Hitting Like a Grrrl April 26, 2009

I was caught off guard a few weeks ago when my four year old son came home from preschool saying things like, “Mommy, I don’t want to hear that story.  It’s a girl story,” and “I don’t play with girls,” and “That’s a girl toy!”  He emphasized the words “girl” and “girls” in a way that made me cringe…its a particular kind of sneer that I became familiar with back when I was, well, just a girl. Today, I’m not just a girl.  I’m a wife, mother, writer, educator, daughter…but above all, a woman.  And the kind of woman that I’ve become is the kind of woman who is concerned with all women…a feminist.  Maybe it was the first time I heard some boy on the playground sneer out girl like it was a curse word that I began to glean some vague idea of sexism.  I got used to that sneer, even hearing adult men, my peers, chastise one another for their degree of masculinity by using the word “girl” like an epithet:  “What?  Are you going to be a little girl about it Sean?” and “He’s got the handshake of a girl scout.”  But I got a nice, fresh shock when I heard my four year old use the word in such a way.  I must admit, it shook me, hurt me, pained me in ways that I’m not even ready to totally confront.  I felt like I had been slapped.  I was back on the playground in an instant.

Obviously my son didn’t see me as one of these kinds of horrible, stinky, cootie-infested animals because he wouldn’t have said the word “girl” in such a way in front of me.  My son loves me.  I’m not a “girl” to him.  He’s affectionate and loves to kiss his mom, dad and brother just for the heck of it…whenever he’s feeling particularly lovey-dovey, which is pretty often.  He’ll come up and say, “Squeeeeeezy hug!”, bear hug you to near death, then plant a slimy kiss right on your smacker.  It’s pretty cute.  And I love that my husband doesn’t push our son away, make him feel ashamed for kissing his daddy on the lips.  My good man bear hugs our boy right back and then offers up his lips for kissing. Our family (I’m the only woman in the family) is affectionate and we like it that way.  But over the past few years I’ve occasionally received comments that have a slightly critical and/or puzzled inflection about how my son “is so, um, affectionate and sweet.  He’s really sensitive, isn’t he?”  It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time a family member, or a new teacher at his preschool might make a comment, and when they do, they look to me, at me, and seem to suggest that I’ve done something to make my son “like that.”  My son is normal and healthy.  We just allow him to express his full range of emotions…including affection, which is something most American men probably have needed in their lives for a long, long time.

We’ve never intentionally tried to cultivate any particular gender leanings with our boys.  While I am a feminist, I guess I just sort of forgot (maybe selectively) how gender socialization would eventually come to claim my sons.  Sociological theories of gender identity development posit that “gender is a social construction rather than a biological given” (Bussey & Bandera, 1999, “Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentiation“).  In other words, biology plays a part in the development of a child’s sense of their gender, but society plays, perhaps, an equal part.  We tell our children what behaviors, appearance, toys and media are appropriate to their sex based on the norms of our society.  Behaviors and appearance that vary from the norm are considered taboo and to be avoided, and there is a large amount of social pressure to conform to these norms.  If, for example, Johnny decides that he wants to watch the Cinderella movie instead of the dinosaur movie, we tend to steer him toward the dinosaur movie, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes in not-so-subtle ways.  We might tell Johnny, “Dinosaurs are for boys.  Cinderella is a girl’s movie,” or “You don’t want to watch the dinosaur  movie?  But dinosaurs are cool!”  Subtly implying that Cinderella is not “cool,” or that certain stories and movies are off-limits for Johnny if he really wants to be a boy.  Our fear is that if Johnny watches Cinderella-type movies too often, he will be confused about his gender identity and act more “like a girl,” a negative outcome for the parents of boys concerned with fitting into the norm.

