Parenting

That's Thing 1 playing Daddy with my doll Camilla in a Baby Bjorn. Thing 2 looks on from a pram.

Run to the Anti-Racist Parent blog and read Mamita Mala's take on the parenting fad known as 'babywearing'in The Racial and Economic Politics of Babywearing :

Many, if not most indigenous and people of color communities around the globe wear their babies. From the continents of Asia, the Americas and Africa, indigenous women from ancient times wore their babies, mostly so that they could get back to the daily chores of life while taking care of their young. Babywearing was practical. So practical in fact, that on those continents, it is considered an act of the lower, poor classes. After all, wealthy women had people to do their chores for them, including carrying and taking care of their babies.

And it’s that fact that makes the whole babywearing movement in the U.S. so interesting. The babywearing community is mostly white and upper middle class to upper class and they better be. Wearing your baby doesn’t come cheap. Simple pouches can run 70 dollars and up. “Asian” style carriers are in the 80 dollar range and wraps, long pieces of cloth , are 100 dollars plus. On web boards and at meetings, mama’s show off their stashes of different kinds of babywearing gear, which includes special coats, vests, covers and leg-warmers for wearing your baby in the winter.

I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.

I'm writing this on Mother's Day, a day that is filled with joy and also bittersweet for this year my grandsons and granddaughter have been given their freedom, the freedom to live without fear, without danger, without verbal or physical abuse, without the scourge that drugs bring into a home, without hunger or wanting of a different life, a better life, a secure and safe life, a home to call their own, a bedroom in which to lay their heads at night and know the nightmare is over, that they are wrapped up in the bosom of the love of a family who will do everything in our power to show them it doesn't have to be the way it has been for so many years, that peace and freedom are theirs now, that they have a future they only dreamed of, that it has finally come, the day of liberation for them, a glorious day.

My son has been in a custody fight for his children for several months, it's been a difficult time but has come to a happy ending but it brings with it the pain of a mother who has lost her way and hope by those who have watched that she finds a better way.

I say bittersweet in the title because this Mother's Day is a day of hope and wonder, the hope of dreams lost coming true, the hope that we can turn away from drugs and alcohol, the hope that we will find it in us to reach further than a glass pipe or a bottle, the hope that we have it in us to do better for our children, the hope that we can save ourselves and thus save our children. That the we that once was my son and me becomes the we for my daughter-in-law as well.

I WAS WAITING FOR MY SANDWICH at Subway®, and I heard a woman on the phone with her daughter. I knew it was her daughter because she was on the phone from the time my bread was cut in half to the time it was slid into a wax paper bag. It was all I could do to keep from interrupting her and telling her how to raise her daughter. But I have found in the past that people are not always happy to get this kind of input. And I was unsure as to whether my message would get through to her at all, given our differences in class and race. So I bit my tongue and listened to another child being slowly murdered with the toxic sweetness of a parents' insecurities.

My sandwich was delicious. But I did not enjoy it.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

I have had several interesting discussions around here about global warming. Of course we get the foolish denial lobby drones who yammer “it’s a myth” despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, and I merely deal with them with a slap down, fools that they are. But there also is the legitimate discussions of what can we do—as a society, as individuals. We have a 10 year window according to top scientific and economic experts coming at the question from different angles. We have a 10 year window.

I have expressed how one of my main motivators for personal action is my son. I would say my step-daughter as well, and that is also true. By my son is 2…and completely dependent on my for everything, so the need for me to care and act based on that care is so striking with my baby. So I look at my son and feel a huge responsibility. I consider the 10 year window to MITIGATE global warming’s effect on my son’s world. It is already too late to stop the effects. We would have to have acted when scientists first were telling us we should act. But we didn’t. So we now have a 10 year window to mitigate.

The analogy I use is I consider my great-grandparents and grand parents who worked hard so their children would have a better life. I feel I must work hard to give my children a life that isn’t significantly worse than mine. That is where we are, starkly and realistically. There are huge hurdles, but also huge opportunities.

No, not on the edge as in excitement and fun. More on the edge of sleep about 24 hours a day. Never really awake, never really able to sleep well. Living with a baby, and the brain suffers.

So there we were, ready to get ready to dress up to go to the special reception to meet John and Teresa Heinz Kerry on their book tour. We had told our son, Jacob, that we were meeting John Kerry and he was excited. He has no idea who Kerry is, but he remembers meeting Bill Clinton and he LOVED that. So he was excited. "We are go-ing to meet John Ker-ry...going to take a TRAIN." Yeah, taking a train was also part of the excitement.

