Birthin' no babies

So among the other weird creepy MAGAt things that Tubby47 has uncorked is something call "natalism"

Birthin' babies.

Apparently this came up back in March:

"The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children,” The New York Times reported on Monday. Proposals include baby bonuses for American mothers and a new affirmative-action program that would set aside almost a third of Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have kids. Malcolm and Simone Collins, oft-profiled natalists hoping to seed the future with their elite genes, reportedly sent the White House a draft executive order establishing a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with at least six children."

 "Medal of Motherhood"?

For fuck's sake, haven't we been here before...

And, anyway, it sounded better in the original...aw, fuckit, you know the rest.

Mind you, the obvious point here is not just "more kids" it's "more white kids" since MAGAts, duh. 

As I pointed out back in November of '24, the "problem" of an aging native population can be "solved" by immigration (or, conversely, that eliminating immigration usually results in an aging, shrinking population).

But for MAGAts that's a nonstarter. Hence the Mutterskreuz 2.0.

Anyway, this came to mind today because it's my daughter's birthday today. She's 19.

She's a terrific person, and I'm glad she's my daughter. I wouldn't trade our 17-and-a-half-years together for anything. 

But.

Here's the thing; she and her brother are, in economic terms, expensive luxuries.

Seriously. They've cost her mother and I...well, lots of money. And time. And emotional investment, general head- and heartaches...they're wonderful kids, I love them dearly, but...

If your "chorus of ideas...for persuading Americans to...have more children." were limited to trivial dumbshit like a measly $5K tax credit or similar gimmicks that range from useless to outright insulting?

You can fuck right off with that shit.

The death of the eleven-kid-family is baked into any industrialized society. Once childhood mortality drops to a statistical rounding error and mechanization makes homegrowing extra farm- or millhands superfluous?

People stop pushing out sprogs.

They're fucking hard work. Good work, if you and they are lucky. But decades of often-difficult, always-expensive, sometimes-heartbreaking labor whether you're lucky or not. Even one kid is work. Two is twice the work. Four? Six? Fuck me sideways, no! 

Early on my now-ex and I agreed; two, full stop. And, frankly, after losing Bryn Rose had Sheadon been a little girl? We might have stopped there. It's hard to express how difficult it was to roll the pregnancy dice again after Bryn. Terrifying. To do that four, six, eight more times?

You're out of your motherfucking mind.

And the MAGAt version is actually even worse:

"First of all, it’s telling that this administration will do anything other than what families really need. If the Trump administration was actually interested in supporting parents, they’d be pushing for paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, and an end to laws that make it deadly for people to give birth.

Actually, scratch that—because the administration’s “baby boom” push isn’t just about boosting the birthrate. It’s about reasserting a rigid, traditional vision of American family life: one where parents are straight, women are submissive, and the bro-natalists in charge get to pretend it’s all for the good of the nation."

Color me shocked, bro.

So, no. Nobody but the Quiverfull loons will sign up for this nonsense. Just like the other creepy, weird MAGATrump shit, it's just a clown car full of weirdos.

But whatever. Screw the MAGAts, it's her birthday, so...

Happy Birthday, kiddo. 

You kick ass.

Twenty-one

As always, today.

Fortunately it’s nasty, rainy, and cold…utterly unlike that radiant early spring through which you came and then were gone so swiftly. When every one of those bright, brief blooms would live longer than you did.

 

I often have much to say to you today, on your birthday, the only one you ever had.

 

Today, it's just this: I miss you, love. I'm grieved you are not with us today.

 

Today you’d have been of age to the drink taken, and I’d have pledged you with whiskey and love and pride, my daughter, my dear.

 

 
Instead, tonight I’ll pledge to your memory alone.

 

Bryn Rose Gellar 

March 1 2002-March 2 2002.

The Queen of the Little Sea...

 ...is another year older.

How she manages to be so terrific while juggling me and two teenage kids and being Miss Debbie the School Secretary I have no idea. But she does, and does it well.

I loved you then and I love you still.

navigare necesse est; amare est necesse, etiam

Life in the Dream House

Things have been so busy I didn't even get a post up for my birthday back on the 4th of October.

Well, there you have it; 57 trips around the sun. No wonder I feel tired.

Other than the embarassing tiara the best moment of the day was the cake; my Bride gave me a classic every-verging-on-passe'-man's-dream-gift; a nubile blonde popping out of his birthday cake:

Mind you, she was legless and only 6 inches tall, but then I'm not exactly Cary Grant myself.

But I had it from my child that her plastic conical breasts tasted just like vanilla frosting.

