Author: Jenny

Like a magpie, I've always been drawn to things that have sparkle, from rhinestone-embellished housewares to gold lamé get-ups in second-hand stores or beetles whose metallic armors reflect in the sun. But in my interactions with the world, oh, how I can fixate on the not-sparkly stuff: ill-timed traffic lights, a web page that won't load, the impolite server. Post-pandemic, I took to saying, "Everything's broken, and nothing works." It's not good for the soul, and as a lifelong writer, I've noticed it's also not good for creativity. This blog is about redirecting my attention to what's good in the world -- seeking and finding joy in the same way I notice sparkly objects around me -- and writing about it. There is an old nursery rhyme about magpies, "One for Sorrow," which tells us a solitary magpie symbolizes sorrow, but two magpies symbolize joy. This blog is about looking harder for the good stuff. Here's to finding those second magpies.

Talking until I’m Smurf Blue in the Face (from the Momplex Blog archive)

April 21, 2014February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

I’ve watched a lot of Smurfs episodes over the last six or seven months — first, because I was pregnant, nauseated, and loathe to run around playing tag with my daughter, and now, because I’m constantly trying to come up with ways to keep her somewhat entertained while I nurse and coddle the sleepless, barfing changeling I spawned. We’re talking dozens of episodes, repeatedly. As someone who never got to watch Smurfs when I was a kid, I now want to formally thank my parents for not getting cable. Those topless little blue freaks are smurfing annoying.

Now that Smurfs are a part of my oldest’s obsessions, however, they are also a part of our bedtime ritual. I have to make up a story involving them every time I put her to bed. In fact, I have spent many lunchtimes pretending to be one or another of them, as well. Last year (and sometimes still) it was the Care Bears that permeated everything we did together. We’d be playing with her plastic zoo animals, and she’d hold up a wildebeast and an ostrich and say, “Let’s pretend this one’s Funshine, and this one’s Grumpy Bear.” And everything would just devolve from there.

Mostly, she wanted me to make Grumpy Bear do grumpy things. Though now that the Smurfs have edged out the Care Bears, she typically wants me to make Grouchy Smurf do grouchy things, like give other Smurfs shots. Sometimes I’m even asked to have Grouchy Smurf give Funshine Bear a shot, and it’s just so confusing. It’s like one big psychedelic trip into a four-year-old’s twisted imagination.

But I’ve noticed something about what the Smurfs and the Care Bears have done for us. They’ve given us an alternative means of communicating our deepest fears and grievances. While my daughter flagrantly uses them to play out her paralyzing fear of shots, I admit I have totally whored out Grumpy Bear to help my daughter understand ME. I sometimes make him seem like a beaten-down soul. When Smurfette gives Grumpy Bear a hug, he softens up a little and explains to her what a terrible day he’s had and how he’s just feeling grumpy because he’s so tired and gotten so run down by Funshine Bear’s incessant talking. Most of my snarky subtext goes over her head, and she gains a little empathy for crabby buttheads in the process, so it’s therapeutic for both of us.

I’m surprised these pretend-play games have done what they’ve done for our relationship, because I’ve otherwise concluded that words have almost zero impact on young children. I can tell my daughter that I love her a zillion times a day, and, God, how passionately I do, but my doing so does just about nothing to take the edge off the fact that I have barely spent a quality minute with her on days like today. And similarly, I can speak to my seven-week-old in the most adoring tone you can imagine, but we all know he could really give a shit what garble is coming out of that toothy hole in my face. He just wants it to shape itself into a smile. While I hold him. And hold him. And nurse him. And hold him. I can talk to him sweetly until I’m Smurf blue in the face, but it’s the caress he’s seeking, the nourishment, the human touch. My nearly five-year-old is not all that different.

Originally published 2009 JLF and the Momplex Blog

babies · breastfeeding · general mockery · motherhood

The Season’s Hottest New Accessory: My Kid! (from the Momplex Blog archive)

April 9, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny2 Comments

At first, I thought that my new baby was kind of cramping my style. I’m literally talking style, because I gained 50 pounds this pregnancy. How does one dress herself when she’s no longer with child and is instead with all the Saltines and root beer she ate over the previous 39 weeks? Not very fashionably, I’ll tell you that. Fortunately, the only way my new baby will stop crying is coiled like a potato bug inside a sling I wear all day long. And seriously, wearing your baby is, like, all the rage these days. I’m super-trendy.

