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.
My daughter wants to be Angelina Jolie when she grows up. That’s not how she puts it. She doesn’t even know who Angelina is. But she’s been telling me for years that she wants to “adopt nine or ten kids someday, from all over the world.” I guess that as long as she doesn’t take up any other Angelina tendencies, like making out with a cousin or blowing up her lips to look like two boffing slugs, I think it’s pretty cool.
I’m happy when my daughter tells me she aspires to having kids. It makes me feel like I’m making this gig look easy, which it isn’t, and rewarding, which it is. Interestingly enough, a Living Social psychic tried to tell me a couple of months ago that my daughter was “going to have kids at an early age.” I pressed the woman for details, and she said, “Not too young, maybe around 19.” Excuse me? Because this woman feels that 19 is a reasonable age to have babies—and because she had to ask if I had kids in the first place—it was easy to laugh her off.
The great and wise man-child Justin Bieber tells us we should never say never, but I feel pretty good that my daughter’s not going to fulfill that psychic’s prophecies. However, she might just fulfill her own. I see the kind of sister, daughter, and friend she is, and I just know she’s going to be damn good at motherhood when it’s her turn. And, hey, just look at this list of “Possible Jobs” she made last week:
The last item on that list has “motherhood internship” written all over it. Being a mom to a deserted baby penguin seems like a half-okay set of training wheels for actual motherhood, right? I love my girl’s optimism, her bold vision. Part rose-colored glasses, part bad-ass, I’d say she’s totally on the right track to fulfilling her dream.
Poop-slinging is not just for primates. I know, because I experience it as a mom firsthand all the time. I’m not talking about literal poo once flung at me by kicking baby legs—technically, that’s not slung. I’m talking about the endless heaps of crap the world puts on parents, day in and day out:
Sexualized monster dolls with anorexic thigh-gap and Kris Jenner eye makeup
Vaccination, breastfeeding, and red-shirting debates that outheat the meetings of the Continental Congress
Surprise commercials for things like CSI: Cannibal Ear-Rape Unit during family Christmas specials
Endless scare campaigns about eating high-fructose corn syrup, GMOs, aerosolized feces, snow, etc.
Magazine covers with the lying liars who make babies in Hollywood and the lying liars who help them lie about the baby weight they “melt away” three weeks post-partum through a combo of Pilates, coconut oil, and Acai berries. Liars.
Know-it-alls forever saying, “If I were a parent, I would never…” [insert karma’s placeholder here] as if it were as simple as boiling an egg or crate-training a dog
YouTube instructional videos for DIY push-up, padded training bras
Absurdly expensive athletic programs that require 12 practices a week and a second mortgage, until the third grade, when it all doubles
My personal nemesis, the bottomless sea of paper: teachers’ notes, permission slips, school calendars, snack lists, book fair circulars, fundraiser order forms, and really bad artwork that only qualifies as artwork because your child wrote his/her name on it during art class
It’s nothing, really. I’m sure every generation of parents has it’s crap, and I’m not complaining. I do my best to roll with the punches and stay ahead of the whack-a-mole game that is raising kids. But sometimes I just have to laugh at the absurdity of what gets slung at me by our hyper-ridiculous society. Look at the headline of a note I received today from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health:
An Intervention!!! Exclamation Point!!!!
No pressure there, right? Screw the “happiest kid on the block.” We’re going for global domination! Basic rule of thumb I’ve learned as a writer: Be wary of exclamation marks. They often indicate hysteria, fake excitement, ignorance—or, in this case, all three.
Turns out the university thinks my kid is fat. And they want to do something about his dangerous fatness—as well as mine and his dad’s—through a special web-based program to help us exercise and eat healthier meals: “All parents and children will be weighed and measured at the first visit, and again at 6 month and at 12 months.”
Um. Really?
This letter took me off guard. It explained that an enclosed body mass index (BMI) chart—on which my son’s latest BMI was shown—indicated that my son is heading for heart disease, bone problems, and diabetes. Basically, they called my kid fat, and then very subtly indicated that my husband and I must be fat, too.
Thank God SOMEBODY’S looking out for my kid.
Most of you don’t personally know my son. Let me just say that I regularly worry he isn’t eating enough. He even has a little preschooler six-pack. You know what I’m talking about, right? I’d kill to have his abs.
The BMI is an arcane tool, and you can Google to your heart’s content to find out why. Basically, it’s an oversimplification and doesn’t really measure what doctors purport it measures. My husband used to always tip the BMI index at “obese” when he was in the military. Then they’d do what’s called a “tape test” to measure his various body parts in proportion to one another (no penises, I promise) and conclude otherwise. In other words, the BMI is flawed.
So, I wrote a harsh letter to the university. It had more to do with my critically anorexic cousin—now in her 20s—than with my son. That the medical community would start imposing diets on 4-year-olds with six packs? Please. Let’s sling some more poop at parents. I’m sure there are kids who will benefit from the program, but I could not help but wonder about the 11-year-old girl who might intercept that form letter, who might be perfectly well proportioned, and who might head up to her bedroom sobbing because the numbers show she’s “fat.” And the doctors want to pay her family a $100 research reimbursement to see if they can un-fat her!
Maybe the medical school undertook this ill-researched project to jump through a funding hoop. I’m certainly not signing up. I don’t aspire to having the “healthiest kid on the planet,” but I don’t think I’m terribly far from just that. I aspire to having normal kids who walk the usual tightrope of living, who aren’t scared to death by all the poop being slung at them and their parents over the course of their sweet little childhoods. I want kids who are prepared to take the reins when it’s their turn to be mommies and daddies. I suspect there will be ever-more poop slung at them. But just as I was there to wipe it off their bums from the start, I want to be there to wipe it off their faces someday so they can still see straight.
