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Candid Camera
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No Rest for the Wicked
One Foot on the Soapbox
Noseybodies, Crackpots
Myself With Udders*
Uncanny X-Man
Cold War / Warm Heart
Who Do You Love?
Mommy Diarist
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Bedside Reading
In the roundabout of pregnancy, most women I know inherited a lot of maternity clothes. I got books. My upstairs neighbor gleefully dropped off a stack of texts including not one but two naming books (which I'm strangely finding more fascinating now that the kid has a name) and my close friend G. seemed quite eager to clear out her shelves, presenting me with an arsenal of volumes, slim and otherwise, on such topics as self-soothing and (jumping the gun a little) What to Expect...the Toddler Years.
Now that I have my little library I largely ignore it, except in dark hours when I'm desperate for a solution to the sleep paradox, at which times I squint at these texts hoping for simple answers, written in gentle matter-of-fact tones that haven't occurred to me. This research method is indirectly useful. While flipping around for the quick answer, I'll encounter some other issue I never knew was even brewing, and the existential funk it encourages eclipses everything else. Such is my 4 AM mind.
Fortunately, I'm not alone. My husband must have turned the wrong page one night because he staggered in growling: "Well, we've clearly broken the kid. We don't even have a copy of Goodnight Moon and the book says we should have read it to Felix at least 57 times by now." I don't know why the recommendation of what is "best" for the infant is invariably something that is completely enervating for the parent, but since Felix hasn't let me in on his preferences, beyond an interest in the marvelous finger puppet text Little Duck, he often gets an excerpt of whatever it is I'm reading. Someone would surely say this is an unfortunate practice because it doesn't sufficiently rely on repetition and familiarity to be edifying for an infant, but if I can see one thing in my future it is the endless rereading of stories on request, and while Felix is still pre-verbal, and I suspect pre-caring, he's going to have to endure.
Most recently, I'm entertaining him with the goings-on in Georgian England as described in Princesses: the Six Daughters of George III. I'm not halfway through (the King has only just survived his first serious bout of insanity), but if you're ever curious about the possible downsides to the princess lifestyle, look no further. The King and Queen were more attentive than most royal parents (even though they had 15 children, only two of whom died in early childhood) but they still managed to, uh, royally screw things up for their kids. Tales of nanny-poaching and discipline conflicts that we hear about today as being the product of yuppie culture are entirely familiar in 18th century England. The long list of children and their strangely stunted lives can't help but bring to mind all kinds of modern parenting issues: mother/daughter rivalries, favoritism, smothering vs. indifference, discipline styles, allowance... etc.
I feel very sorry for the princesses, whose happiness was frequently thwarted by a combination of excessive restrictions and neglect by their parents. Their father held them too close and then lost his mind and their mother couldn't bring herself to shepherd them once her husband was lost to her. (Some were never able to marry; one was rumored to have an incestuous thing with one of her brothers and did have an illegitimate child, surely by someone else; almost all of them wound up rechanneling their considerable energies into various "womanly arts:" landscape gardening, embroidery, illustration, paper cutting, letter writing, fashion.) At the same time, I really pity Queen Charlotte. Married at 17, she began producing children immediately (all natural births, but no breastfeeding). She was ardently attached to her family but utterly collapsed when her husband's porphyria rendered him mad. A shy woman, in a country not her own, afraid of the government her title represented, she retreated and never really emerged again. Her daughters needed a champion and she wasn't up to the task.
I don't generally read histories for the object lessons, I'm just an 18th and 19th century enthusiast, but I am surprised at how strongly I've been reacting to the story of the princesses. What Felix hears of it is all gobbledygook to him right now, but perhaps he can get something out of it- a mother who can adequately guide him, I hope. In the meantime, I'll consider regaling him with Goodnight Moon, or at least the book I'm imagining is the sequel to Little Duck.
posted by Elise at 7:40 PM
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1/13/2007 5:21 PM
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1/20/2007 10:00 AM
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2/20/2007 4:37 PM
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