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Scattered Tidbits (In the News)
Slate runs a cumulative column called Human Nature, which scoops up all sorts of general health news stories and provides a tiny bit of analysis. It is a great "cocktail party" column, since it provides all sorts of odd information one can toss around to spark chatter. This week there were a few oddities about pregnancy and parenthood that demonstrate a strange set of anxieties.
Men who deny paternity tend to be wrong.
From the "No Surprise" department, it isn't particularly healthy for pregnant women to work long hours at stressful jobs.
Breastfeeding may have unexpected benefits- or at least breastfeeding for more than a month. (No information on what the implications of this Danish study are for babies who were never breastfed).
And apparently, older men can take some blame for at least one complication of pregnancy.
I am not good at analyzing statistics, but it is certainly interesting to consider why all of these issues demand studies and wonder what we're supposed to do with this information now that we're gathering it.
posted by Elise at 7:32 PM
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What Does Looking Back Get You?
Twice this week, my husband mentioned my former moviegoing habits and rituals to the people we were eating dinner with. One woman at the first meal looked at me as if she had never seen something so absurd. If her salmon had begun chatting with her, she would have somehow found that less silly.
I no longer vacation at the Toronto Film Festival, coming home pale and somewhat unwell from eating Smarties and watching 5 movies a day. It really broke my heart when pregnancy-induced sciatica made me incapable of using my press pass to hit all of the New York Film Festival press screenings. And of course the next year has seen very little multiple movies in a day action, except on DVD.
But now that I am well out of the first year of my son's life, what should I be? I'm not in a position to return to the pale days of film binges. Even without him I wouldn't have the time, but I do wonder right now were I am going and what I am doing. I wish I hadn't been reminded so keenly of my old ways- especially now when the Tribeca Film Festival has descended on the city (screening films all over town, planting information booths in the East Village which is far away from Tribeca). I feel guilty for not trying to scam fistfuls of tickets, a little ashamed at my lack of dedication to the Church of Movies, even as I know I have less time and more things with which to wrestle- especially a kid who likes climbing, and work that needs doing.
Of course this is one of those eternal struggles, but as I sat at these dinners I missed my old self and wanted to defend her from the salmon eater's corn, even though those were different times and really, in some ways I'm talking about a different girl.
posted by Elise at 2:04 PM
2 Comments
Go Not to the Toddlers for Counsel
On a blitz panic run to the local baby store (needed to find "newborn" present for a 4-month-old, a free copy of the May/June issue of Cookie magazine found its way into the bag with the teething whatnots.
Much has been written about how problematic Cookie is, how it offers such an odd celebration of incredibly expensive baby items and lifestyle choices. But I can handle those things. I don't need to track down hugely expensive haircuts for my kid, but am not offended by the fact that they're highlighted (if you will) in the magazine. I have never taken my cues from fashion magazines so why should my kid?
What stung about this issue was an essay in which the writer spent a week trying to decide whether or not to have a second child.
Fair enough. It's one of the eternal questions. If one is single, one's friends want to find one a match. If one is in a relationship, one shouldn't stop there but get married. If not staunchly child-free (these new terms are annoying), then the "baby, when?" questions start, and it doesn't stop after one because everyone wants to know if you'll do it again (and possibly again- since I have heard from two sources that "three is the new two" when it comes to kids... though I have yet to see what that means in practice).
Anyway, the article is at once weird and shallow on the subject, raising issues then casting them aside unexamined. Perhaps you think I'm being peculiar for wanting rigor in a lifstyle magazine, but really, without analysis, this piece makes no sense.
The writer goes to a party and meets someone who advises her to leave off at one, because one is easy and can more fit into the life of adults. The writer takes this to heart until her husband (who is not on the fence) points out that the party-friend was probably a terrible mother. So much for that worry.
On another day, the writer is caught looking sad by a friend. When she tells her friend about how she is struggling to figure out what to do, her friend gets harsh because she is single and not even a position to satisfy her biological clock at all. (And what is the moral of that story? Don't tell your friends about your worries even when they ask you because your concerns might grate against theirs? Think hard about your friend's circumstances before you say anything to even your closest friends about anything, ever? There are no answers here.)
And finally, the writer really panics and starts crying in front of Sesame Street and seeks counsel from her 18-month-old who tells her to have two.
Now.
Is something remarkable going to happen in a couple of months? My child, who is not that many months younger than hers, does say a few words, but we don't have what I would chats about theoretical futures. I would have much more luck getting any kind of answer from quizzing a Magic 8 Ball.
