Polly and Pip were sick last week. It was some sort of minor respiratory bug that produced a lot of snot, irritated their noses with all the wiping, gave them both a low-grade fever, and kept all of us from sleeping well. It took about four days for them to get through the worst of it. Now we just have to finish off the last of the snot.
The whole experience was relatively normal except for one small coincidence: About this time a year ago, I had to take Pip to the emergency room because what I originally thought was just another cold turned out to be much more.
*****
Ava had a job interview that week. The day before she left, Pip developed the sniffles and a fever. It seemed like no big deal. He had been bringing home colds from preschool all winter long. That night his temperature went up and with it his breathing rate. We’d seen this before, so I gave him some fever reducer and did not worry too much about it.
At breakfast the next morning, it quickly became obvious that he was laboring to breathe. Every intake of air was short and quick. Every breath out sounded like he was blowing bubbles through a straw. I spent an hour watching the bit of skin between his collarbones flex in and out as he worked to get enough air into his lungs. I kept hoping the motion in this little triangle would fade back to its normal state of calm, that his difficulty was just the result of some overnight mucus accumulation that had to be cleared out. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case and, after a brief phone call to our doctor, I packed up some food and books and took both kids with me to the emergency room at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
The experience of walking into that emergency room in the middle of a weekday was a paradoxical one. It was a relief to be doing something, to be past the stage of weighing whether I should or should not take him somewhere. It was also comforting to walk into the ER and find the waiting area largely vacant. There were a few people scattered about the available seating but the general feeling was one of an airport in the early hours of the morning. The space was calm and still, almost in repose, as if composing itself before the rush that would eventually come. At the same time, I was anxious to get Pip in to see a doctor. He was breathing like Darth Vader, but I had to stand quietly in line as a young woman gradually signed in patients at the registration desk then trundle both kids and our stuff over to the waiting area to hang out until a nurse called us back into the ER itself. The absence of urgency in the process was unnerving.
Once we got out of the waiting room things happened more quickly. We spent only a few minutes in the nurses’ triage station before moving into an examining room. In this room the hospital staff got Pip hooked up to some monitors and a doctor started assessing his condition. After some observation and a couple of tests, they found no major problems. So they gave him a steroid inhalant to dilate his bronchial tubes in the hopes that this would give his body the chance to push back against the mucus. (In another argument for baby-wearing, I was able to do the necessary paperwork, talk to the doctor about Pip, feed both kids, keep Polly from messing with the room’s medical equipment, and eventually get her a nap by holding her in our baby-carrier the whole time.)
After administering the inhalant, the doctors left us alone for a while and Pip took a well-deserved nap. The whole time he slept all I did was watch the monitor that was tracking his respiration rate, trying to exert whatever force I could to make that number move slowly downward. I felt each slight drop as a personal success and each little rise as a horrific failure. Eventually, the drops began to outnumber the gains and my sense of crisis started to fade. Around dinnertime, the doctors released Pip from the ER.
*****
Of all the things that happened in that twenty-four hour period, there is one image that has come to dominate my emotional memory. It comes from our time in the hospital, as we were escorting Pip to the X-ray lab for a chest X-ray. A nurse was leading us. Pip was following close behind her and Polly and I were bringing up the rear. There was something about Pip in that moment. He was walking down the hallway wearing a hospital gown, brown pants, and leather shoes with thick soles and wide laces. A bit of red from the dinosaur underwear he was wearing peeked out between the overlapping edges of the gown. His body posture was relaxed but curious. He kept turning his head left and right as if briefly pondering over each of the things he passed: the beeping green monitors, the empty stretchers, the IV tubes dripping their clear liquid, the stark red bags of hazardous waste. While doing this his bright blue eyes widened and took on an angelic hue. I don’t think I was the only one who saw it because everyone we passed looked down at him and smiled.
It was a beautiful, poignant, and potentially tragic picture – the blond haired boy contentedly padding his way along, unconcerned that his lungs might be filling up with life-quenching mucus. I remember thinking in the moment that so many truly sick kids have this kind of beatific aura about them and that in some ways it is a very cruel thing for a parent to see. I hoped and hoped and hoped that it was not an indication of where Pip’s illness was heading.
Luckily, it was not. Several colds have come and gone without another trip to the hospital. It appears that this event was an outlier, an aberration of sorts, and not an indicator of some chronic or terminal disease. But the crystalline wonder and fear of that walk to the X-ray lab remains with me. I manage to keep it locked down most hours of the day, but in the middle of the night, with Pip’s snot filled nose gargling beside me it skips loose for a few minutes. I find myself comparing his breaths to mine, trying to judge if they are unusually quick or painfully short. When it feels like they are, the image comes floating back. I see Pip in his hospital gown and leather shoes walking blithely past all those smiling faces, down the florescent hallway towards a white light from which he can never return. It never fails to overwhelm me and it may be the real reason why the nights that either child is sick are sleepless ones for me.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Effects of Playgroup
On Friday, Polly and Pip went to a playgroup with some neighbors we recently met. Now, they are both snotty, feverish, and not sleeping well. As a result, I lost my usual writing time the last two nights and do not have a post ready for this week.
For a substitute, I offer the comments from last week's Daddy Dialectic post. I went back and forth with a couple of others over exactly what we should take from my post, and I thought the results were worth perusing. Here is the link: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23363296&postID=474601232720578166.
Hopefully, this bug won't last too long, and I'll have something more for next week.
For a substitute, I offer the comments from last week's Daddy Dialectic post. I went back and forth with a couple of others over exactly what we should take from my post, and I thought the results were worth perusing. Here is the link: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=23363296&postID=474601232720578166.
Hopefully, this bug won't last too long, and I'll have something more for next week.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Breaking Down a Real Lemon
Two items for today.
First, I recently read a very erudite and funny spin off from the topic of Tiger Mothers by blogger Paul Rasmussen. In it he pits Tiger Mothers against the legendary mothers of Sparta and finds that the Tigers are weak by comparison. You can find the post here.
Second, this week's full post can be found on the Daddy Dialectic blog. Here's a short teaser to whet your interest:
Imagine the following scenario:
A father and his five-year-old daughter head out to a basketball court at the local playground. He has carries his regulation ball on his hip. She rolls her kid-sized version in front of her, occasionally kicking it to keep it moving. When they reach the court, the father shoots a couple of shots while his daughter proceeds to dribble her ball around the court with two hands. After a few minutes, the daughter says,
“Look Daddy.”
