So breastfeeding made the cover of Time. Well, how lovely..wait a minute, why is everyone so riled up on Twitter? Why is my phone blowing up? Oh, because this is the picture…
Source
So what side does a Sensible Mom take? Are we repulsed, gratified, offended, justified, enlightened or dismayed?
This calls for strong words to convey strong emotions and here is mine: DISGUSTED.
Disgusted that we, as women, as mothers, are being manipulated once again for the noble cause of saving a magazine from fading into extinction.
Disgusted that our anxieties about mothering are being twisted so that some of us have to be right and some of us have to be wrong, pitting Sister against Sister.
Disgusted that we are half the population, but we carry the lion share of judgment on our shoulders for earthshaking things like how we feed our children.
To be crystal clear, I am outraged by this blatant and careless toss of a match from the media onto the tinder of our insecurities to ignite a flame under the sales of their magazine.
I can just envision the meeting that took place to develop this cover…
“Hey, Ted, the Mommy Wars are on again. There has to be a way to spin this to increase our sales. Print media is dying, man.”
“I heard Kate is writing an article on attachment parenting. We should be able to get something stirring with that. You know there is no one a woman hates more, than another woman, who is not parenting the exact same way she is.”
“Oh, yeah. So attachment parenting is about breastfeeding, right? Should we champion the rights of women to breastfeed?”
“Dude, we’re trying to sell magazines, not improve the world. Get your head in the game.”
“Well, what about making bottle-feeding moms feel badly about themselves?”
“Why piss them off? They have money too. There has to be some angle where we can rile breast –feeders and bottle-feeders. Think.”
“I got it! Let’s find some hot chick to put on the cover nursing a three year old who looks like an 8 year old! Nursing an older kid should ignite the maximum number of mothering types!”
“We just need a title that implies that mothers are doing it wrong”
“I got it: ‘Are You Mom Enough?’”
“Well, it’s not exactly subtle, but we don’t want anybody to miss our point.”
Your point, Time Magazine, was to sell your sub par product.
Here is this Sensible Mom’s point–If your kids are safe, tended to, and raised with love, then you are indeed, Mom enough.
And Time, I am smart enough to see what you are doing, and I am banking that a majority of my Sisters are too. Don’t take the bait. Let’s cut bait and rebuke the manipulation.
We are hooking up to Yeah Write #49 this week. Head on over there to read some great blogs and discover some great writers.
Erin- Smack. Hand on forehead. Every once in awhile we all just need one of those.
Ellen- I find it keeps me from throttling other people.
Erin- Today was one of those days. A few weeks ago, we had THE TALK. Not THAT ONE, the other one—the one where you meet with the preschool teacher about whether to send the baby to kindergarten.
All I can hear is Joe Strummer singing in my head, “Should he stay or should he go?”
Ellen- Remember folks, she not only has a visa for Planet Teen, she is the Princess of Preschool Nation. She’s got five kids in her army.
Erin- Goodness, haven’t I been around this tree before? Am I still supposed to be wringing sweat from my hands about preschool and kindergarten?
Ellen- Shouldn’t it be one of the perks of being a mother of five to get a reprieve from kindergarten being a colossal decision?
I mean, really, you’ve been there and done that 4 times already. Isn’t it the consolation prize that you get to have some things on autopilot? I mean why else would you triple or quadruple your food bill, your electric bill, and your college tuitions? Except for, of course, you also exponentially increase your joy. (For real, Erin’s family is a joy to be around.)
Erin- One of the supposed joys of mothering a brood is the notion that decisions become less fraught because your experience (times 4 or 5) makes you wiser.
So when can I stop and smell the roses? When am I allowed to stop sweating every decision??
Ellen- Apparently never. No GET OUT OF THIS CONVERSATION FREE card for you. Doomed to sit in the little chairs yet again.
Erin- To be perfectly honest, although I love Eddie’s teacher and think she loves him back, I was a little annoyed that I had to take an hour of my time AND schedule it so that Steve could be there too AND this was all ON A SCHOOL NIGHT. Which meant the teens were running the evening routine. Enough said, and GRRRRRR.