Happy Birthday to me, then.

LVI

It's the sum
of the first six
triangular numbers,

some kind of
Stonehenge black magic,
being born in '56,
then turning it.

Somebody said,

"Watch your back,
both Abe and Adolf
were shot in the head
at fifty-six ―

both the good and bad
could be targeted."

My Alice was good,
leader of a certain world,
hers no less tragic,
dead at the same age.

But I should be okay ―

my name doesn't begin
with the pyramid A,

I'll avoid theaters,
packing,
and most of all,
politics.

~ Tess Kincaid

This year the lavish sun warmed me and the gentle wind fanned me and for just one afternoon banished the cold aches and stiffness that serve to remind me, like a blind slave standing behind me, that life is as fleeting as glory and that mine has more yesterdays than tomorrows.

But that is fitting, withal; we owe God and ourselves a death. The trick is in filling the time and space between our birth and that death with living.

I hope I have done that.

When I look back I have remorse but no regrets.

When I look forwards I have hope but no illusions.

If I can do anything to make it so I will leave my world better than I found it; from my works, from my words, in the lives of my children and those I have touched.

I have loved extraordinary women.

I have seen flares in the night over the Gulf of Fonseca, and held my living son in my hands still warm from his mother's womb.

I have drunk deeply of the kisses of dark passion, and watched the sun set behind the Sierra in blue and purple as rich as wine and peaceful as the descending night.

It has been a good half-century and six.

I Knew A Woman

(By Theodore Roethke)

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).

Forty-six years ago you parted company with your mother for the first time; today you are with her and parted from me, yet you will not be parted from me. You are my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.

I know our love will not last forever.

But I can hope that it will last as long as we live.

Happy Birthday, love.

Flann O'Brien 1911-1966

"Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop. When a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind. Sweeny in the trees hears the sad baying as he sits listening on the branch, a huddle between the earth and heaven; and he hears also the answering mastiff that is counting the watches in the next parish. Bark answers bark till the call spreads like fire through all Erin. Soon the moon comes forth from behind her curtains riding full tilt across the sky, lightsome and unperturbed in her immemorial calm."

This day a century ago we were gifted with one of the great strange and lyrical voices of our age. Brian O'Nolan was born in County Tyrone.

I just happen to be feeling a great deal of kinship with O'Nolan at the moment. Born just a day after my own birthdate he was the same age I am now - 54 - when he died of heart failure.

Writing as Flann O'Brien he produced one of the truly fine stories in the English tongue; "At Swim-Two-Birds", a combination of poem, stream-of-consciousness blog, and surrealist novel. It may be the most bizarre and unique things to come out of Dublin since James Joyce. He was the source of a fountain of other fine works, many published under other names as he was an employee of the government of Ireland and thus prohibited from writing or otherwise expressing political and social opinion.

If you're interested, you can find it here on-line. It's not for all tastes, but, musha, it is without doubt a very memorable flavor indeed.

Far Overhead

The date of my arrival on Earth as an individual was marked, according to Wikipedia, by "...panic overt(aking) the American public, which created an enormous sense of vulnerability regarding the United States' ability to defend its territory. Adding to this fear was the element of surprise...which left the American public in what was observed as a “wave of near-hysteria"

I wasn't responsible. Really. I wasn't.

It was this guy...

"Простейший Спутник-1"

...better known as Sputnik.

Funny, in a way; the birth of the Space Age (or at least the Space Race) the same day as my own. And here we are just over half a century later with the Space Age reduced to a sagging badly-maintained space station loafing about in high Earth orbit with no particular purpose and nothing to look forward to except obsolescence.

I hope this is not a personal commentary as well.

Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called Sputnik's radio signal "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

No one ever described me quite so poetically.

Well, damn.

My Soviet counterpart lasted 90 days. The radio transmitter fell silent in early November when the batteries went dead. The satellite's low orbit decayed through the autumn of 1957 until on 4 JAN 58 the object re-entered Earth's atmosphere and was consumed in a fire that probably lasted no more than a few seconds.

The reentry is not reported to have been observed.And here I still am.

Little PS-1 might just have been responsible for much of the modern world. It stunned the U.S. public and jump-started much of the Fifties and Sixties science boom in my country. The Wiki entry says that Sputnik-1 "...would eventually invent the Internet, upon which this page is published, NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education. One consequence of the Sputnik shock was the perception of a "Missile Gap." This was to become a dominant issue in the 1960 Presidential campaign"

Which leads me back to last night.

As I was driving home I got to thinking.

Who am I?

What am I doing, and why?