So we were all ready to meet Kerry.

Until I saw Michael Bouldin's diary describing the very event we were about to go to...which actually happened yesterday.

D'oh! Only that is the polite version of what I said upon realizing I had gotten the day wrong.

Sleep deprevation is par for the course when you have a baby. And sleep deprevation is cumulative. It has been well over 2 years since I routinely got a good night's sleep and the cumulative effects show...memory declines, motivation declines. About the only thing that can get us to Manhattan in the evenings these days is Bill Clinton or John Kerry. I can assure you Hillary or Chuck wouldn't be enough to inspire us to make the trek and give up even a small amount of sleep.

As someone who not only suffered as a child the trauma of a bad marriage but also the trauma of my parents awful divorce, my heart goes out to Andrew Giuliani. In an interview this past weekend, the always candid son of the Rudester, talked about the strained relationship he has with his father :

New York Daily News - Politics - Rudy's son: 'I got my values from my mother':

"I got my values from my mother," 21-year-old Andrew Giuliani told ABC in an interview quoted on "Good Morning America" yesterday, the same day the Daily News spotlighted the rift between the former mayor and his only son.

"She's a strong influence in my life," Andrew Giuliani said of his mother, Donna Hanover, seemingly drawing a contrast between her and Rudy Giuliani. "She's a strong woman."

As The NY Times aptly points out, Giuliani's children are nowhere mentioned on his campaign site, an omission that has not been missed by GOP contenders like Mitt Romney, who is vying for the conservative-est of them all.

But Giuliani, in trying to be hip has just declared to news wires that it's just a normal problem facing blended families : "I believe that these problems with blended families, you know, are challenges — sometimes they are," he said. "The more privacy I can have for my family, the better we are going to be able to deal with all these difficulties."

Yeaaaaaah. Riiiiiight.

I, Liza Michelle Sabater-Tirado, am the father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter, Dannielynn.

It was a freak accident of telepathic autogenesis that made me the father of Anna's daugher. Seriously. Since the father of my children doesn't want more kids, I was using all my mental abilities to immaculately conceive the baby girl I want so much. Unfortunately my powers got transferred to Anna Nicole.

We've gone to town with the news of Mary Cheney's pregnancy. We are so full of cheer we went ahead and created a whole cornucopia of baby shower gifts for the happy mom, her out-of-law wife and their baby to be.

There's more stuff at our Mary Cheney Baby store, but it's just a start. Would you like to add to the fun? Then go to town with your photoshop!

What are the rules for playing?

Breast feeding, for a long time seen as a bad thing, has made a resurgence in recent years in America for many reasons. Science has suggested many benefits from breast feeding including a better immune system, higher intelligence, a happier baby, and better mother-child bonding.

The overall benefit of breast feeding, when possible, are pretty clear. And it is important to keep this in mind. Breast feeding is NOT EASY. Contrary to what many expect, the process is not easy or automatic and can be quite painful and frustrating for both mother and child. Hence the need for "lactation consultants" and such. But if it can be worked out between mother and baby, it is well worth the effort.

What is less clear is WHY it is more beneficial. The initial breast milk provides antibodies that protect the child right at the beginning. But that is a fairly brief benefit. There are clear later benefits that CORRELATE with breast feeding, but it is hard to find the CAUSATION behind that correlation.

One example is the observation that in the developed world (I am unaware of studies that look cross-culturally) there is a positive correlation between breast feeding and intelligence.

Based on this, a friend of mine at UCLA did some research in rats where they looked at different formulas vs. breast milk diets. Their data suggested that there are fatty acid in breast milk that are vital to brain development that are not in formula. This is very likely since formula traditionally was not made with the specific fatty acid composition in mind. I think some effort has been made by some formula manufacturers to take these studies into account when they make their formula.

I've enjoyed a half-century of thrilling school sports -- personally I bleed orange and blue -- but I'm prepared to argue that it is immoral and degenerate (if not downright sick and twisted) to school little kids as if they were competitive commodities in big-money academic sports franchises.