I think of Simone de Beauvoir famously saying, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”  What de Beauvoir says is applicable to men too.  When it comes to my feminism, it has been mainly, erroneously, focused on women, not men.  Though lately, that’s been changing.  But back when our oldest son was about 20 months old, I wasn’t really too worried about sexism affecting him.  I went on many a play date where the mothers of toddler boys would say, “There’s just something different about little boys.  He just naturally goes for the cars, trucks and robots.  It’s biology, I guess.”  While I felt skeptical when I heard other mother’s saying such things, I noticed that as soon as my son was finished with his baby toys, he moved very easily, seemingly naturally,  into trains and cars and dinosaurs.  Then again, we didn’t buy him any dolls, or playthings that were particularly domestic (like a toy vacuum cleaner or kitchen set). I remember, though, entering Toys R Us for the first time in years.  I was astonished, perhaps naively, at how gender segregated the toys were.  While the girls’ section was amply supplied with pink kitchen sets and mini baby strollers…the boys’ side had no such boy version.  There weren’t any blue strollers with daddy-n-baby sets.  The girls’ side had very few pink cars, or bulldozers, and not even one policewoman dress-up outfits.  Likewise, the boys’ side had no nurse practitioner dress-up outfits, despite the fact that there are plenty of men who are nurse practitioners, and women who are law enforcement officers, and plenty of dads who push strollers, cook dinner and clean-up around the house.

My son has a slightly older cousin who he idolizes.  If cousin liked dinosaurs, our son liked dinosaurs.  If cousin liked Transformers, our son liked Transformers.  I didn’t see any problem with this.   It seemed natural enough for our son to look up to his older, cool cousin.  I didn’t think about the toys themselves…only that our son wanted to be like his cousin.  We just sort of went with the flow…he had Thomas the Tank Engine toys, mini soccer balls, Star Wars action figures, Pokemon, every Matchbox race car you could possibly imagine, cowboy hats and play cap guns, puzzles, robots of every kind…his closet was full of boy stuff, and I say that without a sneer.  He had all kinds of boyish movies in his collection; his favorites being Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Cars, Shrek, Toy Story (I and II) and Transformers Animated.  We signed him up for soccer class through the city recreational program.  He wrestled extensively with his dad.  We paired him up with other little boys to make friends with.  We dressed him in very boy-oriented clothing…shirts with guitars, baseball bats and skateboards, pants and long shorts, race car shoes, baseball caps…a wardrobe mainly made up of four colors: blue, green, black and red.  My son has never been deprived of stereotypical models of American manhood.  And he’s got active male role models in his life: a guitar-playing, WWII trivia-loving, teacher dad, two grandpas (both who served in the military during wars), and my husband’s band mates (one married, one not).

But then our son went to preschool and began to make friends with a group of boys in his class.  Being slightly on the anti-social side in middle and high school myself, I suppose a part of me really wanted my son to fit in with the kids at preschool.  I encouraged him to make friends and play with the other boys in the class, and I saw preschool as an opportunity for my son to learn about sharing, community, leadership, empathy, discipline…and other relatively benign virtues.  It became clear, very quickly, that there was one little alpha-pup that boy-o-mine latched onto immediately.  Alpha Pup was the leader of a mini-gang of preschool boys who went around the playground imitating the Power Rangers, making potty jokes and generally proclaiming that certain things were for “girls” (with a sneer).  I have to admit, I was taken aback by how early and immediate this kind of socialization begins.  At first I sort of went with the flow, trying to convince myself that it was all just a “normal” part of his process of becoming a boy, but then I started noticing that Alpha Pup got in trouble more often than the other boys, and on a regular basis.  I felt guilty for encouraging my son to befriend someone who seemed to get him in trouble so often.  Alpha Pup hit, swore, taught boy-o-mine to give us the bird!  All at the ripe age of FOUR.

When I went to friends and family about this issue, many just brushed it off as “boyhood.”  But I couldn’t shake the image of my kid flipping me the middle finger.  In fact, it’s not just my friends and family who dismiss my concerns about the social environment that we’re raising our boys in.  There’s a new breed of scientists who increasingly believe that the differences between boys and girls are more biological than social.  Over the past few years there have been a rash of books that attempt to address the “problem” of the “boy brain.”  Says Peg Tyre, in her 2006 Newsweek article “The Trouble with Boys,” “Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic ‘boy’ behaviors were a result of socialization, but these days scientists believe they are an expression of male brain chemistry.”  It’s that old nature vs. nuture argument all over again.  What frustrates me is that researchers, parents and scientists seem to want a definitive answer to that old battle…and there isn’t one.  It seems obvious to me that boys are driven both biologically and socially.  Isn’t that obvious?  It seems obvious to me that girls are driven both biologically and socially.  To underplay the role of socialization in the process of a child’s development is to be ignorant…no matter how many PhDs or children you have.  For example, while human beings across the planet share a particular biological design, we seem to all behave in different ways, with different social norms that pertain to sexual norms.  Diffrent cultures set down a wide array of different social norms for members of social groups, despite the fact that a great majority of us were born with two arms, two legs, a brain and a vagina or a penis.  I have to ask, why tell my son to watch the dinosaur movie instead of Cinderella if it’s all biology?