Ellen- Shudder. But why is this decision so angst-inducing? He has done his year in preschool, and he makes the cut-off date for kindergarten, right?
Erin- The main arguments for holding Eddie back are that he is physically small, has a late birthday in the late summer, and the majority of his class cohort has much older birthdays.
These are fair arguments. They are just not compelling ones—at least to me.
Ellen- If we are talking about Eddie, specifically, and not in generalizations, they are not very compelling to me either.
Erin- And yet my husband had made me promise to muzzle it and let THE TEACHER talk: “We’ll learn a lot about what to do from what she tells us without our interpretation or input.”
The teacher had no concerns about his academic readiness, his social skills, or his developmental readiness, so my main takeaway was that another year could be a gift to him—another year to play and be a little boy. Hmmmm. Who wouldn’t get on board with that?
The only thing I said during our hour was “Thank you, we would like some time to think this over.”
And that’s what I did, except when I said “think it over” what I meant was give myself time to read everything I could find and poll every person I know.
Ellen- I’m impressed you could tamp down that niggling voice whispering, “This is all a big waste of time.”
Erin- Oh, it was niggling me! More than that really, it was saying, “Put this baby to rest. Send THAT baby to kindergarten. We have bigger fish to fry.” But I put on my Good Girl hat and started doing my research.
Ellen- Good Girl hat? I’m thinking you lost those brownie points when you didn’t immediately accept holding him back. So what did the research say?
Erin– At this point, I want to be able to say that the research (the paper kind and the people kind) clarified everything, but what I found was. . . contradictory at best.
There were some very good reasons for holding him back. One study found that the youngest students were much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and were three times as likely to repeat a grade. Umm, no thank you.
Another study found that the oldest students were most likely to become student leaders. Well, what parent DOESN’T want that? At this point, I started daydreaming about my sweet boy as class president circa Class of 2022!
But by far the most compelling argument for another year of PreK was what my mother (former preschool teacher, current kindergarten teacher) said: “You cannot underestimate the power of feeling confident and capable in the classroom.” Maybe Momma IS always right.
I was all ready to give him another year, but, of course, I then kept reading. The arguments against another year of Pre-K pushed me right back on my fence. There were negligible long-term academic benefits. The differences between the oldest and the youngest are the largest on the first day of kindergarten, but the advantages decrease over time. Younger students catch up with the oldest by third grade. Even studies that matched each child who delayed entrance with a child of like intelligence who had not delayed entrance did not find any solid proof that this practice made any difference at all.
At this point, my head was spinning. I heard Joe singing, “If I go, it could be trouble. If I stay, it could be double.” What’s a Momma to do?
Ellen, singing: “This indecision’s killing me.”
Erin:THIS Momma remembered her maxim to Have a Little Ellen in her life. I handed this mess over.
Ellen: Are you getting the gist? Erin read pages more of research and she sent them to me. Here is my take-away: despite research indicating there is no real benefit, it is becoming a common practice to “red-shirt” for kindergarten.
Erin: We did not make that up. It’s a term. Oy.
Ellen: There are no large studies with good statistical significance to show that it is beneficial to hold back. It is most often recommended to white males, and quite frankly, there are whiffs that it is recommended so that schools have better scores on their “No Child Left Behind” rankings.
Erin: Wake up! At this point, I’m cutting her off. She could analyze statistics for hours. The links are there if you want to read what I read. My last call was to my dad, the fair-minded judge and father of 4. It’s his daily work to evaluate two sides of an issue, balance interests, and come up with good solutions.
He just said, “What did your mother say? Do that.”
Ellen: At this point, I had heard this talk long enough. It was now time to call on The Sisterhood.
They were only too happy to share their thoughts:
SIL with two summer babies: “Was worried, but both kids are doing great.”
SIL with two fall babies who got that valuable extra year: “Kids are happy and doing great.”