September 11, 2006
NEWSWEEK Cover Story
The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon
Among affluent families, the pressure to succeed at younger and younger ages is an inevitable byproduct of an increasingly competitive world. . .Parents are acutely aware of the pressure on their kids, but they're also creating it. . .
"There comes a time when prudent people begin to wonder just how high we can raise our expectations for our littlest schoolkids," says Walter Gilliam, a child-development expert at Yale University. Early education, he says, is not just about teaching letters but about turning curious kids into lifelong learners. It's critical that all kids know how to read, but that is only one aspect of a child's education.
. . . childhood takes time.

Giving little kids TIME to love reading and learning sounds great, doesn't it? But see how once again we twist general good into specific harm. As usual, we do it simply by misapplying force instead of respecting the individual. We love both nature and humans -- why such little love for the nature of little humans?

Harshness in parenting. We've seen it across cultures, certainly.

But what is it really? It's a less harsh scenario than what that parent grew up in.

They've managed to lessen the blows they pass on to their young one.

But how?

Through sheer goodness. Through sheer love for their child.

And sheer hatred for what happened to them.

They decided back then, back when it was so hard, to never inflict that same crap--the harshness they found themselves receiving--onto another human being. Ever.

And now you'll hear them lament that they are "just like their mom", "just like their dad."

They aren't.

They are less harsh, less mean--even if only by a fraction. But their parenting lets you get a glimpse of how it was for them as children.

But that stuff happened. And it goes into one's brain like a recording.

It doesn't seem to matter whether I saw someone be mistreated or I was actually mistreated myself. Being that small and mostly unable to stop the unfair and senseless harshness--in whatever form--is a hurt.

And hurts become oppressor patterns down the road. (In the case of POC internalized oppression.)

Unless!

Unless a natural healing process is allowed.

[via Is baby Suri Cruise living the Scientology life? - Gossip: The Scoop - MSNBC.com]:

"While on his worldwide promotion of Mission Impossible III, I am told, his behavior was, in a word, paranoid," says Ross. "He was obsessed about the purity of the air and at one point, he was convinced he was being followed and insisted on taking longer routes to places. He was also quite concerned about whether locks worked and had them checked. Scientologists are not only afraid of creating engrams, they're also afraid of the effects of those around them who they call Suppressive Persons or SPs. It's possible that Tom Cruise is being overcome by his Scientology training and that's leading to a paranoid world view that is being reflected in his behavior with baby Suri."

I really was not going to write an article about Tom Cruise's bizarro family life but I have to. This privacy and religion thing is cutting too close to the bone for me.

You see, I am living my little invasion of privacy hell because the father of my children has convinced them to try going to school this next September. The privacy that we were afforded with our homeschooling life is gone, dead, kaput and now I have to contend with prying noses of school teachers, principals and administrators in a way that is invasive and crosses the line of being not just rude but anti-constitutional.

So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.

Do you know what words of advice inspire the greatest players in the world as they enter Centre Court for Wimbledon, to show what they know and can do?

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”-
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?

I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling.

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.

This is meant within the context of, the "fair use" provision of copyright law, under which this site posted the new family's image. It's meant to raise important cultural issues here where we can examine them as free citizens:

Now retired from a public education career and home with my own children, I dedicate daily effort these days to supporting parents in making their own (legal, non-abusive) discretionary decisions about their own children, from whether to have them in the first place, to how to help them learn without signing them over to the government. Parents are the creators of, and therefore the primary protectors-decision makers for, their own baby and child. That's one important principle at play here.

But that doesn't make everything biological parents decide to do wise, or ethical, or best for the child. Or for modern society at large. That's a whole different conversation and one that society MUST be able to have. I don't see any parent's right to sell exclusive images of such private moments as a given, any more than I'd reflexively defend Michael Jackson dangling his baby out of a hotel balcony for the world to gawk at, as long as no actual physical harm resulted - in other words, if he got away with the exploitation without immediate, demonstrable and actionable injury to the child. (Dropping it)

A Song I Wrote i don't know if i'm gonna finish it, it's a song/ rap
by Mariah Occhi

After all my pain my gain my aches my ways my days. After all my stress I’m still blessed still striving to impress struggling in my happiness. My power to exist is to be someone else living life through others and not myself. To the sky through lies i swear i deny it wasn’t me is that why i’m still alive? X2

