Motherhood Under the Gun June 5, 2008

Today it occurred to me that my usual posture as a mother is a defensive crouch. That realization sent shivers down my spine. When I am in public with my children, or around people who don’t know me all that well, I assume a position of defense. I instantly thought about what effect this general attitude of defensiveness would have on my kids. I go about every day cagey, waiting for the next backhanded compliment, judgmental sneer, outright admonishment, like a boxer waits for his opponent’s next punch. Yikes! Is this what my life has come to?

It all happened in the grocery store, of course. (Imagine that primitive television special effect of the wavey lines to signify a trip back in time). My little guy has some kind of nasty virus and ear infection and it just so happened that we also ran out of diapers. I had to make a bank deposit to buy the diapers. So we stood there making a deposit at our in-store bank, while my little guy, sick and nearing nap time, began to pitch a fit. The twentysomething bank teller looked at my son’s red, tear-streaked, snotty face with disgust and proceeded to ask me inane procedural questions that, no doubt, she’s required to ask. Nonetheless, with a screaming and sick toddler, I was understandably irritated with the teller’s tedious questions and lack of sympathy. We then proceeded on into into the grocery store, attracting the judgmental and derisive eyes of the other customers, all of whom seemed to accuse me of beating my child into a crying fit, and through the check-out line where the checker, also a twentysomething, was so concerned with my obvious neglect of my own child (you can read some sarcasm in there), that she offered me a Kleenex to wipe his teary and snotty face (actually, can you hold my son?), while I struggled to get cash from my wallet, to pay as quickly as possible, in order to get home. And while this may merely seem like a nice, friendly gesture on the part of a sympathetic and sweet young woman, the attitude with which the Kleenex was offered implied the following sentiment: “You housewives can’t get it together enough to pay for your groceries and wipe your kids’ noses? If I have kids someday, I won’t be like you, you slacking loser.” My god, I thought, is there no safe haven for the sweat-suited, errand-laden, sleep-deprived, make-up-less mothers of the world if not the grocery store? I mean, isn’t the store supposed to be my second home? That was an emotional war zone! As soon as we left the store, my son calmed down (of course!) and I was the one nearly in tears. I felt like a disorganized, lazy, unfeeling mother who was traumatizing and abusing my son. What a crock!

Truthfully, that wasn’t the first time I’ve felt besieged by a chorus of mothering critics. Shocked by the realities of motherhood with my first son, I was initiated into the raucous, intensely judgmental and harsh world of motherhood when I decided to breastfeed my son. It seemed no matter where I turned, my simple decision to breastfeed my son was a public and controversial act, making me the target and receptacle of admonishment, judgment and disdain, not only from old-fashioned family members, but also perfect strangers! And it wasn’t just childless strangers who seemed to enjoy sending me laserbeam eyes, it was other mothers too. As I struggled to demurely remove my breast from my shirt under a tiny receiving blanket once during a park play date (in order to feed my three month old baby boy), some of the mothers, my friends, winced and looked away, and then found some excuse to remove themselves from my company.

It isn’t just breastfeeding mothers who catch flack. It seems, these days, no matter what you decide for your children, no matter whether you are in public or in the privacy of your home, there is a large contingent of people ready to speak to you in person, from the newspapers and internet, in chat rooms, at the park, in the grocery store, at home, over the phone, to tell you exactly what is wrong with your mothering skills. If you breastfeed, you’re a pervert. If you don’t, you don’t love your child enough to invest in their future. If you cloth diaper, you are an old-fashioned, liberal curmudgeon, going to extremes to prove a point. If you use disposables, you are creating a tainted Earth for your child to inherit. Punish your child in public and you are an unfair, abusive tyrant who enjoys the power you have over your child. Allow your kid to run, skip and scream through the grocery store without a word and you are too lenient; your child will become the scourge of society as a result of your inability to discipline your spawn in public. The Mommy Wars have been written about (perpetuated) in daily columns, books, magazines. Oprah hosted a show with Elizabeth Vargas about the ways in which mothers seemed to be locked in fruitless debate over whether to work or stay at home with their children. When Babytalk magazine featured a baby breastfeeding on its cover, droves of people (not just mothers) wrote in to complain about the obscenity. Mothers just can’t win. In fact, I’m sure someone will read this and claim that I’m whining. You know that old cliche about everyone having an opinion? I won’t repeat it here.

I realize that mothers are raising the generations of the future that will someday run the world. It would seem that this perception makes many people feel entitled to have a say about the way I raise my child. However, it’s overly simple to blame a generation for the way the world is going. Does George W. Bush represent baby boomers? Do all of his decisions directly reflect the choices his mother made in raising him? I mean, let’s take a look at this issue from the reverse position. Let me ask, how close is the correlation between the Iraq war and whether or not G.W. was spanked? Did Barbara Bush hover over her children so much that her son George’s sense of insecurity caused him to overcompensate by insuring that he’d go down in history…even if in infamy? Was his addiction to alcohol caused by his daddy’s choice to rub a little whiskey on the baby’s gums (and old, and laughable bit of home remedy for teething)? The questions get more and more preposterous. Of course a mother has an impact on her children. Of course the way we choose to raise our kids influences who they become. But there are many other institutions and cultural practices that more directly shape the world we live in as a whole. In the meantime, the world has focused it’s microscope on the fact that you have chosen non-organic baby food for your kid, and how that will cause a nuclear holocaust someday in the future.

