I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY hate the end-of-year dance class extravagance.
That’s about $400 worth of despise:
Starting with $37 a month, including months containing two or fewer classes.
A $50 recital costume.
Having to pay $65 for four tickets to attend the recital (because it was booked at a professional performance space).
A mandate that five-year-olds wear make-up because "the lights will wash them out."
Dinner-time performance scheduled for preschoolers.
Not to mention that every minute of every class since February being entirely focused on "getting it right for recital," which often forced the cajoling of my wee one to actually participate after she lost interest.
Add insult to injury, just for kicks, and pay $18 + $7 shipping and handling for one 5x7 PROFESSIONAL PORTRAIT(TM) of the class (not to mention being told by a puckered-face woman that the pictures are copyrighted so I can't snap the action, too, even after I paid their highway robbery, no-customer-service, prices.) I hate the business model that demands parents herd their kids into a room and pay gobs of money for pictures, sight unseen, to arrive in six to eight weeks.
But the real end of my rope came as I was running around like a crazy person trying (and failing) to find nude-colored tights, a mandate for the dancewear that was not included with the $50 dancewear.
I practically broke down in tears when the husband, trying to be helpful, asked if I'd gone to WAL-MART. "I do NOT spend money at WAL-MART ... I'm NOT breaking THAT principle, too."
"OK ... Ok ...." came his soothing voice over the phone, evidence I'd gone too far; lost my moorings. I'd haplessly fallen over the edge of reason over sheer hose.
Much ado about nothing. Much ado over something that should just be fun. Something that no matter how it is presented, encourages the arts.
It wasn't the tights but my overall failure that I was lamenting.
My failure to find a class that met my desires for less consumerism. My failure to stand up and assert those values anyway. My insistence she continue when her interest waned. All the while feeling the emphasis was on the wrong place - the recital not the art.
My failure continues to kick me when I’m down as I recognize that the trappings were the ONLY part my daughter had any interest in after all these months: Having her picture taken in the dress and the chance at being on a real stage was poking me in the chest with my inability to NOT buck trends.
I knew it would be this way. I knew as they scheduled the circus, I was going to be playing an angry clown. I'm just utterly stunned and shocked by my own rage and stubbornness when it finally came to pass.
Can't just keep my mouth shut and smile. I know when the lights go down and the girls start their performances I will be just as proud as a parent can be.
And then a friend told me something that made it all fit together.
"Let your principles be a guide, not a shackle."
So easy to forget that, isn't it?
When we enslave our "principles" we really run the risk of becoming unprincipled.
I had said that I didn't want THIS to be our experience. And it won't be if I don't let my principles petrify. If I don't shut down and fold my arms to other possibilities.
... I just hope it's the dance that will be the reason she'll want to continue in six to eight weeks (if she chooses to continue) ... not just to see her picture on the wall.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
He’s no longer an infant, but he’s still my baby
Dear Champ,
Now we are two.
Well, you are two and I am trying to force myself to think of you as a person all your own. Apart from me.
I didn't have this trouble with your sister and would chalk it up to last-child syndrome, but at the time she turned this auspicious age I had my doubts there'd ever be another baby in our house.
Of course by this age, she had moved along to her own room and had decided cow's milk was sweeter than mine. I'd changed back to my non-nursing bras and embarked on a new journey of bringing up toddler.
But every time I look at you, I see the infant you were two years ago not the boy you are becoming.
You are just as feisty as she was. You ask for what you want and expect to get it, but you melt my heart when I tell you "Later, Ok" and you sigh and say "OK."
I feel a jolt of disbelief as I leaf through photographs from just a few months ago ... the baby is becoming a boy. You love trucks and tractors and horses calling them out as they pass by your window on the morning and evening commutes. Translating your words has become a family past-time.
CHAMP: "Ah-bells coos!"
MAMA: "Annabel's cool?"
DADDY: "Annabel's shoes?"
ITTYBIT: "I think he's saying Annabel's SCHOOL!"
