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I've Fallen Down and I Can't Get Up
Will It Work This Time?
Summertime and the Living Is... Vague
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You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
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Well I Won't Spoil It
But I was curious about the new horror movie Orphan, after hearing so much vitriol about it. There has been a lot of ire unleashed about the subject of this movie (gorgeous loving family adopts older child who turns out to be an utter monster), because it appears to play with and reinforce the stereotype that adoptive children (particularly older adoptive children) are troubled, can't adjust, will only break their adoptive parents' hearts, etc.
I have friends who have adopted and all of them report having been told numerous horror stories from friends and strangers about third parties who have apparently had bad experiences with adopted children. All of these tales of woe have the whiff of urban legend about them because they always start with barely identifiable connections ("my brother-in-law's wife's friend's sister" or "my hairdresser's uncle") and then the story could either be about taking home a dog that turns out to be a small rodent or adopting a child who turns out to be a monster.
So now there's this movie and people are livid. The Daily Beast ran this piece called The New Movie Parents Hate about how awful and repellent the attitude of this picture is.
But I don't think these people have necessarily seen Orphan.
I like horror movies, but it is hard for me to get out as often as I'd like and unlike 99.5% of the population, I don't mind having movies spoiled for me, so I weeded around through some film spoiler web sites until I uncovered the secrets to Orphan. Once revealed to me, I now think I understand why the filmmakers aren't strenuously defending themselves against these accusations and I sort of wonder if some of these irate people will return to admit that they were angry about something that this picture doesn't really address. It certainly addresses other problems, somewhat sillier and more far fetched ones, but I'm not sure it gets at the stereotype parents are legitimately battling to refute.
posted by Elise at 11:15 AM
1 Comments
I've Fallen Down and I Can't Get Up
Here I am! Really. Here I am. I tumbled headlong into a pit of sorts but now I am up and about again. Summer is supposed to be one of those times when things slow down and you can space out, but this year has been like an obstacle course. Some of it is kid related. Much of it, in fact, is kid related, but I was in a work slog that made me want to chew off my leg (since it felt as if I really had been snagged in one of those inhumane glue traps for rodents that are banned in the UK). Sadly all self-improvement promises have been forwarded to August just in time for the Summer Malaise to set in. This does not mean it has been a fun-free summer. There has been quite a bit of pleasure found in many forms from butterflies to pint-sized rollercoasters.
But there is also a weird smell in the parenting zeitgeist and that is the smell of competition. I wasn't getting it so much for a long time for whatever reason and suddenly people seem to be ready to brag about their kids again. Just today I got impatient with a post on Slate's "Double X" blog in which a woman, writing about her life's second act, talked about her child's tremendous talents:
"He is an easy, smart kid, and we practise(d) full attachment parenting—nursing, co-sleeping, wearing your baby, diaper-free, and added sign language to the mix. He was pooping on the potty at 2 months (never looked back), and totally out of diapers at 18 months. He topped out at about 500 signs, telling complete stories and songs, and when he started speaking at 16 months he had an enormous vocabulary."
and
"At 2 and a half, he can identify more plants than most adults, already uses tools, planted the whole garden, harvests veggies, sings all day long, still uses sign language, knows all about compost, water cycles, fungi, insects, and even photosynthesis. "
I don't blame her for being proud. This kid sounds like he's got an extremely impressive handle on his world. But I don't care for the bragging at all. I don't know why it has such a place in this article and I'm actually sort of sick of hearing about children being potty prodigies. (It early potty training a sign of great things to come? I always thought of it as a convenience but not much more than that.)
My kids are not prodigies... well one is able to make a prodigious amount of noise and is capable of a remarkable amount of destruction in a short amount of time, but my stories about that aren't interesting and tend to reveal how often this household has to call repair people or look up stain removal techniques. (Baby wipes really do work wonders on a lot of potential stains.) So maybe I'm jealous. Or maybe I just don't see the point of this type of crowing.
Is there a way to talk about the ways in which you are pleased with your child without being insufferable? Does it always have to come off as smug and self-congratulatory?
posted by Elise at 8:43 AM
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Will It Work This Time?
Feeling defeated and suddenly at loose ends in the wrong neighborhood (or, I suppose there's a tiny possibility of it being the right neighborhood) I purchased an enormous stack of containers at the Container Store. This has been tried before, by me. In one apartment I took a stab at the utility closet-- valiant but failed, and then we moved and a fit of optimism sent me again to get a bunch of clear boxes in varying sizes with tidy lids thinking I could shake some sort of order into the floods of Playmobil and Lego... but there was always the trouble of the little uncategorizable things that quickly filled a couple of boxes and then they generated mass entropy until at last we moved.
And now the Conatiner Store has infected me once again with this strange industrious optimism. Now the hope is that the children will understand that they can put their crayons and Lego and trains and Playmobil away themselves because everything has been neatly sorted into plastic Conatiner Store drawers. (The boxes that survive-- there was some attrition due to their being used as boats and hats-- have been retasked to kitchen duty, temporary office tasks and the onorous and terrifying vortex of entropy that is the Arena of Uncategorizable Toy Bits.)
The children, at this moment when the novelty factor in the plastic drawers is soaring, are enjoying the idea of putting things away. The place is still an outrageous mess, but now I am operating under the delusion that I can triumph over mess and that my children and the terrier will be thrilled to jump in.
Do the containers ever fulfill their promise? Does this ever work or does the Container Store survive on people like me, hopeful recitivists who wake up every couple of seasons wondering where everything got to?
posted by Elise at 5:31 PM
1 Comments
Summertime and the Living Is... Vague
Are we at the halfway point of summer yet? I can't tell. I have an unreasonable fear of August, so there is still a dark month on the horizon. What's my problem with the eighth month? I have trouble when routine evaporates. Suddenly there's no school, no camp and everyone vanishes. 
Last summer I badly miscalculated the loneliness factor and this summer I am about to make the same mistake... tomorrow I promise to do something to save me from myself and schedule a thing or two. But how to people manage to disappear for a month?
I should be grateful, though because these are still days of blissful ignorance for the boys. They don't know yet how far they can blame me for their moods... especially boredom. This might be the last summer of plan slacking, I'm afraid. I should revel in it while I can.
posted by Elise at 4:27 AM
1 Comments
Strings, Excessively Attached
So I'm curious. I was going to say that I'm not complaining about this, but in fact I am. Is there a reason why children's clothing is made with faux-drawstring waists by so many manufacturers? This is a small lament in the world of things to complain about, I realize, and this is hardly a stumbling block to sartorial success (in the case of my children, the biggest one is probably their mother) but it is just sort of baffling.
A bunch of hand-me-downs for Sebastian showed up recently and I had the opportunity to do a little survey, and everyone does this: Old Navy, Pottery Barn Kids, Gap... a friend recently mentioned that Crew Cuts (from J. Crew) doesn't have working drawstrings and she wound up returning a bunch of stuff. This is something I might not have noticed but both boys' physiques seem to have changed around so that now the elastic waists could use some extra help staying put.
Is there a reason? Can it really be so much less expensive to thread the string through the waistband than it is to stitch fake drawstrings on? Is there a safety issue the way there sometimes are for hood pulls?
posted by Elise at 5:48 AM
2 Comments
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