The Opening Salvo in the Parenting Wars

I have thought for some time that with the amount of miscellaneous work necessary to prepare for the upcoming arrival of a child, first time parents-to-be would be too busy to start oneupmanship contests with other gestating couples.

I was most unfortunately incorrect in this perception. With fourteen weeks still to go, I have already had to extricate myself from a conversation that was less about the care and feeding of aliens and more about establishing some kind of moral authority over the question of which is superior – cloth or disposable diapers?

Or rather, I stated that we intended to use disposable diapers and was treated to a lecture by the non-childbearing member of the couple on how the decision was wrong, wrong, wrong. Evidential proofs were tossed (“Babies with cloth diapers don't get diaper rash! It is less expensive in the long term! Hire a diaper service if you don't have the time to wash them! My mom used them on me when I was a child!)

Silently I cursed the gods for ruining a perfectly good evening out, imbibing garlic parmesan wings, eyeing mixed drinks lustfully and feeling overall like a normal, non pregnant, female being for a couple of hours to the service to making him feel smug and pretentious over using cloth diapers (1). I tried, twice, to explain in very simple clear terms that we had neither the money to pay a diaper service nor the time to clean them ourselves (2). He continued lecturing.

So I changed the topic by asking him if his wife was planning breastfeeding, playing the odds that any couple that committed to using cloth diapers was probably also going to be breastfeeding instead of using formula. The gambit paid off, we found a topic of common agreement and the conversation turned to other things as agreeing about breastfeeding is not as interesting as probing for other proto- parenting decisions to criticize.

(1) I suspect if they find out that their budget can not stretch to paying a diaper service they will revert to disposables after a few weeks of trying to clean them.

(2) Massive digression that probably needs a separate entry. In our house this would translate to me cleaning them, as the laundry has evolved into my primary duty. Most of the time I am actually OK with this, as J handles all the outdoor yard work, including mowing our little patches of lawn, caring for the five rose bushes we have lining the driveway and up the steps to our house and tending to the flowerbeds. This actually consumes as much time weekly as doing the laundry, so it is a fair division of labor. And prevents me from killing the plants, as my power to keep living things alive does not extend to things green and leafy.

To be fair, I should say “did” the laundry as J has stepped up laundry duty in the past months as a natural consequence of me first being too overwhelmed with all-day morning sickness and fatigue to keep up with it, then becoming too unbalanced on my feet to properly navigate the narrow basement steps with a full basket in my hands.

However, as good as J is at remember to start the laundry, he is not very good at remembering to finish it, leading me to ask him at least twice every weekend and once during the week to bring the clean clothes upstairs for me to fold. As there is an unspoken expectation that I will be taking over laundry again once the alien has arrived, my desire to spend additional time soaking and cleaning nappies on top of the addition of onesies, pajamas, layettes, burp clothes, crib sheets, blankets, and towels to our regular weekly loads, is nil. In our conversations about disposable versus cloth I got the sense that J would prefer to use cloth, but since I will end up as the party responsible for cleaning the things, I elected to veto for the sake of my sanity.

Patience Worn Thin

It has been awhile since I witnessed my father-in-law behaving atrociously. I have gotten better at choosing when to interact with J's family and at filtering out the worse of his irritating behavior. He has gotten better at behaving himself, especially in our home, a direct result of J insisting that he conduct himself in a more civilized manner.

Unfortunately, with the upcoming arrival of a new grandchild, the pressure to include myself in more family activities has begun anew and has been gradually ratcheting up over the past few months. As agreeing to allow my mother-in-law host a baby shower on my behalf puts me back on the obligation hook, I reluctantly and not very willingly agreed to accompany J to a family lunch on Sunday.

I chose to ignore the voice in the back of my brain that woke me on Sunday morning, suggesting that lunch at the in-laws was not the best of ideas on this particular day. As I could not find a legitimate reason to back up my sense that it was not going to be a good day, I elected to fulfill my promise to make J happy.

To lunch we went, arriving approximately 45 minutes from the noon hour (planned) and waiting an extra 20 minutes (unplanned) past noon for his siblings to arrive, thus underscoring one of the ongoing irritants of J's family – with the exception of one sibling (who is not J), none of them are capable of arriving for 90% of functions on time.

I filtered it out. I filtered out J's sister using me as an object lesson in fetal development, with her insistence that I describe how “big the baby in my belly (1) was right now” to her three children. Setting aside that my knowledge of an alien at 25 weeks falls under “large enough to be uncomfortable”, my sister-in-law was not content with an estimate of length and weight – she wanted a detailed descriptions of the alien's features. I filtered out the discussion over the relative merits of the different high school football teams and leagues in the area. I filtered out the church talk, the complaints about the federal government giving aid to overseas, faith-based missionary organizations.