When I was born I lost my mom don’t really know about my dad alls i know is the mom i have now is the best one i’ve ever had and you know it’s really sad for someone to keep givin and givin but they ain’t getting nothin back five kids under one roof with one parental unit honestly she’s exhausted i have no clue how she does it. I wrote a letter to Oprah but it just got passed up just like any other sad story or homeless guy askin for money to tell the truth i am upset it really meant a lot and plus that shit was just way to important to be forgotten I’ve been worryin for so many years feels like I lost it but that’s not the end of my story i’m just getting started. My ****** hasn’t she suffered enough blood work needles and followups every month? This shouldn’t be somethin she has to handle sometimes wish it was my stomach she came outta. Even though she has it her brother didn’t seem to catch it, now tell me, would you pop pills, take drugs, or drink booze if you knew that you was pregnant, nope i didn’t think so but now because of those wrong decisions she in special ed and she thank that everything is hilarious. Laughin it up it’s all a joke but what happens when she runs into the wrong person and they don’t know now i gotta have this up on my brain i just cant stop thinkin even though it’s driving me insane to know one day she could get hurt and i swear i’d just kill myself if one more person i loved got buried under the dirt

Pussy as in The Pussycat Dolls.

Do y'all remember this bit of madness? Well, this is the first time I agree with those crazy fundamentalist groups.

Girls already have to contend with the incredibly screwed up messages of Barbie and the Bratz dolls. Why would anybody think it's OK to sell dolls of strippers to six year-olds?

[via MTV News - Hasbro Decides Not To Stickwit Pussycat Dolls Toy Line]:

On Wednesday, less than a month after first announcing plans for a line of dolls based on the sexy sirens, Hasbro has announced its decision to shelve the figures indefinitely, declaring them "inappropriate" for young consumers because the act is targeted toward a more mature audience.

"Hasbro will not move forward with the line of dolls based on the Pussycat Dolls," a statement from the toy manufacturer reads. "[PCD's label] Interscope's current creative direction and images for the group are focused on a much older target than we had anticipated at the time of our original discussions, thereby making a doll line inappropriate for Hasbro."

A spokesperson for Hasbro declined further comment.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is an orthodox (modern) Rabbi who has a new show on The Learning Channel called “Shalom in the Home”. It is a cute show where, inspired by his own childhood loneliness due to his parents’ divorce, he travels around the country trying to help families find “Shalom” (peace).

My wife and I have watched a few shows and find it endearing and a cut above the average voyeur show. Reb Boteach is compassionate and insightful and is able to cut through bullshit without angering the people he is counseling.

Last night’s show the Rabbi dove wholeheartedly and intentionally into controversy raising the quality of his show from “cute and endearing” to pretty damned cool.

What we had was an orthodox Rabbi counseling a lesbian couple on how to raise their two daughters in what looked like Park Slope Brooklyn. Rabbi Boteach used this as an opportunity to COMPLETELY demolish the morality of religious attacks on homosexuality.

He came right out and said that they knew this show would be controversial and that was one reason why they wanted to show it. They even had an unusual segment where the crew and the lesbian couple discussed whether the show should even air of if it might be misinterpreted as criticism of the ability of a lesbian couple to raise children. Again, the Rabbi made the point that the message is the exact opposite—that he is helping one of the most compassionate, deep and caring families he has known.

Waking up to those two smiles makes every day Mother's Day.

Women ought not be damned to reproductive servitude through forced pregnancies and human harvesting. Make sure you contribute to to Planned Parenthood or NARAL Pro-Choice America; who are fighting each day for women's reproductive freedom.

And while you're at it, make sure you contribute to our blog and ensure we continue fighting the good fight one daily posting of dissent at a time.

Happy Mother's Day y'all!

Our pop (culture!) quiz for the day:

Which control-obsessed subculture of our institutionalized lives is being critiqued in this morning's NYT op-ed passage about respecting personal choice?

[quote=Robert W. Cort]The problem for the rest of us is that a monopoly like this one, without any underlying economic rationale, distorts the marketplace and hurts consumers. It will not hold in the face of democratizing technology.[/quote]
Big Business, Big Church, Big State?
Big Media, Big Law, Big Labor?
Big Education?

It hardly matters -- Big Mouths for Big Money, all.

When choice control is the goal and the winner takes all, we always play the paying public, giving it up at the gate.

Just you wait. Keep trying to starve, shame, coerce and compel us out of our own homes and choices and inclinations according to your timetables, targets and price lists. Keep manipulating the many into settling for whatever further enriches YOU and your chosen few.