Answer: because it isn’t all biology.  And if that is the case, then socialization is very important to the shaping of a child.  I have to wonder, ask, explore this (and many other) questions because my own child’s selfhood is at stake.  I’ve gotten some pretty intense reactions to some of my questions.  The idea that a feminist would try to actively shape her child’s (particularly a boy’s) worldview as feminist brings about the following responses: scoffing, throat-clearing, eye-rolling, laughing, the statement “You are sick,” and one face slap.  Yes, a face slap.  Yet, rightwing Evangelicals fight with tooth and nail to raise their children the way they see fit, and seem to believe pretty firmly that socialization has a very important influence on the development of the child.  I am about to write something that I hope I never write again; I couldn’t agree with the Evangelicals any more.  They are right.  I understand why very religious parents want to control and shape the kinds of things that their children are exposed to.  It is a parent’s job to show children the correct (right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, fair or unfair) way to behave in relation to other people.  For me, it’s not the Christian ideology that forms the basis of my moral compass…it’s feminism.  It’s an extremely subjective call to say that feminist principles and mothers have “hurt” children, or even devleopmentally disabled them.  I suppose I could say the same about Evangelical principles and mothers who selectively eliminate aspects of a curricula (Darwin’s theory of evolution, certain parts of history, the Big Bang theory) to fit the Christian ideology.  But I wouldn’t do that, because I respect a parent’s right to raise their children the way he or she sees fit, even if the principles that parent uses to guide him or her are different from my own.  This is America, isn’t it?

Why Preschool Should Be a Part of Public Education September 3, 2008

Found this terrific and comprehensive article about why we should make preschool a part of public education!  I’m so happy!!!  As educators, my husband and I have had many long discussions about why it is so important that we include preschool education in our current public education system.  This article from Edutopia.org will help explain why…

Preschool Comes of Age: The National Debate on

Education for Young Children Intensifies

Educators rave about the benefits of early childhood schooling. So, why don’t we support it more?

by Michael Lester

Early this year, two dissimilar governors delivered two similar messages.

“Effective preschool education can help make all children ready to learn the day they start school and, more importantly, help close the enormous gap facing children in poverty,” announced New York’s Eliot Spitzer. He boldly promised to make a high-quality prekindergarten program “available to every child who needs it within the next four years.”

Across the continent, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation expanding preschool opportunities in low-performing school districts and providing additional state dollars for building and improving preschool facilities. “Preschool gives our kids the strong foundation they need to be successful in school and in life,” said Schwarzenegger.

Spitzer (a Democrat) and Schwarzenegger (a Republican) may not agree about a lot of things, but here’s one area where they concur: Preschool education can perform miracles. Children who attend prekindergarten programs have bigger vocabularies and increased math skills, know more letters and more letter-sound associations, and are more familiar with words and book concepts, according to a number of studies.

Nationwide, almost two-thirds (64 percent) of children attend preschool center in the year prior to kindergarten, typically at age four. On any given day, more than 5 million American youngsters attend some prekindergarten program.

And a preschool day is not just advanced babysitting for busy parents. Kids also practice many key components of the school day, including the importance of routine. That’s key for early learners. “They understand carpet time, clean-up procedures, how to share crayons, or even getting their pants on and off without the teacher’s help; that’s big,” says Steve Malton, kindergarten and first-grade teacher at Parkmead Elementary School, in Walnut Creek, California. “Little kids have only only a certain amount of what’s called ‘active working memory.’ If a large portion of their brain is figuring out what they’re going to do next, there’s less room there to spend on learning.” Result: Preschool has a huge impact on their ability to keep up in class.

Too Much, Too Soon?

So, what’s not to love about preschool? Plenty, say critics. “Young children are better off at home,” says Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association [1]. “We are in danger of over-institutionalizing them. A child will develop naturally if the parents give the child what he or she needs most in the formative years — plenty of love and attention. In this way, the brain can develop freely.”