When I was a child I dreamed like a child. Except I dreamed that I would shake the world, that I would leave a name that would echo down the years with a grandeur and a whispering, like Hulagu Khan with his pyramid of skulls.

And then I grew up into the real world.

But when I was a younger man I still had at least some pretensions to playing a part on the world's greater stage. Not inventing NASA or the Internet, perhaps, but as a soldier I was involved in events that changed the way the world wagged, for better or worse. I went places and did things that, in their small way, impacted those places and things. I had notions about the world and my ability to affect it, and those notions, while exaggerated, made me at least believe that I was changing the world and the lives of the people in it.I spent a moment yesterday reading about the people who are "occupying Wall Street". For all that I think they are a quixotic and forlorn hope they are, at least, acting out their beliefs and those beliefs - that my country is and continues to be fallen into the hands of malefactors of great wealth and that only by prying that wealth from the levers of power will there be any chance that the Lesser Breeds such as I and my family will have any chance at having a say in our own futures beyond mere random chance - while my part is to sit and read about them and then go home to my dinner.

I think about myself today; slowed, domestic, exercising myself in the public fora through nothing more than this pallid electronic medium...and contrast that with the younger man in his jump boots and aid bag.

I think about joining that group in Zucotti Park, about more; about the kind of men who fought the company thugs and the National Guards for the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day, who fought the FBI and the state troopers for civil rights, who fought the British soldiers for liberty and law.

And immediately think; but what about my family?

Who will work to pay off their mortgage, their schooling, their food? Who will help them with their homework, find their stuffed pets (my son just awoke crying that his small stuffed manatee had swum away somewhere in the bedding. At eight years old. At two in the morning. Sheesh.), who will help my bride through her transition to her next job if I am arrested, if I lose my work fighting the banksters...if I'm suddenly not there, who will be?

Thus does domesticity - and my own fears - make a coward of me.

Don't get me wrong. I've had a hell of a fucking good half-century-and-four. I've lived well and foolishly, loved badly and immoderately, sampled life here and there and liked the taste of it. I've seen the sun come up over the Red Sea and set into the mountains of Panama. I've caressed the naked skin of the woman who has borne our children, and felt the fear of violent death and the elation of its passing-by.

And I have, I hope, more yet to come; pride, and passion, the work of helping my children to grow strong and good, in fighting (still...) in what ways I can to make my house, my city, my nation, and my world more honorable, more equitable, more honest, and more realistic places than they might be without my mite's worth.

But I wouldn't be human, and I wouldn't be who I am, if I didn't regret not being...more than I am.That I didn't invent the Internet or pile up my pyramid of skulls no longer troubles me.

But still, in these quiet early morning hours, I can't keep myself as I sit at my darkened desk in my silent house from straining, just a bit, to hear the faint beep-beep-beep in the night sky far overhead.

My Son

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready...

Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

- Sharon Olds

Happy eighth birthday, buddy. I love you.

Princesses

This is Maxine.She is an Adventure Princess.

And when you're an Adventure Princess, you know your Fate: it's to Have Adventures;
This is Lucia.She is a Warrior Princess.

And when you're a Warrior Princess, your Destiny is already Written; you must Fight.With Adventure Princesses, if no one else.

Happy Fifth Birthday, Adventure Princess. I love you.

Full-contact Birthdays

Not for the faint of heart.But eight years ago today a little guy came onto the scene and changed our world. He's gone through Elmos and Thomas Trains and Star Wars and now he's a fierce soldier fighting the cyberwars of otherwhere. But he's still my beloved Peep, and he and his little sister still rock my world.Your feet go so quickly now, and your strides are longer every evening. Every morning I wake and find that time has stolen away the little ones I put to bed the night before and replaced them with a bigger girl and older boy, a little taller, a little wiser, a little further from the soft, warm babies I held to be enfolded in the sweet baby smells and to touch the soft baby skin.

I love you both, my little hostages to Fortune. May tomorrow and tomorrow see us safe abed and all well.

Birthday Girl

We don't know, and probably never will, whether this really was the day four years ago when a woman - whom we will also probably never know - went into labor, probably in a private home, probably somewhere near the city of Dongguan in Guangdong Province in the People's Republic of China.We don't know and probably never will know whether it was an easy labor or a difficult one, whether the woman was young, middle-aged, whether she was a sunny, cheerful sort of person, whether she went through the effort to see her child into the world with her friends and family about her or alone, prey to the fears that suffering unaided through such a great labor might be expected to summon from the lonely darkness.We do know that the baby girl she lifted in her arms had what in the bad old days would have been called the "cat's mouth"; a cleft lip and upper jaw.