Friend with a Summer Birthday Baby and a December birthday Baby: “Hold him back, because you are thinking ahead. If he moves on to kindergarten, he will turn 18 a month before he goes to college. He will be the last in his class to get his driver’s license.”
Ellen- Must interject here. I also have a summer baby, Coco (13), and a December baby, Jellybean (11). And while it is true that the preschool teacher initiated a mortifying conference to discuss Coco using yips to answer questions instead of words, she is doing fine. Upper tail of the bell curve and all that.
Sisterhood Friend: “I wish I had thought to hold X back. He’s struggling socially in middle school, and he has a late summer birthday.”
Other Sisterhood Friend: “I don’t think you can make a wrong decision, but you will definitely know which one is better.”
Ellen: Eddie is ready for kindergarten. He is articulate. He is one of the few 5 year olds I can have a conversation with that I enjoy. His best buds are moving up. And besides, it will make it much easier to work on the blog.
Erin: Rest assured, no decisions were made based on this blog. You did catch that Ellen took the time to read my research.
Then my sister called to weigh in. My mother and father had filled her in on our Big Dilemma.
My beloved sister: “Are we seriously even talking about this?”
Erin: OK, so, maybe my sister Karen is the voice in my head. Hmmm.
So here is the thing I learned that I already knew: all of these kids, including mine, are going to be just fine. The decisions to start preschool or kindergarten and when are important decisions, but they are not deal-breakers. Kids grow where they are planted and nourished and cared for.
Hence, the forehead smack. I knew that. I needed to remember that. And not for nothing, the fifth time around this tree made it easier to see that.
Eddie is going to kindergarten next year. He is curious, inquisitive, and ready to learn. He is still small, will still have a birthday in the late summer, and will still be the youngest in his class. He will still have time to play and be a little boy, but he will also learn to read and write and, if we’re lucky, eat some paste, because that’s what curious, inquisitive little boys do.
He is going not because of any one thing we read or brilliant insight someone shared. He is not going because of any readiness assessments we took (although they did make us feel better—really). He is going, because one night after we put him to bed, Steve and I looked at each other and at the same moment said, “He’s ready.”
He’s going, because he’s ready, and we both feel that to be true.
I could break into song, but this time it’s not Joe in my head, but the Hallelujah Chorus. No more hand-wringing or sweating this decision.
Ellen: Get Eddie a bigger backpack because he’s goin’ to kindergarten!
Addendum: As we were working on this piece, 60 Minutes also ran a segment about kindergarten redshirting. Definitely worth a look if you are also in the midst of this decision.
You know the saying, “You never know someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.” Well, it was never truer than when said about a mom. Here is a little snapshot of Ellen’s Friday told through her footwear.
We are linking up to Yeah Write #44! Click on the links to read some great blogs!
Erin- We all have our Mom Code—the one we live by and love by that makes our families work as smoothly as we can manage. We all have different names for the guiding principles that rule our parenting. You may call them The Law According to Mom. We happen to call them Sisterhood Secrets.
Ellen –One of the most important Sisterhood Secrets I live by: Don’t poop in your own den.
You heard us.
Erin – This may need some translation if you don’t have an Ellen in your life, but let me just say right now, you should find one. Now.
Ellen- Erin’s being very sweet, but ask our friend Mary how well they fared making tie-dyed t-shirts without me.
Erin- I shudder at the memory. Anyway, Ellen is the chick who gets things done. She is a no-fuss, no muss kind of momma, so if she tells you that she lives by this maxim, you might want to sit up and listen. The idea of not messing up your den is a lot harder than it sounds. We all get upset, excited, tipped over our breaking points, ESPECIALLY when our babies are involved. We want the sweet release of watching someone squirm and having our voices heard. But I am telling you now, resist this urge. The squeaky wheel may get the grease at first, but pretty soon she’s just darned annoying and causing drama in the parking lot.
