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.

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Life is Life: A Master Chief story

When my father was dying last spring several of you asked me to tell you something more about him. I don't know...yes, I do know why that occurred to me this morning; a friend of mine just lost her mother and I thought back to losing my father.

So. You recall that I told you that my father the Master Chief was a proudly intellectual man, an engineer, with an engineer's dislike of obfuscation and insistence on precision in both word and deed. That made him something of an uncomfortable man to be around; he was perfectly capable of the sorts of small evasions and elisions that we use to lubricate our interactions with others, but one could never be sure if, or when, he might simply state an unpalatable truth. Not rudely, perhaps, or as a weapon of social combat, but simply as he saw it.

I'm not sure when this was - probably some time in the early Seventies when I was between puberty and young adulthood and full of the sort of rudely anxious certainty that seems to come with our early teens - but I was holding forth at dinner on the unfair requirement that I perform certain chores during the long summer vacation, in that that vacation time was itself limited and the requirement to put my own entertainment on hold even further seemed grossly burdensome, a needless reduction of my already-painfully-short free time. The Master Chief listened to this gravely, and nodded, and replied:

"Well, yes, but you still have more free time than you will ever have again in your life. After your school days are over you will never have this much freedom again. Not just less but much less. You'll probably never have more than two weeks vacation the rest of your life. You'll work at your job that means five days a week or more, no spring breaks, no summer vacation, no half-days, no two weeks a Christmas. Just work and two weeks a year."

This seemed appallingly, punitively unfair, and I said so. Was that it? School and work, work and school, endlessly and forever with only the thinnest of hopes of a rest? What was the point, then? What was the end? When did it stop?

"Once you're older, perhaps, if you've planned and worked carefully, there might be a "retirement" when you will have all the free time you could hope for." he noted. I wailed that this seemed even worse; the only hope for freedom was to hope to be to ancient to enjoy it. What hope then?

"Well, then you die." was his conclusion. Dinner done, he retired to his chair to smoke a pipe and mark up the paperwork he'd brought home with him.

My mother was horrified; "Jack!" she exclaimed, and hurried to reassure me that life wasn't that bleak. But I think that my father was well satisfied to remind me, hedonistic youth of the hothouse hedonism of the Seventies and the relative wealth that his work had brought us, that at bottom what mattered was living up to your promises, taking satisfaction from work and life well-done, and dying without regrets, without leaving your works unfinished.

And that was my father, or at least a part of him.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

Elevenses

When you were a baby you were the noisiest, most restless baby in the history of babies.

We kept you beside us for the first half year, in a sort of platform thing that stuck onto the side of the bed. It was called a "co-sleeper" and was supposed to be the perfect solution to keeping your infant near you without actually having them in the bed where you could, say, roll onto them in a drunken stupor and suffocate them.

We called it the "co-screamer" and looked upon it with unmitigated loathing for the nocturnal hell-din it signified.

When you were four you had a caretaker you adored. She and her wife loved you and indulged you and scolded you and watched over you and you thought that the sun rose and set on her. That same year your elders here in Oregon decided in their wisdom that people like your caregiver shouldn't be able to call their beloveds "husband" or "wife", and we tried to explain to you why she was sad. We told you that some boys liked girls and some girls liked boys but some girls liked girls.

"But dada..." you said, insistently, "Janey and Susie are boys."

When you were seven you had night terrors that lifted you shivering and sobbing from your bed in a dream so terrifying that I could not console you.

When you turned eight you told me that there were two people who knew everything about everything in the Universe; God, and Santa Claus, and you weren't certain about God.

You told me that you would rouse in the small hours of the night and think about Big Things; stars and galaxies, about how big the world was and how many things were in it and how you might never know all of them and how that made you feel small and sort of sad.

When you were ten you would break into tears, sometimes at the smallest of checks, because you had frustrations and fears and hurts you couldn't express. You hurled yourself at what you loved, like your mother, with the wild thoughtlessness of one who has never been badly hurt and then were aggrieved when she pushed you away as too rough.

Now you are eleven.

Even after more than a decade together I am sometimes amazed at what I don't know or understand about you.

