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.

babies · grandparents · happiness · intentional happiness · motherhood · speed-posts

Not Done Yet: The You Your Kids Haven’t Met Yet (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 24, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny2 Comments

My living room walls are painted the color of old Coors cans. It’s a sort of muted golden yellow. I didn’t even realize I’d chosen Coors yellow until this week, when I got to feeling sappy about my childhood. The walls have been that color for five years. How could I miss the connection?

Coors Banquet Beer made regular appearances at my parents’ neighborhood barbecues when I was a little kid. And I can still almost taste the sweat I’d swipe off the cold ones, freshly popped by my dad and other mutton-chopped men, after golf tournaments in the crusty mining town we called home. They’d scoop them with their gloved hands out of ice barrels near the patio where their scores were posted. I can still hear the hot locusts buzzing as I sat cross-legged in a shady spot watching them, my hair smelling like chlorine and the sun-blistered skin on my shoulders starting to peel. I liked being there around all the dads. They looked mighty high on their low handicaps and tossing back those Coors.

I don’t remember my mom drinking beer, even though she’s the one out of my two parents who will indulge in a cold one now and again. “I never really was a drinker,” I’ve heard my dad say. I can’t argue with that. Knowing how memories go, there were probably just a few backyard barbecues and not nearly so many sweaty Coors cans as I like to imagine. We fudge our childhood memories a lot, maybe more than we think. And some of us take a longer time than others to realize it wasn’t all about us.

I spent this past Saturday in a primitive little hilltop cabin for a quiet getaway with my mom. We had no electricity or running water. The bathroom was an outhouse about 30 feet from the cabin. Snow was up to our knees in some spots, and we had only a wood-burning stove to warm our food. We took little hikes and naps and read quietly from our books. We ate homemade chicken-noodle soup and salad by candlelight and corked a bottle of wine using a shoe and a steak knife. (By God, we were going to open that #%$&* bottle!) At night we curled up together in a loft bed and talked. In the morning we chatted and giggled before heading out to build a snowman and then stab the snow with so many pretty icicles, it looked like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

Wait, I think I'm overstating the awesomeness of what we created. (Source: Wodumedia.com) — Wait, I think I’m overstating the awesomeness of what we created. (Source: Wodumedia.com)

None of this was the elemental thing of it all. No, the whole point, for me, was discovering that my childhood version of my mom wasn’t the “real” her.

My mom stayed home taking care of my sister and me for a long time. She and my dad were close friends with several couples that also had kids, and when we congregated, there was drinking and loudness and so much hilarity, the kids running wild and staying up a little too late and all of us playing games of badminton or cards. We were happy and nuts. I can still see my mom laughing and smiling in all these scenes.

When I was in college, she started to change. In fact, though she’s always been an angel to others, over the years, she’s become almost obsessive about helping the elderly, the mentally ill, the poor, animals—just everyone and everything that breaks your heart. Her latest thing is the fight against human trafficking. Sometimes talking with her is depressing. “Mom, I’m sorry. I know you think some of these death stories are sweet,” I remember telling her when she was working with hospice, “but they just terrify me.” There is sadness all over the world, and she can’t just relax. Sometimes I just wish she’d be her old self. I miss the real her.

But as we talked this weekend and I told her how much I hate these Wisconsin winters that I was never cut out to endure, she said this: “Imagine that you’re sitting behind our old house in Arizona, and it’s 100 degrees out, and the LAWN has just been put in—a lawn has been PUT IN—and you’re staring at the wall of dirt over you, where they’ve just cut through the earth so you can have a house, because they just did things like that. And flies are buzzing around your head, and you think, ‘This is where I live now, and I’m going to just live here for a long time, and this is it.’” She explained to me how she made a good life there, how she sought her friends and found ways to make it work, but the things that gave her days meaning were not the things I would have expected. It sure wasn’t the Coors banquet beer cans.

And that’s when it hit me, how blind I’ve been. I know good and well my kids don’t really know the whole me. They have no idea what a detour was taken when we decided to have them—before we moved to a town with polar vortexes that make me feel murderous. Before I quit my editing career to raise them. Before I put on stretch marks and wrinkles. Before I learned how to speak in whole G-rated paragraphs. Before I knew anything about time-outs or changing diapers or making sure homework gets done or shoveling snow or volunteering on school committees or teaching Sunday school—or, really, most of the things they’ll probably remember about me at this age. They have no idea that, like them, I’m not a finished product. There’s more than meets they eye. I’m still becoming something, and I may become many more somethings before I’m done.

So, that pretty much tells you where my “real” mom went. She went to the cabin with me this past weekend. Turns out she’s been with me all along.