When I was pregnant, I didn’t read parenting books. Seasoned moms said my instincts would be all I needed, and I believed them. Babies sleep. Babies poop. Babies eat. You put them down when they’re tired. You change their diapers when they’re dirty. You feed them when they’re hungry. And you do any and all of the above when they cry. I presume that advice is probably sound advice for most moms and babies. But as it turns out, the usefulness of instinct goes only so far with some situations.
My daughter arrived a few weeks early, yellow and small. It’s almost laughable to recall that we had trouble rousing her during her recovery from jaundice. I remember gripping my own breast in my hands and sliding the nipple back and forth across her mouth to make sure she got a little sustenance, and she’d just be out cold. But man, when she came out of it three weeks later? What a change.
My daughter cried. A lot. And cried and cried and cried. She had a whistle-register cry, and people used to joke that she sounded like Mariah Carey. She spit up constantly, and she was a dreadfully bad sleeper, sometimes going whole days without napping and usually waking up at least five or six times at night. My husband couldn’t help as much as he wanted, because he was at work all day, and anyway, my daughter just wanted to nurse. And nurse and nurse and nurse. I still remember one day when I felt completely liberated just to be able to set her in a bouncy chair while I stood—in her full view—across the room without her screaming hysterically. It lasted about 15 minutes.
CHORUS: Maybe she has attachment issues? Could it be reflux? She just doesn’t need to sleep as much as other babies. You’re putting her down when she’s overtired. You’re overstimulating her. You haven’t waited long enough between naps. Don’t look into her eyes. Don’t let her nurse for too long. Are you letting her nurse long enough? Maybe it’s gas. Is there an allergy? Try eliminating dairy from your diet. Maybe she needs soy. Cut out all chocolate. Is there a neurological problem? Don’t bounce her. Do bounce her. Have you tried swaddling? Have you tried the Miracle Blanket? The swaddle looks too tight. No, maybe it’s too loose. How about an Amby bed? Want to borrow my Maya Wrap? Put her down awake. Put her down sleepy. Set her car seat on the dryer. Run the vacuum. Don’t keep a quiet house. Do keep a quiet house. Never put her down. Sleep her on her back. Answer her cries. Ignore them. Did you test her for reflux again?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGH!!!!
Don’t think we weren’t looking for answers—at the doctor’s office, in books, on TV shows, and of course, from other parents. Coupled with all the unsolicited advice I got, I feel pretty good saying I did my homework. Yet it seemed the more responsive I was to my daughter’s wailing, the more demanding she grew. Everyone kept assuring me this would all get better, but it just kept getting worse. And I, stupidly, just kept tightening my grip on my dream of being one of those “gentle parenting” parents who can solve any problem with a boob, sling, or co-sleeping. I was going to be damned if I let my baby cry it out.
Well, here is something the gentle parenting books—the very ones that most closely jibed with my fantasies of how parenting should be—fail to mention: A chronically sleep-deprived caregiver is far more dangerous to a baby than being left alone to cry. And getting a desperate mother the critical medication or rest she needs is ultimately a lot more important to baby’s wellbeing than breastfeeding is. If you are a mom who went through or is currently going through the sleep hell I’m describing, you know that these can be real-life either/or scenarios. This is not hyperbole.
Mad…and not gonna take it anymore!
There finally came a day, 8.5 months into my daughter’s life, when I realized I was in a truly precarious mental state. By then, I’d begun fantasizing about driving away from my house and never coming back. It sometimes took every last ounce of self-control I had to not harm my own baby. Mother-rage has to be one of the worst feelings in the world. I know from talking to other parents that these terrifying impulses happen to tired and isolated parents more often than you think, even with people whose babies have “normal” crying. But if a few nights of bad sleep or a few days with a heap of shrill crying can turn a regular parent into a regular nutcase, just imagine what eight months of it can do.
So, there came a point when I made a choice–to give the arrogant faction of the “gentle parenting” community the boot before I completely snapped. I didn’t allow their commentaries, judgment, or advice to sway me from doing the thing they’d so long warned me was “barbaric”–to just let our baby cry it out. Sure, doing that went pretty hard against the grain of my mom fantasies. But there was nothing left to try, and I couldn’t go on in that state of stress and exhaustion any longer. The process took weeks, not days, but it worked. After it was all done? We FINALLY got to meet our real baby. This one wasn’t miserable and crying and constantly looking at my aureole. She was rested, happier, more playful, and had a wonderful personality. She didn’t break, and our whole family’s life improved immeasurably.
So, now you see: When I talked last week about kids shattering their parents’ dreams of parenthood? Not being able to sing a lullaby was even smaller potatoes than I made out. I dreamt from before she was even born of holding and rocking my baby girl, comforting her crying, and being that mom that always knew what her child needed. Naturally, I wanted to be good at the one thing a mother is supposed to be good at—knowing her child’s needs and answering them. In my obsession with that ideal, I instead just got good at judgy parenting dogma, and I found myself putting that dogma ahead of our family’s wellbeing.
It took me 8.5 months to do it, but letting a parenting fantasy die so that I could make the best of our reality was one of the best things I ever did. Come to think of it, I did end up being that mom that knew best what her child needed, pretty much as I was told when I was pregnant. It just took me a while to tune out the peanut gallery and realize it. More than eight years (and a second child) later, I can tell you things turned out just fine.
The Second Magpie 