I have no notion where you inherited your slender build; your mother and almost all of her family are compact and boxy rather than gracile (where they are not simply as round as balls...) and I am as bulky and squat as most of mine. What long-legged girl or lanky boy married into your family too long ago to be remembered, whose small, rounded arms and legs are reborn in you? Certainly not the one you took your rufus colors from, all thick Celtic hair and freckled fair skin.

And perhaps the most strange: I cannot seem to see though your eyes. You are too different from me, sky where I am earth, cloud-topped highs and drenching teary lows where I stretch away endlessly calm and stolid.

I do not understand your frequent glums, how often you give up quickly rather than persevere, why you seem to see boredom and frustration where I see patient learning and practice.

I love you, but I often don't understand you. We are air and flame against earth and water.

Here you are now, poised near the Land's End of boyhood, at once straining to strike out into the dark seas of adolescence while still clinging to the last vestiges of childhood; your mother's touch, your stuffed friends, the small warmths and cozinesses of your brightly-painted child's room. You are beginning to strain away from me while I am still finding new things to love about you.

I love your small sweetnesses and your great silliness, your quiet moments and your wild, tearing energy. I love you, my no-longer-small-boy, with the open-eyed recognition of all your faults and failings that live alongside your virtues and strengths. Family is for loving when there may be little liking and we are, at the last, family.

It's late, and I am tired, but before I am done I will walk slowly down the darkened hallway in my halting step, to lay my hand on your head where you sleep wondering what dreams you dream and hoping, in the still, silent moment the hope of every father for every son; that he will wake each day wiser, kinder, and stronger than he lay down.

And so I do for you, my son.

Happy Birthday.

Carrot? Stick?

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Here's the deal. The woman who posted this is really a Good Person. Kind, caring, great mom...she was instrumental in the foundation of Occupy Portland. Has an immense sense of social justice. Very serious about Doing the Right Thing.

Yet...

This little motivational card typifies everything about my friends on the Left who are a certain type of lefty that drives me absolutely crazy.

It's all the kindness, all the love that it prescribes as the cardinal (or even the only) method of child-rearing; "...if we choose to be there as a guide, as a compassionate presence that can motivate from a place of genuine interest with patience and understanding so that ultimately our children will WANT to do things."

Mmmph.

Now in case you're already reaching for the phone to dime me off to CSD, look; I don't believe that kids - any kids, my kids, yours, whosever - should be raised through force and fear. I agree that "tricks and threats" are not a good idea; I didn't like them as a kid and I don't like them now, either as an adult or a parent.

But I do think that there is more to parenting...hell, there's more to LIFE...than "genuine interest...patience and understanding."

The bottom line is that there are some things that nobody wants to do. Nobody "wants" to go to the dentist. Nobody "wants" to pay taxes. Nobody "wants" a colonoscopy, to break up with their lover, to clean up human waste, to go forward through mortar fire, to work long hours in bad conditions. No amount of interest, patience, understanding, love, money, incredibly great mind-altering monkey sex...will make any of that shit more likeable and want-able.

But that stuff still has to get done.

Some of the most important lessons I've ever learned in life involved discovering the ability to persist through truly rotten times and places and finish whatever task I had to complete. That required a certain degree of internal toughness that wasn't inherited or inspired from within; it was instilled, and often through the teaching of people who were anything but compassionate and gentle.

So, yes, as parents (or peers, or leaders, or mentors, or followers) we should be patient, compassionate, understanding, and interested. That's an important part of teaching and learning; the saying "If you don't care about them they won't care about you." is true as hell. The only thing a savage who "leads" through fear earns is a cooked-off grenade through the door of his hootch as soon as his victims work up the nerve.

But...I think there has to be some steel there, too. I believe there has to be a place for a simple declarative statement; "You need to get this done. Now." Because...well, because sometimes it does have to get done now. And not in your time, or in your way, but at some time and in some way that you may not "want" because if you don't then other people - and, possibly, you - will lack for something or suffer ill consequences.

I always get the sense that this kinder-gentler thinking has permeated the Occupy movement and much of the Left in general. It's the need for consensus, the unwillingness to be rude, judgmental, abrupt, and unpleasant. Sure, we do our name-calling, but to what effect? How does marching in the street calling some bloated bankster a "vampire squid" affect said bloated plutocrat up there in his paneled office? How does that reinstate Glass-Steagall? How does that kill the sunofabitch's "carried interest" deduction?