Maybe this all relates to the culture of fear that Michael Moore talks about in his film Bowling for Columbine. The advertising industry spends a great deal of money targeting parents of young children. Look through any magazine dedicated to babies, mothers or small children and you’ll find a large number of the pages dedicated to advertising all kinds of products…from new designs in sippy cups to diaper cream. Businesses need to sell their products. What makes Americans buy goods? Well, if we answer this question based on what ads reflect, we’d have to conclude that fear and, by relation, guilt sells. You want the best for your child….wholesome, healthy goodness…without toxins or pesticides…the most natural way for your child to ride in comfort…made with real, made with 100%, organically grown…proven to improve development, to stimulate brain development…designed by a pediatrician, psychologist, teacher… Not that products that are 100% organic, designed by pediatricians or proven to increase brain development are bad (I’ve bought into the marketing myself…making all of my first son’s baby food, and buying all organic produce to do so), but it seems to me that the focus of advertising to parents these days exploits (in the same way that advertising always exploits to some extent, not by evil intent necessarily) a fundamental lack of confidence prevalent today. For fear of making an inferior, or even, wrong choice, we must have the best. Our way of doing things must be the right way, in order to protect ourselves from the only alternative…that we are hurting our children. If our way is not the right way, then we are doing something wrong. It’s these kinds of abstractions, labeling non-life threatening parenting choices as right and wrong, that I find problematic.

Of course there is a right and a wrong. But where is that line drawn when it comes to cloth diapers, baby food and teething remedies? Can we extend morality to bedtimes? To appropriate morning snacks? To types of toys? Am I a bad person if my daughter plays with a Bratz doll? I mean, really. All complexity when it comes to defining right and wrong in parenting is often lost in this case. If I refuse to let my child play with water guns, then I am making a statement to the world about my commitment to a violence-free household…and if you let your kids play with water guns, well, then we all know what that means…

My question is this: when did we become so intolerant of the parenting choices of others? I’m talking within reason here. Obviously beating, sexually abusing…breaking the law with regard to your children…is NOT okay. Let me use a juvenile phrase here: duh. But it is not a crime to give your ten month old undiluted apple juice! Nor is it a crime to opt out of breastfeeding! Or to opt into breastfeeding! I’m so sick of hearing women get uppity about their own parenting choices, as though the differing parenting choices of others are inferior. While we may see it that way, who are we to say how others should raise their kids? I don’t know what is right for my neighbor’s children. I know what is right for my own kids, for our family. Having a kid doesn’t make you an expert on the children of others.

So, today, at our Creative Play class…when I was offered unsolicited advice about weaning my sixteen month old son, I kept my mouth shut. There’s no need for debate. I don’t have to demonize another parent in our Parks and Rec class merely because, with good intention, she offered her way as the better way. I don’t mind discussion, especially with those who I differ with. It was actually a relief to let it go, to not feel embattled in the middle of a fun hour hanging with my son. We adults managed to find something else to talk about anyway.

In Praise of Liberal Guilt by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate.com May 24, 2008

I couldn’t agree with this article more.  Thank you Ron for illuminating the many reasons why a progressive worldview is a moral one.

In Praise of Liberal GuiltIt’s not wrong to favor Obama because of race.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 5:34 PM ET

When did “liberal guilt” get such a bad reputation? You hear it all the time now from people who sneeringly dismiss whites who support Obama’s candidacy as “guilty liberals.” There are, of course, many reasons why whites might support Obama that have nothing to do with race. But what if redeeming our shameful racial past is one factor for some? Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last. Instead, their feeling must be disparaged as merely the result of a somehow shameful “liberal guilt.”

If you Google “liberal guilt” and “Obama,” among the nearly 32,000 hits you get are a syndicated Charles Krauthammer column under the headline “Obama’s Speech Plays On Liberal Guilt“; a Mark Steyn post on the National Review Online that describes “a Democrat nominating process that’s a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions”; a column by self-styled “crunchy con” Rod Dreher, who suggests the mainstream media coverage of Obama indicates that “liberal guilt will work [on them] like kryptonite.” Even liberals make fun of liberal guilt. A couple of years ago, Salon coyly proposed supplementing the Oscars with the Liberal Guilt Awards and awarding political dramas with “Guilties.”

Since when has guilt become shameful? Since when is shame shameful when it’s shame about a four-centuries-long historical crime? Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before, but if we want to praise America’s virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America’s sins, else we praise a false god, a golden calf, a whited sepulcher, a Potemkin village of virtue. (I’ve run out of metaphors, but you get the picture.)

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Guilt is good, people! The only people who don’t suffer guilt are sociopaths and serial killers. Guilt means you have a conscience. You have self-awareness, you have—in the case of America’s history of racism—historical awareness. Just because things have gotten better in the present doesn’t mean we can erase racism from our past or ignore its enduring legacy.

Critics of Obama supporters who use the phrase “guilty liberal” or “liberal guilt” in a condescending, above-it-all manner suggest there’s something weak about feeling guilt; they paint a trivializing, Woody Allen caricature of it.

Actually, I think it requires a kind of strength, not weakness, to face the ugly truths of history and to react to them in an honest way. “Liberal guilt” isn’t a reason one must automatically support a black candidate, but that doesn’t mean that liberal guilt—better defined as an awareness of the need to contend with, and overcome, a racist past—shouldn’t be a factor in politics.

Of course, it’s not enough just to feel guilty or to act on guilt alone. But guilt can often spur us to deal with the enduring consequences of the injustices of the past and force us not to pretend there are none.

It’s especially surprising to hear “guilt” being disparaged by conservatives, since they present themselves as moralists; they are quick to decry liberals for seeking to abolish guilt over various practices conservatives deem immoral. But was slavery not immoral? For those conservatives who make a fetish of “values”: Was not the century of institutionalized racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of “flawed values” that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? For those conservatives who are forever speaking of the way they value history and memory more than liberals: Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they’re no longer legally institutionalized?

Do we abolish its memories and its effects? Do we abolish the very consciousness of the past and pretend we have a clear conscience? Pretend that on the question of racism, there is no problem anymore? America is impeccably virtuous? This sounds more like Jacobin “Year Zero” thinking than true conservatism.

What I don’t understand is why there doesn’t seem to be any conservative guilt over racism. Contemporary conservatives could learn from their revered godfather William F. Buckley Jr., who, early in his career at the National Review, wrote a pro-Jim Crow lead editorial—little remembered in liberal and other encomia to the man—titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” in which he argued that segregation should persist even by illegal means because “the White community … for the time being … is the advanced race.”