And this seems like a terrible idea. What happens when the toddler changes his mind and tells his mother to take that baby away?
Was she asking permission? Why does she feel her kid is even capable of offering such absolution?
Perhaps my outrage is the ire of existentialism. I found everything about pregnancy to be unfathomably lonely. Each decision and problem is something one handles alone. I wrestled with crowded and uncomfortable isolation (big baby) and the prospect of having a second puts me back in this frame of mind. Of course my husband has a voice, but the final decision is mine.
I wish I could fob it off on someone, but that's a choice I can barely handle. Why should it rest on a toddler's shoulders?
Or perhaps it is that easy for some. Maybe the writer's 18-month-old didn't tell her to have a second child. Maybe he said he wanted to watch two episodes of Sesame Street, and she just heard what she wanted.
More on schools when my blood pressure goes down.
posted by Elise at 1:32 PM
2 Comments
Smarts
I don't know if I can even begin to believe this after reading the whole Gendered Hat Controversy coming out of Park Slope or witnessing a Q&A session full of people who were so clearly of the "since you weren't directly talking to me or my highly specific situation I didn't bother to take in a single word you said for the last hour" at the preschool forum from earlier this week, but someone has trotted out a book that claims becoming mothers makes women more intelligent.
Well, smarter at least. The book in question is called (cloyingly) The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, and is supposedly chock a block with "science" that proves as much.
Sad to say, I don't really feel smarter. And what is this supposed to mean? Is it saying that my brain is more stimulated because it's hopping all over the place what with its new rations of pleasure and worry and ire and curiosity? Is SMARTER supposed to b a consolation? "Oh don't worry about that food on your shirt, or not getting the gig for which you stayed up too late on horrible postpartum nights writing a proposal, oh losing friends- you're SMARTER"
I shouldn't be bitter. I will take a boost where I can get it. But what about women who don't have children? Can they fake it by multitasking heavily, sleeping less, and getting a few extra pets?
If you're curious, here's the review I eyeballed this evening, in the Times UK.
But who am I to be so sharp? Apparently this book came out a year ago in the United States (when I was likely still deep in the postpartum swamp) meaning I may be ineffably more clever but am practically less au courant.
posted by Elise at 4:54 PM
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You're Never Too Young to Get Bent Out of Shape
So as is probably more than evident, I am a skeptic and I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable. So I'm finding myself on the edge of a pool contemplating sticking my foot in right now, and that pool is preschool.
Stop laughing. I'm rolling my eyes too. I know how old my kid is and how preposterous it must sound to be thinking about this already, and frankly it wouldn't have occurred to me if my oldest closest friend weren't an educator. Just before she hightailed it for her Spring Break she delicately prodded me: "You know, if you're interested at all in preschool, you need to be ready to start applying in September for the following year. And everything is closed by the end of May."
This was a little worrisome for a girl who hasn't yet decided to send her son to preschool 17 months from now, but my friend has always done well by me. She kept me from falling behind on bureaucratic wedding things and took me to buy infant necessities- dragging me out of denial where I had been cozy until the last weeks of pregnancy. And I can't deny her practicality. This is New York City where things really do fill up, as my laissez faire attitude has taught me lately.
To date, I haven't really taken her advice and run with it beyond having a long cup of coffee with a friend of a friend who navigated New York City preschool applications a year ago, and the event of last night...
Yesterday, I shambled into a panel discussion about the process of preschool admissions. Walking into the school auditorium, where these things take place, it was instantly apparent that I was in something of a snake pit.
The auditorium was stacked with wide-eyed parents all vibrating with anxiety about how to get their kids into Harvard, rather, nursery school- everyone acts as if they're one and the same anyway.
While the forum was actually interesting, it was the parents who made me want to run. Early on I wanted to punch nearby woman I began calling Huge Necklace and Zippers and her husband, Bad Shirt. The two of them seemed to find the whole business just so tiresome and snickered and whispered all the way through. I assume they just needed to kill some time before their dinner reservation because they certainly felt there was nothing useful being said. Everyone was either savagely scribbling notes or pretending to be world weary while poking at a Blackberry.