THE CHAMP: "Yeah. Ah-Bell's COO."
And where you can ask for "Coeder" (demand the Courduroy Bear book be read over and over) or locate and procure your own snacks (usually raisins, though sometimes 'Gookies’) you have no interest in changing your brand of milk.
You think cow's milk is the sole property of your sister, and you have no intention of fighting her for it.
Milk, for you, for now, is me. In that way, you are still my baby.
But as your legs stretch longer and your body thins out as you are able to ask for what you want: "Milch, peas," nursing on demand has gone by the wayside. At least in public.
"Later," I coo, "later."
"Ok," you say with a sigh, "ok."
And where I was once confident to lactate in public, during your infancy and early toddlerhood, I am furtive and feeling the pressure of secreting your sustenance now that you can tell me what you want in ways even strangers can understand.
And though you are interested in big boy things including — against all stereotypes I've ever been dim-witted enough to believe — using the potty the way all plumbers have intended, I'm having a hard time recognizing you without my shadow.
Your father is counting the days until you have your own room. Your sister is even packing your things, she feels she's given you free and first access to her mother for long enough.
But I'm just not ready to make you grow up faster than you are growing on your own.
Happy Birthday, love
Mommy
Now we are two.
Well, you are two and I am trying to force myself to think of you as a person all your own. Apart from me.
I didn't have this trouble with your sister and would chalk it up to last-child syndrome, but at the time she turned this auspicious age I had my doubts there'd ever be another baby in our house.
Of course by this age, she had moved along to her own room and had decided cow's milk was sweeter than mine. I'd changed back to my non-nursing bras and embarked on a new journey of bringing up toddler.
But every time I look at you, I see the infant you were two years ago not the boy you are becoming.
You are just as feisty as she was. You ask for what you want and expect to get it, but you melt my heart when I tell you "Later, Ok" and you sigh and say "OK."
I feel a jolt of disbelief as I leaf through photographs from just a few months ago ... the baby is becoming a boy. You love trucks and tractors and horses calling them out as they pass by your window on the morning and evening commutes. Translating your words has become a family past-time.
CHAMP: "Ah-bells coos!"
MAMA: "Annabel's cool?"
DADDY: "Annabel's shoes?"
ITTYBIT: "I think he's saying Annabel's SCHOOL!"
THE CHAMP: "Yeah. Ah-Bell's COO."
And where you can ask for "Coeder" (demand the Courduroy Bear book be read over and over) or locate and procure your own snacks (usually raisins, though sometimes 'Gookies’) you have no interest in changing your brand of milk.
You think cow's milk is the sole property of your sister, and you have no intention of fighting her for it.
Milk, for you, for now, is me. In that way, you are still my baby.
But as your legs stretch longer and your body thins out as you are able to ask for what you want: "Milch, peas," nursing on demand has gone by the wayside. At least in public.
"Later," I coo, "later."
"Ok," you say with a sigh, "ok."
And where I was once confident to lactate in public, during your infancy and early toddlerhood, I am furtive and feeling the pressure of secreting your sustenance now that you can tell me what you want in ways even strangers can understand.
And though you are interested in big boy things including — against all stereotypes I've ever been dim-witted enough to believe — using the potty the way all plumbers have intended, I'm having a hard time recognizing you without my shadow.
Your father is counting the days until you have your own room. Your sister is even packing your things, she feels she's given you free and first access to her mother for long enough.
But I'm just not ready to make you grow up faster than you are growing on your own.
Happy Birthday, love
Mommy
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Names can wound us, words can cripple us
There are lots of people who disagree with the idea that only words used as decorative objects, forged in metal or cast in plaster, that fall from atop some monumental shelf onto our thumb twiddling noggins can do us bodily harm.
And truth be told, I’m one of those folks who believes that while it behooves us to use our words wisely — that what we say and how we say it can shape our understanding and our actions, as well as our relationships with other humans – we have to choose our battles.