A valuable essay on this question by William Hogeland in the May/June issue of the Boston Review reminds us that even Buckley felt guilt—if not precisely “liberal guilt”—about this editorial, guilt that he expressed in a 2004 Time interview. “Have you taken any positions you now regret?” Time asked him. “Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.” Why can’t conservative wiseguys (especially at the National Review) stop sneering at liberals long enough to learn from the admirable guilty wisdom of their sainted leader?

Shouldn’t conservatives feel guilty about slavery and racism and the consequences thereof, or must they disdain such feelings, however moral, because they are associated with liberals? Do they choose their moral priorities because of their popularity among others? That doesn’t seem like a conservative way of thinking about moral values. It sounds like a form of relativism. It’s the kind of thinking that treats values as a brand identity. Guilt over racism is not part of the conservative brand identity. The more shame if that be the case.

(The conservative brand identity also doesn’t have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton’s problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Or could it be that conservatives disdain liberal guilt about race because they have historically more guilt to bear for the perpetuation of racism and segregation?

I’m not talking about Republicans per se. The fact that the GOP was the party of Lincoln and most strongly supported anti-lynching and anti-Jim Crow legislation in the first half of the 20^th century is to its eternal credit, just as the “Southern strategy” was much to its discredit in the second half of the century. And, needless to say, liberal Democrats collaborated with a stone-cold racist wing of their party when they needed electoral votes for most of the century.

No, it’s not a Democrat or Republican issue; it’s a liberal and conservative issue. And there are those on the conservative side who understand that the first step to justice is an acknowledgment of guilt. Just not many and not very vocal.

This is what I don’t understand about the conservative attacks on “the ’60s.” They willfully ignore, in their rote denunciations of the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll aspect of that decade, the great movement of moralists known as the civil rights movement. The movement that brought deserved honor and pride to America. The movement that may well have been motivated (among whites participating) by liberal guilt. But so what! The guilt was justified. The truly guilty were the ones who didn’t feel guilt. Such as the conservative movement of the day that largely stood on the sidelines making carping augments about states’ rights that were a shamelessly transparent defense of institutionalized racism. Where’s the conservative guilt about that? No wonder they ignore the civil rights movement, one of the great epochs in American history, when they demonize “the ’60s.”

The question of liberal guilt and guilty liberals often comes up in discussions of reactions to “black anger,” unfortunately expressed most loudly and bitterly in this campaign by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But it’s all too easy to dismiss the legitimacy of black anger merely on the basis of the Rev. Wright’s sadly twisted version of it.

Do the people who dismiss black anger think there’s nothing to be angry about? As a Jew, I think I have a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before I was born. It would be hard for me to understand an African-American not being angry about 400 years of murder, rape, and enslavement on the basis of race. Anger, like guilt, shouldn’t be the endpoint, but anger at injustice is not illegitimate and can be a starting point, a spur to moral action. Where you end up is, alas, often a different matter.

But it seems to me that some people use the Rev. Wright’s ugly expression of anger as a fig leaf to discredit Obama, who has clearly ended up at a different place from the Rev. Wright (largely due, one imagines, to the civil rights movement). Yes, Obama may well have an understanding of the Rev. Wright’s anger, but if you can’t see the difference between the two men historically, culturally, generationally, and temperamentally, then I’d say you just don’t want to: It’s a kind of willful blindness that seeks to find ways of discrediting Obama and his “guilty liberal” supporters by holding up the Rev. Wright as the true face of black anger. I think intelligent people are able to make these distinctions.

But I wonder whether there’s something deeper going on here in the delegitimization of guilt and anger. I wonder whether it’s a misbegotten legacy of the long-discredited but still-lingering influence of Freudian theory. Which alas too many otherwise intelligent people still take seriously, despite the pseudoscience of his method, his misogyny, his malpractice, and his coke-addled arrogance. (If you’re unaware of the extent of Freud’s fabrication of evidence to support his pseudoscience, I strongly recommend you read Frederick Crews’ anthology, Unauthorized Freud.)

Nonetheless, the popularized version of Freud that has embedded itself into culture sees guilt more as a symptom, a mental disorder rather than a virtue or a legitimate reaction to a crime that one is, in this case—by enjoying the privilege of being American—implicated in. To pop Freudians, guilt is “neurotic,” the product of the “oedipal struggle” fairy tale Freudians take as gospel or, worse, “science.” (It’s amazing to me how many forthright opponents of creationism still buy into the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis.)

And the medicalization of guilt by psychoanalysis is echoed in the psychobabble of this era’s pseudoscientists, the “new-age healers” who demonize guilt as the source of disease, blame you for your illness if you don’t exorcise it.

People who lack guilt also lack humility, which is another one of those virtues conservatives are always flogging (although not with a lot of humility).

I’m always amused, listening to the Sean Hannity radio show, how the host and caller frequently salute each other with the phrase: “You’re a great American.” (There’s humility for you!) What’s so great about being “great” if it depends on historical ignorance or denial? Again, to love America truly, one has to love the America that is and was, not a fantasy America free from flaws.

To be a truly “great American,” one doesn’t have to be a guilty liberal, but one has to know guilt.

Breastfeeding Leads to Higher IQs! Big DUH! May 6, 2008

MSN posted an article today about how breastfeeding your child could lead to higher IQ test scores.  I’m glad that MSN posted the article because it means that breastfeeding is becoming more mainstream, but I’m very disappointed in the focus of the article.  There are many other benefits of breastfeeding…all just as important, perhaps more so, than higher IQ test scores.  Furthermore, it’s been said time and again that IQ tests are not necessarily good indicators of a person’s intellectual capacity.  Nevertheless, awareness about breastfeeding, even if it feeds into the hyper-competitive, performance-driven culture that we live in, is a good thing.

I find it sort of humorous that MSN is posting this article just now.  Books have been written about the benefits of breastfeeding.  There are organizations, websites, magazines, etc. that have been touting the benefits of breastfeeding for years and years.  Any expectant mother will get some information from either her doctor or some other outlet about the benefits of breastfeeding.  I suppose new studies are news…and any new study that reveals yet another benefit of breastfeeding makes those wierdo opponents of this natural relationship between mother and child look more and more foolish.  Call me a lactivist if you like!