In spite the evidence of my impatience, which you can see, was documented in my notebook, many interesting things were said about a number of issues, including but not limited to:
-Separation anxiety (on the part of children and parents)
-Whether to send a kid to school at two and a half or three
-How school interviews work
-What sorts of questions to ask a school
-How to gauge your reaction to schools
-How to decide on a list of schools to apply to in the first place
-Realize that the UrbanBaby boards are not wildly trustworthy
But when the audience questions started, things took a nosedive. Everyone was a special case and kept revealing fine details of their lives to get very general answers about a process that won't begin for months.
- I have twins who were born in June but who are extremely bright. How many schools do I need to apply to?
- I have a child with ESP. Can't we just apply to the school she points to in the catalogue and be done with it?
- What if my kid has a speech delay but is interested in art and sculpture. Should he be on the older side in a class?
- My child has an extra eye, which makes him a great early reader. How can I make sure the schools will adjust their curriculums to accommodate him?
Oh all right, I'm stretching the point. But the tug of war between the practical and interesting speakers who provided good and interesting advice (particularly on the what-to-ask-schools front) and the truly off-the-wall desperate parents was wild. I don't know where my family fits in or what we will do.
But this topic is sure to come up again.
posted by Elise at 11:20 AM
2 Comments
Good Dog
The tactile, almost non-narrative That's Not My... books have yielded to a different, rather romantic series. Felix and I both have fallen for the Good Dog Carl series. Felix isn't particularly discerning yet, but I tend to be skeptical of children's stories that don't have any elements of threat or danger or that seem too complacent.
This series (many of which I read in the redoubtable board book format) is really quite complacent and depicts a world that is utterly secure, except for one gently fantastical exception.
Each book of few words and natural, but 1950's-esque illustrations depicts a different occasion in which Carl, a handsome Rottweiler, is put in charge of a baby. Sometimes they merely compress a day's worth of activities (meal, make-up experimentations at the mother's vanity table, swim in the fish tank, bath and general clean up) into the window of time left open when the baby's mother runs errands. Other times they are in the field, going shopping, wandering the park while the baby's mother has tea with her friend. I know, the whole business just smacks of incredible blandness, but there's something hypnotic about these books. Carl is the perfect companion for the baby. The mother is sexy in her buttoned up but windblown and rumpled way; the house is classically beautiful though it still has a dark basement (which we see after the baby has gone down the laundry shoot).
Of course there's an endless history of dogs-as-caregivers. (The expression "raised by wolves" had to start somewhere.) There is even a strange little coincidence in that Carl author Alexandra Day is a pseudonym for Sandra Darling and anyone with a memory of great canine-nannies of literature will recall that Nana, the Newfoundland in Peter Pan takes care of the Darling children: Wendy, Michael, and John.
Just now I looked back at Peter Pan to see the introduction to Nana, and while she has more apparent likes and dislikes than Carl, it is clear the two would have something to say to one another about child care.
I recently mentioned Carl to one of my sisters-in-law who told me that she had once encountered a book of a similar nature featuring her favorite breed, the Irish terrier. This text, which she figured to be quite old, is called Paddy's Pay-day. As it turns out, the reason for the connection is hardly coincidental. As Carl's website reveals, Alexandra Day created Paddy as well (Paddy was written in 1989 and I guess the true inspiration of Carl didn't blossom until 1995).
Recently I've been extremely aware of the relationship between dogs and kids- particularly my dog and my kid. Since my dog is a terrier, he isn't at all temperamentally suited to babysitting- he's be too likely to take Felix out on a rat chasing expedition or encourage kitchen looting. But the two of them are very close and my dog really does seem to feel responsible for Felix, in spite of all the slights to his tail. Maybe this is because Felix shares food so well, but perhaps it also has to do with the fact that Felix has learned how to talk to dogs, saying: "Wow-wow-wow-wow-wow" in a way that suggests I must be missing something.
posted by Elise at 10:41 AM
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More Documentation
It's a holiday weekend, and everyone will be out rolling Easter eggs or doing residual Passover duties, so I've been thinking, again, about life records.
I'm not aces at documenting anything, as I've mentioned before, and the records of the goings-on in my life are spotty. I've improved, post-Felix, but that kind of organization doesn't come as naturally to me as, say, falling down does.
It is impossible for me to remember to run for the video camera at opportune moments. But a friend clued me in to a feature on the digital camera that has been nothing short of a revelation: Motion Picture mode. Maybe I'm just slow and everyone else has been taking little video snapshots forever, but this is a mode that really suits me. No longer do I get all peevish thinking about having to watch and log and edit my kid movies, I just snag the camera when something novel is happening, record a couple of minutes and there it is.
