Everything I Tell You is Hearsay

There is practically no end to the compliments I receive whenever the child is allowed to spend time with the families of her friends. It happens, without fail. People marvel at how polite, well-behaved, respectful, and helpful she is. I am pleased that she takes her manners with her wherever she goes, but I am always a little stymied at how they seem to consider this to be rare, or an accident of fate, rather than a firmly executed plan. Otherwise known as discipline.

Just last weekend I agreed to let her spend the night with a friend who’s mother had already once failed to be sure the child was returned at an appropriate time. It was as much my fault as hers, but more so the child’s, so I was willing to give things another chance to go well. After letting this woman set the time and place of child return, I arrived promptly and was prepared to be polite and genial. This was until I texted the child for an ETA and received a frantic call telling me they were just setting out and it would be nearly a half an hour before arrival. Aria knows how I feel about punctuality (I see it as a failure of planning, intellect, and manners on the order of intentionally dribbling spittle into a person’s eye, to be late) and was duly upset on account of it. When they finally arrived, I was in the middle of a phone call, and delayed from the plans I had made based on the meeting time SHE had suggested, so I was in no mood to be further delayed by this woman. When they arrived and Aria said her friend’s mother wanted to meet me, I was in no mood whatever to be polite anymore. I told the child as much, and she attempted to relay this information, but instead of taking the hint, this person came over to my car and rapped on my car window to get my attention even though I was clearly  on the phone. Imagine, me thinking she didn’t have the manners to be on time…

When I rolled down the window, the mother proceeded to apologize by blaming the children for making her late. My first internal response was “Wait, I was under the impression you were the adult in this scenario, and thus, in charge of your own destiny?” Instead of saying this aloud (though I was sorely tempted) I made non-committal noises of sympathy for her bad decision making which resulted in her having possession of six adolescent children at once. She then proceeded to tell me how wonderful Aria was to have. I smiled and nodded,

“Yes, I expect her to behave when she is a guest. I’m pleased to hear she did.”

“I just don’t know how you do it!”

“Oh, I beat her. You should try it some time!”

“…hrrmeh…oh!”

This had the intended effect of communicating my scorn for her lax parenting, as well as the bonus feature of ending the conversation forthwith.

Ultimately, a more accurate way of putting it is that I will beat her, rather than that I do. It is absolutely the fact that pushed far enough, she will be faced with the physical consequence of corporal punishment for disobedience or disrespect. Aria is well aware that this is not an idle threat, and because I have always been consistent on this subject, the last time she was actually punished in this fashion, she was 8. She remembers it vividly, and is the first to admit she deserved it.*

I believe people who do not teach their children to abide by rules, respect authority, think for themselves, and be self-sufficient are failing in their most paramount duty as a parent and ultimately leaving their child ill-equipped for life.

• It is not important to give your child everything they want: it is important to teach them how to work for what they want and to cope with disappointment.
• It is not important to be your child’s friend: it is important to be a trustworthy support system and arbiter of boundaries and guidelines.
• It is not important to make everything easy for your child: it is important to help them realize how to face opposition.
• It is not important to keep your child from feeling bad: it is important to instill empathy

Many of my daughter’s cohorts have been emotionally and intellectually crippled by the way their parents have allowed them a license they are not mature enough to manage. They are unable to understand what it might be like to struggle for anything they desire, to be responsible for their behavior, to respect something other than their own wishes. Aria has more than once expressed horror at the way these children address their parents and treat them with an utter lack of regard. While I find the behavior offensive, I feel that a parent who does not insist upon respect from their child probably isn’t worthy of it.

My child is happy and well-adjusted, in spite of a greater than conventional amount of upheaval in her upbringing, mostly because despite the many changes she has faced, there has remained within our relationship a consistency with regard to boundaries and expectations. She can rely on me to be both supportive and strict, and this frees her from worry over what might happen, should she transgress. She claims to prefer it this way. It’s possible she’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome at this point…

The vast majority of my interventions involve asking Aria to reflect on her actions, and to draw attention to how she might choose differently in the future. Sometimes it is difficult to get her to attend to how important a given subject is, and the intervention escalates. As she gets older, I resort to that kind of escalation less and less, but I believe that the judicious use of corporal punishment is an indispensable element of sound discipline. In pursuit of that most precious of all parental feelings, child obedience, use your words, by all means. Should more be required, I have a wooden spoon that doesn’t see much use anymore… **

*The offense for which she was beaten (5 hard swats on her bare rear-end) after a multitude of verbal warnings, was an epic screaming fit she threw over my unwillingness to buy her new shoes, 20 minutes before I was about to sing. At my grandmother’s funeral.