Why the Word Progressive is Synonmous with Family Values April 18, 2008

One reason that I started this blog is that I’m so tired and sickened by the continued claim that progressives don’t have family values. As a married, left-leaning citizen of the United States with two children, I decided to add my voice to the ‘family values’ discussion happening in the blog world. I don’t think it is crazy to support the equal right for a homosexual couple to marry and be married myself. I don’t see what is so weird about being a married feminist. I don’t believe that the best way to teach a child morals and ethics is through Sunday School. I also love my children and my husband. I want our family to be safe and happy. I want the same things that most Americans want for their families.

Anyway, I’m not the most eloquent one leading these debates. There are many others who say, and have said already, all of this before. For example, there’s a blogger named Nichola Torbett who lays down the bottom line when she says, “There are certain words and phrases that trigger in me a Pavlovian fury, and ‘family values’ is one of those phrases. I suspect I’m not alone in reading this phrase as right-wing code for the hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; opposition to reproductive choice; discomfort with sexuality in general; preference for male-dominated households; stigmatization of single people; and even uneasiness with women in the workplace. What’s more, families are hardly the sacred refuges the right would make them out to be; far too often, the mores associated with the “sanctity” of the American nuclear family serve to conceal an array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses, as well as myriad less egregious ways that family members damage each other.” Torbett argues that a progressive family-friendly culture is a happier, healthier culture. I couldn’t agree more.

I also really Matthew Blackham’s take on progressive family values in his column from The Utah Statesman. Blackham makes a very persuasive case for the inclusion of gay marriage into law when he says, “Imagine a world where building families is not the exclusive right of heterosexuals, where welfare policies favor families and help parents spend more of their precious time with their children and spouse than at the office, where parenthood is better planned, a world with fewer teen pregnancies and abortions and is the progressive vision for America’s families.” I like this college junior’s vision of the world. That is a world I want to live in.

Perhaps the Rockridge Institute best spells out how progressive values can be family values in the “Nurturant Parent Family Model.” In part two of their three-part “Nation as Family” series, Rockridge Institue defines what a Nurturant Parent Family Model is and how that model is informed by progressive values: “In the Nurturant Parent family, it is assumed that the world is basically good. And, however dangerous and difficult the world may be at present, it can be made better, and it is your responsibility to help make it better. Correspondingly, children are born good, and parents can make them better, and it is their responsibility to do so. Both parents (if there are two) are responsible for running the household and raising the children, although they may divide their activities. The parents’ job is to be responsive to their children, nurture them, and raise their children to nurture others. Nurturance requires empathy and responsibility.” And, posits Rockridge, empathy and responsibility are cornerstones to progressive values. “The values inherent in the Nurturant Parent model of the family,” argues Rockridge, “translate directly to political values. Progressive political positions are based on a responsive morality that centers around Empathy and Responsibility—responsibility for oneself and social responsibility. These values are to be promoted in every area of life, both public and private. For progressives, these values are typically unconscious, but the more we understand them, the more we can articulate and work towards a society that is consistent with and extends our values.” In other words, the basic thrust of progressive politics, in fact, naturally and directly relates to parenting because it isn’t just politics that the word “progressive” applies to…it is a worldview, one that has been literally demonized by conservative right-wing politicos.

There are many other voices out there promoting progressive family values. I hope to be another mother working for a family-friendly world.

The Perfect Grocery Store April 18, 2008

If I had known at the age of sixteen that I’d be blogging about grocery stores and cloth diapers I think I would have become very, very depressed at my future prospects…but here I am. I accept my life. I am thirty-three, married with two kids and a stressful job.

Nevertheless, one thing I refuse to accept is defeat in the face of my search for the perfect grocery store. Square as it may be to discuss grocery stores seriously, I can’t help it. I am in grocery store hell. I can’t think of a more disorganized, intense, sweaty, frustrating, exasperating, mind-numbing, pocketbook-draining, horrible task than going to the store. And I have to go to the store constantly. I think I go to the store every day, if not multiple times a day. I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t have to. One reason that I’m constantly going to the store is that I can’t remember a damn thing. After a lengthy trip to the store, after unpacking and storing all of the goods I’ve just purchased, while at the same time trying to appease the tiny tyrants at my feet demanding things from me, I’ll find my grocery list and scan it only to discover that the one thing I really needed on my list I forgot to get. It’s always some crucial item too: toilet paper, tampons, bread, water. At that point I take out my imaginary twelve gauge and blow out my imaginary brains right there in the kitchen. My brains are so imaginary. I don’t know in what realm my brain exists, but it isn’t this one.

I digress. While it is true that I am your typical scatterbrained mommy/professor type, I have to lay some of the blame on the grocery stores that I frequent, which are Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Albertson’s, Ralph’s, Stater Brothers, Target and Fresh & Easy. When faced with a death-sentence style grocery list, I try to go where it’s most convenient, but see “convenient” can be a sticky word. Do I go to the nearest grocery store? How about the store with the best prices? Do I go to the grocery store that is most easily accessible? Should I go for the most family-friendly store? What about the grocery store that has my bank branch in it? Or, do I go to the store with all the items on my list? And there’s the rub…there isn’t one grocery store in my area that carries all the items on my list. Not a one.

