in front of me. Ugh.
I guess part of this angst is just my unwillingness to accept that I am getting older. I don't want to admit that I can no longer blend in on a college campus, and wear all the same clothes with the same ease that I did back then. I want to present an appearance to the world (as some women are capable of doing, and real women, too, not just celebrities) that says, "Child-bearing didn't change me. Here I am, still the same lithe and beautiful person as ever." But, clearly, child-bearing did change me. I have the marks of it all over my body - more stuff sags, more stuff is stretched out, there are pale, feathery marks all over my flanks. I wanted to manage the whole biological event with the utmost of grace. Instead, I have daily reminders that I am mortal.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Separation of Church and School
I was talking to a blow-hard recently about kids and schooling. He has some young kids he's planning to enroll in Catholic school. His reasoning was, "It's too confusing for kids to get the different messages from home and school. I don't want my kids being told these contradictory things, and having to go to their teacher with, 'but mommy and daddy say this,' or 'my priest says this.' " I felt a sudden, quick, burst of sympathy for teachers who might be faced with such children. If I was a teacher, my blunt reaction would be, 'So what? I don't care what your priest says, this is how it really is.' It's not that I'm anti-religion. I just think that a lot of it is parables and poetry, and I don't have patience with people trying to substitute it for reality.
The blow-hard's other complaint about public schools was that science class never goes into the morality of certain issues. I guess he means sex ed doesn't tell the kids that premarital sex is sinful, or gay people are evil. I suggested that there was no moral consensus across cultures and that morality wasn't a scientific judgment anyway, so that was why schools didn't go into it. But I think my words fell on deaf ears. I know some people do emerge from the private school system with intact logic and reasoning, and a few even go on to become scientists. One of the smartest guys I know attended Catholic school. But I feel like a school that could mix morality with science (in fact, that deliberately planned curricula to do so) would stack the deck against its students. Oh well. If this guy wants to spend the money to send his kids to private school, I guess there's nothing I can do to convince him otherwise. I just feel a little that the kids aren't getting a fair deal.
The blow-hard's other complaint about public schools was that science class never goes into the morality of certain issues. I guess he means sex ed doesn't tell the kids that premarital sex is sinful, or gay people are evil. I suggested that there was no moral consensus across cultures and that morality wasn't a scientific judgment anyway, so that was why schools didn't go into it. But I think my words fell on deaf ears. I know some people do emerge from the private school system with intact logic and reasoning, and a few even go on to become scientists. One of the smartest guys I know attended Catholic school. But I feel like a school that could mix morality with science (in fact, that deliberately planned curricula to do so) would stack the deck against its students. Oh well. If this guy wants to spend the money to send his kids to private school, I guess there's nothing I can do to convince him otherwise. I just feel a little that the kids aren't getting a fair deal.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Journey
Today I was thinking how awesome and bold my husband is. I've lived in this same city all my life, including for college, and have never been more than a short drive away from my parents (who are still my best friends, and whom I still visit at least once a week just to hang out and chat). But my husband left his family of origin eight years ago and created a new one, in a totally new environment. He came east to attend a school hundreds of miles from home, where he didn't know anyone. He found a place to live, learned where to shop, learned how to get around on the public transportation system, made friends. He found a wife and started a new family. It seems to me that he's so brave for building a new life like that. Maybe it's easier for men to strike out on their own that way, and maybe it's easier for people who aren't quite as close with their parents. But he still gets props from me for doing it.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
An Actual Serious Question
This might come across as frivolous, but here's the burning question that is currently occupying my mind: How many kids should a couple have, for optimal happiness?
The whole time I was growing up, I worried a lot about the environment and the population crisis and vowed that I'd never have more than one or maybe two children, to avoid adding any more burdens to the earth.
Then the night my daughter was born, I was so over-the-moon full of joy I remember thinking, "That was great! I did it! I want to do it again - I'd love to have about four kids!" And so far parenting has been the best time of my life. I love being with my husband and my daughter, taking care of our family. I feel like I'm so much better at that stuff than I am doing my jobby job, earning my way in the world. In my daydreams I quit my job and stay home with the kids (lots of them) in a big rambling house in the country, and we all make our own butter and cheese, and the kids tend a vegetable garden, and we're all happy as clams.
But realistically. I'm too old to have a bunch more kids. And the environmental problems are still there, including climate change which threatens life as we know it, and is a menace no generation has ever had to face before. And even if it was guaranteed that the world we love is going to go on forever, and will be safe for our children to grow up in, I'm not sure my husband and I could afford to have more than one more child - not and provide the quality of life that I want for them.
So a lot of this speculation is just that, just hypothetical dreaming. If we *did* want to have two more children, the time to get cracking on that would be right about now, since I'm already 32 and I wouldn't want to take the risk of pregnancy past age 35. One of my friends who had her baby about the same time that I did is now eight months pregnant with her second child. I'm amazed. I haven't even gotten my period back yet. I'm physically incapable of becoming pregnant again, and here she's almost done carrying #2!