Sadly, my baby likes to be worn in an elasticized black Infantino sling. I don’t mind it so much, but I can tell this sling does not impress the baby-wearing set in our hippie-dippy town. It practically shouts, “I shop at Target and won’t fork out more than $29.95 for my child’s faux womb!” I guess that’s better than the statment I’d make were I sporting an itchy Guatemalan-inspired ring sling in a fabric that doesn’t match anything but Birkenstocks and leg hair. You know, the sort that shouts to the world, “I use all-natural deodorant made from soy and Ralph Nader spittle, and intend to feed my child on demand until he’s 33!”

Did I say that out loud? Sorry. Clearly I’m getting a little tired of the hard-core baby-wearing set. I do actually enjoy being able to get our little potato bug to sleep in the sling. And it’s not terribly inconvenient having him close to me while I take care of people and things that would otherwise be left to mold, cry, or pile up. But frankly, I’m not trying to be part of an anti-establishment parenting faction. I’m not trying to make some sort statement with my sling. It would be more truthful to say my son is making one. He does not want any other sling, damnit. He wants the Infantino.

So, he happens to heavily favor a cheap sling that isn’t popular with the aforementioned cult. Many of whom continue to treat me as if I’m some sort of greenhorn that needs to be guided toward a finer baby-wearing device. (And let me just clarify here that by “finer,” I actually mean a carrier that’s more primitive: The more it emulates something worn in the rice paddies, the better.)

I do own a very nice ring-sling by the way. And I tried on a zillion other baby-wearing devices before buying it. With my first baby, I owned a pouch. And a Maya Wrap. And an expensive-as-all-getout backpack. And various other devices that made her scream at me as though it were foot-binding, not baby-wearing. With my son, however, the ring-sling turned me into a 24-hour convenience mart: Strapping a baby’s face against milk ducts is like setting meat on a lion’s nose and expecting him to take a sleep, ever, instead of eat, constantly.

I’ve found that when I wear my baby in the ring-sling, I tend to attract other baby-wearers. It’s like a secret club. The first rule in Ultimate Baby Wearing Club is definitely NOT like the first rule in Fight Club. It’s the opposite. DO talk about it–constantly, if possible. But wearing my baby in a ring-sling doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. It also doesn’t mean I’m automatically like-minded with the next woman wearing her kid. It doesn’t mean I use hemp diapers or had a placenta-eating ritual after giving birth in a wooden washtub. It doesn’t really mean anything other than my baby likes this thing, and I don’t want him to cry all day, so he wins.

Yesterday at my daughter’s preschool, I decided to introduce myself to a pair of new moms on the playground. Maybe I should have heeded the warning. I mean, one of them was wearing a serious ring-sling, a quilted and perhaps even homemade specimen. (The second rule of Ultimate Baby Wearing Club: the more primitive, the better). She took stock of my Supertarget Supershit Sling, and reminisced about the time she’d tried one on and how awful it was.

“Have you ever tried a Mei Tai or a ring-sling?” she asked. “My son really loves his.”

She was referring to her 14-month-old, who instead of being loosed on the playground with the other children was bound tightly around her hip. (Mama loves her accessories!) I explained that I actually use a ring-sling sometimes but don’t prefer it, because it makes my baby frantically root on me. Her disapproval was almost palpable.

“And there’s something WRONG with that?” she asked, judgement steaming out of her flared noseholes.

Truth is, I’m actually quite fond of nursing, but not while shaving my legs, emptying the garbage, or doing various other things that are part of my decidely non-tribal, modern, industrial existence. So, yeah, lady, the day I decide it’s cool to nurse while eliminating in the loo is the day I expect my family to stage a breastfeeding intervention.

Okay, after I swallowed back the hot puke that came up my throat, I explained that I simply prefer not to nurse him every 15 minutes and that I actually wear him in the Infantino because it’s the one place he’ll sleep. Knowing that so many of the Ring-Sling Rambos and women in the Mei Tai Mafia think a baby’s naps are more of a luxury for mom than a necessity for baby, particularly when compared with the benefits of breastfeeding every 2-3 seconds, I should have expected what came next. What came next was her explaining to me that 50 years from now parents will probably all be doing as she’s doing. She said they’ll disdainfully look back at our generation of parents and shake their heads in disbelief.

I’m sure.

Maybe I should start going topless and strapping my baby to my front-side using braided corn husks. Oh, the skin-to-skin contact! The everlasting breastfeeding-on-demand! The primitive gorgeousness of it! Then, as is my obvious wish, maybe future generations will look back at me as if I were some sort of mother-goddess. Yeah, I’ll show them all.

