Martha Hirschfield and Hanna Rosin
A New Mother Comes Clean
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2001, at 7:27 PM ETDear Martha,
Today I got a glimpse of my future and it's a ... multiethnic utopia. Instead of going to the zoo, I spent the afternoon at the neighborhood park, where I witnessed an Indian woman taking care of Filipino twins, a white woman watching an Asian girl, a Chinese woman tending to an African-American boy, and everyone playing with each other. The only people left out of the fun were the white mothers watching their own kids, who sat alone on distant benches. There's a lesson in here somewhere. ...
Two of the boys played war, or basically hide and seek with water guns. It's interesting to see that the fantasy of the military lives on in young American boys, even if the actual army is soft-selling itself in language cribbed from a spa brochure. I refer, of course, to the New York Times story about the army's new ad campaign, "An Army of One," designed to dispel the idea that soldiers are "faceless, nameless cogs." I realize we're in the age of the lifestyle army, but this seems one step too far. "Be All That You Can Be" always struck me as perfect for the times, individualistic but appealing to a universal ideal. This new watered-down version is more like "I'm OK, You're OK--We Like You Just the Way You Are." Whatever happened to the good old days of "Drop and give me 50?"
Are you ever conscious of treating Eli like a boy? Now that Christina Hoff Summers has made us aware of our girlcentric culture, you should probably start the toy guns early lest he wind up, well, an interior designer. My favorite gender experiment story: A friend of a friend shielded her daughter from all girlish toys: no Barbies, no strollers, no Singing Suzy. Instead she bought her all boy toys: trucks, trains, fire engines. Then one day she came into her daughter's room and found her swaddling and cooing to her Tonka truck.
Before I answer the questions, Shocker of the Day: Abandon Socks! How could they? After all those little boys and girls wrote him such nice letters. If nothing else, doesn't Hillary recognize the New York Post headline danger: "ONE MISSING SOCKS" with a picture of a forlorn, scraggly cat scratching its way through a garbage dump, followed by "DEAD SOX" with a picture of a euthanized cat.
Now for the questions:
1. All the time. She is mesmerized by the mobile. I get tempted. Should I turn myself in?
2. Yes. It's cold in our house, warm in the bed.
3. Yes. Yesterday I caught David writing dozens of thank you notes using her back as the hard surface.
4. I chew on pens. I pick up the baby.
5. Definitely not fresh, and usually not stained.
6. I avoid that clipper. Seems impossible. I use a nail file.
7. I change them every day because I like to. It's a girl thing.
8. We have dropped all manner of crumb on her head when she's in the Baby Bjorn on our laps. But I have yet to scald her.
Will you still let us baby-sit?
H
</?xml:namespace>
A New Mother Comes Clean
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2001, at 7:27 PM ETMartha Hirschfield is an attorney, a new mom, and is married to Slate's William Saletan. Hanna Rosin is a Washington Post reporter on maternity leave and is married to Slate's David Plotz, who is Martha Hirschfield's cousin once removed.
Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: A lot of messages about birth control, and about penguins. Great discussion on childcare followed on from Paul Decker's post, below. Some readers--how can we put this?--weren't fully in sympathy with the Breakfast Table's new mothers: others were.]
I quote: "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: But what if Noa want to be a zoologist, specializing in penguins?" I suppose we need to cut new mommies some slack, but there aren't any penguins at all in the Arctic. How many hundreds of emails came in with this point? Sigh. Unfortunate, but there it is, the medium makes criticism so much easier. If this were print in the pre-internet era, then you might get two letters pointing out that penguins live down below in the Antarctic and are primarily food for leopard seals and so forth. But now, with Dear Editor only a click-on-reply away, the possibility of gazillions of outraged penguinphiles writing to you at once and crashing your server can't be called a mere possibility, but rather a stone cold certainty, and cold stones naturally brings me back to the odd fascination penguins have with pebbles, which they stack in little heaps. Nearly 15 years ago, when the oldest of the offspring was a newly gooing bundle and I was the only dad in the park with a stroller, I decided to do something once a day in the company of grownups, so as not to go berserk. I wound up taking Intro Chinese. The rest is rock and roll history, and here I am in Beijing, with three and a half years already spent here in a couple of big chunks, and all four sons fluent in Mandarin Chinese-- two in fact taking end of term Chinese tests as I write-- and all because when Martin was born, there was no internet, there was no Breakfast Table, there was no email inbox, there was no Instant Messenger. Congratulations on the birth of your wee one. Says I, father and primary child care provider for nearly a decade and a half, there is nothing better. Nothing comes close.
--Mike Connelly
(To reply, click
here.)
A pacifier is not pure distraction. It has mystical properties. I believe the sucking actually produces changes in the child's neurochemistry. The problem is how to get the damn things away from them. My 2 and three-quarter month old daughter worships her pacifiers--she literally builds shrines to her pacifiers. Help!
--David Edelstein
(To reply, click
here.)
Pacifier elimination is the first cold turkey parenting situation. Later will come unlimited cable TV and internet privileges. Depending on how phone services are billed in your locality, phone call privileges may go the way of the pacifiers for some period of time so that school work can get done on time. If you are lucky to not have free local calling, you can just make them pay for the itemized charges which usually makes them stop calling their friends all night long.
The cute thing about teenagers is that they whine the same way they did as two year olds when you took away the pacifiers.