By not having to race for the video camera, I have managed to grab:
Felix's second time rolling over (it followed the first by about 30 seconds)
Early smiles
Nap fragment
Carousel riding
Kid and dog carousing
Unusual poolside dining techniques
Musical exertions
Each of these movies is a couple of minutes long, and can easily be screened for eager but distracted relatives without having to go through the whole process of scanning through a videotape and flinching through the embarrassing moments where one's own voice and person are too apparent. The camera is always lying around, just out of kid's reach, so it is infinitely handy.
This is really for recording little windows, handfuls of minutes here and there (as long as you have a large card in the camera) but really, I find I prefer the short form for home movies. If I want something long, I'll watch something by Bela Tarr on my own time.
posted by Elise at 9:31 AM
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Dumb Dumb Dummies
The other day, after a nice trot uptown to visit the newest member of the family in his swank hospital cap, I caught an ad on the tube that initially looked sort of sweet in a Sweet n' Low kind of way. Now I can't recall which brand of facial tissue it was for, but the tasteful images went like this:
A man in muted earth tones looks through a window (in what is not identified as, but what clearly is a hospital nursery) at the spacy alien stare of a newborn- apparently his child. The man's eyes well up with fresh paternal tears.
An attractive woman in a clean, fluffy pink bathrobe walks down the hall in no apparent discomfort and spots her sensitive partner eyeing the baby. She cozies up to him. . . and frowns with something like disgust.
She pushes him to a different section of window and he locks eyes with a different baby's spacey alien stare. The proud papa starts to cry because finally he sees his True Child and the baby's mother hands him some facial tissue.
Yep, dopey dad fails to recognize his own baby. Thank God his Better Half is there to point out the error of his ways and clean him up when he manages to produce the tears at the right time. . . for once.
I felt kind of bad for this guy. I'm terrible at distinguishing newborns from one another unless they have remarkable characteristics (super tiny, outrageous. hair, that sort of thing).
But now I see I have to spread the pity around. Madison Avenue seems to feel that every husband is a total moron. There's a whole cultch of Idiot Husbands who fall of roofs while they are trying to fix their satellite dishes (they should have gotten cable). There are men whose wives wisely know how to do laundry that they are too stupid to negotiate. Some husbands don't know how to make a few simple calls on their (football shaped) phones to get the best rate on insurance. What about the dumb cluck who gets dressed up as a giant bunny when the rest of his family is in pastel colored "Easter best" outfits? In some ads, it is unclear what specific bit of idiocy the husband has perpetrated but there he is acting like a dolt in the background while the wife rolls her eyes and talks about how she saved money on their telephone bill (this was in an ad for Vonage). Men with children are especially not to be trusted. They will always do something amazingly foolish unless their hands are held constantly. It does no good to leave lists of instructions, explain things or call to check in. He will only do the laundry wrong, feed the kid junk or eat salsa on the white living room set with a toddler around out of spite or the inability to help himself because he is too stupid to do anything else.
How did it become the norm to depict husbands (or boyfriends- though for the most part these guys are coded as spouses) are idiots? Why is it comforting to women? Are women they to get the sense that the world can't turn properly without them? Is the humor supposed to blind women to the true message of the ad, which is that they should be totally paranoid and that only through strategic shopping can they keep the house intact and children alive in their absence? Is it supposed to be reassuring that no woman is alone in being saddled with a dolt? Do these advertisements project some kind of insane fantasy where women are all-powerful but nevertheless afflicted with insanely stupid men?
It perhaps is revealing too much for me to say that I don't think there is a gender or an age or a proclivity that is not subject to bouts of outrageous stupidity. I couldn't possibly limit my finger pointing to husbands alone. (I most frequently turn that sharp pointer back upon myself since I regularly forget to do simple things around the house, have been known to waltz out with two different color shoes on, stand on chairs with wheels to reach things off bookshelves, and walk out of grocery stores without the things I went in to get.) At any given time at least two-thirds of the world is stupid while everybody else just tries to cope until they get their turn.
Where does this trend come from and why do we like it? Is it funny enough to justify itself or is there a different longing operating? Are we trying to chuckle while secretly wishing that it could be our turn to be stupid while someone else takes up the mantle of concern about laundry and cleaning supplies, telephone service and insurance quotes for a while?
posted by Elise at 8:47 AM
1 Comments
Why I'm Not a Joiner
New York Magazine this week runs a little squib of a piece that means to illustrate how insane certain types of New York City parents are. Certainly the proffered example would yield little argument. A Brooklyn community has an email forum in which parents typically trade the sort of obvious information that people with children toss around, but recently one Simple Soul made the critical error of posting one of those Good Samaritan notices that could only be punished. The person's post was called "Found: boy's hat" and went on to describe that a hat had been found, and I presume detailed how the hat's owner's parents could retrieve it.