Ellen- In other words, don’t make a princess-worthy stink in a place where you are going to have to play for a long time, like your kids’ schools. You can truly accomplish more by acting like the respectful person you want your kids to emulate. But forget that, I was pacing and growling around my den like a Momma Bear who had eaten gas station sushi and needed to squat.
With forethought and planning, I was seriously considering bringing it down hard on my poor elementary school. I was hot. I was considering thumbing my nose at one of my guiding principles because, darn it, I felt justified.
Now you are going to have stick with me on this one. I am not overly precious about my kids. But my Jellybean (11) came home with a D on an art project. We were not informed of this grade until AFTER the report cards came home, because it was put in late. AND it was part of a DOUBLE grade on the same project, because while the teacher was required by county policy to have 4 projects to grade, she only had 3, therefore double grade.
This same teacher had twice sent Jellybean’s work to the county art show. Where was the love now?
Erin- Have you ever heard of a double dipping grade? I mean, really, even my collar was getting warm.
Ellen- This D prevented Jellybean from getting an A in art by 0.7%. This B prevented her from having Straight A’s. This would have been Jellybean’s second marking period getting straight A’s this year. BUT get this Sisters, they FORGOT to recognize her in the newsletter for it last marking period. Hence, why I was PRIMED to make a stinky.
Erin- And this was not Ellen’s first dance with this teacher. Years back Ellen had to encourage a rubric for objective grading. Before that, grading had been sketchy. Pun intended.
Ellen is not all the way up her tree yet, but she is clinging to the bottom branches.
Ellen – She is either being kind or having amnesia, because I remember being precariously at the top of this tree and throwing F bombs at anything moving. I was calling Erin as a touchstone, because I was queasy that I was going to violate my own rules. My cub had been wronged!
Erin – I know Ellen, and she has never been THAT mom—the crazy one who insists that her kids get all As. She wants her girls to excel to the best of their abilities and they do —two lovely chips off the old, but still looking fabulous, block. Jellybean happens to be a conscientious and excellent student. To say that this grade hit her hard was an understatement.
Ellen – AND Jellybean reported that they had been promised another class period to finish the project, but that the teacher had taken that extra time away as punishment.
Erin- It was the principle of the thing. Jellybean was getting the short end of the stick.
Ellen was in her tree because she was caught not between a rock and a hard place, but between two maxims that guide her parenting— between the one to keep that den nice and clean and the one that she is going to stick up for her kids. As a Sister, my job was to talk her down from the top of the tree, but she was ready for action. And I could see why. I was on her side completely.
Ellen– So I have picked my battle and I was going to kick some booty and take some names. SO what did I do?
I…I…
I let the catharsis of my venting rant to Erin wash over me. I took a breath, slept on it, and wrote an extremely polite email to the art teacher expressing my puzzlement over the grade.
Erin- Surprised? Feeling cheated of the specter of the Momma Bear attack?
You'll thank us. In fact, you're welcome in advance.
Ellen – And guess what? Since I had never pooped in the den, the teacher listened to me and expressed her surprise and regret that this had gotten past her. She teaches between two schools, and the grade had gotten lost in the shuffle. Jellybean’s class had gotten robbed of class time due to some field trips; so the teacher could not get more projects done. She acknowledged that Jellybean was a dedicated and good art student, so if she said that she thought she was going to have more time, the teacher was going to give it to her. Jellybean finished the project and was re-graded.
Erin- See?? I told you all that you needed a little Ellen in your life. How ‘bout that for results? Because she muzzled her inner Momma Bear, Jellybean and Ellen were happy, the art teacher was not eviscerated, and Ellen’s den was squeaky clean. Score one for The Sisterhood.
Run, do not walk, away from my family if you see one of us coming. We are facing down some evil viral menace here. Save yourselves and pray for our sweet deliverance from the grips of this Virus From Hell.