I’d drive to the other side of town for a store that had all the items on my list. I love completing a task and I’ll go to great ends to do it. I’ll be honest though, my list isn’t easy. I try to buy organic food products and environmentally friendly paper and cleaning products. I sometimes like an “exotic” food or two. I’m shopping for a family of four and I need to satisfy their widely varying needs and wants. I’m trying to get the lowest price on top of all of that. Trader Joe’s very nearly meets all my requirements. I love the range of items and the prices are competitive with other stores. I can get a good wine for under $10 and soy yogurt for less than $.90. There seems to be an emphasis on healthy, organic and/or vegetarian items at Trader Joe’s…which is wonderful for us because both of my sons have milk allergies. What isn’t wonderful is that Trader Joe’s doesn’t carry baby items at all. If I want to purchase diaper cream, baby food, baby wipes, sippy cups or diapers I have to visit another store. This means lugging my three-year old and my fifteen month old in and out of their car seats and then into another store. If I forget to visit the other store first, then my Trader Joe’s goods sit in my hot car while I race (as fast as one can go with two children of that age) in to grab some diapers. Needless to say, I’ve locked an unusual combination of things inside my car on Shopping Day: baby/keys only, toddler/purse, toddler/baby, frozen grocery goods/toddler/purse. Multiple grocery store shopping days can be a tad confusing.

If on Shopping Day I go to Trader Joe’s, that means the closest store for diapers is the dreaded (and ironically, loved) Target. Lucky for this mother, the diapers at Target are competitively priced. Unlucky for the Mother Earth, Target does not offer cloth diapers…oh, pardon me, they do offer cloth diapers…the kind that no one uses anymore! You know, those white prefolds that you used to cover with steamy plastic pants, but then leaked all the time anyway? Well, today we have a wide selection of cute, easy to use, washable cloth diapers. I love cloth diapers. I tried to sell everyone in my family on their value, both environmentally and economically. Plus, they are so much cuter than disposables!!! Squeal! We went for it for the first few months of my second son’s life after watching our first son’s diapers pile up and up and up, imagining our baby’s nightmarish contribution to the local landfill. It was a change, but once I got the hang of it, I saw that cloth diapers were easily much cheaper than disposables and much better for the environment (as long as they are washed with detergent that is planet-friendly). But after a while I became worn down. The drag about cloth diapers is that your children eventually grow out of them and then you have to move up a size…which wouldn’t be so much of a drag if cloth diapers were offered in grocery stores. Maybe my head is in the sand, but I couldn’t find one local store that sold contemporary cloth diapers! Not even the high end granola-stomper stores like Whole Foods were willing to charge me exorbitant prices for cloth diapers! Instead, you have to buy cloth diapers online and wait for weeks and weeks to get them. I broke down after the manufacturer that sold our brand withheld shipments from their online stores, making them unavailable and back ordered until our son is scheduled to enter his freshman year of college.

But “Wait!” you say, “don’t they sell ‘green’ diapers at Target and other local grocery stores?” Why, yes, in fact, they do. G-diapers, Seventh Generation, Tushies and other environmentally friendly diaper brands are, in fact, available at your local Whole Foods…but not at Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s, Von’s, Albertson’s, Fresh&Easy or Stater Brothers. In fact, Target sells its own brand of eco-friendly diapers, but they come in such small packs and they are considerably more expensive than the nationwide diaper brands. It’s not just Target that opts out of the eco-friendly and cheap diaper products. Cruise the aisles at your local nationwide chain…Pampers, Huggies, generic brands…would it kill them to throw in one brand of eco-friendly diapers?

In defense of the nationwide grocery store chains, they are starting to figure out that there are alot of women like me shopping their stores. Recently our local Albertson’s remodeled to compete with the new Fresh & Easy that opened across the street. I was very excited about Fresh & Easy despite the fact that I didn’t know much about it. All the brand-associated logos and fliers looked very “green” and there was a buzz around the neighborhood, however upon my first trip into the British-owned store I found that the look was very “green” but the product offering didn’t even rival our local Albertson’s. After their remodel, Albertson’s had an entire section dedicated to healthy foods, including soy products (don’t ask how much their soy yogurt cost though)! Neither store carries eco-friendly diapers, but Fresh & Easy did have special parking for “adults with young children,” and that’s more than I can say for Stater Brothers or Ralphs!

My ideal grocery store, the perfect grocery store, my Xanadu of grocery stores, would be located right around the corner from my house with special parking for “adults with small children”(Fresh & Easy), contain products that are eco-friendly for low prices including “green” diapers and perhaps (am I dreaming too big?) a branch office for my bank.  But I’m not making the decisions here…I’m just the customer.

Why We Didn’t Circumcise Our Sons January 10, 2008

In 1994 I wasn’t much concerned with that “extra” flap of skin sometimes found on the end of a penis. I was just leaving my teen years in 1994. I had seen exactly seven naked men (I hadn’t even seen my father or stepfather’s genitalia) and all were circumcised. I heard nasty rumors about uncircumcised men from my friends…none of whom had ever seen an uncircumcised penis firsthand. Men with uncircumcised penises were “dirty” and “unclean” and you could get V.D. from them! They were weird. The sex was different, not as good (though there was no real explanation for this). Then there were the stories about the foreskin growing together, debacles with zippers and hangers and, of course, the infamous story about the foreskin that wouldn’t retract around an erect penis…the trapped erect penis causing much pain…or that’s the way they told it. I believed much of this until I had a boyfriend with an uncircumcised penis. I didn’t even know that he was uncircumcised until months after we started dating. We had already had sex many times. The sex was good. We did it in the dark, like most 19 and 20 year olds. I hadn’t given him oral sex yet. There was nothing that would have indicated to me that he still had his foreskin intact. Then he told me one day, when I suggested that we have sex during the day. His parents were gone (both of us still living at home confined most of our sex to night time hours) and I wanted to take advantage of this rare moment of privacy. He soberly looked at me, and in that brief moment I thought for sure that he was going to break up with me, tell me that he had a venereal disease and/or suggest that we try some wildly perverse sexual act. He wanted to prepare me because he had had bad experiences with springing the foreskin on past girlfriends. I didn’t know what to think. I was silent for a short while, thinking about all the dangerous and scary images that arose from the rumors and stories I had heard from friends and friends of friends. Enflamed and trapped penises danced in my head. Oozing, disgusting, dangerous V.D. ridden penises taunted me. But we had been tested for venereal diseases before we had sex…together, in fact. I didn’t even notice all these months…how different could it be?

He unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out of his boxer shorts. In the light of day, there it was. Flaccid, his uncircumcised penis looked like a small elephant trunk. I imagined the ends of his foreskin strong enough to pick up objects from the ground…a pencil, a coffee mug. It definitely did not look like the penises I had known, but there, beneath the foreskin I could see the outline of a familiar shape. A friendly dome lurked there, draped by this thin layer of skin. When I saw the familiar shape of a penis head I felt safer, more relaxed. This moment, this relaxation, was more important to my future than I could have known then. With all the examination, my face scientifically scrunched, he started to get erect and we picked up right where we left off, before I knew he was uncircumcised.

The boyfriend and I didn’t last for more than a few months but the experience of seeing an uncircumcised penis stayed with me. My friends treated me like a penis guru. Because it was so uncommon for men to be circumcised in America, I was the only one among my friends who had ever seen an uncircumcised penis in the flesh. My friends told their friends and eventually it became typical to have girls outside my circle of friends come up to me at parties, at school, at coffee shops…shyly asking questions when the topic opened up in conversation. They acted as though my ex-boyfriend’s penis was exotic, special, unusual.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I started reading the works of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary theorist. His specialty was postcolonial studies and I found a connection between my ex-boyfriend’s uncircumcised penis and these postcolonial critical premises. Circumcision is a custom, a cultural practice. Here in America we talk about the medical benefits of circumcision…attempting to badly and inaccurately rationalize why a great percentage of the world does not circumcise (including Western countries) and we do. But ultimately when pressed to answer why an American parent has circumcised their child, more often than not the answer is that they prefer their children to look like their fathers and fear social stigma if they do not adhere to the norms of society. Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), talks about a process by which the Western world has, intentionally and sometimes subconsciously, undermined the customs, value and culture of the East through faulty assumptions in order to further imperialist and capitalist impulses. To make something exotic or “oriental” is to make it different from the norm, to marginalize it, categorize that practice or that something as weird, different…Other.

When we think about those who are Other or things that are Other, we often feel fear because we find ourselves in a territory that is uncomfortable, not home. Those on the fringes of a society are usually feared. Cultures that we don’t understand and are foreign to us are feared. Fear is a big part of our lives in America. While many people from different cultures come to live in America, rarely do we embrace the cultural practices of the immigrant…rather the immigrant becomes “Americanized” and this is seen as a good thing. We tend to become resentful and fearful of immigrants who retain their culture rather than adopting our American customs. It is fear that drove many at the start of the 20^th century to begin circumcising their baby boys.

The germ theories in the early 1900’s and new advances in medical technology spurred the growth of hospitals and increased the significance of the role of medical professionals. Procedures and events like births or even illnesses, otherwise handled with home remedies or overseen by specifically appointed members of society (midwives, apothecaries, local healers) were now handled by doctors, with drugs and specialized tools, in hospitals and offices. Medical care was expensive and generally the poor continued to use more homespun methods of dealing with illness, had home births and rarely went to see doctors at all. As a result, getting care from a doctor became a mark of social status. To make money, the medical world began to create a culture of fear of disease and infection, which were real threats, but perhaps were exaggerated with the hope of increasing profit. The same social forces that pushed childbirth out of the home and into the hospital helped create hysteria in the parents of baby boys. An uncircumcised penis was a symbol of the “backward” East (this idea mainly presented by an imperialist British medical community, which spread the idea to American doctors), a haven for germs and infection, whereas the circumcised penis symbolized the new Western medicine, modern science…clean, germ and infection free. Propaganda was used to further these ideas. Women and men were told to forgo their instincts and, instead, put their trust in medical professionals who “knew better.” Circumcision is yet another procedure that is unnecessary and a tool of the medical world to generate money.

As modern medicine advanced, the idea that doctors knew a person’s body better than the owner of that body became more prevalent, so much so that today we sometimes forget that the body is a relatively self-efficient organic machine, which generally needs little intervention. Enter me in my graduate school phase. After reading Derrida, Foucault, Friedan, Said, Greer, Paglia, Said, Spivak….I decided that there was no way that I would entrust, without question, my body or my mind wholeheartedly to any institution. I would question authority throughout. So when I got pregnant with our first son in the middle of the last year of graduate school, I thought long and hard (no pun intended) about the issue of circumcision.

My husband is cut. When the issue of circumcision came up it came up early in my pregnancy and my man brushed aside the notion that we would do anything different to our own child. He had never even thought about the subject. He had never even really thought about his own circumcision. I was in a strange position. Having strong feelings about questioning Western medicine’s approach to the body, but not a man with a penis myself…I didn’t even know if I had a right to push the issue. He is the dad, I thought to myself, this is his area. But the further my pregnancy progressed, the more I could feel my son move from inside my body, the more I felt that I should have a say in this decision too.

We started doing research. We talked to our friends. We took impromptu polls. Like many American men, my husband responds much better to statistics and numbers than to emotional appeals. The more we researched and talked and debated and polled, the more we became convinced that circumcision was not the way for us. Many of my own preconceived notions about circumcision were challenged during my personal investigation of the practice. During this process our friends and family members questioned our motives for resisting circumcision.

Don’t you want your son to look like his father?

After reading many horror stories about botched circumcisions I practically laughed at this question out loud. Doctors are not sculptors. As far as aesthetics go, I trust Nature to make things beautiful and doctors to help heal us when we are ill. I’ve yet to see doctors create anything that comes near the perfection of Nature. There is nothing sickening or ugly about an uncircumcised penis. The body is beautiful when it is born, in it’s many different emanations. We need to be aware of the ways in which we are conditioned and socialized. Familiarity does not always equal “normal.” And you have to ask yourself, “How did I get familiar with this ______ in the first place?” I know that when I first saw a penis in the flesh, I wasn’t exactly comfortable with it. I had to become familiar with it before that could happen. Furthermore, as my husband pointed out to me, every penis, circumcised or not, looks different from the next one. There are black penises and white penises. There are short, pale ones and fat, pink ones. Some look like the head is a mushroom, or a helmet or a cap. Also, penises change over time. A man starts out with no pubic hair with smooth skin, turns into an adult, grows hair, grows old and his skin wrinkles, his pubic hair turns white. Line up one hundred naked fathers and sons and I think you will find that it is difficult to identify who is related merely by the “look” of their penis.

