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Dizzy in the New Year
Loss on a Day of Excess
Aged and Seasoned
Wonderful Life
Fever
Back in the Saddle
Holiday Reeling
Playing Wild Things
Signs of the Times
Expectations...
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Dizzy in the New Year
Cheers to you and to everyone who actually managed actual reveling. New Year's has never been my favorite holiday (the chill, the abundance of people who have drunk much much too much) and that combined with the impossibility of finding a babysitter made for a night in and a chance for me to practice one of my culinary exercises. I actually find that the people I know who do manage excursions rely on their parents to handle baby-watching.
My other issue with New Year's - or really, any moment where one is supposed to mark time's passage and think about what one has or has not accomplished - is that is always triggers bouts of dissatisfaction and something very much like regret. One has never ever done enough, never ever gotten enough done, never ever lost the weight or gotten tidy and organized. And there it is, that new calendar page looming. I have managed some things this year, both professional and domestical, among them these non-denominational holiday and birthday stockings, which I finished against all odds (and my husband was not above placing odds on the unlikeliness of my completing this mission). I need to approach so many other things with the kind of zeal that comes when one suspects people are betting against one. But that's what the new year is for. They say.
But one thing I can say with great force is that I am truly done with the holiday season. Felix has been asking to go back to school since December 23rd and in spite of my best efforts to entertain and keep everyone lively, we are having these ridiculous fights about who will put the tissues in the garbage can (the lot of us has been congested since Halloween... at least), and why in 19 degree temperatures shorts are ill-advised. I did my best, tried to safeguard against boredom, found activities, dragged the entire family out to the Museum of Modern Art as soon as it was open yesterday morning (go go go go go see the Pipilotti Rist installation), but I think I must admit defeat. Nothing beats school.
On other fronts, while languishing on vacation and under the weather, Felix finally did watch his first movie from start to finish, which suddenly made relevant Emily Bazelon's recent piece for Slate about why "G" ratings are not useful for parents who are trying to figure out how much sleep they'll be getting/not getting the night(s) after seeing the latest kid offering. I have no fondness for the MPAA rating system and never have, but now as a parent I realize exactly how useless it is.
posted by Elise at 4:00 AM
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Loss on a Day of Excess
Sadly, in one day, Harold Pinter AND Eartha Kitt (and one wonders about how the balance of the cosmos required both of them at once) died.
I had the pleasure of seeing Eartha Kitt perfom at the Cafe Carlyle about ten years ago and still have this absolute memory of her slinking around the place, seeming quite ageless, almost supernatural. It is worth reading her obituary to see what kind of a life she had before she became the cat-like creature that certainly had me fascinated even as a child, watching her as Catwoman on television.
And Pinter, too, has been in my mind for so long. I've seen his plays, his performances in movies, watched films based on his screenplays... read accounts of his anger that it is hard to imagine he won't be venting his spleen or prodding people to read what's happening in between the sentences they speak and hear.
posted by Elise at 5:25 PM
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Aged and Seasoned
The holiday undertow pulled me under for a while, well, that and a fever that roamed freely throughout the house. But the sun is out, the worst is past and here it is Christmas Day.
Cheers.
posted by Elise at 8:48 AM
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Wonderful Life
In a season that tends to neglect subtext (which is why, perhaps, people have all of these stress and angst issues around now), Wendell Jamieson's New York Times piece on It's a Wonderful Life is beyond refreshing. Without denigrating the movie, it celebrates the classic for being more complicated than we tend to give it credit. Cheers to that.
Of course I won't be screening Frank Capra to my kids this year, or for a few years to come as far as I can tell. Actually, I won't be screening much at all for them, though I could be prepared to navigate all of the holiday Christmas specials with Dahlia Lithwick's help, though I confess to being a bit impatient with the whole genre, and since no one is actually requesting, I'm ignoring them for as long as I can.
For my own part I love movies where the holiday is secondary. I love Die Hard, for instance and would happily watch it again next week. Oh, and of course The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.