Long ago in a galaxy far away, Princess Leia had advice for sociopathic powerbrokers everywhere: "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

I sent the following letter today, inspired by the NYT story below to pay the one compliment that deserving teachers treasure and the undeserving don't, probably because they: a) never hear it and b) never think to miss it.

It made my children's teachers cry.
They must be VERY deserving!

DEAR MISS MICHELE, Damien, and your handpicked staff of oh-so-special teachers,

No one finds and loves the unique best in each child the way you do, so they can find their own happy spot onstage and the star they are inside as well as out - you are gifted artists and teachers all, but for my children at least, what counts at our studio isn't so much your class but your CLASS!

What you do for your students is so complex and often unseen, steeped in Power of Story, family, teamwork -- it is as this news feature describes the experiences you offer through your art: elegant, graceful, smooth, supple and refined.

I know great technique when I see it demonstrated, and you know I'm a doctor of education, not dance. So you know I'm not just talking about the dancing.

Love to all!

The backstory to this letter is that my kids are definitely not standard issue. Not just their minds and heart but even their bodies are not standard. They aren't particularly built for dancing, nor are their parents; we didn't pass it to them by either nature or nurture, I am reasonably sure. But they love it, are drawn to it and everything to do with it. And their teachers help them love it more, rather than discourage them out of some sense of duty to be practical, because they might never dance professionally.

Who's got your child's back?

Is it the certificated class, the malignantly multiplying army of school administrators, lawyers and agency-registered wonks who claim to know best what's in your child's interest?

Or is it you?

The Cleveland Bar Association is threatening to fine the parents of an
autistic boy $10,000 for not hiring a lawyer when they brought, and largely won, a court case on their son's behalf four years ago. . . Brian and Susan Woods settled their case with the Akron school district in 2002 when the district agreed to send Daniel, now 11, to a private school.

Michael Harvey, the Rocky River lawyer handling the charges for the bar association, said the goal is to protect the rights of children. Harvey said special education laws are so complex that children need experts, not untrained parents, looking out for their rights.

"You hope parents will do the right job for the child, but that's not always the case," Harvey said.

Maybe I can make sense of this -- we support the certificated class so it can exercise a sort of prior restraint over all parenting, to interpose legalisms between even successful parents and well-served children, at every opportunity they can claim by law?

Dr. Seuss titled one of his illustrated stories, "Oh the Places You'll Go!"

Today I offer two short stories to illustrate that wherever you go and whatever you see, what matters most is why you go and what you think you're looking for.

My two little stories are word-for-word true;
I wrote them down right after they happened.

I do that often, figuring my purpose in life is faithful witness to the lives I love.

Susan Sarandon in "Shall We Dance?" dismisses her private detective when she realizes mature love isn't about power and control or even knowledge, that she and Richard Gere are "witness" to each other's life and that what she sees depends on why she's looking. So she determines to change her own focus -- and that change in her eye as beholder makes all the difference.

That's the story I see at home. We unschool and always have, which means only that there is no "in loco parentis" in our living arrangements. I see myself as privileged witness for my children, not a teacher, preacher, pumpkin-eater, spy or enforcer of social norms, nor feminist foreperson driving them to market and/or to mark the world. I don't send them off to any of those folks to mold or judge, and I refuse to BECOME any of those folks at home, "in loco publicus."

We've all heard, "hate the sin, love the sinner." But what happens when you hate the sinner, and the sinner is the self? Where does that hatred go? Enmity spills outward. When I imagine the souls of such people, I see clouds of toxic coal dust, leaking from their pores. But I also see wounded children cowering, waiting to be rescued from the darkness. It makes me sad and angry. It makes me wish that I could reach out and have a discussion with that person in which peace would be the result.

But it has ever been so. It has taken me many of my almost 43 years on this planet to quit trying to rescue people. I can feel for them, sympathize with them, but I cannot nurture the proverbial viper in my bosom.
I spend a lot of time thinking about self-hatred. My own, of course, which I cop to on a regular basis. Although I must say, I've done more to learn to love myself in the past five years than I had done previously. I think that it's about a 80/20 split these days (which makes me a good candidate for the Church of 80% Sincerity. That other 20 percent, well, that quasimodal part, she shows up on some days, and I just try to love her. What else can I do? She's part of me. I remember that this is her, too.