I filtered out up to the point of hearing J's father saying “Well we all know why South Africa is receiving aid, with the kind of president we have in the White House”.

I could not filter that out. I called my father-in-law out on the statement. I reminded him that the federal government had been giving aid to faith based charities for at least eight years. I stated that his comment was racist and he should retract it.

He said his comment was not racist and refused to retract. J's brother, who has spouted forth some of the finest poor-oppressed-upper-middle-class-white-man absurdities I have ever heard come out of the mouth of anyone upper middle class white man, vocally expressed that he did not think it was racist either.

Less you believe that I am jumping to conclusions and believe that perhaps my father-in-law was merely implying that South Africa was receiving aid because a Democrat was occupying the White House, I have sat at this man's table at various meals for 14+ years listening such coded statements. This is the man, who upon meeting me for the first time and learning about my ambition to attend graduate school, felt it necessary to illustrate how enlightened he had become by telling me about the events that precipitated his agreement to send his daughter to college. In the late 1980's. (2)

I left the table. I tried to walk out the front door, but it was locked and I could not get it unlocked. After what felt like several minutes of me trying to unlock the damn door, I went out through the garage instead. Once in the backyard, I sat down at a table and cried.

Meanwhile, inside, J was defending my blowup by informing his family that I had spent the last 14+ years politely holding my tongue as his family enthusiastically demonized the people and beliefs that held dear and that whether I had misinterpreted his father's words or not I had reached my limit of tolerance.

Then he came outside, brushed aside my apology for making a scene and ruining lunch and told me that it was braver to stand up for what I believed in then sitting silently and that I had no reason to apologize.

I also apologized to J's father for making a scene and silently endured the humiliation of having another sister-in-law pat my sore abdomen.


(1) The use of anything other than code words for organs used in bodily waste evacuation and reproduction is verboten in front of children in J's extended family, no matter the age of the child. Thus his 23 year old cousin and almost 18 year old nephew hear the same terminology as his 5 year old niece. I know that everyone does it, especially with young children but listening to grown adults use inaccurate biology with children makes me cringe and want to grind my teeth. I blame this on my parents, both nurses, who used biological and medical terms in an indifferent, matter-of-fact manner at the dinner table. The sneaky, snarky, subversive side of me is looking forward to the expressions of horror on the faces of my in-laws when the alien begins using real terms, as I fully intend to pass on the correct terminology, fragile sensibilities of cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, in-laws and the parents of the alien's classmates be damned.
(2) And less you wonder why I would marry into such a family, J is definitely the anomaly.

The Wrath of the Crossing Guard

One of the less savory aspects of living and working in Pittsburgh is the adversarial relationship drivers have with any one other than another person in a four wheeled, gas powered, moving machine. Pedestrians and cyclists are considered fair game to be run down at any moment.

This has lead to more than a few incidents of drivers obscenely gesturing, yelling (“fat ass” remains a personal favorite) and nudging me as I legally cross the byways of Pittsburgh city streets.

The intersection of Forbes and Murray is an especially bad location to be a pedestrian at any time of the day. Because of the high volume of both vehicular and foot traffic and the close proximity of half the schools in Pittsburgh, the city has deemed it necessary to put in a four way stop to allow pedestrians a sporting chance at getting across the street without getting maimed.

Not that this discourages the most aggressive of Pittsburgh's drivers, fond as they are of running the red light to make an illegal right turn, thus accomplishing the task of mowing down walkers from two directions instead of one.

Enter the crossing guard, posted at the intersection in the mornings and mid-afternoons during the school year to add an extra visual element of safety to perilous street crossings. They can't stop a speeding SUV with a single bound or write tickets. But they can and will stop drivers breaking traffic laws and yell at them. Loudly. For extended periods of time.

As I mentioned above, the intersection of Forbes and Murray is not the safest in the city, in spite of the four way stop. Earlier this summer a truck missed hitting me by inches when it ran the red light on Murray to turn right onto Forbes while I was crossing Forbes. He never slowed down and never saw me. The only reason he did not hit me was that I saw him first. The only satisfaction I could get from the incident was knowing how much of a world of trouble he would have been in once he learned he hit a pregnant woman.

So it was a wonderful sight to witness the man in the black SUV get caught attempting the same maneuver on Thursday morning. Never did the sound of a whistle sound so sweet to my ears.

Not only did the crossing guard stop the driver, she approached his SUV and yelled at him. Sternly, loudly and unreasonably. She made such a scene that the driver began to back the SUV up to get away from her. And made his second mistake of the morning.