Where's the lefties who "want" to do the had graft of twisting legislators' arms, drumming for donations, running campaigns, winning votes and defenestrating these rotten plutocratic bastards and their bought Republican stooges?

I'm not exactly calling for the rope and the torch...but, still...I just don't see how you beat Darth Cheney with love, patience, and understanding. And I don't see how that - and ONLY that - helps give a kid the kind of persistence in the face of frustration and lack of pleasant reward to become an adult who can do unpleasant things when they need to be done.

I am being to harsh on my liberal friend? I feel like I am being so. I sort of hate the feeling of being the Mean Boy and rudely thumbing my nose at all that lovingkindness and gentility.

Yet I can't escape wondering if people like the Homestead strikers and the freedom riders of Montgomery, the Paris Communards and the students and workers on the barricades of 1848 and 1917 - the humble people who actually took on the bosses and their hard men and changed the world - might have had something a trifle more demanding in their upbringing than genuine interest, patience, and understanding.

Who's Your Daddy?

Busy couple of weeks combined with, sadly, a grim headshaking despair at the ridiculous inability of about a third of my fellow Americans to put down their fucking teabags and accept things like paying taxes as the price of civilization and the lunacy of the idea of returning our nation to the open oligarchy of the Gilded Age that has kept me silent.

That, and March is roaring in like a sorry, soggy, mangy sort of lion and with it the annual stations of my personal cross. Ugh.

But thinking about Bryn made me think of parenting in general, and that, in turn, turned me to a couple of news items pitched at me or dropped on my digital carpet like a particularly noisome headless mouse by some friends of mine.



And, speaking of noisome things, when you have come to recognize the sound of your dying cat's ass exploding it may be that the time has come for said moggie to find herself half in love with easeful Death. I'm just sayin'; the laundry list (and I do not speak figuratively here) of the items you have shat on is getting longer than your tail, cat, and you've shat on that, too. I've spent fifteen years with you curled on my lap, little friend, but this incessant incontinence is wearing on my patience and the overall aroma of the house as well.

Still, it seems monstrously unfair to end a life, even a small life, because the end of that life has become nothing worse than a rather embarrassing and physically unpleasant nuisance.

Anyway, the main reason I started this post is because a friend of mine - who is childless by choice and chooses to continue as such - linked to this article and, yes, it is fucking Newsweek but that in and of itself should not be an excuse. The author's point is pretty straightforward:

"As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes."

But more to my point is that this is a pretty standard screed you hear from the sort of anti-tax/pro-oligarchy types mentioned above; OMFG! We're not breeding! We're dooooomed!



Not mentioned in these screeds - and not mentioned by the author of this Newsweek thing - is that the subvocal corollary of this wail of despair is that "us wealthy white people aren't spawning..!" Or white people, anyway, wealthy or no. The enthusiastic breeding by the lesser sorts beyond the Law - the blacks and browns, both imported and domestic - aren't mentioned. It's the prospective dearth of precious whities that seems to be being mourned here.

That's pretty goddamn ignorantly racist, but, whatever.

But beyond that is the entirely, painfully, bone-stupid obliviousness of the damn thing.

Because the human bottom line has always, always, been that once people - and the people are usually but not always women because women end up doing the most of it - gain the ability to safely prevent pregnancy they do.

I've talked a fair bit on this blog about parenting and my take on it. That take hasn't changed. It's not really hard and it's not really work. If anything the worst parts of parenting are most similar to the worse parts of warfare; hours, days and weeks of endless, mind-numbing boredom spiked with irritating trivialities interrupted by brief moments of heart-squeezingly frightful terror.

So, not surprisingly, if you're sane and not a Duggar the first thing you do when you find a way to have sex and not have babies is to use it.

L love my kiddos. Usually. They're typically sweet and loving, silly and imaginative and vigorous and gentle.



But they're also kids. Raising a kid is often like playing catch with a Labrador; you're gonna get bored a long, long time before the kid or the dog. What's your limit on My Little Pony or tic-tac-toe or playing with LEGOs? I have no idea in absolute terms but I will tell you that it's way lower than your kids'.