As soon as the subject of schooling before K-12 comes up, another concept quickly follows: testing. That gives some parents the jitters. “The only way for school programs, including preschool programs, to show accountability of public funding for education is through testing,” says Diane Flynn Keith, founder of Universal Preschool. “The only way to prepare children for standardized testing is to teach a standardized curriculum. Standardized preschool curriculum includes reading, writing, math, science, and social sciences at a time when children are developmentally vulnerable and may be irreparably harmed by such a strategy.”

That’s part of a broader test-them-sooner move across many grades. One pushdown from No Child Left Behind, for instance, is that highstakes testing now begins as early as the second grade. “It’s not the same kindergarten we went to,” says Don Owens, director of public affairs for the National Association for the Education of Young Children [2] (NAEYP). “It’s not the same kindergarten it was ten years ago. Kindergarten used to be preparation for school, but now it is school. That’s why school districts and boards of education are paying attention to what happens before the kids arrive at school.”

The result is a desperate tug-of-war between prekindergarten advocates and critics, with the under-six set placed squarely in the middle. In 2006, for instance, the Massachusetts legislature passed, by unanimous vote, an increase in state-funded high-quality prekindergarten programs. Governor Mitt Romney promptly vetoed the bill, calling preschool an “expensive new entitlement.”

On the national stage, Oklahoma is the only state to offer publicly funded preschool education to virtually all children (about 90 percent) at age four. But twelve states — Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — provide no preschool services at all. “There is not enough support for preschool,” explains David Kass, executive director of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids [3]. “It’s very expensive, and most parents cannot afford it.”

The three costliest states for private preschool are Massachusetts (where preschool runs an average of $9,628 per year), New Jersey ($8,985), and Minnesota ($8,832). In Rhode Island, the average yearly tab for preschool ($7,800) represents 45 percent of the median single-parent-family income. In California, part-time private preschool and child-care programs cost families on average $4,022 statewide. By comparison, the average full-time tuition at a California State University campus was $3,164.

“America is forcing its parents to decide between paying for early education for their kids and saving for their college education,” says the NAEYP’s Don Owens.

That’s when the subject of state-sponsored preschool comes up. Over the past two years, the total state prekindergarten funding increased by a billion dollars to exceed $4.2 billion. But those numbers are often inadequate. After Florida voters approved a preschool-for-all initiative similar to a voucher program, the state legislature appropriated about $390 million — or roughly $2,500 per child served. Reasonable budgeting for preschool, however, should parallel that for K-12 schools. “If you’re a state like Florida spending $9,000 per student on a yearly full-day program of K-12, your costs for a half day of prekindergarten should be somewhere around $4,500, not $2,500,” complains Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research [4].

That pattern is true nationwide. In 2002, average state spending was at $4,171 per enrolled child, but that figure fell to $3,482 in 2006, according to the NIEER’s 2006 State Preschool Yearbook. Some states spend even less: New Mexico provides $2,269 per child, and Ohio budgets just $2,345. Compare those amounts with the national average of $10,643 for each child enrolled in K-12 schools.

Barnett says Florida and other states are creating a dual system consisting of high-quality, expensive preschools in private settings and underfunded public schools for low-income families.

Credit: Veer

The Survey Says . . .

While the battle over funding continues, it’s difficult to dispute the positive effects of preschool not only in better learning in kindergarten but also in long-term educational value. Furthermore, key research findings indicate that those who go through prekindergarten programs are more likely to graduate from high school and make higher wages as adults.

The research recited in support of preschool education usually comes from three long-term studies of low-income families. In the Abecedarian Project [5], launched in 1972 in rural North Carolina, fifty-seven infants from low-income, African American, primarily single-mother families were randomly assigned to receive early intervention in a high-quality child-care setting; fifty-four children were assigned to a control group. Each child had an individualized prescription of educational activities, which consisted of “games” incorporated into the child’s day and emphasized language skills. The child care and preschool were provided on a full-day, year-round basis.

Initially, all children tested comparably on mental and motor tests; however, as they moved through the child-care program, preschoolers had much higher scores on mental tests. Follow-up assessments completed at ages twelve, fifteen, and twenty-one showed that the preschoolers continued to have higher average scores on mental tests. More than one-third of the children who attended preschool went to a four-year college or university; only about 14 percent of the control group did.