When he looks her direction she begins awkwardly batting at her ball with just her right hand, managing to dribble it four times before it gets away from her. After corralling the ball, she looks up proudly at her father. He smiles quietly back at her. Then he leans forward slightly and dribbles his own ball effortlessly back and forth between his legs.
You can read the rest of the post here.
First, I recently read a very erudite and funny spin off from the topic of Tiger Mothers by blogger Paul Rasmussen. In it he pits Tiger Mothers against the legendary mothers of Sparta and finds that the Tigers are weak by comparison. You can find the post here.
Second, this week's full post can be found on the Daddy Dialectic blog. Here's a short teaser to whet your interest:
Imagine the following scenario:
A father and his five-year-old daughter head out to a basketball court at the local playground. He has carries his regulation ball on his hip. She rolls her kid-sized version in front of her, occasionally kicking it to keep it moving. When they reach the court, the father shoots a couple of shots while his daughter proceeds to dribble her ball around the court with two hands. After a few minutes, the daughter says,
“Look Daddy.”
When he looks her direction she begins awkwardly batting at her ball with just her right hand, managing to dribble it four times before it gets away from her. After corralling the ball, she looks up proudly at her father. He smiles quietly back at her. Then he leans forward slightly and dribbles his own ball effortlessly back and forth between his legs.
You can read the rest of the post here.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Ripple Effects from a Petty Theft
Last Saturday night, somebody stole our cellphone. It was a petty crime. There was no damage or injuries. Due to a change in our regular routine and some distracted carelessness on my part, the thief had an easy grab and walk away situation.
That afternoon I had taken the kids with me to pick up Ava from the airport. After confirming that she was waiting for us in the pick-up area, I put our cellphone down in a cupholder on the center console of the car. We picked Ava up and made our way home. During this time, some new neighbors were moving into the apartment above us. When we got home, their moving van was blocking the driveway. So, I parked on the street. Then, when I got the kids out of the car, Polly started heading for the truck. I hurried over to keep her from getting in the way and, in the process, failed to lock the doors on the car.
The next morning when we went looking for the phone, it was gone. At first we thought it was just lost. But after calling the phone and having it send us straight to voice mail – an indication that the phone had been turned off by someone – we understood what had really happened. During the night, someone saw the phone sitting there in the unlocked car and took the opportunity to snatch it.
After this realization set in, I spent the next couple of hours drifting around the house in a pool of impotence and frustration. While it was not my fault per se that someone stole our phone, my actions were the ones that had created the possibility. Now, all I could do about that was to file a police report and try to get over it. There was no other action to take; no way to save the day or repair the damage. I had to just sit there, chew up my mistake, swallow my ire, and push all the frustration of the morning out through the other end.
This digestion was not easy to take. But in the process, I did have two experiences that gave me a bit more insight into the dynamics that shape families in crisis.
The first showed me how easy it is for kids to become victims in this kind of situation. The second made me wonder about what trials may lie ahead for full-time fathers as our numbers continue to increase.
*****
Pip is a curious and inquisitive four-year-old. He wants to be included in everything his parents are doing and wants to understand everything we are talking about. His pursuit of this understanding is persistent and determined. He will ask questions and ask questions and then ask some more. Then he will return to the same questions again to see if the answers are different the second, third, or fourth time he asks them. From a distance it is a very impressive operation. When you are in the middle of it, it can be overwhelming.
So, as I was stewing over the stolen phone, Pip was plugging away with questions. Ava provided some buffer for a while, but eventually Pip made it over to me. His questions were the ones you would expect a four-year-old ask:
What happened to our phone? Why? What are you going to do? Where is the phone now? Are we going to get the phone back? Why are you filing a police report? What will the police do? Why did someone take our phone? What are they going to do with it?
They were the basic questions of a child trying to make sense of something that had never happened before. And yet, in my state of frustration, each question felt like a small accusation. After a while all I could hear was: Why did you not lock the door, Daddy? Why did you forget to lock the door, Daddy? How come the door was not locked, Daddy? It was like a mosquito biting me over and over, and I had to fight with myself not to lash out at him.
A couple of times I could feel my patience cracking. In those moments all I wanted to do was angrily hiss “Leave me alone.” This little outburst would have stopped him in a hurry and more than likely brought on a few tears. It would have sent him off to his mother or the couch or some other safe place until I was ready to deal with him.
While this is not the parent I want to be nor the model of what I want Pip to do in a similar situation, in that moment of frustration and anger, there was something very satisfying about playing through such a scenario. It would have demonstrated (to whom? I don’t know) that I still had power over something, that I was not helpless in the face of the world’s randomness. It would have given me a chance to regain some feeling of control over everything that was going on around me. It would have eased my pain by spreading it around to others.
It also would have been wrong. In thinking about that rush of feelings later in the evening, I began to recognize in a more substantial way how truly vulnerable kids are when the crises of life hit their families. Given their position as dependents in the family structure, kids become ready targets when the adults who are supposed to care for them are feeling powerless and out of control. In many respects it doesn’t matter what the kids do or don’t do. In the moment of abuse, it’s a question of relationships and the desire by the abuser to re-activate a hierarchy of power. It’s why people who abuse animals are also more likely than others to abuse their children and their spouses. The actual being suffering the abuse doesn’t matter. Its all about where they reside in the hierarchy.
What amazes me is that while I know all of this, the boundaries between the person I want to be and the person I abhor are shockingly thin. When the emotions generated by someone stealing our lousy cellphone can send me hurtling into a position where I had to struggle mightily to remain civil with Pip, it makes me wonder. Is this flimsy restraint all that separates me from the abusers of the world, the kickers of dogs, the beaters of women and children? I scares me some to think that such may be the case.
*****
The other understanding that came to mind as I worked through my frustration and disposed of my anger has to do with some of the undermentioned vulnerabilities that come with being a full-time father.
As I said above, while having the cellphone stolen was not really my fault, my actions were the ones that made it possible. The financial loss involved is not horrendous – about $200 – but it hurts nonetheless. This is particularly true right now as we are coming to terms with the fact that we are going to take a $30,000 - $50,000 bath on a house we bought for $150,000 five years ago. In light of this, even the waste of a dollar on something we could have gotten cheaper elsewhere brings a certain amount of anguish.
For me, this anguish is intensified because I do not bring in any income to our family coffers. In a previous life, I could make the claim that I would pay for the phone myself, thereby taking – at least in my mind - the financial hit fully on my shoulders. Then I could go to work and earn more money to pay for a new one. Now, I have to find other ways to expiate my sin. This usually means being extra conscientious about taking care of things around the house. These are things that I would be doing anyway, but in the wake of this kind of mistake, I feel the need to do them with an extra bit of hustle and attention. In this way I feel like I am demonstrating to Ava both how sorry I am that I messed up and how useful I am to keep around.