Globe · home · humor · motherhood · poop · whereilivedwednesday

The Dump on Sharp Road (the Momplex Blog archive)

March 26, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny16 Comments

Today’s writing was prompted by a weekly meme called “Where I Lived Wednesdays,” from Ann Imig at Ann’s Rants. Want to join the fun? Just click here and leave your link!

Way out in Six Shooter Canyon, in that time, nobody cleaned up their dog poop. There were piles of it in every yard, including ours. We used to let it sit out there for days, maybe weeks, wondering who was going to pick it up. In the desert sun, the turds dried until they were light and hard as chalk. My best friend, Anne Marie, and I made a game of spraying these with the garden hose. The best ones sent up a puff of dust, then shrunk away, layer by colorful layer, like an Everlasting Gobstopper. It was the best game ever, after Nun Rock, which was when we put ladies’ skirt-slips on our heads like wimples and solemnly circled near my waterbed humming monk melodies. Then we’d ascend a little step ladder and tear off our habits to jam out like punk rockers.

Sometimes in the fall when I came home from school, I burned energy by practicing my gymnastics in the side yard. It ran along the giant garden kept by our neighbor, a rotund Mexican man who looked like an old Diego Rivera. His was a garden overgrown, too much food, and yet we once caught him stealing plums off our tree. I liked that he kept his garden sloppy and was never out there picking, because I didn’t want his audience. What I really wanted was for the boys on my street to happen by on their bikes and catch me turning aerial cartwheels and back flips. Usually it was just a boy named Mark, who looked like he’d stepped out of a De Grazia painting—irises black as his pupils, and hair to match, stick straight and shiny. He was probably cute, but I didn’t think so at the time. If no real boys happened by, I’d flop into the yellowing grass with my dog, Molly, who could be found snacking away on her own poop. “Stop that,” I’d say without really trying to make her stop. Later, my dad would let Molly lick his face all over, even his mouth. I didn’t tell him.

Winters were short and mild, and when we got snow, it was a magic like looking into God’s mouth. Of course, the flakes came down in millimeters not inches, and only every couple of years. That’s why the schools would close, because we didn’t have plows and the buses didn’t want to risk the trip to the Apache reservation. It wasn’t enough snow to cover the dog poop, and one winter I packed a lot of turds into snowballs. These I collected into a bucket, which Anne Marie helped me carry down to the end of Sharp Road, where the neighborhood boys had been pelting us. I pitched a big one at Chad Cecil instead of Chuy Casillas or Frank Grice. Chad was the popular kid with blonde hair and the shit-eating car-salesman grin, all teeth and not very nice. He shot his arm up in the air like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and caught the snowball and froze in that position with a smug look, like he was something else. But the snow had crumbled so that he was holding a pile of dog crap in his mitten, and I think he almost cried when he saw it. I was very happy that day.

In the spring, our grass would finally green up. That’s when anyone could tell the exact size and location of our septic tank, because the blades were more vibrant there, like emeralds, and much thicker and taller. This was my favorite spot to lay down in the yard and listen to the locusts, counting down the days to summer and hoping my mom wouldn’t notice I had nothing to do. When she did notice, she’d bring out the weeding tool and pay me five cents a dandelion, but only if I got them out by the roots. I’d end up with a pile big enough to get me to the movies in town, which cost only two dollars for a double-feature that started with cartoons. The theater was lorded over by greasy Carl with the glass eye and the polyester pants and Colonel Sanders beard. He greeted everyone with a devilish smirk, conspiratorially, like you were about to see a peep show and he might call the cops on you, or not.

It costs $8.50 now to go to the theater, but Carl might still be there. I saw him last time I was in town, years ago, and he gave me that same smirk and it was like he hadn’t changed a bit in 30 years. I couldn’t say the same for my house on Sharp Road. The door to the garage where Anne Marie and I used to hold séances and haunted houses was peeling and cockeyed. The weeping willow tree from where the locusts used to serenade me was gone. Of course you can come in, the woman at the door told me. I’m so sorry about the way things look. Dad passed away two weeks ago. He had Alzheimer’s, and we didn’t know it had gotten this bad. Piles upon piles of detritus were everywhere—papers, cans, jars, clothes. It felt dark in there. And interestingly enough, it smelled like dog poop.

There's dog poop in them there hills. — There’s dog poop in them there hills.

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