Another important research effort was the High/Scope Perry Preschool study [6], which began in Ypsilanti, Michigan. From 1962 to 1967, 123 three- and four-year-olds — African American children born into poverty and at high risk of failing school — were randomly divided into one group that received a high-quality preschool program and a comparison group that received no preschool.

These children were evaluated every year, ages 3-11, and again three times during their teens and twice in adulthood. The latest results of this High/Scope study were released in 2004. By the time members of the preschool-provided group reached age forty, they had fewer criminal arrests, displayed higher levels of social functioning, and were more likely to have graduated from high school.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s Child-Parent Centers [7] (CPC) have been around for forty years, and more than 100,000 families have gone through the federally funded program, which still operates in twenty-four centers. Parents are drawn into the program with classes, activities, and their own resource room at each school site.

A longitudinal study by Arthur Reynolds, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, looked at 1,539 Chicago students enrolled in CPCs in 1985 and 1986 and tracked their progress through 1999. He found they were much more likely to finish high school and less likely to be held back a grade, be placed in special education, or drop out than 389 youngsters who participated in alternative programs. Intervening early improves student achievement and has a cumulative effect: The longer students were in the CPC programs, the higher their level of school success.

Other shorter-term studies — and there are many — argue these kinds of benefits are not limited to at-risk children but extend to middleincome kids as well. But when a family’s budget is tight, preschool becomes unaffordable. Less than half of low-income toddlers attend preschool, but half of middle-class four-year-olds and three-quarters from high-income families (earning $75,000 or more) attend preschool.

That enrollment gap can have immediate academic consequences, say educators, who note that the lower the family income, the more pronounced the benefits of preschool. “I’ve worked with a lot of kids and know the achievement gap starts before kids are even in kindergarten,” says Kimberly Oliver, a kindergarten teacher from Silver Springs, Maryland, and 2006 National Teacher of the Year. (See “Kimberly Oliver [8],” September 2006.)

Learning While Playing

Many educators appreciate the wide range of positive influences preschool seems to germinate. Debra King, a preschool teacher for thirty-five years, has run the Debra King School, in San Francisco, for nearly half that time. “There’s been a big push lately to make preschoolers ready for academic learning, to teach children the alphabet and how to write their names,” King says. “Many children are developmentally ready to learn these things, but I think socialization skills are more important. I believe that playing with blocks, dolls, and toys, scribbling with crayons, painting, communicating, storytelling, and music — that’s readiness for school. There are a lot of different things to learn to be successful in the world.”

That’s an important insight. “The original preschool was a place for socialization, but, increasingly, today it has become necessary because of working and single parents,” explains David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child and The Power of Play. “And that’s muddied the waters, because people think it needs to be an educational thing. We got it turned around and are learning the academic things before we learn the social skills that are prerequisites for formal education.”

Elkind believes phonics, math, and book reading are inappropriate for young children. “There is no research supporting the effectiveness of early academic training and a great deal of evidence that points against it,” he says. “The age of six is called the age of reason because children actually develop those abilities to do concrete operations; brain research substantiates this. Take reading: A child needs to be at the age of reason to understand that one letter of the alphabet can sound different ways. That age might be four or it might be seven. They all get it; they just get it at different ages.”

Elkind argues that toddlers need to learn only three things before entering kindergarten, and they’re all socialization skills: listen to adults and follow instructions, complete simple tasks on their own, and work cooperatively with other children. “Children need to learn the language of things before they learn the language of words,” he adds. “They are foreigners in a strange land, and they need to learn about the physical world, they need to explore colors, shape, and time, they need to find out about water and the sky and the stars, and they need to learn about human relations. Much of this learning comes from direct experience.”

Sharon Bergen, senior vice president of Education and Training for the Knowledge Learning Corporation, counters that curriculum and fun are not mutually exclusive: “Children are capable of a lot of development earlier than we thought,” she says. “But we don’t want their time to be overly structured. We still want kids to have a good, fun, joyful childhood.” With prekindergarten education, many people think, we can have it both ways.

Michael Lester is a writer and editor. He recently launched a site about fatherhood, Dad Magazine Online, at www.dadmagazineonline.com [9].

Palin’s Daughter is Pregnant?! September 1, 2008

What kind of an example are we setting for teenagers across the world when we endorse a candidate who couldn’t seem to model the very morals and socially conservative platform that she hopes to sign into law for everyone else in the nation?  What conclusion can kids come to except, “What’s good for Bristol Palin must be good for me.”