For instance:
Curse words. Personally, I think curse words are terribly satisfying to say. Occasionally, too often, they roll off my tongue with the ease of a longshoreman.
Is that sexist? Probably. Longshoreperson.
To be quite honest, the only reason I think logical to oppose them in general is the long term cause and effect, which is the more you rely on them to make your point the less punch your paragraphs actually pack. It’s just a simple truth, they really aren’t effective if you want people to pay attention to anything serious you may have to say.
So when a word, unmentionable in a grandmother’s company, slips from between the sugar-sweet lips of my soon-to-be kindergartener, I can see how that secondary lesson about curse words is going to be harder to mandate than it would have been to model.
Thus far I’ve been trying the "you-realize-we-can’t-say-that-word-in-public" response when I hear the offending usage, hoping it doesn’t turn into an "if-you-say-that-word-at-school-you-could-get-into-big-trouble" admonition. At that point I’ll just be praying we don’t get a phone call from the principal or several angry parents we were hoping to befriend.
But there is one word that, if I possessed such a power, I would erase completely from the pages of Webster: boredom.
"I’m so bored," whenever I’ve heard it, has always seemed a whiney complaint that is a complete and utter waste of angst.
They are three words when strung together will literally make the hairs on my neck stand on end.
How is boredom possible if you can read?
If you can draw?
If you can think or plan?
How is it possible with the hundreds of must-have toys, the internets, the telephone, the myriad of amusements one can invent with their mind, folks can’t think of something more interesting to do than announce they are bored?
To me boredom is an acceptance of one’s own lack of imagination. A lack of intellect we announce to the world, demanding that it be fixed for us. A petty demand the same as when the sullen teen holds up an empty glass one room away from the kitchen and demands service by wiggling it in the air, saying "Can I have more juice …" but making no attempt to move off the couch.
The response we have is almost always something along these lines of: "Do I look like you’re personal waiter? You have legs. You know where the refrigerator is. You MAY have juice."
Perhaps all those things I mentioned: … the toys, the games, the virtual pleasures of the computer have softened us. Perhaps television has rotted our brains and given us minute attention spans. The argument seems plausible.
Only thing stopping me from believing it is that the slogan isn’t new.
Seems to me that the people who see boredom as a consequence of over stimulation, also see it as an acceptable alternative to modern technology. That doing nothing is OK, too.
But I don’t define doing nothing as really doing nothing. I don’t think Roget would have paired the two words in his thesaurus, at any rate. We are always doing something if we can think, or curl up with a book, or take a nap.
Allowing boredom to be an acceptable activity, if you ask me, just steals the thunder of the quiet thrills like dreaming up acceptable curse words to work into one’s English essay.
And truth be told, I’m one of those folks who believes that while it behooves us to use our words wisely — that what we say and how we say it can shape our understanding and our actions, as well as our relationships with other humans – we have to choose our battles.
For instance:
Curse words. Personally, I think curse words are terribly satisfying to say. Occasionally, too often, they roll off my tongue with the ease of a longshoreman.
Is that sexist? Probably. Longshoreperson.
To be quite honest, the only reason I think logical to oppose them in general is the long term cause and effect, which is the more you rely on them to make your point the less punch your paragraphs actually pack. It’s just a simple truth, they really aren’t effective if you want people to pay attention to anything serious you may have to say.
So when a word, unmentionable in a grandmother’s company, slips from between the sugar-sweet lips of my soon-to-be kindergartener, I can see how that secondary lesson about curse words is going to be harder to mandate than it would have been to model.
Thus far I’ve been trying the "you-realize-we-can’t-say-that-word-in-public" response when I hear the offending usage, hoping it doesn’t turn into an "if-you-say-that-word-at-school-you-could-get-into-big-trouble" admonition. At that point I’ll just be praying we don’t get a phone call from the principal or several angry parents we were hoping to befriend.
But there is one word that, if I possessed such a power, I would erase completely from the pages of Webster: boredom.
"I’m so bored," whenever I’ve heard it, has always seemed a whiney complaint that is a complete and utter waste of angst.