As for the kids, I think we'll just stick with the usual requests which tend to be to see Nigella Lawson cooking an old-fashioned chocolate cake. When I quizzed Felix about what he liked so much about Ms. Lawson, he said: "I love the way she talks." And here I was thinking her allure was elsewhere.
posted by Elise at 5:10 AM
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Fever
Why the silence? Nothing much to say, really, because a substantial chunk of time recently was spent going to and from the doctor's office and somehow, and this is surprising in light of how frequent the visits were, I failed to bring the feverish but still hungry and jolly kid in at the peak of the ear infection he didn't seem to find troublesome.
Now, I am not really complaining about this but it is something I have wondered about in the past with both children. How will I know if something is up if they don't say anything about it? Is it really true that they will somehow let me know if something hurts enough or will they continue (more or less as their mother does) to ignore problems until (with any luck, touch wood) they go away on their own?
I read an article once about the difficulties of parenting a small child who had trouble with sensation and how she had to be constantly monitored for wounds because she simply didn't register pain and while this is nowhere near my situation-- there is plenty of shouting around here, I wonder what else I've missed.
But something has just happened so I must cut short these musings and see to what I assume is a toe that has suffered some indignity.
posted by Elise at 6:38 AM
1 Comments
Back in the Saddle
Thanksgiving weekend isn't cold in its grave and the New York Times is hot and bothered to get everyone angry and angsty about contemporary parents, kids, parenting and lifestyles. It is amusing really, now that the holiday season has well and truly dug in its heels, that the Times feels the need to generate more bile and snark when it comes to the Domestic Sublime.
Before I had children, but when I was training the terrier, I would occasionally find myself wandering my block at an ungodly hour (5:30 or 6:00). The only people from my building I ever encountered at that time were: the fun couple just getting home from a night out (one heard quite a lot about their fun, too), the guy who always had an early flight and the Dad Whose Son Played Hockey. I told my husband then, and I mean it now: if hockey is on the menu I am not handling the transportation.
But now it seems my husband and I could start preparing our arguments regarding sport drop off because the Times published an article today which suggests people might be able to predict (a bit) what sports their children will be good at based on a DNA test. No mention is made of what to do about children who decide to pursue sports in spite of not being particularly talented, of course, but maybe this sort of test only applies to team sports and highly competitive situations not to people like me who are willing to try things (trapeze school, running) knowing that there is no future in it for her. The DNA pursuit seems utterly silly to me except as an academic exercise, but people do love tests and even more than tests, they love prophesies, so this is not the last we've heard of the Agility Predictor.
The real bit of savagery, though, comes in the New York Times Sunday Magazine's cover story, by Alex Kuczynski, which is called "My Body, Her Baby." In it Kuczynksi details her decision to enlist the services of a gestational surrogate to carry her baby. She doesn't really say much that is new or revelatory in the piece. In fact, a few too many words seem to be wasted paying token service to the enormous number of issues and complications raised by gestational surrogacy. Perhaps there is no way for a person to discuss these choices that will not put some people out, but the Times really made sure to emphasize the topic's nasty questions of economy and class, with the remarkably crass photographs that accompany the story. Does Kuczynski's surrogate, a woman named Cathy Hilling really have to be shot barefoot and pregnant on her porch while Kuczynski is so proper in her unstained skirt and sweater standing on her perfect lawn with a baby nurse at her side? Even if Hilling really prefers to be barefoot (nothing wrong with that, says the woman whose mother used to have to pull glass shards out of her feet every summer from running around shoe-free), wouldn't someone say that this creates a terrible impression?
The comments, which of course I looked at because I knew it would be a blood feast, are predictibly hostile. People hate Kucznyski, hate her priviliege, hate her choices, hate "breeders" (an appalling word), hate people who don't adopt, hate haters, hate hate hate.
So there it is. I have known enough people who have wrestled with infertility and come to hugely varying solutions that I wouldn't have much to say about Kuczynski's choices, except for the fact that she's written this crude article that seems to exist only to generate ire.
But maybe this is the point and the piece is doing a public service, giving us something other than money and politics to fight about over leftovers.
posted by Elise at 4:33 PM
3 Comments
Holiday Reeling
It is impossible, I think, to face the holidays as an adult with anything like pure pleasure, or even pure pleasure that is only mildly adulterated by Cooking Angst or Traffic Teeth Gnashing. I find that holidays are very much like regular days but the volume on my usual struggles is much much higher.