It comes back again to a question of power. In a single income family, there exists an often unstated imbalance of power. Ava has a job. She brings money into our household. I do not have a job. I send money out of our household. In this simple flow diagram, Ava can do without me. I cannot do without her.
Even more critically, if our relationship were to deteriorate to a point where we wound up separating, I would have a very difficult time getting a job. I have been out of the workforce for four years and counting. My credentials are aging and my resume shows no development of job-related skills. My local contacts are mostly other full-time parents. In order to become employable again, I would probably have to go back to school and take whatever part-time or menial job I could get in the meantime.
This all means that I feel a certain extra pressure to make sure my relationship with Ava works. While this pressure is not something that matters on an everyday level, when something goes wrong because of my choices or actions, I want to make sure that Ava knows that I am doing what needs to be done to address the problem. This is something I want to do anyway because its how a good team handles problems, but I also can’t ignore the reality that my financial dependency on Ava exerts a subtle push on my attitude and choices.
This kind of push and the other ramifications of such an imbalance in financial status are a familiar experience for many women. The choice made by many battered women to stay with their abusers is just one example of the power this imbalance exerts. But I’m not sure that men like me who are acting as the primary care-giver in a family are as cognizant of their vulnerabilities. It’s just not something that we have seen before. However, as the number of men becoming full-time fathers increases, should we expect to see the emergence of a population of men who, in the wake of divorce, struggle to maintain the lives they once enjoyed? Or is there something in the current order of things that will make the experiences of these men different from those of full-time mothers who after divorce suffer substantial rates of poverty? I don’t know the answer to this, but I imagine that we are going to eventually find out.
That afternoon I had taken the kids with me to pick up Ava from the airport. After confirming that she was waiting for us in the pick-up area, I put our cellphone down in a cupholder on the center console of the car. We picked Ava up and made our way home. During this time, some new neighbors were moving into the apartment above us. When we got home, their moving van was blocking the driveway. So, I parked on the street. Then, when I got the kids out of the car, Polly started heading for the truck. I hurried over to keep her from getting in the way and, in the process, failed to lock the doors on the car.
The next morning when we went looking for the phone, it was gone. At first we thought it was just lost. But after calling the phone and having it send us straight to voice mail – an indication that the phone had been turned off by someone – we understood what had really happened. During the night, someone saw the phone sitting there in the unlocked car and took the opportunity to snatch it.
After this realization set in, I spent the next couple of hours drifting around the house in a pool of impotence and frustration. While it was not my fault per se that someone stole our phone, my actions were the ones that had created the possibility. Now, all I could do about that was to file a police report and try to get over it. There was no other action to take; no way to save the day or repair the damage. I had to just sit there, chew up my mistake, swallow my ire, and push all the frustration of the morning out through the other end.
This digestion was not easy to take. But in the process, I did have two experiences that gave me a bit more insight into the dynamics that shape families in crisis.
The first showed me how easy it is for kids to become victims in this kind of situation. The second made me wonder about what trials may lie ahead for full-time fathers as our numbers continue to increase.
*****
Pip is a curious and inquisitive four-year-old. He wants to be included in everything his parents are doing and wants to understand everything we are talking about. His pursuit of this understanding is persistent and determined. He will ask questions and ask questions and then ask some more. Then he will return to the same questions again to see if the answers are different the second, third, or fourth time he asks them. From a distance it is a very impressive operation. When you are in the middle of it, it can be overwhelming.
So, as I was stewing over the stolen phone, Pip was plugging away with questions. Ava provided some buffer for a while, but eventually Pip made it over to me. His questions were the ones you would expect a four-year-old ask:
What happened to our phone? Why? What are you going to do? Where is the phone now? Are we going to get the phone back? Why are you filing a police report? What will the police do? Why did someone take our phone? What are they going to do with it?
They were the basic questions of a child trying to make sense of something that had never happened before. And yet, in my state of frustration, each question felt like a small accusation. After a while all I could hear was: Why did you not lock the door, Daddy? Why did you forget to lock the door, Daddy? How come the door was not locked, Daddy? It was like a mosquito biting me over and over, and I had to fight with myself not to lash out at him.
A couple of times I could feel my patience cracking. In those moments all I wanted to do was angrily hiss “Leave me alone.” This little outburst would have stopped him in a hurry and more than likely brought on a few tears. It would have sent him off to his mother or the couch or some other safe place until I was ready to deal with him.
While this is not the parent I want to be nor the model of what I want Pip to do in a similar situation, in that moment of frustration and anger, there was something very satisfying about playing through such a scenario. It would have demonstrated (to whom? I don’t know) that I still had power over something, that I was not helpless in the face of the world’s randomness. It would have given me a chance to regain some feeling of control over everything that was going on around me. It would have eased my pain by spreading it around to others.
It also would have been wrong. In thinking about that rush of feelings later in the evening, I began to recognize in a more substantial way how truly vulnerable kids are when the crises of life hit their families. Given their position as dependents in the family structure, kids become ready targets when the adults who are supposed to care for them are feeling powerless and out of control. In many respects it doesn’t matter what the kids do or don’t do. In the moment of abuse, it’s a question of relationships and the desire by the abuser to re-activate a hierarchy of power. It’s why people who abuse animals are also more likely than others to abuse their children and their spouses. The actual being suffering the abuse doesn’t matter. Its all about where they reside in the hierarchy.
What amazes me is that while I know all of this, the boundaries between the person I want to be and the person I abhor are shockingly thin. When the emotions generated by someone stealing our lousy cellphone can send me hurtling into a position where I had to struggle mightily to remain civil with Pip, it makes me wonder. Is this flimsy restraint all that separates me from the abusers of the world, the kickers of dogs, the beaters of women and children? I scares me some to think that such may be the case.
*****
The other understanding that came to mind as I worked through my frustration and disposed of my anger has to do with some of the undermentioned vulnerabilities that come with being a full-time father.
As I said above, while having the cellphone stolen was not really my fault, my actions were the ones that made it possible. The financial loss involved is not horrendous – about $200 – but it hurts nonetheless. This is particularly true right now as we are coming to terms with the fact that we are going to take a $30,000 - $50,000 bath on a house we bought for $150,000 five years ago. In light of this, even the waste of a dollar on something we could have gotten cheaper elsewhere brings a certain amount of anguish.