The post sparked a fabulous protest. People felt it was not only unfair but also hurtful to place some sort of gender description on a hat. Obviously, a child of any or all genders could wear the hat. Others felt obliged to project a kind of blind narcissism onto the hat issue feeling defensive about how their own children were mistaken for boys because of their lack of hair and this sort of email is just another example of how these painful mistakes get made (that particular brand of sniveling bruisedness always makes me angry- my toddler occasionally gets mistaken for a girl and the only person who seems to mind is the stranger who I correct). Some folks seem to have become impatient with the aggressive language policing and a few retained their senses of humor.
Now if I had been the person who unwittingly started that ball rolling, I think I would have written: "Oh forget it, there was no hat, and the dog ate it anyway."
Of late I have been struggling a bit with the fact that I hate community. My modus operandi has always been to enjoy the people I like and waste as little time as possible on the ones who make me angry and impatient. But one of my most savage fears about having a child is that I am too misanthropic to be a good parent, that my skepticism and lack of interest in team activities will somehow hurt my child. I'm a very good friend and neighbor, but Community, of the sort that this Park Slope email club exemplifies makes my skin crawl: nosy judgmental people, humorlessness, obscure rules and codes of behavior (in this case gender-neutral preferred language) and an inability to look beyond them to address the matter at hand (someone's hat is lost). I hate this crap and it crops up everywhere making even the simplest questions impossible and boring and contentious.
I hope that as my kid gets older and grows more and more social, I am able to negotiate these groups, because maternity hasn't mellowed me, and my time is shorter than ever.
And the secondary tragedy (the first being that there are thousands of children in Brooklyn whose parents have no sense of humor at all) is that no one claimed the hat. There is something very sad about spotting a discarded hat in the street. Or a sock. Even now there is a tiny white (now surely once-white) sock lying in a gutter somewhere in Chinatown where my kid flung it last night in a fit of despair that there were no more dumplings.
posted by Elise at 9:06 AM
1 Comments
Worry Now
I don't usually read Glamour, so it was with some surprise that I discovered the article "The New Lies About Women's Health" from a link on Salon (where, no doubt it will reach more people than anything I have to say here).
But. I do feel compelled to talk mention it. It is absolutely astonishing, and I can only hope that there is hope in the fact that Glamour will print something as serious and disturbing as this piece and that it will galvanize people.
Put bluntly, the United States government (in the form of the FDA, the NIH and the CDC) is lying to women about all sorts of things that can seriously affect their health and putting policies into practice that will further compromise their lives.
Here are the bullet points. The article elaborates and, I hope, works to convince women that it is up to them to fight not just for their reproductive rights but also for their lives, since this is far from a benevolent administration. This is a government that would like to punish women of any age and lifestyle for having sex.
- Women are being denied emergency contraception.
- Women who have been raped are also denied emergency contraception.
- Women are being lied to about how effective condoms are at protecting against HPV.
- There is a good chance that women will be denied vaccines that would protect them from the HPV strains that cause cervical cancer.
- Women's tax dollars are paying for misleading anti-sex propaganda.
- Doctors can be compelled by law to lie to their patients. (In Texas, Kansas, Montana and Mississippi, doctors are legally obliged to tell women that there is a link between abortions and breast cancer. There has been no study that suggests that conclusion at all.)
These are scary times and one would be a fool to think that one's body is not on the line.
posted by Elise at 8:29 AM
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Cheers!
I'm vicariously observing a red-letter week. Babies are arriving and thrilling their parents in ways that fourteen months ago I really could not have imagined. Fourteen months ago I was too caught up in a singularly persistent discomfort that had not let me sleep for many weeks to really get excited properly, and I think that not knowing what having a child would be like left me at a disadvantage. I know better now.
(And no, I am certainly not writing this with the smug and much hated "you can't understand anything until you've had a child" attitude. It is one thing to be condescending, another entirely to be blindsided by nostalgia, as I have been.)
These children have arrived in conventional and unconventional ways. Some are first children, others already have at least one sibling; another is being adopted. And is it all amazing. Astonishing.