Won’t he get teased in the locker room? Women won’t want to have sex with him!

Absurdity! Children can be cruel, teenagers more cruel. They will find any reason to tease if they want to tease you. As a child I was made fun of for a host of reasons that could and could not be controlled by myself, or my parents and the bullies were always searching for material. Why give bullies the material to mock my child, you ask. We will never be typical in our house. There’s a high chance that regardless of whether or not we allow our sons to be circumcised, they will be teased. We have tattoos and listen to punk rock. We are unconventional in our values and beliefs. There are many reasons. And many circumcised boys, with very traditional families, who are well-liked by classmates are also teased. In fact, the majority of people I know were teased in school, while the bullies remain in the minority. Why succumb to bullies when they are the minority? My husband did not see another man’s penis (other than his father’s as he climbed out of the shower once) until he was in high school. By then, most of these fifteen year olds were too shy and afraid to get caught looking at another young man’s genitals, straight or gay. Glancing at another person’s genitals in the high school locker room is a much worse sin than merely having an uncircumcised penis.

A circumcision is a cut by which the foreskin of the penis is removed. Cutting, by any person in any environment, incurs risks. A cut must heal. Not everyone heals the same. Scarring and infection can occur, though rarely, in circumcision. However low the risk, I reasoned with my husband and myself that if women are going to avoid our sons, if people are going to make fun of them because of the look of their penises, I’d rather that happen without having to subject them to pain and possibly life threatening infection. And there are many incidents in which newborn babies have died, become ill and/or come away from circumcision with a scarred and disfigured penis.

As for women and whether or not they would want to have sex with my uncut sons…see my anecdote about my ex-boyfriend. When I asked him once about whether or not women thought his penis was “weird” or “disgusting” he laughed. In short, most were curious and that gave him an advantage over many other men with circumcised penises. Not one woman had ever been repulsed by his penis. Surprised, yes. Repulsed, no.

Uncircumcised penises are difficult to take care of.

Whoever came up with this one is just a dunce. If you can’t wash your own genitals with water, what are you doing making decisions for a newborn baby? Additionally, infants and toddlers don’t need any kind of special care for their uncircumcised penises because their penises aren’t retractable until approximately the age of 5. Even then, the only extra care that a boy with an uncircumcised penis needs to take is to wash the area periodically to remove smegma. That’s it. Pretty simple. All you need is water and a clean washcloth. Is that difficult?

One night at a party, when I was eight months pregnant with our first son, my husband was asking his friends about their opinion on this issue. Our friend Chris’ inhibitions were lowered due to the consumption of many, many beers. He recounted the following cautionary tale to Shannon:

“So this uncut dude was like camping out in the woods all rudimentary style. He just had like his tent and some camping supplies and shit. He was waaaaaay out in the middle of the desert, like no lakes or rivers around. And he got real dirty and you know what, man? That guy’s Johnson got all infected and nasty because he couldn’t clean it properly out there in the desert.”

Uh huh. I’m sure that happened. Question: was this genius camping out in the desert without any kind of water? Without one clean piece of cloth? Excellent reason for us to subject our tiny baby to a shiny sharp-ass scalpel.

Isn’t it cleaner to have a circumcised penis?

Yes and no. We tried not to laugh at these questions, we really did.

What would be extremely clean for all human beings, and in order to avoid infections, is if we could find a way to eliminate all dark, moist, enclosed areas of the body. That’s right! How about we start with our ear holes? The vagina is next. Nostrils follow. Oh yes…the mouth last. Any dark, moist and enclosed space is a haven for germs. We do not remove our ear openings or nostrils merely because there’s a risk that we might get an infection, in fact according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ear infections in children account for more than 30 million physician office visits per year! Should we remove our ear openings? I don’t remember the last time one of my boys needed to be seen by a doctor multiple times in one year for a penis infection.

Perhaps that’s a false analogy…we need our ear holes for hearing. Alright then, does the foreskin have a purpose? It does. According to Dr. George C. Denniston, in his paper “Functions of the Foreskin”(presented to The Second International Symposium on Circumcision back in 1991) “The male foreskin has three important physiological functions that circumcision irreversibly destroys.” Dr. Denniston’s paper outlines those three important functions. First and foremost, the foreskin protects the glans of the penis while it is flaccid. It also allows for the male penis to fully elongate during erection. When the foreskin is removed, the penis glans develops another layer of dermis to protect it, since during circumcision its only line of defense was removed. Since this layer of dermis is slowly grown on top of the glans, it stands to reason that most of the growth of this dermis is during times at which the penis is flaccid. Ultimately, this limits the extent to which a penis can elongate during erection…which, in turn, can limit that man’s ability to inseminate sperm into a female partner. Furthermore, the glans is a very sensitive part of the penis. With another layer of dermis grown on top, sensitivity is decreased, which, in turn, decreases pleasure during sex. So, the foreskin protects, aids in erection and provides sensitivity (not only pleasurable sensitivity, but also protective sensitivity). Why would we then cut off the foreskin?

Many claim that circumcision helps reduce HIV/AIDS. This is true to some extent. However, most of the studies on this issue are based in developing nations where participants in the studies have little to no access to sex education or healthcare. In these places, birth control and condoms are often hard to come by and rarely used (which also accounts for the high number of pregnancies in these nations, despite the poverty and lack of resources). Circumcision will help to reduce HIV/AIDS in men who have repeated unprotected sex. If we think about this issue logically, circumcised men who use condoms correctly have about the same odds of contracting HIV/AIDS as an uncircumcised man who also correctly uses condoms. These studies focus on men who do NOT wear condoms. Worse, the studies themselves are flawed, driven by pro-circumcision advocates who are determined to prove the medical validity of mass circumcision once and for all by linking the procedure with lower HIV/AIDS rates.