This ticket is becoming too much like a Jerry Springer episode.

What’s Wrong with this Palin Picture? September 1, 2008

Many of the pictures I’ve seen of Sarah Palin, Republican vice presidential candidate, on the internet have been very close to cheesecake shots. In fact, I’ve seen already some air-brushed pin-ups of Palin in a thong bending over a football. I’ve also seen her hot-to-trot head shot baring her shoulders, and I’ve seen her up-do’s, the Vogue cover and family photos with the Alaskan landscape beautifully rolling itself out behind them. There’s no doubt she’s a beautiful woman. Very photogenic. Her family looks like a happy and healthy one. But pictures can be deceiving.

She’s being marketed as a perfect mother, qualified statesman and the dressed up version of those bikini-wearing, machine-gun toting babes who smile at us from websites like Gungirls.com. I’m wondering today, how that represents middle America exactly. Yes, it may be that Americans living in the Heartland want the right to tote guns and consider themselves pro-family, but how many middle American women would leave their three-month child with Downs syndrome home with Daddy (or nanny?) to campaign on the road…even for the vice presidency? Where are the family values there? I know we need women to represent in politics, but this seems to fly in the face of all the “family values” rhetoric that has been slung at working mothers for the past few decades…basically as a backlash against the women’s movement, and the idea that women can work and have a family.

Don’t get me wrong…I believe that women can work and have a family, but we need the rest of society to get in line with that idea, mainly so that women, like Sarah Palin, can spend the time with their newborn babies without having their careers penalized. I’m all for the ‘whole package’…husband, family, career…I think we can do it. But when we have groups of Americans (mainly conservatives) slandering women who work (whether they have to or not), and then Palin, who presumably represents these Americans, on the campaign trail with such a small baby…well, I have to ask, where are the critics now? Working women, like Sarah Palin, need support…both from their families and from institutions…in order to make the ‘whole package’ work.

We need government institutions and individuals alike to support paid maternity and paternity leave for all mothers and fathers of babies under one year. I think it’s wonderful that Palin is working and has the support of her husband and family (and maybe even a nanny, that remains to be seen), but not all American women have that kind of support. Not everyone has the family structure and support that Palin does.

Take me for instance.

My mother helps my sister to raise her son alone. Like Palin, when my sister found herself pregnant, but in a less than ideal situation (Dad wasn’t really around to help and wasn’t sure he wanted to participate), she decided to have the baby anyway. As a result, our whole family had to woman-up (as I call it). We rallied around her. We babysat while she finished her college degree. We took turns shuttling my nephew around town. After college my sister moved back in with our mother and went to work, and now my mother and our other sister help offset the outrageous cost of childcare. When I decided to get married and have children of my own, I had to take time away from my career as a college instructor and writer to stay home with my children. That also meant that there was one less babysitter for my sister. While I wanted to be close to the kids for the first year anyway, even if I hadn’t wanted to stay home for the first year, I had to because my family was centered around helping my sister…and rightly so since she needed the help more than I did. Our entire family makes do. I make enough at my job to necessitate working to help pay the bills (our mortgage being increasingly difficult to cover), but the childcare that we must pay for in order for me to work is just insane.

Nevertheless, you can see the difficulties there. You can call me a “whiner,” but I’m not whining. I think we are lucky, because I’ve heard from women in much more difficult and desperate situations.

I hope that when Palin’s riding that anti-abortion platform in the next couple of months that she thinks of the consequences of reversing Roe vs. Wade. How will all these women support their saved babies? With divorce rates settled around 50-60%, how will all these single mothers work and raise their children without affordable childcare, health benefits and government institutions that help single mothers and fathers afford food, shelter and utilities? I hope Palin thinks about all those dreaded taxes and government institutions that the country will need to help support the families that are created with such legislation.

I also wonder how good it is for Sarah Palin’s little child to have his mother campaigning at such a critical juncture in his life. Before we all start calling Palin “one of us” let’s think about what our lives are really like as mothers. How much is her life like ours? Clearly, she’s a politician first and foremost, and her other roles take a backseat. That’s fine with me…but how do social conservatives feel about that? I’m just wondering out loud.

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 uncircumcised 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.