And they're also greedy and short-sighted, demanding, irrational, and their intellectual horizon is typically about the far side of this room. They're often whiny, and fight with each other, and my wife, and me. Their little lives are a constant struggle for attention, which is wearing when you're at the stage where you're constantly struggling for dignity and a little silence.


So what did this Newsweek idiot expect? That all those smart twentysomethings were gonna take a kiddo HEAT-round for Team America? That Joe and Molly were gonna give up that loft in the Pearl and move to Clackamas and start cranking sprogs out of her belly like water out of a hose so our journalist can be sure that there's someone to change his Depends thirty years down the road? That those young white folks would throw themselves on the baby grenade so the national demographics aren't all jacked up in thirty years?

Sorry, pal; people don't work like that.

So my bride and I chose to go down the kid road.

But I won't pretend for a moment that that road's been a cheery nonstop ride, or that there's something wonderful and virtuous about it. The pavement's cracked and rough, the scenery's nice in spots but damn deadly dull in others, and there's not a single goddamn way to be sure that the entire journey won't be for nothing when you get to the end and the sign there says "convict" or "unemployed layabout" or "surly lout" or "whiny drama queen". If you learn anything during parenting it's that you get about 1 or 2 out of the 10 things that influence how and who your kid turns out to be. Or IF they turn out to be; this Friday is an ever closer reminder that all that love and care and wishing and hoping can end in a sifting handful of ashes.

But that's another thought for another day.

Hard Work II: Electric Boogaloo

Apparently the latest D.C. flame war is the Ann-Romney-vs-Hillary-Rosen Chain-Cage Death Tweet Grudge Match.

This sucker kicked off after the Romneybot trotted out the Little Woman to try and display that, yes, indeedy, he DOES understand that Wimmens Are People, Too, and so they should vote for him because he married one of these women-things so he can do women-positive stuff like cut people off those oh-so-demeaning entitlement programs and refund the money saved to the wealthy (like...Ann Romney!).Ms. Rosen pointed out, rather obviously, that Mrs. Romney wasn't exactly wet-nursing a dozen toddlers in a go-down off of Gin Lane; she was (and is) an insanely rich housewife who could afford to "stay home and raise five boys", as opposed to 95% of the rest of the moms in the U.S., who would quickly be reduced to standing on a streetcorner with a baby on one hip and a basketful of matches on the other if their family lost their share of the income.

This pisses me off on a number of levels.

It pisses me off because of the ridiculous assumption that stay-home moms "work" harder than moms who, y'know, work.

Which is ridiculous, because stay-home moms are way at the bottom of the work food-chain, below the working moms and far, far below the single working moms, for whom there are simply not enough hours in the day.

It pisses me off because of the way it automatically genuflects to the "traditional" wife and mother without any thought of how difficult it is to "choose" to be a stay-home mom after the relentless thirty-year cramdown of wages for the non-two-yacht family.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about this.

That's the Twitter feed from Rosen's original post. Go and read the comments from the Obama people walking Rosen's comment about how Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" back; "I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly.", "Families should remain off-limits" (because...Romney trotted out his little wifey for no reason other than personal pride?) and especially this one: "i personally believe stay at home moms work harder than most of us do."

To which I say; great gigongeous flaming titanic planetary-sized balls of horseshit.

And I speak with some authority because I've been a stay-at-home-dad. And a paratroop sergeant. And a diesel mechanic, a jumper stable undergroom, the downstairs guy in a JiffyLube^TM, a high school AND a community college teacher, and a professional geologist.

And I will freely tell you this; every single damn one of those jobs. Every one. Every fucking moment of every one.

Was harder than being a stay-at-home-dad.

Oh, there were things about being a SAHD that kinda sucked.

The hours often aren't great. The clientele is not always friendly. Flat-out the WORST thing is the fucking boredom; raising a kid is often like playing catch with a dog - trust me, you're going to get bored waaaaaayyyyyy before the dog (or the kid) does. Remind me I said that after reading "Thomas the Train and the Blustery Day" to your toddler for the eight zillionth time.

So at-home parenting is sort of like one of those brain-killing data entry jobs people with "computer science" degrees used to get in the Seventies and Eighties. Long, insanely dull, repetitive, occasionally panicky, sometimes stressful.


But "hard"?

Fuckety fuck, no.