**I have never actually used an implement to strike my child, and never would. If I am going to dish out a spanking, I deserve to feel it.

Cheese fries and ice cream did this. There was a baby in there somewhere too, I think.

I looked like this. Actually, to own the truth, it got worse, but I lost that photo somewhere. Really; I liked to carry it around and show it to newly pregnant women as something of a morality tale: don’t think you can just eat whatever you want there, mommy. This could happen to you!!

I’m actually only at about 37 weeks in this picture. I had, by this time gained 50 lbs, dislocated my pelvis, and developed a set of stretch marks that gave a New York City subway system map a run for its money for terror inducing complexity. I had also been in active but non-productive labor for about 2 weeks. What this basically means is that I was having contractions on a regular basis, but they weren’t accomplishing anything apart from keeping me awake on tenterhooks thinking it might actually be about time to be done being pregnant.  By this point I remember quite vividly looking at my husband and saying plaintively

“I just want to put the baby down for a little while…”

Finally, on the morning of June 28th I fell into a labor pattern that justified a trip to the hospital. They took their sweet time about getting to me (dismissed as a hysterical first-time mother) but acknowledged that the contractions were both regular and frequent enough to consider legitimate. However, my water still hadn’t broken and I wasn’t making progress; the contractions were not causing my cervix to dilate as it should. My obstetrician, Dr DeCastro came out to check on me, and acknowledged my state of extreme misery with great sympathy.

Dr DeCastro was not only my doctor, he also delivered three of my sister’s children. I had met him under those circumstances and liked him a great deal. He was warm and considerate and charming, and best of all, he looked like the guy who played The Greatest American Hero.

Tell me this does not look like a man ready to catch your offspring

He knew that I could not move without significant discomfort, due to the dislocated pelvis I had been coping with since my sixth month. Since then (a bowling related injury that was my first -and worst- but by no means only) walking, standing, and sleeping had all become difficult and extremely painful. People told me my waddle was adorable, but really,  it was unavoidable. That coupled with my size and the length of time I had already been in labor prompted him to check on the baby and see if she was ready enough to warrant inducing me even before I was technically due.

Once we agreed that the baby was in fact cooked enough to come out, he said I could come back first thing in the morning to begin the induction. I will own the fact that I literally cried that he wasn’t going to start the process right then and there, but since she was my first he worried I would need a considerable amount of time to labor and wanted an early start after a good night’s rest.

Riiiight.

I was averaging about 3 hours of sleep a night in the week leading up to delivery. This was both because there was simply no position which the human body can achieve that did not leave me tremendously uncomfortable, but also because dammit, I was READY TO HAVE THIS BABY RIGHT FUCKING NOW and was thus too wound up to sleep anyway.

We went home that night and I did not sleep a wink. I puttered around packing and repacking the bag, looking at her room and making sure we had everything we needed, strapping the car seat into the new car and generally counting the seconds until it was time to go to the hospital. Right before we left, I kissed Bob on the cheek and apologized for making him spend his birthday in the hospital…

We arrived at 8:00 am as instructed and immediately discovered that Bob had failed to grab the hospital bag. While he went home to fetch it, they put me in a gown, strapped me to an IV, and unceremoniously broke my water. The nurse told me I could use the bathroom one last time before I would be confined to bed and as I walked back from my last trip to the potty, the first post-water-breaking contraction hit.

AHEM

Up till this point, the contractions had been persistent and vaguely bothersome, but in no way were they painful. That changed in a hurry, let me tell you. I stood with my hands gripping the edge of the bed and turned to the nurse and said

“Wow. That one was different.”

She chuckled a little and helped me climb into the bed. I asked if it really made sense to give me the pitocin after all; if maybe just breaking my water would be enough to kick my labor into gear. She told me that no, once the water was broken, they wanted to ensure that I delivered within 12 hours to minimize the risk of infection, and since it was my first baby, and with my small stature, they didn’t want to take any chances it would go on longer than that.

At the point they began to administer the pitocin, I was dilated to 3.5 cm.