Facebook warning from Erin posted from the midst of her very own version of “Contagion.” She had not one, but TWO, kids throw up at two separate sleepovers on the same night. She’s not holding her breath for thank you notes. And it only went downhill from there. They all succumbed, all SEVEN of them. -Ellen
Steve’s reply after I crawled up the steps to see if he needed anything. To set the scene, an hour ago, he had dropped Ace off at his soccer game with the instructions, “You are going to have to find your own ride home because the plague is upon me, starting now.” -Erin
So, in a previous blog with Erin, I wrote about the craziness of redoing Coco’s (13) room and the havoc it struck on the rest of the house. {Coco Room Apocalypse} I now feel ready to defend, I mean explain, myself. There had been an epidemic of teenage redecorating in her class and we were one of the last to fall victim. We should have painted during the summer, but as Coco put it, “We were too busy living life.” Well, we started living the high life of cleaning and sprucing up the week of Thanksgiving. (I know, bad timing. I already acknowledged this in the other post.)
So Jellybean (11) was helping me and chatting with me as I painted. She says, “You should have known we would hate pink and purple when we were old. I’m going to save time when I have kids and paint my girls’ rooms blue to start with.”
This indeed sounded like a good idea as I was drowning hummingbirds and butterflies in Caribbean Blue. Coco, Frank, and I had already spent hours removing the trellis wallpaper border that completed the garden gazebo theme.
By the way, just don’t do wallpaper. The horror on the Home Depot clerk’s face when I began my request, “Where is the wallpaper…,” was only trumped by his relief when I ended the sentence with the word, “remover.”
Garden Gazebo Theme. Pregnancy hormones must have deluded me into thinking wallpaper border and stenciling were good ideas.
In my defense, Coco’s room was decorated 11 years ago when Jellybean overtook the nursery. Eleven years. My Coco is not so much a packrat as a prolific creator and collector of stuff. She then tends to bury this stuff away and then promptly forget all about it. So really, she is more of a happy-go-lucky squirrel than a nasty old rat.
So due to this squirreling, I am finding a treasure trove of Coco-ness shoved in boxes, books, and under furniture. My favorite find was the foreword to her first novel crediting her sister for inspiring the title.
I could go on (there was A LOT of stuff), but the specifics of my child’s preciousness doesn’t have to be detailed here. But, it all tugged at my heartstrings. It also made me grateful that I had gotten pushed into the whole re-decorating slippery slope. (And believe me; I did not embark on this project willingly. You feel kinda attached to the dozens of pansies you lovingly hand-painted for your first born while six months pregnant with your second. Hmmm… or maybe I just felt attached in the sense that I did not feel like sanding and priming all of those suckers. I’m going to go with mother’s love over laziness, just for the sake of my next point).
So here is why I am grateful, even though I’m a little cracked from the whole snowballing project. Do you think that a surprise walk down memory lane would feel like warm nostalgia five years from now when Coco goes off to college?? No! It would feel like sucker punches! Sucker punches that could land me curled around a teddy bear longing to turn back time.
So I’m glad I didn’t have the forethought to decorate a 2 year-old’s room with her future teen self in mind. Otherwise, this massive clean-out might not have taken place until she leaped from the nest. So criticize something else, Jellybean. I’m letting Coco project HER view of self on her room and I’ve assembled a nice box of mementos that I can choose to open when I WANT that trip down memory lane.
So if you need me, I’ll be the one floating down the River “De-Nile” ignoring that Coco has 5 more years to squirrel away new landmines of preciousness for me to find.
Oh yeah, and in response to Jellybean’s pleas that her room, too, be repainted, I say, “In five years, all this can be yours.”
-Ellen
Finished product. It was worth it, right? Right!?!
If the Best Buy Guy had been drinking a soda, he would have done a spit-take. I neither look like a lady who uses substances or would know where to find them. And I don’t. Truly.
So I fully realize that this post is taking place well after Halloween. This is because during the week of Halloween, I and my equally computer illiterate friend, Erin, were trying to get this blog up and running. The fact that we were spending HOURS trying to learn all of the computer science that we avoided in college, (oh wait, there was no freaking internet or blogs when we were in college), showcased how much precious time I was wasting on Halloween activities.