All right, some of you may be wondering. When is she going to get to the fucking point? I do have one. It's about self-hating women, especially those who inhabit the conservative think tank known as "Concerned Women for America." I know that I should just stay away from the place. It gives me the heebie-jeebies when I'm there, sort of like wandering around inside those catacombs where the walls are made of bones. A reminder of human frailty, but just macabre and perverse and something faintly sinister about all of it.

They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children. 

--Ann Richards

If you're looking for reasoned analysis, read no further.

I'm too fucking tired. I think I'm just going to take to my fainting couch and have a case of the vapors. I'm going to gather my lovely children around me, and instruct them in the gentle, moral arts, so that both my daughters grow up to be fine mothers, who recognize that despite their intellects, their ambitions, and their dreams, when push comes to shove, (and a lady never shoves,) their jobs are about putting their children above all.

The fate of Western, elite, white society depends upon it.

All else is pure selfishness.

You can call me paranoid, but I don't think that it's accidental that at the same time that we have a virtual war going on against women in the United States (and that war is spreading throughout the West) --just one example among many--over the right to privacy, at the same time, another assault has been re-launched. It's all part and parcel of the same meme: women are selfish creatures. We cannot be trusted.

About this time, six years ago, I was having sleepless nights over the prospect of not going into labor to deliver my second baby. Well, they were two sleepless nights to be exact. I was already into my second day of false labor.

Anybody that has had to live through that hell knows what I'm talking about : You get humongous contractions that make you feel you're going to spit your guts out and then they start wanning and wanning and trickling until they stop ... to start all over again the next day.

When I started blogging, I had done it with the intention of writing about motherhood. I wanted to exorcize the demons that had encumbered me with writer's block. culturekitchen started as a "mommy blog" and, in a way, I've always felt it's kept to it's spirit. We blog about the domestic and personal side of politics in more ways than one.

Motherhood radically altered my practices and politics. Blogging has made it possible for me to creatively unfold this change through my writing and political activism.

With that in mind, I'd like to reprint a post about the closing of Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center. Without their midwives, I would have had a hard time going through my pregnancy, needless to say labor. I've just fished it out the archives ... it's so old, it's MovableType number is 000047 in an archive that has almost 3000 entries.

So without further ado, I'm republishing A very personal reason for not closing the Elizabeth Seaton Child bearing Center. And for the story behind my cesarian-birthed baby, go to Friday 21 august 1997; 12:01 pm.

I'm off to baking cupcakes.

Really. I love it when you call us "mommy" and assume that because we were born with a vagina and a uterus that we are more caring and empathetic, that we will clean up corruption because, we are, after all, women and women are natural-born housekeepers, cleaner-uppers.

Fuck me, dead. What goddamned century is this? Are we ever going to get past one-dimensional stereotypes about women? Can we please get over the idea that as a woman, I'm automatically going to vote for a woman? Please. I have nothing in common with the women of South Dakota who pushed through the abortion ban; I have nothing in common with Condie Rice; I most certainly have nothing in common with Margaret Thatcher. So can we please, please, please STOP assuming that running a woman for an office is somehow going to get me to sit down and shut up with my whining about the fucking party already?
The latest entry in this discussion is in today's NYT, which begins its analysis with this sentence:

Talk about the dance of planned parenthood -- I've known two families through their adoption of baby daughters from China.

Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in America
Most of the children are younger than 10, and an organized subculture has developed around them, complete with play groups, tours of China and online support groups.
Molly and Qiu Meng represent the leading edge of this coming-of-age population, adopted just after the laws changed and long before such placements became popular, even fashionable. . .

The first was an older couple, financially and professionally well-off in their second marriage and wanting to be a family with children. They went through a Catholic adoption process and asked us to write a formal recommendation for their application, assessing the qualities we believed would make them good parents.

Although my family left the immediate neighborhood while the daughter they'd named Amber was still a toddler, we see them out and about, at the grocery store, park or credit union. Today she is a gawky, grinning 'tween, strikingly similar in age, culture, cadence and affinities -- for Harry Potter and chess -- to our Florida-born son. The two obvious differences between them, race and sex, seem irrelevant.

