motherhood

Spoons


I set the table for breakfast yesterday morning and I got the spoons wrong again. I laid out a small spoon for Dee and a big soup spoon for Rob.

“Honey,” Rob called from the dining room as I headed back to get the oatmeal. “Can you bring me a small spoon.”

“Oh, it’s the small spoon for oatmeal, isn’t it?” I said as I headed back with oatmeal and proper spoon.

“Yep, it’s small spoon for ice cream and oatmeal and big spoons for cereal and soup,” Rob said as I dished up breakfast to Dee.

“You’d think I would know that after all this time,” I said.

And yet, it hasn’t been all that long. Two years and small change of married life and just a smidge more as a couple. It just feels like we’ve been together since the dawn of existence, and it’s moments like this which remind me that I am a johnny-come-lately to Rob’s life.

The spoons thing isn’t a big deal. Dee has an obsession with a particular spoon that she would eat with exclusively if I felt like catering to her. I don’t. The big spoon/little spoon thing is something that Rob learned as a child and it stuck tenaciously. We all carry our families’ odd quirks or specific ways of doing things with us as we make our way in the world. If we are lucky, we don’t completely warp our own children with them.

Dee watches Rob like paparazzi stalking the Jolie-Pitts. Very little escapes her notice and she imitates him and adopts his preferences.

Over the weekend she was at a sleep-over and took a nasty tumble on the new sidewalks in front of her friend’s home. She barked the hell out of her knee, ankle and the back of her thigh. Nearly as I can tell, she almost went end over end. Friend’s mother cleaned and dressed the wound with the appropriate Hanna Montana band-aids but as Dee is the kind of child to let bandages wear off, neither Rob nor I checked the extent of the wounds. She said she was fine and we took her at her word.

Tuesday evening, Rob peeled them off her after her bath and discovered weeping, pus-pocked wounds. That and a nasty case of pool-induced conjunctivitis kept Dee away from swim lessons on Wednesday and might scuttle this round of lessons. Rob expertly cleaned, disinfected and dressed Dee’s knee. When I went to clean it off the next afternoon and reapply polysporin this is what I heard,

“That’s not how Rob does it, Mom. Just listen to me and I will tell you what he does.”

Right. What he does is right and you do … not right.

Right now she loves that little spoon, but I can see the soup spoons on the horizon.

The Climb


While I am being held captive at the local cineplex today by BabyD’s adoration of Hannah Montana, enjoy the only Miley Cyrus song I know and for which I actually feel an affinity.

Super Multiple Births: WTF are Some People Thinking?


With the media once again cooing and going goo-goo/ga-ga over another freakish maternity event, let’s take a moment to ponder why medical intervention gone seriously wrong generates such awe and wonder.

I was living in Iowa quite nearby when the McCaughey septuplets were born about a decade ago. I actually knew about it before it hit the news because one of the nurses taking care of the mother was a regular at the bar where my late husband’s pool team played league, and she had spilled the beans to a few of the patrons.

Des Moines was the center of a media storm for a while. Like the Magi, they came to worship the medical cojones that granted a childless couple this modern day miracle. Except they weren’t childless. They had a little girl already and were suffering from secondary infertility. In order to conceive a second child, the mother was put on fertility drugs, monitored and scheduled for an insemination. The cycle, however, produced too many follicles (possible eggs) and the doctors made it clear that higher order multiples (more than twins or triplets) could very well be the result. They were advised to skip the cycle and try again, but the couple was cash strapped. They couldn’t afford another cycle right away and decided to gamble. Because, I guess, another cycle was more expensive than raising quads or quints would have been?

I never shared in the septuplet love. I didn’t think it was a miracle. I still don’t. The McCaughey’s took a huge risk and two of the seven children have paid for it with multiple disabilities.

I know it’s risky to debate because children are born and viable and growing into distinct beings, but once they were merely ideas and potential and it was at that point the feasibility of gestating, birthing and raising them should have been considered rationally.

The California mother of eight is actually a mother of 14 as she already had six other children between the ages of 2 and 7. Without a baby daddy in sight, she is living with her parents. Her father has decided to return to Iraq to find work to support her and his grandchildren (which makes the immigrant in me wonder about the families’ legal status).

There is so much wrong with this scenario it’s hard to know where to begin criticizing, but the lack of any specifics about the circumstances that surrounded the conception, the woman’s partner, her financial position (the family supposedly filed bankruptcy a year or so ago in addition to walking away from an existing house and its mortgage) and why someone in her mid-thirties with six kids already and living with her parents was even considered by a fertility clinic in the first place.

I am not opposed in any way to fertility treatments. My daughter is a product of IVF and began her existence with a twin even, but I was able to support the fruits of my womb and neither the McCaughey’s or this new mega mommy in California were in positions to take care of a horde of babies who would do nothing but grow and consume for the rest of their lives.

As I used to tell my high school students,

“If you cannot take care of a baby without assistance from your parents and/or Uncle Sam, you are not in a position to entertain the idea of parenthood.”

The McCaughey’s got a house and I believe a brand new vehicle along with a mountain of other baby products and community assistance because they were freaks celebrities. I wonder what the baby fevered will be offering in return for pimping the octuplets? Because you can bet someone is right now dreaming up ways to capitalize on one woman’s foolishness.