And the reason this "Ohhh, those sweet stay-home mommies, they work so haaaard!" crap drives me so nuts is because - while they're doing their best to make things harder for the sort of people who don't have the Ann Romney kind of cash to hire nannies and au pairs and cleaning services and diaper services and all - the GOP sorts of people luuurves to talk about how wonderful and hard-working all those SAHMs and SAHDs are (though good luck expecting them to get excited about, you know, the people with penises staying home with the kiddos - how the hell you gonna hang with the Tea Party Commandos with that baby bag, there, dad?)

But here's the Big Reveal; staying at home with the kids really ain't hard work.Physically the worst nuisance is between about 18 months old and five or six; as babies they're basically noisy luggage - you can take them with you wherever you need to go as long as you remember their mountain of kit (diapers, wubbies, change of clothes, Cheerios...) - and after that they're in school most of the day. It's a pain again when they're older - starting in the late-grade-school tween years - because of the emotional headaches; you have to worry about herpes and smoking weed and drunk driving and on-line predators.

But the "work" part throughout pretty much consists of feeding 'em, cleaning them, and cleaning up AFTER them, and word up - nobody reading this is living in fricking "Little House on the Prairie".

And sure as HELL not Ann Romney. Little Mansion on the Hudson, probably.

Laundry? You got a machine for that. Dishes? You got a machine for that. Cleaning? How the hell long does it take to vacuum a floor and wipe down a countertop? You've got a fridge and a microwave and a range/over - you don't exactly have to hunt, kill, butcher, and roast a mammoth haunch over an open fire.

When my kid was little and I was out of work I swear, I could get pretty much all the housework done in the space it took for him to nap; maybe an hour, tops. I could toss him in the car and do the marketing, with stops on the way for the library and some coffee. Hang out at the bookstore, go to his fave indoor play place. I pretty much had a leisurely day with the kiddo, tantrums and the hour or so of housework aside.

Now...what I couldn't do was the stuff I liked doing; I couldn't sit and read (unless he was sleeping), or exercise, or watch a movie or a soccer match on television, or blog. And that was frustrating, no kidding.

But it was not effing hard work.

Nope.

So this pisses me off because it's a plain and simple attempt by a hereditary rich couple to try and con the marks suckers "independent" voters into believing that the RomneyTron 2000 is really a warm, empathetic humanoid that loves him some good ol' plain folks because he's, you know, a family man with a Hard-Working Li'l Woman just like them!

But instead it tells me the opposite.

Because as a guy who's been one; if this gomer and his wife think she was "working hard" when she was staying home with the kiddies and the nanny and the housekeeper and the gardener?

They need to go out and learn about real hard work.

'Cause hanging around the house vacuuming the carpets and wiping the baby's ass ain't it.

Nasty?Yep. I'll give you nasty.

A Poor Black Child

OK, here's an oddity. Maybe you can help me figure this one out.My little girl doesn't like talking about her pre-adoption life. She does the three-year-old version of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "la-la-la-la-la!" when you bring the subject up. She violently objected when I tried to talk about her birth mommy in China, pointing at Mojo and declaring "That's my mommy!".

So the other night, we were coming home from the Nickel Arcade after giving Mojo Mommy's Night Off and talking about what the Peeper is learning about Dr. King. The conversation turned to how people who come from different places look different, and upon being informed that she was Asian, Missy said:"I was born a poor black child am NOT Asian!"

Her brother - cartoon Scotsman as he is all red hair and freckles - insisted that she IS. Is NOT! Is!

I had to shut down the Peep before the tears arrived.The thing I can't figure out about this is:

Is Missy saying this because she hears "Asian" as "not like my mommy and daddy and brother" and is saying this just to insist that she is - i.e., she doesn't understand the entire concept of race and is just demanding her place in the family?

Or does she understand, and is she doing a Steve Martin and insisting she is TOO Caucasian like mommy and daddy and brother?I want Little Girl to like herself and be happy with who she is. And if what she's saying means the first expression then it's just a question of development and understanding. But the second argues a degree of dissatisfaction with her own appearance and ethnicity, which makes me a little saddened and a little worried, and I'm not quite sure which it is...