They are three words when strung together will literally make the hairs on my neck stand on end.
How is boredom possible if you can read?
If you can draw?
If you can think or plan?
How is it possible with the hundreds of must-have toys, the internets, the telephone, the myriad of amusements one can invent with their mind, folks can’t think of something more interesting to do than announce they are bored?
To me boredom is an acceptance of one’s own lack of imagination. A lack of intellect we announce to the world, demanding that it be fixed for us. A petty demand the same as when the sullen teen holds up an empty glass one room away from the kitchen and demands service by wiggling it in the air, saying "Can I have more juice …" but making no attempt to move off the couch.
The response we have is almost always something along these lines of: "Do I look like you’re personal waiter? You have legs. You know where the refrigerator is. You MAY have juice."
Perhaps all those things I mentioned: … the toys, the games, the virtual pleasures of the computer have softened us. Perhaps television has rotted our brains and given us minute attention spans. The argument seems plausible.
Only thing stopping me from believing it is that the slogan isn’t new.
Seems to me that the people who see boredom as a consequence of over stimulation, also see it as an acceptable alternative to modern technology. That doing nothing is OK, too.
But I don’t define doing nothing as really doing nothing. I don’t think Roget would have paired the two words in his thesaurus, at any rate. We are always doing something if we can think, or curl up with a book, or take a nap.
Allowing boredom to be an acceptable activity, if you ask me, just steals the thunder of the quiet thrills like dreaming up acceptable curse words to work into one’s English essay.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
No babies are saved in killing of doctor
No one should ever refer to the killer of Kansas gynecologist Dr. George Tiller as being pro-life.
He wasn’t.
Any person or group that resorts to killing doctors as a means to an end of medical abortion is certainly advocating death.
The gunman who stalked Dr. Tiller in the lobby of his church was a murderous terrorist, plain and simple.
I can’t change your mind if you feel potential for life, and not life absolutely, is what matters.
There’s little I can say to a person who sees human existence in such black and white terms. I can’t sway anyone from the belief that some lives are more valuable than others. Some people just value life in reverse proportion to its weight and innocence; the smaller the more valuable.
I can’t expect them to understand a parent who doesn’t want to watch their children suffer and die over the course of a few minutes or more years than they have on this Earth to care for them. It’s a cost that will haunt them, too.
I know they have their reasons for believing what they do just as surely as I have my reasons:
I am pro-life, I am for medical privacy and I am pro-woman. It is not my place to decide what is best for anyone else regardless of what I would decide for myself.
I am not walking in their shoes.
Putting aside our most fervent moral beliefs, the giant irony in all of this – beside the horrible, tragic terror of such an unconscionable act in the name of life -- is that no babies would likely have been saved in the killing of Dr. Tiller, even if the gunman had leveled his gun and hit his mark 30 years ago.
Late-term abortions – clinically referred to as Dilation and Evacuations - are rare, and the people who have them are not women who waited too long to decide they didn’t want to be mothers. They are women who desperately want the babies they’ve carried. They have hoped beyond all hope for healthy, squalling newborns.
Instead, their babies were given a grim prognosis, perhaps one that determined a condition that might be incompatible with life outside the womb, or one that would present a lifetime of suffering. They may have found themselves in a hospital fighting for their own lives, perhaps battling preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related hypertension that can set in after 20 weeks of gestation.
The Preeclampsia Foundation estimates that globally hypertensive disorders account for more than 76,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 infant deaths each year.
There are many different conditions, each as rare as late term abortions, that can turn a pregnancy from a joyous occasion into a nightmare through no fault of the mother and with no redress by the doctor.
There are genetic maladies commonly detected in the second and third trimesters, such as severe Dandy-Walker syndrome or hydrops fetalis, which can produce babies not meant for this world; babies who will never breathe on their own.
These mothers who would like to choose to deliver a healthy baby, instead are faced with choosing how they will mourn their loss. Some wait and deliver stillborn babies. Some need closure sooner. Some are faced with having to protect their fertility and their mental health the best way they know how.