--Tom R.
(To reply, click
here.)
New mother Hanna has not spent enough time reading trashy women's novels. They often make reference to abortifacients, usually after the heroine gives it up to the hero in some ill-advised fashion, gets pregnant, and tries to keep it a secret. Fun things like wacky combinations of herbs. Even better, the birth control measures! Sponges soaked with vinegar!
As far as the Pill being an abortifacient as well as a preventive measure: it does prevent ovulation, as Momma Hirshfeld points out. However, it provides a backup plan as well. If you do ovulate anyway, the fertilized egg cannot implant into the uterine wall. So, technically, a potentially viable pregnancy is ended. The key word is technically - certain people, such as Ashcroft, will make any argument rather than accept that people should have control over their own bodies. Why do certain Republicans think the government should no power over our monetary decisions, but should have total control over our biological ones?
--Laura
(To reply, click
here.)
Apparently Martha was able to find a place in a decent child care center because of her affiliation with a federal agency. But what of the vast number of other families without access to such resources? Preschool child care is a state issue (except in the federal District of Columbia), but as far as I know, no state is doing anything to support it. Yet, there has been no organized movement to do anything to change this, either by getting state support for private preschools or by any other means (though there are plenty of efforts to get state support for private schools, and they aren't all religious).
I have thought from time to time that raising child care work from its current low-paid ghettoization in the dot-com economy would be a unifying cause that liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives would embrace. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope.
--Paul Decker
(To reply, click
here.)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: A lot of messages about birth control, and about penguins. Great discussion on childcare followed on from Paul Decker's post, below. Some readers--how can we put this?--weren't fully in sympathy with the Breakfast Table's new mothers: others were.]
I quote: "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: But what if Noa want to be a zoologist, specializing in penguins?" I suppose we need to cut new mommies some slack, but there aren't any penguins at all in the Arctic. How many hundreds of emails came in with this point? Sigh. Unfortunate, but there it is, the medium makes criticism so much easier. If this were print in the pre-internet era, then you might get two letters pointing out that penguins live down below in the Antarctic and are primarily food for leopard seals and so forth. But now, with Dear Editor only a click-on-reply away, the possibility of gazillions of outraged penguinphiles writing to you at once and crashing your server can't be called a mere possibility, but rather a stone cold certainty, and cold stones naturally brings me back to the odd fascination penguins have with pebbles, which they stack in little heaps. Nearly 15 years ago, when the oldest of the offspring was a newly gooing bundle and I was the only dad in the park with a stroller, I decided to do something once a day in the company of grownups, so as not to go berserk. I wound up taking Intro Chinese. The rest is rock and roll history, and here I am in Beijing, with three and a half years already spent here in a couple of big chunks, and all four sons fluent in Mandarin Chinese-- two in fact taking end of term Chinese tests as I write-- and all because when Martin was born, there was no internet, there was no Breakfast Table, there was no email inbox, there was no Instant Messenger. Congratulations on the birth of your wee one. Says I, father and primary child care provider for nearly a decade and a half, there is nothing better. Nothing comes close.
--Mike Connelly
(To reply, click here.)
A pacifier is not pure distraction. It has mystical properties. I believe the sucking actually produces changes in the child's neurochemistry. The problem is how to get the damn things away from them. My 2 and three-quarter month old daughter worships her pacifiers--she literally builds shrines to her pacifiers. Help!
--David Edelstein
(To reply, click here.)
Pacifier elimination is the first cold turkey parenting situation. Later will come unlimited cable TV and internet privileges. Depending on how phone services are billed in your locality, phone call privileges may go the way of the pacifiers for some period of time so that school work can get done on time. If you are lucky to not have free local calling, you can just make them pay for the itemized charges which usually makes them stop calling their friends all night long.
The cute thing about teenagers is that they whine the same way they did as two year olds when you took away the pacifiers.
--Tom R.
(To reply, click here.)
New mother Hanna has not spent enough time reading trashy women's novels. They often make reference to abortifacients, usually after the heroine gives it up to the hero in some ill-advised fashion, gets pregnant, and tries to keep it a secret. Fun things like wacky combinations of herbs. Even better, the birth control measures! Sponges soaked with vinegar!
As far as the Pill being an abortifacient as well as a preventive measure: it does prevent ovulation, as Momma Hirshfeld points out. However, it provides a backup plan as well. If you do ovulate anyway, the fertilized egg cannot implant into the uterine wall. So, technically, a potentially viable pregnancy is ended. The key word is technically - certain people, such as Ashcroft, will make any argument rather than accept that people should have control over their own bodies. Why do certain Republicans think the government should no power over our monetary decisions, but should have total control over our biological ones?
--Laura
(To reply, click here.)
Apparently Martha was able to find a place in a decent child care center because of her affiliation with a federal agency. But what of the vast number of other families without access to such resources? Preschool child care is a state issue (except in the federal District of Columbia), but as far as I know, no state is doing anything to support it. Yet, there has been no organized movement to do anything to change this, either by getting state support for private preschools or by any other means (though there are plenty of efforts to get state support for private schools, and they aren't all religious).
I have thought from time to time that raising child care work from its current low-paid ghettoization in the dot-com economy would be a unifying cause that liberals, moderates, and even some conservatives would embrace. It hasn't happened yet, but I haven't given up hope.
--Paul Decker
(To reply, click here.)