Love for Three Oranges

I have her blog bookmarked over on the sidebar because her combination of the art of living and the science of adorable daughters is so delightful, but every so often Maia over at Une Envie de Sel really brings the heat. And today she's smoking:

I had to steal this little drawing to show you. Hard to breakdown all the things that make it so terrific. The artistry, of course, the combination of dark and light, straight line and curve, colors and shapes and the arrangement of them all that turns a blank page into a little Faberge' gem that holds a moment within it.

But it's the subject of the drawing that so tickles my fancy. The hopeful daughter pleading from behind her treasured box of prepackaged, preservative- and artifical color-added, Stearman-biplane-orange, absolutely-no-ingredients-found-in-nature "Mac and Cheese"; the horrified veggie-Mom, her finger already raised in dire warning as the fruits of her local-produce-shopping lie packed wholesomely in the cloth bag at her feet...it's every parent's dream, nightmare and reality all lovingly presented in a simple illustration.

I've sent you over there before. But today is just a reminder that you pass her by at your own risk; there's always something piquant next to the saltcellar.

Private Time

Ah, they grow up so fast...Little Miss, as you can see, is becoming quite the Big Girl. In fact, she'll tell you just that; "I'm Big Girl!" she'll announce when you ask "Who's my baby girl?" "I'm not little - I'm big!" she crows.

I'm beginning to think she may be right.

The other morning we were rushing about getting ready for work, school and daycare when the Peeper flew into the bathroom needing to drain the hose. This, of course, meant that young lady immediately attempted to seize the porcelain high ground, shrieking "I gotta pee!", an arrant falsehood. I restrained Little so that Big could do his thing, and then told her that she could go about her business.Keep in mind that she's only been using the big toilet seat for a couple of months now, and we are accustomed to helping steady her on the seat. NOT that morning. She wriggled and struggled, her little pink pants around her knees, until I leaned back to see what the problem was.

"Do you want some help, sweetie?" I asked, and received a stern little headshake.

"No!" the watering can announced, "Private Time!"

I stepped back. "Are you sure, little Max?"

An impatient hand flipped me towards the hallway.

"Close the door!" she barked. I did.But daddies aren't quite obsolete yet. After urinating and wiping and flushing, she still had her pants down around her knees and I had to pull them up.

Ain't Misbehavin'

Just thinking out loud here. Bear with me.

Started with this article off the AP wire in the World's Worst Newspaper. Money graf is that 1/8-ton autistic 13-year-old gets canned from church for his tendency to "spit, wet his pants, made loud noises and nearly run) over people".

So, I'm thinking, here we are with the Peeper, who has become the all-world little drama king and Lord of the Tantrum Dance.Michael Flatley has nothing on my boy for kicking his heels. And we're in church, or a restaurant, or a library and he starts fussing, crying and screaming.

We're outta there.

I don't care if I'm literally carrying him like a screaming toddler sack. We're in the car going home. It's not the business of the other parishioners, diners or readers to have their eyes and ears assaulted by my uncontrolled offspring.

It doesn't matter to me if he's not being "bad" or naughty. It's not a question of "punishing" him for his tantrum. It's my personal conviction that my child's, and my family's emotional outbursts are not your or anyone else's problem. You, and they, shouldn't have to listen and watch for longer than it takes me to remove my kid from the area.

I feel a little less responsible in noisy public places like parks, pools or supermarkets. If he melts down there we just move away far enough for the screaming to be lost in the crowd noise...

Now obviously autism is an unusual case. But I'm not sure how this makes the circumstances different. Here's one of the moms from the AP article:

Barbara Coppo, whose 30-year-old son, Kenny, was banned from a Vallejo, Calif., health club for screaming, said Americans need to learn about living with autistic children. "Autism may frighten people because so little is known about the disorder," said Coppo, who wrote a book about her son. "The cause has not been scientifically proven and the victims often act in ways society doesn't understand."

While society may not understand, I damn sure understand that my treadmill workout isn't going to benefit from a thirty year old man standing next to me screaming like a factory whistle in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I don't know at that point whether he's autistic or just being a dick. Take it outside, Jack; your "why" is not my problem.