Very soon after this, I began to experience pain like I did not know was possible. One of the two nurses keeping track of me came in shortly after this transition, and I asked her to check my progress to see if I might have come far enough along to have an epidural, since I was in considerable pain. She eyed me contemptuously and asked how much progress I think I could have made in 20 minutes.

“I’m not really sure. I’d check myself, but I CAN’T REACH.“

She sniffed and left the room to go check on her other patient. Meanwhile the nicer nurse came in and I repeated my request. She was much more diplomatic and said that I probably had a long way to go yet, and might need to tough it out a while longer before they could call the anesthesiologist. As she was delivering this news I began to have another contraction. Trained by my choir director never to scream in case I might damage my vocal cords, I instead picked a high note and simply sang on pitch at the top of my voice.  She paused and raised her eyebrows. Then she said,

“Wow. That was pretty intense, huh? Let me go ahead and check you…” Her eyes got really wide for a moment, “Well, you’re at 7.5, so I think we can get you something for the pain now.”

In between then and when she got back with the medication, I had another contraction resulting in another top-of-the-lungs exhortation. Shortly after she had administered the shot, another nurse came to the door and asked when they were getting the anesthesiologist up here.

“She is scaring the other mothers!”

By the time they’d drugged me up to the point where I could no longer feel anything south of my chin, I was fully dilated and ready to push. They effectively had to tell me WHEN to push because I was too numb to be able to sense for myself. The dislocated pelvis came in handy at this point though, since I only had to work through about 4 rounds of 5 pushes each before, as Bob winningly put it, the baby “escaped the cave of doom.”

It remains the best day of my life, and the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me, and though it was Bob’s birthday, I feel like I got the greatest gift ever.

I’m in Seattle with Hodie visiting her godmother Allison. It’s been drizzly all day, but we had a pretty nice time nevertheless.

We went to H&M and I bought her various accessories because that is what I do.

Then we went out to Ballard and looked at the shoreline a bit. Technically, just Allison and I did this, because by this time, Hodie was interested less in scenery and more in avoiding the drizzle. Which, to be fair, was wise since most of the scenery was clearly visible from the car.

We then went and had dinner at a place called the “Hi-Life” and I can say that the only thing to recommend it was the lovely historic building in which is was situated. The food was underwhelming and overpriced while the service was just plain lousy. Ah well, it was a last resort after Hodie got us kicked out of the first place we went to…

Allison and her husband Michael suggested we go get some ice cream, and they were talking to the right pair of girls. During the course of this outing I kept making accidentally inappropriate comments. By which I mean to say, they were fine in context, I wasn’t trying to be nasty, but then M & A would snort and make them dirty. For example;

M: “You’ll want to take a hard right here.”

me: “Yes because god forbid I do anything that isn’t hard”

(snort, cough,heh)

M: “It looks like Oregon beat Washington 53 to 16″

me: “Yeah, they beat the pants off the huskies and now they’re going to cream the beavers.”

(baha, mert, ha)

Hodie was fairly mystified, thank the baby Jesus.

M also created on purpose hilarity of his own when he said:

“I’m better than average at that; you could call me outcompetent.”

A’s laughter was echoing off the buildings and we had to make sure she didn’t collapse in the street. It was wet there.

(heehee, haha, ahem)

I got up early this morning and made her some breakfast. She wanted bacon and toast. No eggs. I poured her a glass of milk only to be informed that she doesn’t really like milk to drink anymore. I’ll have to start thinking about another way for her to get enough calcium I suppose. We talked about where she ought to keep her phone, and that it needs to stay on silent. That I’d want her to take out the trash for me when she gets home. How she wants to redecorate her room, selling her current bedroom set for something a little less little girl.

And she is less a little girl than ever before. When I mentioned I was excited for her to go to Outdoor School, and that it had been the best week of my life when I was 12 she looked at me seriously and said “Mommy, that makes me kinda sad.”

As she was walking out the door, she submitted to be photographed with relative good cheer. As I looked at her standing there I almost cried, but I think I hid it pretty well. My sweet daughter is not as prone to sentiment as I am, but she would have comforted me gently if I had. I wanted to spare her the energy of having to. She was utterly composed, but then, she is way cooler than I am.

every tattoo i have is both for someone i love and a lesson i’ve carved into my skin.

appropriately, this one hurt much more than any other, as i love the person i had in mind much more than any other. also, the lesson is harder to remember. so.

I promise…

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