But despite the fact this “holiday” has come and gone, I still wanted to record for all of motherhood what took place in my house over a two, I repeat, two hour period. Because yes, I do want a cookie. So, in said time period, Jellybean (10) and I constructed a papier mache zombie wedding cake; I cooked dinner, edited a speech, braided hair (so Coco (13) could have wavy hair when delivering the speech,) mended a shirt (to be worn during the speech), folded laundry, and shortened the pinkie of a Michael Jackson glove. So if you are like,” Ellen, you could have put away the Super Woman cape and passed on the laundry,” I have this response for you: we all desperately needed clean underwear in our drawers. While I generally prefer to have my kids do the laundry; the facts were, Coco was writing her speech and Jellybean is not yet woman enough to multi-task to the level of working with flour paste and clean laundry simultaneously.
Wanna slice with the finger or the brain??
Now out of all of the tasks, I do have to admit that the papier mache was the most fun. As you can see our zombie wedding cake was epic.
But the most annoying task was shortening the pinkie of the Michael Jackson glove that we ordered online for $10. That stupid pinkie was as long as the ring finger. Take a look at your own finger and you will realize how freaky that is! Now before you judge me on the $10 glove, wrap your head around the fact that it was my ten year old daughter that was dressing up as Michael Jackson. That is definitely on the spectacular side of awesome. I will have to delve further into her Michael Jackson obsession at another time.
Now if it never entered your mind to question why I was making a papier mache zombie wedding cake, congratulations, you are a mother. You were doing your own equally stupid things during Halloween, so I don’t seem that far off the bell curve to you. At my daughter’s elementary school, they have this great event, started by a great teacher called Trunk-or -Treat. Parents circle their cars at the fire company’s carnival grounds and the kids trick-or- treat from trunk- to- trunk. Sounds simple, but what would be the fun if there was no competition involved? Of course, we have to decorate the trunks! It is in its fourth year and as with all good things it gets grander and grander. The first year we opened our decoration box and threw a bunch of stuff in our trunk. APPARENTLY, we were not really embracing the spirit of the whole thing. My mommy tiara got a little tarnished. The second year we did an 80’s theme, but alas, the older gentlemen judging the trunks were not feeling that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The third year we won a trophy (that is still proudly displayed on the mantle) for “Kid Friendliest Theme.” Check out the “Funky Monkey Hot Tub.”
We have a lot of monkeys.
You are looking at a winning trunk, Sister!
Well, the theme this year was “Zombie Wedding.” (We watch way too much “Say Yes To The Dress” and “Cake Boss”). This involved constructing a zombie couple out of PVC pipe and the aforementioned cake. We’ll just say I spent $100 on this glorious-ness since Frank has promised to read my blog at some point. I swear, you give me PVC pipe, wire ties, duct tape, and fishing line and I can out-design MacGyver. But oh my goodness, this dragged on my time so much that I had to practice deep breathing and drink wine to calm myself down. The killer is that this event replaced a free and simple school Halloween parade. Kids just brought their costumes to school and walked around the school yard; simple as that. But would we really be in the 21st century if we were allowed to keep things simple?
Zombie Implants: NOT FDA Approved
And just to give you some insight into Erin’s “fun-loving/not learning from my tribulations” psyche; she stole the idea for her school. Oy!
Well, to bring this story to a close, we were indeed victorious. Oh yeah, we won “Most Creative!” People were standing next to our creeps for photo ops like it was Disney World. Was it all worth it for the plastic trophy and $10 Wawa gift card? I must admit, we are competitive enough to say, “Yes!” But truth be told, Jellybean’s excitement and pride were pretty awesome, too. I can hear the thump of one more brick mortared into the foundation of our relationship. And here is the Sisterhood Secret: you REALLY need that foundation to be strong by the time they reach their teens. Just ask Coco, who wasn’t too cool to celebrate with the rest of us.