And until Felix was born, while I could absolutely share in the pleasure that friends and family took in their new children and new lives- and these are children I know and love- I understand much better right now what my little cluster of people is experiencing. And I am nostalgic. In some way I am maybe a bit jealous of the swamp of pleasure and thrills, and fear that they are wading in- the sense of having your identity temporarily cut loose while you get to engage with the new creature that is altering everything. It is a new world for these families. All day, I yearned for Felix, even though he was trotting around me. I kept finding opportunities to catch and squeeze him (he doesn't mind really, as long as you say "I'm going to get you" first.)
So this is really just to say that I understand now, and in this week of a little population pop where I am reading breathless emails of play-by-play adoption news while sitting by the phone hoping to get word from an uptown hospital, I am very happy that I really can comprehend. It means so much to me to have been included in all of these lives and I think Felix has helped make me a better participant.
posted by Elise at 4:56 AM
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Breastfeeding Benefit Debunked, Still Praised
This is just a quick plug for an interesting piece that ran in Slate recently about the science surrounding the whole question of breastfeeding and antibodies. As it turns out, breast milk doesn't really help in any way more elaborate than to protct babies' gastrointestinal tracts. This is not to say that breastfeeding isn't great and a good thing to do, it's just to say that if you can't or don't want to, this is something you probably don't have to feel guilty about. It isn't new science. It's just old data explained well.
posted by Elise at 8:19 PM
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How Wrong is it Not to Care?
The New York Observer ran a piece in its March 27th issue that lodged in my craw a little bit, but not because I felt obliged to argue with it. The writer took issue with the way people have been bashing Britney Spears for taking her infant son for a spin in the front seat a few weeks ago. In the second paragraph she admits to holding her newborn in her lap in the taxi on his way home for the first time. (Her husband sat beside her with the car seat in his lap. I am assuming they had the car seat because I had to prove I had one, actually my kid had to be IN the car seat before I could get past the security guard at the hospital where he was born.)
I'm not sure why the writer and her husband didn't stick the baby in the car seat just that once- while they had it in the car and everything, but her husband's knees' relative comfort on their ride home from the hospital is no concern of mine. Really, though, why do we care that Britney or the author drove around with an unsecured baby? Certainly Britney broke the law by not having her kid in a carseat; I'm not sure what the rules about taxis and infants are in New York City (anyone?). But I am curious about the vitriol.
According to the article, people have been weighing in all over the place about how low-class the Spears must be not to strap her kid in, how she doesn't deserve to have a child... savage things. But why is this such an affront? Don't tell me she's a maternal role model. People may want to sing and dance and look like Britney, but her mothering skills are happily under the radar. Don't we have other people in the world doing more appalling things to children than this to worry about?
The Observer writer clearly doesn't feel so anxious about taxis as I do. Reading her piece and her gentle mockery of the Sit n' Stroll (I gently mocked it her too- called it ugly actually) made me feel a little uncool for having bought the unattractive contraption, but without it, I was too frightened. Maybe she only goes on very short trips and never has to scoot up the FDR Drive or the West Side Highway to visit various sets of grandparents. Perhaps she has more faith in the world. There's a possibility her worrying energy might be preoccupied with fears of germs and problems with mass transit. I don't know.
And what makes me so scared of cabs anyway? Is it the bad driving or the uneasy suspension? Do I not trust other drivers? Is my problem more with the world, generally? Was I really that susceptible to the absolutely insane ravings of the Infant CPR and Baby Safety teacher I had? "E," all of the above, probably. But I don't have time to get peeved with the choices she makes that I find odd or unwise. I'm not going to report her to the police or wag my finger or hope that she learns a lesson. I understand saying someone's an idiot, but when people start cursing others for doing stupid things, I get mystified.
I would never shut up if I had to wish terrible things on everyone I saw doing something idiotic. People drive backwards up the cross street near me. Jaywalkers frolic in the street when the light turns green. People still ask me for directions to the World Trade Center once a weekend. None of them deserves tragedy.
So why is the carseat thing a scandal? Contrarywise, why does the Observer writer feel she has to brag about being carseat-free? It doesn't really have the cache of riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Do tell. I don't feel comfortable without a carseat, but I do other crazy things. There are a few people I know who thought I was wicked for drinking coffee from weeks one to 40. My first request once visitors could make themselves manifest the morning after Felix was born? Hospital Starbucks. And I'm still walking the streets.
posted by Elise at 8:16 PM
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