We don't know if that was why this woman left the baby outside a filling station one morning several weeks later. We don't know if she was pressured to give the baby up by her family, boyfriend, or husband. We don't know if it was because the baby had difficulty nursing and was failing to thrive, and the worried mother had decided that those more powerful and wealthy than she could help the tiny girl in a way that she couldn't.We will never really know what the little girl's first year-and-a-half was like, in the "Social Welfare Institute" in Dongguan. We know that it couldn't have been much good for when we first met her that Friday evening two and a half years ago in the immense hotel on Shamian Dao she was a tiny, underweight, crewcut little thing; nonverbal, barely ambulatory and full of giardia.We'll probably never be able to know what she thought and felt that first long winter as we struggled to understand each other. We'll never know what she needed, or wanted, or the whys that started each tear that fell.

There's so much that we'll never know.But we know that it has been a very long way for such a small girl to run in four short years of life.

You've grown so big, and stretched so far. Those slender little legs you barely used now carry you so quickly that your mother and I can barely keep up with you. Climbing high, singing, dancing, telling stories to the accompanyment of your own giggles...you've become a very, very Big Girl.So in that time you've done what we all have to do at some time; you've taken hold of the day that someone else gave to you and made it your own. You're becoming the child, who will be the adolescent and, eventually, the woman you choose to be; smart girl, sweet girl, happy girl, stubborn girl, silly girl, loved and loving girl, funny girl, serious girl, growing girl, daddy's girl...
Birthday Girl.

My Angel is a Mudflap Girl

Thank's, Powell's Books......for finally finding me a way to fit into to the North Portland vehicle community, yet in a way I can still respect myself.

My own literary angel is looking a a birthday coming up, which means I need to find her a terrific new book. She's pretty picky; likes science fiction and fantasy if they're well written, will enjoy fiction with the same caveat. No romance, history or politics. Intelligent self-help-type books are OK, although she doesn't really read crafty/projecty-type stuff. Some of her favorite authors are David Gerrold, Judith Merkle Riley, Diana Norman/Arianna Franklin, Tom Robbins. Any suggestions?

Unexpected Largesse

Remember how I told you that Birthday Week was over?

Well, okay. Sorta. But yesterday morning we shared a delightful surprise left over from Birthday Week: Grandma and Grandpa Chief's box of prezzies arrived for both little peeps.We all liked the books, though I suspect I know where "The Seven Wonderful Cats" comes from, Mom...But the big successes were different for each child.Big Peeper loved his Christmassy nightcap, twirling the tassel-end around like a vaudeville villian's moustaches, and even wearing it to bed that night, as shown on TV.Little girl, however, spurned her snowboarder hat and went for the little wooden duck, to the point of insisting on taking it with her to daycare where sister-diva-rival Baby Ryan and young Bubba were to be overawed by Missy's largesse. And here she is! Looking appropriately mysterous and alluring.So thanks, Grandma and Grandpa Chief!

Birthday Week

Birhday Week is over.

It was a lot of work, but it was fun, too. What helped is that the Peeper's Sunday turned out to be a little spitty but pretty much downpour-free, which meant we could spend much of his party running in and out of the porch door. Little guys cooped up inside?

Not so good.

But though the dogwood blossoms were wet with the preceding night's rain, it didn't pour again until last night. Pretty, neh?That morning we celebrated the sun by planting Mommy's clematis and the kids' little pansies. Much of the digging and backfilling and watering were done by the Peep his ownself. Missy "helped" by toddling around and climbing the porch rail.As much as anything, he seemed to enjoy bossing his dad and his baby sister around the most. He was a good little gardiner!Little Miss couldn't do much to help when planting her flower, although she did make dirtballs out of the spoil, throw them and announce "I'm throwing snowballs!" But she sure was proud of her flower when it was all planted and pretty.Then it was inside for breakfast. Baby girl proceeded to clown around with her food - which is a mom and dad no-no, but she was so damn cute it was hard to tell her to stop. We start by shovelling some chow into the cakehole......and then we show off how much we got into our mouth......and then we make silly faces...[and this one, though I burn in hell for it - we call "Missy's O Face". Stuff like this is why your girlfriend's daddy (or your daddy, if you're female) was so paranoid about his daughters' dating. We laugh at this stuff now, but...]...and then give everyone a big happy smile expecting the applause. Bravo, Little Miss!So that afternoon we had the Peep's actual party. He was pretty cool about it until an hour before the other kids were due to arrive. And then the excitement began to build and he started bouncing off the walls...Everyone seemed to have a good time. Munchies worked (at least I wasn't stuck with a ton of leftovers), and Missy had her favorites again, shrimp (tho she doesn't understand why the tasty crunchy part at the end is supposed to come off). Peep wanted cupcakes instad of cake and that went well, too. He liked all his presents, and there was much playing. But the BIG fave was...