Anyway, back to the question of the hour. I can see that having one kid, even if it's a lot of work and fundamentally changes your life together, still leaves time for snuggling and the occasional date night and all the little joys. And one kid is portable - I can get around town on my own, carrying her and the stroller and her bag of stuff, and it's doable. But if I had two, I don't know how I'd manage to go anywhere. I just don't have enough arms. I can also see, based on the couples we know who have two young kids, that two soak up all available time - not that there is a whole lot remaining after the first one. These couples are in crisis all the time, slamming through the days, constantly struggling to keep food in the fridge, keep the house from descending into chaos, and collapsing into bed exhausted every single night. No more date nights, for sure. One tired mother told me, "One was fun. But two is just - I mean, we love him, but - we don't have a life any more. We're just hanging on and hoping it will get easier in a few years." Which means that three kids is a level of madness I can't even bear to contemplate.
But! but but but. Having a baby, the first time, was so great. And I loved watching her grow and learn. I couldn't even tell you what my favorite stage was. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get the chance to do all that again? and again?
So, back to the question again, which is: Have there ever been any scientific studies to determine the optimal number of children a couple should have in order to achieve or maintain happiness? The research would have to be relevant to young urban/suburban Americans living in environments similar to mine, of course. And the outcomes would have to be various, including both marital happiness for the parents and long-term happiness and positive feelings about their family for the kids. I wouldn't want to have a family where the kids leave home asap and never want to return even for holidays.
My hope is that if you sample enough families a pattern emerges, like - two kids bring about the perfect balance between adult and kid pursuits within the family, whereas three kids make the marriage strained. Or, three kids are optimal for allowing different personalities to flourish within the family and to create a well-rounded whole. Or, four kids is just right for creating that warm tribal sense of belonging. I just don't know.
I would be really interested to learn more about this. Maybe I'll check out the department of family and child psychology at the local university and see if they have any leads.
The whole time I was growing up, I worried a lot about the environment and the population crisis and vowed that I'd never have more than one or maybe two children, to avoid adding any more burdens to the earth.
Then the night my daughter was born, I was so over-the-moon full of joy I remember thinking, "That was great! I did it! I want to do it again - I'd love to have about four kids!" And so far parenting has been the best time of my life. I love being with my husband and my daughter, taking care of our family. I feel like I'm so much better at that stuff than I am doing my jobby job, earning my way in the world. In my daydreams I quit my job and stay home with the kids (lots of them) in a big rambling house in the country, and we all make our own butter and cheese, and the kids tend a vegetable garden, and we're all happy as clams.
But realistically. I'm too old to have a bunch more kids. And the environmental problems are still there, including climate change which threatens life as we know it, and is a menace no generation has ever had to face before. And even if it was guaranteed that the world we love is going to go on forever, and will be safe for our children to grow up in, I'm not sure my husband and I could afford to have more than one more child - not and provide the quality of life that I want for them.
So a lot of this speculation is just that, just hypothetical dreaming. If we *did* want to have two more children, the time to get cracking on that would be right about now, since I'm already 32 and I wouldn't want to take the risk of pregnancy past age 35. One of my friends who had her baby about the same time that I did is now eight months pregnant with her second child. I'm amazed. I haven't even gotten my period back yet. I'm physically incapable of becoming pregnant again, and here she's almost done carrying #2!
Anyway, back to the question of the hour. I can see that having one kid, even if it's a lot of work and fundamentally changes your life together, still leaves time for snuggling and the occasional date night and all the little joys. And one kid is portable - I can get around town on my own, carrying her and the stroller and her bag of stuff, and it's doable. But if I had two, I don't know how I'd manage to go anywhere. I just don't have enough arms. I can also see, based on the couples we know who have two young kids, that two soak up all available time - not that there is a whole lot remaining after the first one. These couples are in crisis all the time, slamming through the days, constantly struggling to keep food in the fridge, keep the house from descending into chaos, and collapsing into bed exhausted every single night. No more date nights, for sure. One tired mother told me, "One was fun. But two is just - I mean, we love him, but - we don't have a life any more. We're just hanging on and hoping it will get easier in a few years." Which means that three kids is a level of madness I can't even bear to contemplate.
But! but but but. Having a baby, the first time, was so great. And I loved watching her grow and learn. I couldn't even tell you what my favorite stage was. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get the chance to do all that again? and again?
So, back to the question again, which is: Have there ever been any scientific studies to determine the optimal number of children a couple should have in order to achieve or maintain happiness? The research would have to be relevant to young urban/suburban Americans living in environments similar to mine, of course. And the outcomes would have to be various, including both marital happiness for the parents and long-term happiness and positive feelings about their family for the kids. I wouldn't want to have a family where the kids leave home asap and never want to return even for holidays.
My hope is that if you sample enough families a pattern emerges, like - two kids bring about the perfect balance between adult and kid pursuits within the family, whereas three kids make the marriage strained. Or, three kids are optimal for allowing different personalities to flourish within the family and to create a well-rounded whole. Or, four kids is just right for creating that warm tribal sense of belonging. I just don't know.
I would be really interested to learn more about this. Maybe I'll check out the department of family and child psychology at the local university and see if they have any leads.
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