For me, this anguish is intensified because I do not bring in any income to our family coffers. In a previous life, I could make the claim that I would pay for the phone myself, thereby taking – at least in my mind - the financial hit fully on my shoulders. Then I could go to work and earn more money to pay for a new one. Now, I have to find other ways to expiate my sin. This usually means being extra conscientious about taking care of things around the house. These are things that I would be doing anyway, but in the wake of this kind of mistake, I feel the need to do them with an extra bit of hustle and attention. In this way I feel like I am demonstrating to Ava both how sorry I am that I messed up and how useful I am to keep around.
It comes back again to a question of power. In a single income family, there exists an often unstated imbalance of power. Ava has a job. She brings money into our household. I do not have a job. I send money out of our household. In this simple flow diagram, Ava can do without me. I cannot do without her.
Even more critically, if our relationship were to deteriorate to a point where we wound up separating, I would have a very difficult time getting a job. I have been out of the workforce for four years and counting. My credentials are aging and my resume shows no development of job-related skills. My local contacts are mostly other full-time parents. In order to become employable again, I would probably have to go back to school and take whatever part-time or menial job I could get in the meantime.
This all means that I feel a certain extra pressure to make sure my relationship with Ava works. While this pressure is not something that matters on an everyday level, when something goes wrong because of my choices or actions, I want to make sure that Ava knows that I am doing what needs to be done to address the problem. This is something I want to do anyway because its how a good team handles problems, but I also can’t ignore the reality that my financial dependency on Ava exerts a subtle push on my attitude and choices.
This kind of push and the other ramifications of such an imbalance in financial status are a familiar experience for many women. The choice made by many battered women to stay with their abusers is just one example of the power this imbalance exerts. But I’m not sure that men like me who are acting as the primary care-giver in a family are as cognizant of their vulnerabilities. It’s just not something that we have seen before. However, as the number of men becoming full-time fathers increases, should we expect to see the emergence of a population of men who, in the wake of divorce, struggle to maintain the lives they once enjoyed? Or is there something in the current order of things that will make the experiences of these men different from those of full-time mothers who after divorce suffer substantial rates of poverty? I don’t know the answer to this, but I imagine that we are going to eventually find out.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Thanks
Thank you to everyone who took a moment over the last several days to vote for this blog in the Circle of Moms Top 25 list. With 337 votes, we (the collective, not the royal) finished in 33rd place. As there were more than 150 entries, I'm thrilled with that result and so appreciative of everyone's support.
A new post is coming tomorrow evening.
A new post is coming tomorrow evening.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
On Tiger Mothers, Class, and the Siren Song of Elite Universities
Several years ago as network television was losing viewers to cable and the internet, one commentator lamented the loss of moments of collective consciousness that had been created by television shows like The Cosby Show, Friends, and the X-Files. According to this commentator the large audiences these shows commanded enabled a series of ideas and topics to filter into society-at-large, weaving threads of common knowledge into a broad and diverse population. Without these shows, he wondered, would we lose these collective moments, would the quilt of society become just a collection of fabric scraps?
The answer, we have learned, is a resounding no. While on the average day, the multiple media and multiple platforms which people use present an unfathomable array of different content, there are a few stories that manage to find their way into a huge number of them. This kind of viral spreading can be annoyingly ugly when its content is the ridiculous pseudo-dramas of people like Charlie Sheen or Brett Favre. Other times, when a story has a certain depth and its range of harmonics trigger a host of different vibrations in different people, the results can be both fascinating and enlightening. Such a story acts as a mirror, giving us a peek into the souls that constitute our collective.
Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother book is one of these latter type of stories. After a first life on the pages and blog of the Wall Street Journal and a second life in the proliferating discussions about her in blogs like this one, a third life is coming. This month’s Atlantic Monthly contains not one, but two essays reviewing her book and the conversations that have swirled around it. Regular commentators Sandra Tsing Loh and Caitlin Flanagan parse through Chua’s text and the initial knee-jerk reactions to it to pick out some of the less obvious dynamics at work in the conversations these have created. The results make for interesting reading.
*****
The most important theme that emerges from both pieces is that much of what Chua and the reactions to her book represent is less a question of cultural difference and more one of class expectations. Tsing Loh, herself the daughter of a Chinese father who pushed her to excel musically and mathematically, highlights how much “working of connections” and “financial outlay” were involved in bringing Chua’s children to the heights they achieved. This marshalling of monetary and social resources - a mention of which was conspicuously absent in Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay - takes some of the steam out of the mythological power Chua claimed for the Tiger Mother as it reveals a reality that many of us already knew: lots of people work hard; those who rise to the highest levels often have money and/or connections the rest do not. As Tsing Loh jokes after talking about all of Chua’s efforts, “I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say,…, upper-middle-class suburban Jewish”. In other words, it is a question of class, not culture.
Flanagan’s essay approaches the question of class and the reaction to Amy Chua through the lens of the admissions processes in Ivy League-caliber universities. She conjures for us the image of the ‘good mother,’ the professional class woman who has cut back on her career aspirations in order to nurture her child(ren) into the world. The good mother, Flanagan writes, has “certain ideas about how success is life is achieved.” These ideas are built around the notion that if they deeply support a child’s natural talent the rest will fall into place.
In Flanagan’s eyes, the problem for the good mothers is that despite this belief and their desire to rein in the hyper-competitiveness that surrounds their childrearing, they also see anything less than admittance to an Ivy League-caliber school for their children as a failure, a slipping away of elite status, a “banishment to nowhere”. And in many ways they’re right. In Liquidated, her ethnography of Wall Street investment banks, Karen Ho talks about how companies like Goldman Sachs only recruit investment bankers from three or four universities, with Harvard and Princeton topping the list. The same seems to be true for the best law firms and medical positions. So when students miss out on a placement in an Ivy League type school, they suddenly find that many of the roads to the highest positions in business, politics, and society have become unavailable to them. Their ability to improve their class position – to move from the professionals to the elite - has been dealt a severe blow.
So the good mother slowly accedes to the demands of the market. She reluctantly lets the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex engulf her child, and consequently her family, in its swirl of increasingly time intensive sports teams, music lessons, public service activities, clubs, etc. in hopes that this sacrifice will be enough for the child to snare one of those golden positions.
But, according to Flanagan, its not working. Amy Chua’s kids – the ones whose parents have single-mindedly focused on this goal since their birth - are getting those positions instead. Because their parents have pushed them from day one, kids like Chua’s have developed the singular and spectacular talents that lift them to the top of the pile of applicants in the eyes of university admissions officers. The children of the good mothers, those mothers who want their kids to have both the blissful childhood and the Ivy League education, cannot overcome their mothers’ initial reluctance. In short, they cannot catch up.