Those decisions should be every woman’s to make with her family and her doctor in private.
Doctors like Dr. Tiller.
I believe he was willing to pay this price -- enduring more than 30 years of protest lines and lawsuits, suffering bodily harm, ultimately even death -- to make sure women had the best care possible when facing such dire circumstances. I believe he did that out of compassion and a firm belief in what he was doing was necessary and ethically right for his individual patients’ health.
Dr. Tiller was no butcher.
The butchers were the back-alley doctors women turned to before the law of this land protected them.
The butcher was the man who shot him down as he attended church.
You have every right to disagree. But if you call yourself pro-life you must mourn the doctor’s death and see it as the abomination it was. You can not hold that the man who murdered Dr. Tiller was in any way doing God’s work.
He wasn’t.
Any person or group that resorts to killing doctors as a means to an end of medical abortion is certainly advocating death.
The gunman who stalked Dr. Tiller in the lobby of his church was a murderous terrorist, plain and simple.
I can’t change your mind if you feel potential for life, and not life absolutely, is what matters.
There’s little I can say to a person who sees human existence in such black and white terms. I can’t sway anyone from the belief that some lives are more valuable than others. Some people just value life in reverse proportion to its weight and innocence; the smaller the more valuable.
I can’t expect them to understand a parent who doesn’t want to watch their children suffer and die over the course of a few minutes or more years than they have on this Earth to care for them. It’s a cost that will haunt them, too.
I know they have their reasons for believing what they do just as surely as I have my reasons:
I am pro-life, I am for medical privacy and I am pro-woman. It is not my place to decide what is best for anyone else regardless of what I would decide for myself.
I am not walking in their shoes.
Putting aside our most fervent moral beliefs, the giant irony in all of this – beside the horrible, tragic terror of such an unconscionable act in the name of life -- is that no babies would likely have been saved in the killing of Dr. Tiller, even if the gunman had leveled his gun and hit his mark 30 years ago.
Late-term abortions – clinically referred to as Dilation and Evacuations - are rare, and the people who have them are not women who waited too long to decide they didn’t want to be mothers. They are women who desperately want the babies they’ve carried. They have hoped beyond all hope for healthy, squalling newborns.
Instead, their babies were given a grim prognosis, perhaps one that determined a condition that might be incompatible with life outside the womb, or one that would present a lifetime of suffering. They may have found themselves in a hospital fighting for their own lives, perhaps battling preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related hypertension that can set in after 20 weeks of gestation.
The Preeclampsia Foundation estimates that globally hypertensive disorders account for more than 76,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 infant deaths each year.
There are many different conditions, each as rare as late term abortions, that can turn a pregnancy from a joyous occasion into a nightmare through no fault of the mother and with no redress by the doctor.
There are genetic maladies commonly detected in the second and third trimesters, such as severe Dandy-Walker syndrome or hydrops fetalis, which can produce babies not meant for this world; babies who will never breathe on their own.
These mothers who would like to choose to deliver a healthy baby, instead are faced with choosing how they will mourn their loss. Some wait and deliver stillborn babies. Some need closure sooner. Some are faced with having to protect their fertility and their mental health the best way they know how.
Those decisions should be every woman’s to make with her family and her doctor in private.
Doctors like Dr. Tiller.
I believe he was willing to pay this price -- enduring more than 30 years of protest lines and lawsuits, suffering bodily harm, ultimately even death -- to make sure women had the best care possible when facing such dire circumstances. I believe he did that out of compassion and a firm belief in what he was doing was necessary and ethically right for his individual patients’ health.
Dr. Tiller was no butcher.
The butchers were the back-alley doctors women turned to before the law of this land protected them.
The butcher was the man who shot him down as he attended church.
You have every right to disagree. But if you call yourself pro-life you must mourn the doctor’s death and see it as the abomination it was. You can not hold that the man who murdered Dr. Tiller was in any way doing God’s work.
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