He did not look behind him before he started backing up. Because he did not look behind him, he did not see me crossing behind his SUV* and nearly hit me. Which provoked the crossing guard into yelling at him some more, accompanied chorus of citizens, including a city employee collecting change out of the meters. A mass of humanity descended upon this man in a SUV at 7:55 on a Thursday morning.

*Yes, I know, I should have walked in front of the SUV. Past experience has taught me that is safer to go behind the vehicle instead of in front of it, since drivers have been known to “nudge” pedestrians along with their vehicles.

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To...

In my current state of abstention, going out for dinner with friends, while fun, does not have quite the same adult sense of elan as it did when it was permissible (and non-guilt inducing) to order a glass of wine with my overcooked steak.

In an attempt to bring back a little bit of the sense that I am an adult and not just a giant, gestating, foul tempered vessel, I've taken several dining occasions as permission to order that goofy mainstay of childhood, the Shirley Temple.

The Shirley Temple of my childhood looked like a vodka and cranberry topped with a maraschino cherry, served in the double highball glass that the bartender used for my mother's Old Fashioned. The combination of grenadine and seltzer water made it cold, sweet and not very fizzy. There was only one place in my little town where I drank these concoctions as a child, the Flaming Hearth. I never had to actually order one – we were such frequent eaters at this establishment that the hostess would automatically bring one to the table, along with a Roy Rogers for my brother, my mother's Old Fashioned and my father's favorite beer. Then she would put in an order of my favorite dish, lasagna, and take my younger brother in her arms for a tour of the kitchen.

The modern Shirley Temple comes in a 16oz plastic soda glass packed with ice, Sprite/7Up, far too much grenadine and a herd of maraschino cherries. Some bartenders, in a moment of creativity, add a quarter of lime to the glass to counteract the sickly sweet combination of soda and grenadine. It still has the same color as a vodka and cranberry, but the sense of nostalgia is completely missing from the drink. I felt more like a grown-up drinking it when I was a kid.

It is like candy cigarettes. Candy cigarettes were everywhere when I was a kid. They were a common Halloween treat. Since I was always more of a chocolate girl, I usually “smoked” (but never inhaled) one or two, and traded the rest away for mini Hersey bars and Reese's peanut butter cups.

Then one day they were gone from the candy aisle, a victim of concerned organizations who believed that eating a candy cigarette would lead kids down the path of smoking. Thus goes the Shirley Temple of my childhood, the kiddie cocktail stripped of all its adult feel for fear of over-glamorizing drinking.

Because It Is Almost Friday and I Have Not Done This In A While

I present "Bookends"...

Priorities

J and I have begun the process of amassing the furniture we will need in the coming months, since my womb is going to be considered tight quarters in late December and having easily accessible and destroyable electronic equipment lying around the living room is a bad idea. To aid in that goal, I have been reading Craigslist ads seeking various used household items and attempting to pillage every second hand store in the area, hoping to score some decent, safe pieces of nursery and other home furnishings.

Looking for furniture on Craigslist makes me mean. As I scroll and click through the posted ads, I can not help but make fun of the spelling errors and mentally harangue sellers asking full price for used goods, based on the theory that the goods in question were barely used. One of the more fascinating threads is the number of people selling convertible cribs, using the ability to convert the crib to a bed as a selling point, then stating that they have only had the crib a year or two. If you don't intend to convert the crib to full use, why are you using that as a selling point?

It was in this frame of mind that J and set out to find a crib this past Saturday. Previous scouting visits to price new cribs had left us both with severe sticker shock, as some places would only sell the full suite (crib, dresser, changing table, etc) and others were charging as much money for a crib as we paid for our entire bedroom suite, sans mattress.

Because of the sticker shock, J and I have decided to set aside the repeated exhortations that we only purchase a new crib and that anything less means we want to kill our alien, reasoning that somewhere in the city there exists a respectable, decently priced, safe, used crib.

Not so far. Our first stop, which we mistakenly assumed was a warehouse of used children's furniture, turned out to be a thrift store raising money for children's charities, no crib was to be found. This did not stop a volunteer from spending an excessive amount of time trying to convince us to purchase one of two incredibly ugly, completely unnecessary changing tables. Polite attempts to shake this individual were meet with an increasingly hard sell, akin to an encounter we experienced with a used car salesman last summer.

A jaunt across the street to a second, charity-related, thrift store produced two cribs. The first was leftover from a daycare center, as it came with plexiglass panels and a mirrored back, better to observe an alien without causing a disturbance. J recognized it immediately, as it was the same type of crib used in the center the alien will be attending when I return to work. The second one appeared to be missing several pieces. J was perfectly comfortable with buying the plexiglass model and calling it day. I, on the other hand, reasoned that if the crib was in poor enough shape to be banished from a daycare center it probably had no place in our home.