*****
As a parent and a rejectee of an Ivy League-caliber school (I was wait-listed at MIT), I came away from reading both essays with a single, depressing thought:
So this really is what it has come down to. Polly is two. Pip is four. We have to decide now whether or not they will pursue admission to an Ivy League-caliber school. It is a choice they do not get to make. If they are going to have a chance to get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the like, we have to start doing things now. Because by the time they are old enough to make the choice for themselves, it will be too late to acquire the skills and experiences necessary to do the kind of spectacular things they will need to do in order to make the Ivy League cut.
It is the trap of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie: I want to give Pip and Polly every chance to succeed in whatever course they decide to pursue. However, in order to keep all those options open, I have to push them towards the highest levels of achievement because once you start slipping, you can’t catch back up. Amy Chua’s girls have too much momentum behind them.
The only way out of this trap is to pursue what Flanagan calls the “Rutgers solution:” decide Polly and Pip will go to a regional or state university, set goals accordingly, and let any other extra stuff come from their interest and their discretion. While this doesn’t actually sound that bad, it essentially precludes the potential of either of them making the leap into greatness, into the realm of the global elite. And that potential, however small, is difficult for me – the product of upwardly mobile parents and weaned on the idea that anyone can become president - to let go of.
There is also one other trap lurking in the background of the choice between the Ivy League track and the Rutgers solution. If we give up the pursuit of grand achievement for my Pip and Polly, if we step out of the market and say no to the competition, how do I measure myself as a parent? When I don’t take my children to music lessons and sports camps and all the things other bourgeoisie children are doing, what metrics do I use to determine whether I am doing a good job? No one counts how many smiles or laughs they had this month. All the benchmarks are out there beyond the walls of my house. Inside, there is only me, Ava, and the kids and whether we feel things are going well or not. And how am I supposed to know what “going well” looks like? Its not like I’ve parented a hundred kids and have a sense of what that is. I have these two. They could be geniuses. They could be idiots. They could be the best kids in the world or the worst. If I don’t send them out there, how will I ever know?
To step out of the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex is to leave me to my own devices when it comes to evaluation, and that is a position that makes me feel highly vulnerable and exposed. One needs a combination of self-confidence and blissful ignorance not to go completely crazy from the subsequent navel gazing. Unfortunately, that combination is hard to maintain in the face of the constant barrage of experts and products trying to sell me ways to fix any number of possible child-related problems. Our culture pushes parents hard and from many different angles.
*****
In some ways, Chua and the Tiger mothers are taking the easy route. They have picked their goal and are pursuing it with a single-minded fury that allows for no hesitation, no questions, no uncertainty, no doubts. Even as Ava and I rightly decide to go the other way, to value our time as a family over the pulls of the childhood industrial complex, to send our children to whatever university Ava is currently working at, there will always be in my mind the tiny ‘what if,’ the bit of curiosity about whether Polly or Pip could have set the world on fire had they been given the chance.
But this may be one of the most positive developments to come out of Amy Chua entering my life: that doubt is shrinking ever smaller as I see what that other life looks like. It will not ever go away completely, but every time I read something more about Tiger mothers, I become more and more comfortable with the idea that for Polly and Pip – not to mention me and Ava - the Rutgers solution is not a bad way to go.
The answer, we have learned, is a resounding no. While on the average day, the multiple media and multiple platforms which people use present an unfathomable array of different content, there are a few stories that manage to find their way into a huge number of them. This kind of viral spreading can be annoyingly ugly when its content is the ridiculous pseudo-dramas of people like Charlie Sheen or Brett Favre. Other times, when a story has a certain depth and its range of harmonics trigger a host of different vibrations in different people, the results can be both fascinating and enlightening. Such a story acts as a mirror, giving us a peek into the souls that constitute our collective.
Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother book is one of these latter type of stories. After a first life on the pages and blog of the Wall Street Journal and a second life in the proliferating discussions about her in blogs like this one, a third life is coming. This month’s Atlantic Monthly contains not one, but two essays reviewing her book and the conversations that have swirled around it. Regular commentators Sandra Tsing Loh and Caitlin Flanagan parse through Chua’s text and the initial knee-jerk reactions to it to pick out some of the less obvious dynamics at work in the conversations these have created. The results make for interesting reading.
*****
The most important theme that emerges from both pieces is that much of what Chua and the reactions to her book represent is less a question of cultural difference and more one of class expectations. Tsing Loh, herself the daughter of a Chinese father who pushed her to excel musically and mathematically, highlights how much “working of connections” and “financial outlay” were involved in bringing Chua’s children to the heights they achieved. This marshalling of monetary and social resources - a mention of which was conspicuously absent in Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay - takes some of the steam out of the mythological power Chua claimed for the Tiger Mother as it reveals a reality that many of us already knew: lots of people work hard; those who rise to the highest levels often have money and/or connections the rest do not. As Tsing Loh jokes after talking about all of Chua’s efforts, “I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say,…, upper-middle-class suburban Jewish”. In other words, it is a question of class, not culture.
Flanagan’s essay approaches the question of class and the reaction to Amy Chua through the lens of the admissions processes in Ivy League-caliber universities. She conjures for us the image of the ‘good mother,’ the professional class woman who has cut back on her career aspirations in order to nurture her child(ren) into the world. The good mother, Flanagan writes, has “certain ideas about how success is life is achieved.” These ideas are built around the notion that if they deeply support a child’s natural talent the rest will fall into place.
In Flanagan’s eyes, the problem for the good mothers is that despite this belief and their desire to rein in the hyper-competitiveness that surrounds their childrearing, they also see anything less than admittance to an Ivy League-caliber school for their children as a failure, a slipping away of elite status, a “banishment to nowhere”. And in many ways they’re right. In Liquidated, her ethnography of Wall Street investment banks, Karen Ho talks about how companies like Goldman Sachs only recruit investment bankers from three or four universities, with Harvard and Princeton topping the list. The same seems to be true for the best law firms and medical positions. So when students miss out on a placement in an Ivy League type school, they suddenly find that many of the roads to the highest positions in business, politics, and society have become unavailable to them. Their ability to improve their class position – to move from the professionals to the elite - has been dealt a severe blow.
So the good mother slowly accedes to the demands of the market. She reluctantly lets the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex engulf her child, and consequently her family, in its swirl of increasingly time intensive sports teams, music lessons, public service activities, clubs, etc. in hopes that this sacrifice will be enough for the child to snare one of those golden positions.