There's been some tremendous writing by Caliberal and Bluebird about poverty. Liza has written about the mommy wars at home. It has gotten me to thinking about a time, not so long ago, when I experienced first-hand what happens to a lot of single mothers in this country. I've been working for almost 3 years now at a job I hate. I was thinking this morning of how much I hate my job, thinking, once again of quitting. The time for me to go is approaching. I know myself well enough to know that when I've reached this point of despair, there will be a period of bitching and moaning, but eventually, I'll leave.
This piece was written in May of 2003. It's not polished, and ultimately, it pulls back and lives inside my head, but it's not hard for me to remember what hunger feels like, what fear feels like, and, ultimately, what a belief in self feels like.

------

I am a few days past my 40th birthday, out of work, a writer who can’t seem to get published recently, a mother who doesn’t have custody of her children, a woman who frequently does not eat meals because she is completely out of money. May I mention my two advanced college degrees? May I mention my feminist faith in self-sufficiency? May I mention how difficult it is to maintain my dignity, let alone faith, in the face of failure?

I am having one of those days when I hate everything and everybody around me; though I mostly hate my life.

I hate living with one who hates travelling. It's one of those activities that are fundamental to who I am.

I am therefore I'm everywhere.

A huge part of why I love the internet is that I am almost liberated from the burdens of the body and geography. I can move along places and among people as fast as my time, my bandwidth and my repetitive-stress syndrome allow.

That is, as long as I don't have my family around.

Ever since I came back from Austin, I have been made to pay for my absence. It's not even the guilt for I feel none. It's the whining, the complaining, the ressentment thrown my way for doing something that does not involve neither my kids nor their father. Of course, the animosity is escalating since tomorrow I leave for DC for the last commitment of the season.

We're not happy

Mommy wars? There are no “mommy wars” when it's your own family doing the attack. Most women could care less about what I do. It's my own family who make my work a horrendously painful process to the point of making any non-domestic work an oddysey. I time, space and quiet to write or code. I get very little of that these days. And since I waste so much time being interrupted, I have very little time for domesticity. So I am doubly “whipped” for not being the homemaker I used to be.

Being a working woman, and a mother? You just can't win.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents’ investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system—which involves far more than simple male domination—maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn’t were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a comeback.

Oh, crap. You don't think an article like this isn't going to piss me off, do you? There's so much crap to wade through, it's going to take a while, so settle yourself in while I eviscerate the article here and argue that The Return of Patriarchy is more bullshit from the current issue of FP.
Here's the argument in a nutshell. I'll go into further detail as I come across the passages that make my blood boil. In essence, "well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations" are producing too few children to replace them. Therefore, it's only a matter of time before these populations fade into obscurity, to be replaced by...

Now, here's where the argument gets interesting. The author could have said something gravely offensive, like, "wogs will rule the earth." You know. Those people are breeding like rabbits and they will simply overwhelm us western, good folks. (I say this 'coz we've heard this argument ad nauseum.)  But, instead, the author delivers a body-slam to liberals, because lo and behold, the people who are going forth and multiplying are, you guessed it, conservative, right-wing families and thus it turns out that liberals are going to non-breed themselves right into extinction. Well, shit. Didn't see that one coming, did you?

So, let me start from the beginning and try to set up a counterpoint to the arguments being put forth, or at least point out where this article seems to verge awfully close to something that looks like feminist-bashing, "uppity women are ruining us" kind of stuff. (And I don't know the author, so I'm not trying to pin a tail on his ass, but...)

It has been well-documented that fertility rates fluctuate, as do rates at which people reproduce. Certain cultures go through phases in which large parts of the population do not have children, or marry much later, thus restricting the number of children they might have (most famous example: European Marriage Pattern). What prevents these societies from simply disappearing altogether?

Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.

Patriarchy swoops in to save the day. And it is there that Longman states the two paragraphs that I've quoted above. Strong societies--the ones that survived--were patriarchal. Those societies that did not adopt patriarchal practices died out. (Please give me my props for not inserting snark here.)

Okay. I'm going to start quoting text here, with my commentary interspersed, because I want to point to the exact moments where I started feeling that perhaps the assumptions that this article makes are fucking bullshit.

The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare to put at risk.

Mushrooms grow in bullshit. Patriarchy grows in bad analysis posing as scholarly analysis in Foreign Policy. Really. Who writes this stuff?

In The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration, Martin Walker offers information about the imbalances between male and female birthrates in Asian countries.

Mother Nature’s usual preference for about 105 males to 100 females has grown to around 120 male births for every 100 female births in China. The imbalance is even higher in some locales—1