Our third stop was at a used furniture warehouse down the street from home. Although there were no cribs available, the furniture was beautiful and J found an entertainment center to home all of the aforementioned electronic equipment in a manner that is not kid accessible. Four days later and he is still pondering purchasing the unit.

Our final stop on Saturday was at the Shadyside Arts festival, to look at the work of an artist and children's book illustrator named Kana Handel.

Kana Handel creates beautiful, fanciful paintings of teapots and mermaids, children and anthropomorphic animals such as cats and rabbits. She works with a mix of media including watercolor, ink washes and sumi on Washi. After seeing her work at the Three Rivers Arts festival in early June, I spent the rest of the summer mulling over her work. And I decided that one of her paintings was an ideal addition to the nursery walls.

I ended up purchasing two paintings. Terrible of me, I know. I hear the chorus singing about my skewed priorities. I hear them chanting about how I'm putting the alien at risk of very bad things happening, because I spent money on art instead of a new crib. I hear them scolding my response that my brother and myself slept in dresser drawers as infants (my parents were not expecting twins) and many babies sleep in vibrating bouncy chairs, moses baskets, in the parents bed and in co-sleepers – anywhere they will actually sleep.

I purchased the paintings anyway. When the alien is ready to return to the mothership in twenty something years, the paintings will go as well. If the alien decides that they are not alien-worthy, then I'll hang them in our bedroom instead.

J and continued the hunt while hanging out on Sunday morning. As I wandered through the furniture and appliance section of Craigslist I stumbled across an item on our ongoing wish list – a year old chest freezer of just the right small size for an obscenely low amount of money. As our visits to large box stores have increasingly included a stop in the large appliance section to ogle the chest freezers and compare prices, before moving on to the over-the-stove convection microwaves (to replace our current model, which is dying key-by-key) and flat screen televisions. (1)

Sensing an opportunity, I pointed the add out to J, wrote down the phone number and suggested he call to see if it was still available.

It was. The problem of how to get the freezer from the seller's house miles away to our home was quickly resolved with a phone call to J's parents, who happened to reside in the same town as the seller. Off J roared in his beloved Porsche (2) to borrow the caravan and pick up the freezer.

Hours later, two vehicles return. J's father in the caravan and J and his mother (who apparently spent most of the drive pressing down hard on the imaginary passenger brake and telling J not to waste that money he just saved, because his parents purchased the freezer for us as an early Christmas gift, on a speeding ticket) in the Porsche.

The freezer was not completely free. It came complete with a lecture about cleaning it thoroughly to get the cat smell off of it (which neither J nor myself could detect) and commentary on the small ding on the top (its used, dings are expected). J's father finished with a guilt trip about not coming to Sunday dinner, J's mother with the application of pressure to be allowed to hold the freshly newborn alien via a story of how wonderful it was to hold one of the other grandchildren at only an hour old.

I gently explained, for the umpteenth time, that I would only be in a hospital if something goes wrong in the next 17 weeks. If I remain healthy, I will be at the birthing center and no one would be informed of the birth until I was released and back home, as the last thing I want while trying to bring the alien in the world sans drugs was my in-laws anywhere near me.


(1) J and I have a philosophy about electronics and home features we dislike. We do nothing and hope that the object in question will eventually die. This philosophy would work well if it did not take us years to replace dead items, as we also have a rule that home purchases must have the agreement of both parties to be legitimate. Because of this, the hideous dining room light/ceiling fan which died the summer after we moved into our house is still attached to the ceiling, we have yet to order the other sconces to match the one we like in the living room and it was almost eight years into our marriage before we got around to purchasing a bedroom suite.

Regretfully, our current television refuses to die and has somehow managed to survive through several electrical storms unscathed. We thought the last storm, which occurred right over our house would finally put us out of our techno-lust misery, but no such luck. The set works perfectly, shows no indication of giving up anytime in the near future and will continue to work even after public mention just to spite me.

(2) In one of life's finer ironies, J purchased his much longed for two seater convertible (a 1998 Boxter in exquisite, almost-new condition) in late December. Less than four months later I was pregnant. Did you know that Porsche can install a special switch to disable the passenger side airbags and sells custom fitted infant and toddler car seats? As the first thing J offered to do after he stopped laughing over my pregnancy announcement was to offer to sell the car, one of the responses I'm considering giving when people ask what they can get for the baby is “Money towards the disable switch and infant/toddler seats for the Porsche”. Because J is that spectacularly awesome and deserves, at all possible, to keep his dream car. And for those who have commented on how nice it is for me to “let J keep his car” – how insulting can you get?