But, according to Flanagan, its not working. Amy Chua’s kids – the ones whose parents have single-mindedly focused on this goal since their birth - are getting those positions instead. Because their parents have pushed them from day one, kids like Chua’s have developed the singular and spectacular talents that lift them to the top of the pile of applicants in the eyes of university admissions officers. The children of the good mothers, those mothers who want their kids to have both the blissful childhood and the Ivy League education, cannot overcome their mothers’ initial reluctance. In short, they cannot catch up.
*****
As a parent and a rejectee of an Ivy League-caliber school (I was wait-listed at MIT), I came away from reading both essays with a single, depressing thought:
So this really is what it has come down to. Polly is two. Pip is four. We have to decide now whether or not they will pursue admission to an Ivy League-caliber school. It is a choice they do not get to make. If they are going to have a chance to get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the like, we have to start doing things now. Because by the time they are old enough to make the choice for themselves, it will be too late to acquire the skills and experiences necessary to do the kind of spectacular things they will need to do in order to make the Ivy League cut.
It is the trap of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie: I want to give Pip and Polly every chance to succeed in whatever course they decide to pursue. However, in order to keep all those options open, I have to push them towards the highest levels of achievement because once you start slipping, you can’t catch back up. Amy Chua’s girls have too much momentum behind them.
The only way out of this trap is to pursue what Flanagan calls the “Rutgers solution:” decide Polly and Pip will go to a regional or state university, set goals accordingly, and let any other extra stuff come from their interest and their discretion. While this doesn’t actually sound that bad, it essentially precludes the potential of either of them making the leap into greatness, into the realm of the global elite. And that potential, however small, is difficult for me – the product of upwardly mobile parents and weaned on the idea that anyone can become president - to let go of.
There is also one other trap lurking in the background of the choice between the Ivy League track and the Rutgers solution. If we give up the pursuit of grand achievement for my Pip and Polly, if we step out of the market and say no to the competition, how do I measure myself as a parent? When I don’t take my children to music lessons and sports camps and all the things other bourgeoisie children are doing, what metrics do I use to determine whether I am doing a good job? No one counts how many smiles or laughs they had this month. All the benchmarks are out there beyond the walls of my house. Inside, there is only me, Ava, and the kids and whether we feel things are going well or not. And how am I supposed to know what “going well” looks like? Its not like I’ve parented a hundred kids and have a sense of what that is. I have these two. They could be geniuses. They could be idiots. They could be the best kids in the world or the worst. If I don’t send them out there, how will I ever know?
To step out of the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex is to leave me to my own devices when it comes to evaluation, and that is a position that makes me feel highly vulnerable and exposed. One needs a combination of self-confidence and blissful ignorance not to go completely crazy from the subsequent navel gazing. Unfortunately, that combination is hard to maintain in the face of the constant barrage of experts and products trying to sell me ways to fix any number of possible child-related problems. Our culture pushes parents hard and from many different angles.
*****
In some ways, Chua and the Tiger mothers are taking the easy route. They have picked their goal and are pursuing it with a single-minded fury that allows for no hesitation, no questions, no uncertainty, no doubts. Even as Ava and I rightly decide to go the other way, to value our time as a family over the pulls of the childhood industrial complex, to send our children to whatever university Ava is currently working at, there will always be in my mind the tiny ‘what if,’ the bit of curiosity about whether Polly or Pip could have set the world on fire had they been given the chance.
But this may be one of the most positive developments to come out of Amy Chua entering my life: that doubt is shrinking ever smaller as I see what that other life looks like. It will not ever go away completely, but every time I read something more about Tiger mothers, I become more and more comfortable with the idea that for Polly and Pip – not to mention me and Ava - the Rutgers solution is not a bad way to go.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Transitions
The point of a vacation is to change things for just a little while. It is a time to change locations, change food, change schedules, change rhythms, become something different for however many days are available. With all this disruption, a vacation can also be a time of endings and beginnings. Upon returning home, the latent habits of regular life require re-activation and in this moment there is an opportunity to alter some of those habits or even to break away into something new.
We made good use of this opportunity following our recent trip to Florida.
In the time leading up to our trip, Polly had been working to finalize some transitions. She will turn two this week, and the imminent arrival of her birthday has spurred her to cast aside some of the vestigial elements of infanthood. The most significant of these is breastfeeding.
Over the last year, Polly has slowly but consistently let her regular feeding times drop away. The process has felt very organic as she gradually either replaced a feeding time with solid food or just forgot about it altogether. As such the only milestone I distinctly remember is from last July when she finally started going through the night without getting up for a bit of food.
Polly was reluctant, however, to give up her last feeding. This was the morning wake-up feeding. For several months she would pop up from sleep at 6 AM and demand to be taken to Ava. The two of them would spend about ten to fifteen minutes feeding in the big green recliner that sits in the corner of our bedroom and then Polly would happily slid down to the floor ready to start the day. Ava and I agreed that this routine had very little to do with hunger or nutritional needs. Polly likes to get up slowly, and this morning feeding was a nice way for her to transition from sleep into wakefulness. Ava didn’t really mind either as it gave her a few minutes to organize her thoughts before the day really got going.
It wasn’t our plan to end Polly’s breastfeeding during our trip to Florida. It just happened. Polly skipped her feeding on the first morning because we were in the car traveling. Then the next morning she was so wiped out that she slept late and then was too distracted by the new surroundings to remember her usual pattern. The third morning brought the same thing. By the fourth morning a new pattern had formed and while Polly did not sleep as late, she did not ask for her time with Ava. This remained true throughout the rest of our vacation.
Her one backsliding moment came during our first morning back in Lexington. It was not an immediate reaction. When she woke up, I brought her out of her bedroom while she rubbed her eyes sleepily. It was not until she saw Ava that she remembered about the morning feeding. Ava spent a few minutes cuddling with her then let her play with Pip in our bed for a bit longer while we got dressed. This alternate plan seemed to satisfy her, and it has become our regular routine in the two weeks since. All in all we could not have scripted this transition any better.
*****
With her role as a breastfeeding mother now concluded, I want to take a moment to talk about what Ava accomplished. In a country where only 13% of babies are exclusively breastfed during their first six months and only 22% are still receiving any breast milk at all through at twelve months (the percentages are even lower in Ohio and Kentucky, the states where we have lived), Ava has fed both our children from birth to weaning without any use of formula.