...the balloon rockets.

These guys were fun at Missy's party last week, and with more kids (and more parents) to shoot and race after them they were the hit of the party. Our beloved former-neighbor The Poet won the prize for shooting BOTH the highest (at least 30 feet) and the farthest - his ballon made it all the way over the street into the yard of our diagonal-across-the-street neighbor, probably a good 120 feet. Rayethon should hire this kid for their anti-ballistic missile program.

By dinnertime there were balloons in trees, balloons on roofs...ours and the surrounding yards had been bombed like Schweinfurt.Everybody fired off one or two...

Even Little Girl. Though try as she might, she still needed help fueling the thing with the little air pump.

The little boys were little boys: the screeched and raced around, and anything and everything that came to hand were toys.

At one point they fired up the computer to play the "Path of the Jedi" game, and I think the other boys had as much fun critiquing the player's as they did playing. Mind you, I'm still getting sticky juice-fingerprints off the screen and little cupcake crumbs from between the keys. Much advice was tendered as to how to blow apart the evil droids.

The theme of the day was, of course, "Star Wars", and between the toy lightsaber he got for a gift, the two he had in the house already (since you can't be a Jedi without someone to fight, i.e. the Sith Daddy) and the one that his little buddy Evan brought we had some ferocious battles across the deck and down into the yard.

When that palled, there were little Star Wars dolls - sorry, action figures - to continue the fight. I'm also still finding little blasters and bits of equipment across the living room...and then there were trucks and airplanes and other boyanalia to play with in his room. The place stl looks like Ground Zero.

Finally we had the cupcakes and opened presents. Everyone left smiling. And, even better, our friends Christine and her two boys (famous on this blog as the family of Oscar, the Ginormous Fish That Was Too Mean to Die) stayed for dinner and a good evening's catching-up. It was a little extra work for me - my back is sore from all the standing, running, cooking, cleaning and parenting. But good. Real good.

So everyone's all caught up on birthdays. Time to look ahead to May, hope that the skies start to clear and the weather warm.

As for the Big Picture: we're still slow at my work. Portland was badly overbuilt even before the Crash of 2008, and our private development market has pretty much collapsed. We're still limping along with a badly reduced commercial sector and we're fighting for every federal and municipal project we can find...but it's hard, and scary.

And, of course, you can't explain to your kids that daddy's working a 4-day week and is worried about his company going under. They shouldn't have that weight placed on them at 3 and 6. But I do wake in the night, worried for us; what if I DO lose my job? Could we stay in the house? Would we have to move away, look for work? What would happen, and how could we keep it as least-bad as possible?There's a world of worry that they know nothing about and, I hope, don't ever have to. My parents were children of the Depression, and it shows. In some ways it was very good for them, as adults, in making them the adults they are. But as children, you can tell from the things that DON'T say how frightening and difficult is was for them. I don't want my little boy to be a child of the Second Great Depression.

So happy birthday, little man. I'm glad you can be silly and happy, and I hope I can keep that world safe for you a little longer. There is time enough and more to grow up, and sufficient to the day are the evils thereof.

And, speaking of difficult and dangerous things; while I still consider the Bush foreign policy approach to negotiating (or, rather, NOT negotiating) with difficult states like Iran and North Korea the height of foolishness, I have to admit that it is spot on when it comes to really intransigent polities like cats.

Miss Lily: Meeeeoowwww!!! ["GodDAM it! When will you get your lazy, immense carcass out of the scratcher and get me some goddam CAT FOOD, hunh?!?"]

Me: Huh? Wha..? No, cat, you got your can of food last night.

Miss Lily: "Me-OW! Meow?" ["Bite my furry cat ass, monkeyboy. I'm not joking. Feed me, Seymour, feed me now! Or do you want some of this?"]

Me: "Nope. Sorry. It's dry food or nothing, pussy cat."

Miss Lily: Meeeeuuurrrowww!" [Okay, you hairless ape, I gave you fair warning. Now say hello to Mister Incisor!"]

Me: "What the...OWWWWW! You little bee-yotch!"

{sound of cat feet running down the hall}

Miss Lily: "Meow." [Haha. Who's the higher animal now, fatso?"]