And the children present an interesting alternative to my standard Holiday Reckoning, which has been with me at least since college because they are primarily interested in chaos. They would happily eat Doritos for dinner or spend their evening swinging from a chin-up bar, oblivious to tradition or to the entire season's required emphasis on nostalgia.
So I have managed to get them to do the bulk of the work of the holidays for me. The boys can manage more cheer (until the inevitable line between Fun and Too Much Fun gets crossed and then there are tears and, often, from the baby, some biting) than I can. They are untroubled by questions of inadequacy or guilt or disappointment (except when it comes to having to eat some sort of dinner before dessert). They are like filthy diplomats, bumbling around while I can manage my own state of mind quite handily. My own problems with falling short are easily managed, since I often feel that if we can get out of anyone's house without breaking something a net win for my team.
At some point I think I'll have a reconciliation with the holidays. That's in the cards, isn't it? And until then, I think I'll just say I'm grateful that the children have found way of making my cheer more sincere.
posted by Elise at 4:28 AM
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Playing Wild Things
So I recently got a chance to hear a lecture about how not to drive your kids crazy. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of talk about how important it is for children to play and for play to be a sort of source of future success and interests. It was a highly optimistic, interesting lecture and not nearly as simplistic as I'm making this sound.
And of course I gobbled this up (if you're interested, the speaker was Dr. Edward Hallowell and I suspect strongly you can find his actual words, rather than my simple condensation of a fragment of what he had to say, in one of his 14 books: The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness: Five Steps to Help Kids Create and Sustain Lifelong Joy. I have not read it. Yet?) I don't really go for parenting programs generally, in part because I can't really follow any set of rules all the time and I have a very hard time remembering what I'm supposed to do according to these protocols at crucial moments, AND I resist domestic tweaks that feel artificial or silly or smack of self-help techniques. Anything that even reminds me slightly of that embarrassing confidence-building exercise where one stands in front of a mirror saying things like "I love you and you are great!" to oneself is nothing I'm going to embrace, ever, not even when drunk or tired or desperate or "e" all of the above.
This lecture made sense to me and didn't suggest that we should all start doing a bunch of weird and stilted exercises to ensure our children will all grow up happy and all of that. But indeed, someone felt the same kind of anxiety about these suggestions that I feel when faced with the absurd Mirror Exercise. A parent said she really has trouble relaxing into make-believe play with her child and didn't want to feel that she's a bad person. She said she is happy with other sorts of play but can't get comfortable and not feel dopey when she gets sucked into pretend games.
She was reassured that she is not a bad person. Various audience members had other suggestions to make these playtime sessions more palatable. All of them involved alcohol (some said wine, but there was a strong vote for tequila shots).
I was subsequently reminded of the lecture and the whole question of finding pretend play difficult when I read a strange (for format and for lack of editing reasons) interview with Spike Jonze who is trying very hard to finish his new movie which is an intense live action version of Where the Wild Things Are. If you track movies in production at all (not that you should, or that it is even particularly interesting since you often have to wait years and years to see the things you've been hearing about), you know that this picture has been kicking around in various ways for a while and at some point there was plenty of chatter about how this was going to be something utterly unreleasable. I suspect strongly that it is going to be quite intriguing. Jonze makes it quite clear that this is no movie for small children, that its themes and emotions are strong and threatening and that this comes from wanting the movie to have something of the reality or un-reality of children's pretend play.
Here's what he says: "I wanted it to feel "real," or not-real because it's not "real," I wanted it to feel like... like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice's books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was... it felt like it was everything, you know? It's like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that... you're there, you're in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up."
All of this musing is to say that it is interesting how this sort of play, utterly natural for children is not only uncomfortable for adults, but it is also something adults can not re-interpret back for children in a way that isn't terrifying. My children have and love the Maurice Sendak book, but I suspect strongly that it will be years before they could handle the movie. As for other sorts of pretend, I am lucky because most play acting games around here get stalled as we try to figure out exactly how old all 36 of the stuffed animals are, which is a prelude to any sort of play acting.
posted by Elise at 11:18 AM
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