It wasn’t easy. Just to get started with Pip, Ava had to have the confidence and determination to ignore the poorly trained hospital lactation consultant and seek out competent resources outside the medical establishment. Fortunately, she found what she needed in the form of a La Leche League volunteer. Then, when she went back to her job at the conclusion of her maternity leave she had to figure out how to integrate pumping into both the temporal and spatial constraints of her workplace. She spent an unholy amount of time sitting in bathroom stalls trying to slip a pumping in between meetings. Eventually, she pumped her way through three jobs, at least eight academic conferences, two job interview processes, and two moves. And she did all of this while being sleep deprived from multiple years of feeding children at night.
We looked at all this effort as an investment. By giving both kids full access to the food most suitably engineered for them – breast milk – we were supplying them with the best start we could. Now, as they are both healthy, energetic, and intelligent, it feels like this investment is already paying off.
*****
There was one other major transition that reached its conclusion during our trip to Florida. For most of the last two years I have been putting Polly to sleep using a baby carrier. When it was time for a nap or to go down for the night, I would strap on our Beco Butterfly, slip Polly in between the back panel and my chest, and sing her a lullaby while pacing back and forth in the kids’ room. On the nights when she went to sleep easily, it was great. Having her drift off with her face just below my chin made me feel wonderfully close to Polly. On the (much fewer) nights when she did not readily drift off to sleep, it was tough. Walking back and forth with twenty wiggling, bouncing, sometimes crying pounds strapped to my chest for thirty minutes or more took a physical toll. On those nights I often wondered how I was ever going to move her on from this process. I even once had a vision of her at 12 years of age, still needing me to strap her to my chest and carry her around to get to sleep each night.
Then about a month ago, Polly started asking at bedtime to lay down in her crib before we turned out the light. The first night she asked I told her no. I knew that she was not going to go to sleep that way and to break our established pattern meant extending the amount of time I spent getting both children down for the night. I was tired and ready to have a few minutes of quiet time with Ava so I put her in the baby carrier and walked her to sleep.
A couple of nights later she asked again. This time, while I still did not recognize what Polly was doing, Ava had a late meeting and I felt less of a hurry to get the kids to sleep. So, I put her down in the crib and tucked her in a blanket just like I do with Pip. Before I turned out the light, I told her that she had fifteen minutes and then I’d put her in the carrier. As I expected, once the light went out, she started bouncing and rolling and moving around. After fifteen minutes, I picked her up, slipped her into the carrier, and went about our normal routine.
The next night she asked to be put down in the crib again. This time it finally occurred to me that Polly was not just playing around. After watching me put Pip into bed for almost two years, she was experimenting with this idea too. Polly was trying to figure out how to go to sleep in her bed without using the baby carrier. With this realization in mind, I strategically shifted my language, telling her that I would give her fifteen minutes to go to sleep and then if she needed help I would put her in the carrier.
That third night she bounced and rolled and moved around for the full fifteen minutes then happily reached out for me to put her in the carrier. We did the same thing again for several more nights until one evening she crashed before the fifteen minutes were up. She had not gotten a good nap that day and about five minutes after I turned out the light her movements slowed dramatically. At about ten minutes she had stopped moving completely and after fifteen minutes she was snoring quietly. Surprised by how quickly sleep had come for her, I slipped out of the room and hung the unused baby carrier back on its hook.
Three or four nights later Polly did this again. It took a bit longer this time as she was pretty well rested, but after fifteen minutes passed I recognized the signs of her coming stillness and decided to wait it out instead of putting her into the carrier. Before another ten minutes passed she was fast asleep.
Over the next several days Polly did the same the thing again and again. By the time we got to Florida, Polly and I were both becoming comfortable with this new routine. Even with all the new surroundings and the surfeit of exciting things to see and do, Polly only needed to use the baby carrier once for going to sleep. When we returned home, I gave her a couple more days then I stopped even bringing the baby carrier into the room with us at night. It now hangs motionless on its hook each night, unused and unneeded. I wonder, a bit wistfully, if I will ever strap it on again.
*****
Now that Ava and I have both been relieved of these duties, I know we’ll miss them. There is a closeness that comes with such focused attention to the needs of a young child, and Polly’s recent transitions will chip away at that. Some distance will now intervene between us and the understandings we have gained about her in these venues will necessarily drift away. For two years, I literally had Polly strapped to my chest for twenty minutes or so each night. I knew what to expect as her body slowly relaxed, went slack, and drifted off to sleep. I knew how to carefully get her out of the carrier and into her crib - gently rocking her head back and forth to get the straps unhooked, placing the index and middle fingers of my right hand behind her head to hold it still while I lifted her up, guiding her head first onto my right shoulder and then down to my left elbow as I shifted her down from the upright position, curling her body just slightly as I lowered it onto the mattress, then slipping my arms out along the arch of her back as she nuzzled into her blanket. Those skills, acquired through much experimentation and mastered through numerous repetition, are no longer needed and the knowledge they represent must now be replaced. More importantly, the intimacy we gained with Polly in the process of all that work will never quite be the same again.
At the same time, there is something comforting in knowing that the practices of infanthood will, if we don’t interfere too much, give way to childhood and eventually adulthood. It takes some of the burden off our shoulders and makes me less fretful about all the other things Polly and Pip must eventually do. So, bring on the toilet training, kindergarten, and the like. I can’t wait to see what the kids will do next.
We made good use of this opportunity following our recent trip to Florida.
In the time leading up to our trip, Polly had been working to finalize some transitions. She will turn two this week, and the imminent arrival of her birthday has spurred her to cast aside some of the vestigial elements of infanthood. The most significant of these is breastfeeding.
Over the last year, Polly has slowly but consistently let her regular feeding times drop away. The process has felt very organic as she gradually either replaced a feeding time with solid food or just forgot about it altogether. As such the only milestone I distinctly remember is from last July when she finally started going through the night without getting up for a bit of food.
Polly was reluctant, however, to give up her last feeding. This was the morning wake-up feeding. For several months she would pop up from sleep at 6 AM and demand to be taken to Ava. The two of them would spend about ten to fifteen minutes feeding in the big green recliner that sits in the corner of our bedroom and then Polly would happily slid down to the floor ready to start the day. Ava and I agreed that this routine had very little to do with hunger or nutritional needs. Polly likes to get up slowly, and this morning feeding was a nice way for her to transition from sleep into wakefulness. Ava didn’t really mind either as it gave her a few minutes to organize her thoughts before the day really got going.