The words “clean” and “cleaner” also send up a red flag for me. They are words that have been misused for propaganda by a number of institutions throughout history. The implication is that the intact penis is, of course, dirty to begin with…something like original sin. Hogwash! As my Southern Baptist great grandmother Kate would say. The bodily fluids we excrete are not “dirty” and the human body is not born flawed or unclean. In fact, at birth we are probably the most “clean” that we’ll ever be in our lifetime. The fluids excreted by the body, the semen and the smegma excreted from the sebaceous glands, have a purpose. So does menstrual blood, mucous, sweat, ear wax, saliva…and all those other icky things that come from our bodies. This desecration of the body, treating its natural state as unclean and profane, is a disservice to humanity that spawns all sorts of ills, both medical and social. To continue to believe that our bodily functions are unclean or disgusting is, at best, hearkening back to the Victorian era, a time when doctors were conning wealthy families into handing over their bodies and cash to do with what they pleased in the name of science. What the Victorian families couldn’t have known is that sometimes science can be more painful and complicated than the natural processes of our bodies.

Babies can’t even feel circumcision. They don’t remember it anyway.

Any parent of a newborn becomes attached to that particular baby’s cry almost from the moment of the first utterance. I knew my first son’s voice immediately. Something in me recognized and memorized his sound. My husband too became immediately attached to the sound of our son’s voice. So when they took him down the hall of the maternity ward at one day old to give him his first immunization shots, we jumped and winced when we heard the long sharp peal of his cry at the prick of the needle.

Now, for a moment, visualize a masked person coming at your newborn baby boy, a little infant who has had very minimal contact with the world, who only wants to eat, sleep and defecate now and then. This masked person holds a sharp shiny instrument between gloved fingers. A nurse holds his little arms and torso down as he struggles against these people who are clearly not his Mommy or Daddy. He screams out. Over and over he screams. You do not come to his aid. They apply some local anesthesia which numbs his penis…a strange and disorienting feeling. He is still screaming and you are still not there for him. Then they cut into his small little penis, pulling and stretching out the foreskin so that they can get a cleaner cut. He bleeds. They disinfect the cut and apply antibiotic. Your baby is tense with screaming now. His face has turned beet red and you can hear his calls from down the hallway. They return your baby to your arms and he is shaking, traumatized, breathing irregularly…he barely knows that he’s in your arms. It takes several hours before he returns to calm.

It remains to be seen as to whether or not newborn infants remember the pains they feel later in life. Claiming this memory loss as a good reason to move forward with a very painful procedure is just cruel and unfeeling. There are a lot of painful things that we could subject babies to, but it isn’t in our moral code to do them. Merely because an infant might not remember the pain of circumcision is hardly enough reason to go ahead and do it. But this didn’t even matter to Shannon and I. Our son was in pain just being immunized and his cry told us that it really really really really hurt bad to be stuck by a needle…let alone have a portion of his penis removed. That pretty much did it for us. When the nurses came by to ask about circumcision we emphatically said “No!” To us, the procedure of circumcision became a barbaric practice that we refused to participate in.

The circumcision decision is a highly personal one. I was scared to question the tradition that seemed so prevalent in our society at first. I didn’t want my sons to be stigmatized by society or angry with me for making a decision that would potentially negatively impact them. But once I gathered my courage and gained the support of my husband and family, it became much easier. It was a breeze once I held my sons in my arms and looked into their faces.

While there are many cultures that make male and/or female circumcision a spiritual tradition or a rite of passage, tradition and history are not enough of an excuse to blindly follow the masses. We should never turn over our bodies, or the bodies of our children, to any institution wholesale. As responsible parents we should question these institutions. Whether or not one chooses to circumcise their male child, the decision should be an informed one because it is a decision made for another human being who cannot choose for himself. I encourage every expecting mother to seek out information on circumcision, both pro and con. I am very clearly against circumcision, but there are advocates for circumcision out there and they too have a perspective to share. Making an informed decision about circumcision is a responsibility that we need to take seriously for the health and well being of our sons.

An Intro: Blogging on Blogging January 10, 2008

My introduction to the world of blogs began when I started receiving links to the blogs of mothers who were members of my parenting board. I didn’t really understand what a “blog” was. Once I learned, I wasn’t impressed. I’m a writer and I’m old-fashioned a bit when it comes to technology. I’m always slightly behind the curve…hence, this, my first blog. Is it 2008? Yes. It is.

My skepticism formed itself into a notion that the blog was really just a public diary for the completely narcissistic. This notion both repelled and attracted me as I recognized that everyone is at least a little bit into themselves and at the same time disgusted by the fact that they are into themselves. I’m no different. But I held off my attraction for many years…until I became a mother.

When I saw the kind of stuff coming out of blogs I sometimes cringed. Most of it seemed like ignorant drivel, or nerdy, or shallow, or…I don’t know what. I guess it didn’t seem like anything that I (insert snotty tone here) would read. But when I entered the world of Momdom I was shocked to find all the discord and the blogs that went along with all that discord . I, naively, expected that, to some degree, all of us women would set aside our differences and get down to a really lovely chat about motherhood once our wombs spit out our progeny…something like a sophisticated pajama party, complete with metaphoric hair-braiding. But no. No, no, no…I was gravely mistaken. While mothers may share the label of “mother,” that’s about all they share. Having kids, I found, didn’t necessarily bond you to any other woman who had given birth. And almost every mother I met on the internet had a blog of her own, to share her unique experiences of parenting with the world.

These were some very opinionated blogs and I often differed with what I read. I did not find many blogs that seemed to mirror my values, my life, my choices, etc. And so, like millions upon millions of others, I started a blog.

I intend this blog to be mainly about my experiences as a parent, but it won’t be limited to that topic alone, as I feel pretty deeply that parenting touches on just about every aspect of life…from politics and economics, to house cleaning and marital sex. It’ll be bitchy at times. It will probably sound a tad arrogant from time to time. But I aim at humor and satire, even if I miss the mark.

And so, to commence…my blog.