My opinion has always been that my right - and, by inference, my kids' rights - to swing our fists ends at the tip of the other person's nose. I'm not talking here about finding stuff to be offended at; violently objecting to, say, a mother quietly nursing on a bus or kids playing quietly in the library. I'm talking about out-of-control stuff like my little boy's tantrums. Like the dirty work in a Shakespeare play, I think it's my - and the autistic parents' - responsibility to ensure that it happens offstage for the rest of you. The "why" my kid is screaming is not your problem. Should it be? Is this an issue of public civility or basic rights for everyone to be in a public space?

So what do you think?

Esto es peor

One thing we pride ourselves here at the Fire Direction Center is our unswerving commitment to Truth. We give you parenting with the bark still on.

Or, in this case, the tears.

This started, innocently enough, as a tumble with Mommy on the grownups bed as Daddy finished getting dinner ready. But rough and tumble fun turned to rough play and somebody's little foot hit somebody else in the mouth.

Ohmifuckinggod. The tears.Peep sobbed bitterly, clutching a pillow to his owie lip. Missy wept buckets, apparently in sympathy, although she kept sobbing about her "bum-bum" even though she bore no visible wound.

Cuddling, ice and caresses had no effect.

Mojo was unable to do anything but ride out the storm.

Tears, oh the bitter, bitter tears.

Enough wailing for a dozen operas. More fingerpointing than a Mafia trial. Muffled cries of "She kicked me!" mingled with sobs of "Shea-shea!!" It was Drama multiplied by melodrama that only preschool and toddler can produce...a heartrending chorus of absolute and unconsolable sorrow.Until, of course, it was time to Ride the Bucking Mommy.

Stay up for eight seconds and win the prize.

Our first ear infection

We kept trying to figure out what was the problem with Little Miss.

First, she wasn't her usual happy girl self. LOTS of crying, easily upset, suddenly fussy and angry and rough.

Then she wasn't consoled by lots of mommy and daddy hugs and cuddles. She was more than normally clingy but the change in snuggling she received didn't do its usual work of producing shy smiles and merry giggles.

Monday night was the nadir. She didn't sleep beyond an hour at a stretch, waking fretful and weeping, thrashing in her sleep. Even a rare envelopment in the Family Bed wasn't helpful. At one point she was actually frightening, spasming and flailing frantically oblivious to parental caresses. I think that was when we realized that this was more than a cold, or a nightmare. The next day Mojo took her to the pediatrician and found out what it is:

It's an ear infection.

We were lucky with the Peeper; he never had one. So this caught us by surprise, and now we are better informed, as well as armed with antibiotics and a sloping pillow for little girls to sleep comfortably. She slept most of the night last night, and seems happier and more her usual self today.

But the saddest realization is that, as she was frightening us with her behavior in the dark, we both feared that there was something deeply "wrong" with her; that this was some sort of delayed symptom of neurological problems like autisim or god-knows-what sort of awful brain damage. So now we know and are sadder for the knowledge that although little Baoxin is asleep back in her orphanage in Liangjiang the damage we took from our time with her during our journey to China is with us still.

Cute Little Nipper

Our little angel, shown here contemplating some mischief, has begun to show some of the little devil inside all Good Girls.

Specifically; she's started to nip us.

This is hard to deal with, first, because it's difficult to tell whether this biting is a teething deal (Mojo's theory) or a "biting-is-fun" deal (my theory). We have pretty much discounted the "Satanic-Child-of-Evil" deal (Peeper's theory), although the Peep still nurses his bite mark, insisting that you never see Missy and Satan at the same time..!

Second because she's so darn cute, even when gnawing off part of your shoulder. She gives you SUCH a look with that sweet face just before that perfect rosebud mouth opens and those little pearly teeth emerge, like the slashing fangs of a vicious carnivore, to savage your flesh.

Heedless of the risk, I should tell you that our latest daddy-daughter fun is to "touch tongues" - she sticks out her teeny tongue, I stick out mine and we bonk the tips together and laugh - she has the most contagious giggle when she gets me plonk on the kisser. Mommy is horrified, which is part of the fun, and The Peeper thinks it's the grossest. The only downside is that Missy doesn't get the part where "touching tongues" isn't fun after little girls eat the canned cat food. Eeeewwww!!!

We also had to promise NOT to do it this Saturday when the social worker is here.

Sometimes the Mommy's job is to ensure that no one has inappropriate fun. Not even the Daddy.

Sigh.