It wasn’t our plan to end Polly’s breastfeeding during our trip to Florida. It just happened. Polly skipped her feeding on the first morning because we were in the car traveling. Then the next morning she was so wiped out that she slept late and then was too distracted by the new surroundings to remember her usual pattern. The third morning brought the same thing. By the fourth morning a new pattern had formed and while Polly did not sleep as late, she did not ask for her time with Ava. This remained true throughout the rest of our vacation.
Her one backsliding moment came during our first morning back in Lexington. It was not an immediate reaction. When she woke up, I brought her out of her bedroom while she rubbed her eyes sleepily. It was not until she saw Ava that she remembered about the morning feeding. Ava spent a few minutes cuddling with her then let her play with Pip in our bed for a bit longer while we got dressed. This alternate plan seemed to satisfy her, and it has become our regular routine in the two weeks since. All in all we could not have scripted this transition any better.
*****
With her role as a breastfeeding mother now concluded, I want to take a moment to talk about what Ava accomplished. In a country where only 13% of babies are exclusively breastfed during their first six months and only 22% are still receiving any breast milk at all through at twelve months (the percentages are even lower in Ohio and Kentucky, the states where we have lived), Ava has fed both our children from birth to weaning without any use of formula.
It wasn’t easy. Just to get started with Pip, Ava had to have the confidence and determination to ignore the poorly trained hospital lactation consultant and seek out competent resources outside the medical establishment. Fortunately, she found what she needed in the form of a La Leche League volunteer. Then, when she went back to her job at the conclusion of her maternity leave she had to figure out how to integrate pumping into both the temporal and spatial constraints of her workplace. She spent an unholy amount of time sitting in bathroom stalls trying to slip a pumping in between meetings. Eventually, she pumped her way through three jobs, at least eight academic conferences, two job interview processes, and two moves. And she did all of this while being sleep deprived from multiple years of feeding children at night.
We looked at all this effort as an investment. By giving both kids full access to the food most suitably engineered for them – breast milk – we were supplying them with the best start we could. Now, as they are both healthy, energetic, and intelligent, it feels like this investment is already paying off.
*****
There was one other major transition that reached its conclusion during our trip to Florida. For most of the last two years I have been putting Polly to sleep using a baby carrier. When it was time for a nap or to go down for the night, I would strap on our Beco Butterfly, slip Polly in between the back panel and my chest, and sing her a lullaby while pacing back and forth in the kids’ room. On the nights when she went to sleep easily, it was great. Having her drift off with her face just below my chin made me feel wonderfully close to Polly. On the (much fewer) nights when she did not readily drift off to sleep, it was tough. Walking back and forth with twenty wiggling, bouncing, sometimes crying pounds strapped to my chest for thirty minutes or more took a physical toll. On those nights I often wondered how I was ever going to move her on from this process. I even once had a vision of her at 12 years of age, still needing me to strap her to my chest and carry her around to get to sleep each night.
Then about a month ago, Polly started asking at bedtime to lay down in her crib before we turned out the light. The first night she asked I told her no. I knew that she was not going to go to sleep that way and to break our established pattern meant extending the amount of time I spent getting both children down for the night. I was tired and ready to have a few minutes of quiet time with Ava so I put her in the baby carrier and walked her to sleep.
A couple of nights later she asked again. This time, while I still did not recognize what Polly was doing, Ava had a late meeting and I felt less of a hurry to get the kids to sleep. So, I put her down in the crib and tucked her in a blanket just like I do with Pip. Before I turned out the light, I told her that she had fifteen minutes and then I’d put her in the carrier. As I expected, once the light went out, she started bouncing and rolling and moving around. After fifteen minutes, I picked her up, slipped her into the carrier, and went about our normal routine.
The next night she asked to be put down in the crib again. This time it finally occurred to me that Polly was not just playing around. After watching me put Pip into bed for almost two years, she was experimenting with this idea too. Polly was trying to figure out how to go to sleep in her bed without using the baby carrier. With this realization in mind, I strategically shifted my language, telling her that I would give her fifteen minutes to go to sleep and then if she needed help I would put her in the carrier.
That third night she bounced and rolled and moved around for the full fifteen minutes then happily reached out for me to put her in the carrier. We did the same thing again for several more nights until one evening she crashed before the fifteen minutes were up. She had not gotten a good nap that day and about five minutes after I turned out the light her movements slowed dramatically. At about ten minutes she had stopped moving completely and after fifteen minutes she was snoring quietly. Surprised by how quickly sleep had come for her, I slipped out of the room and hung the unused baby carrier back on its hook.
Three or four nights later Polly did this again. It took a bit longer this time as she was pretty well rested, but after fifteen minutes passed I recognized the signs of her coming stillness and decided to wait it out instead of putting her into the carrier. Before another ten minutes passed she was fast asleep.
Over the next several days Polly did the same the thing again and again. By the time we got to Florida, Polly and I were both becoming comfortable with this new routine. Even with all the new surroundings and the surfeit of exciting things to see and do, Polly only needed to use the baby carrier once for going to sleep. When we returned home, I gave her a couple more days then I stopped even bringing the baby carrier into the room with us at night. It now hangs motionless on its hook each night, unused and unneeded. I wonder, a bit wistfully, if I will ever strap it on again.
*****
Now that Ava and I have both been relieved of these duties, I know we’ll miss them. There is a closeness that comes with such focused attention to the needs of a young child, and Polly’s recent transitions will chip away at that. Some distance will now intervene between us and the understandings we have gained about her in these venues will necessarily drift away. For two years, I literally had Polly strapped to my chest for twenty minutes or so each night. I knew what to expect as her body slowly relaxed, went slack, and drifted off to sleep. I knew how to carefully get her out of the carrier and into her crib - gently rocking her head back and forth to get the straps unhooked, placing the index and middle fingers of my right hand behind her head to hold it still while I lifted her up, guiding her head first onto my right shoulder and then down to my left elbow as I shifted her down from the upright position, curling her body just slightly as I lowered it onto the mattress, then slipping my arms out along the arch of her back as she nuzzled into her blanket. Those skills, acquired through much experimentation and mastered through numerous repetition, are no longer needed and the knowledge they represent must now be replaced. More importantly, the intimacy we gained with Polly in the process of all that work will never quite be the same again.
At the same time, there is something comforting in knowing that the practices of infanthood will, if we don’t interfere too much, give way to childhood and eventually adulthood. It takes some of the burden off our shoulders and makes me less fretful about all the other things Polly and Pip must eventually do. So, bring on the toilet training, kindergarten, and the like. I can’t wait to see what the kids will do next.
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