Day 7 and also a little rant

When I was growing up I had a friend (who we’ll call Britney to protect her identity and in case she is reading my blog) who refused to eat anything that wasn’t name brand. I would pull out the grocery store brand “W” cola and she would turn her nose up and tell me she’d just have water. She told me over and over how much better REAL Pop Tarts were compared to the generic ones that my mother bought and faked illness when my mother dared to offer her GENERIC PEANUT BUTTER sandwiches for lunch. But I liked Britney and we were friends even though I never owned name-brand sneakers or drank REAL Minute Maid orange juice. Somehow though, this ALWAYS made me feel inferior.

An artist's rendition of
my friend "Britney" as I
remember her.

Perhaps this is why I have refused to jump on the “organic foods” bandwagon. As far as I can tell, there is no point is serving Lila organic breakfast cereal, organic frozen dinners, organic cookies, organic yogurt, organic popcorn or pretty much any snack junk food that is labeled as organic.

First off, let me say that for this kind of stuff, the fact that it’s processed is far worse for her than the fact that it’s not organic. Processed foods have all the good stuff taken out and a bunch of other stuff put back in. These are not actually FOOD as people a hundred years ago would understand it, but more like “foodstuffs”, which is like food but with less actual nutrition involved. If Lila wants this stuff, (and because I want to choose my battles because she is a total fucking warrior who will win) she eats the generic stuff. And usually there is no generic organic stuff.

The second thing though, is more rooted in the mentality that I experienced as a kid. I don’t know if I believe that “organic” is necessarily any better quality than “name brand” is. I know there are a bunch of you out there who want to explain to me about chemicals and pesticides and nitrates and all kinds of other things, but truly, that was the same kind of argument the name brand girl gave me, telling me that the factories that make name-brand foods are cleaner and pass a higher standard than their generic counterparts.

Here’s the thing. I am worried that this is going to be a problem when Lila gets older and has her little friends over, just like it was to me. There are so many parents out there who would never let a “regular” apple touch their children’s lips and I worry that someday Lila will feel the same kind of inferiority that I did at the fact that her mom doesn’t buy into the bullshit marketing campaigns and that honestly, generic regular popcorn slathered in butter and salt is just as bad for you as name-brand organic popcorn slathered in hormone free butter and sea salt.

For the big stuff, I am on board. I like grass-fed meat better, I am all for not giving my kid hormone-filled milk and I truly think organic produce tastes better. But if it comes from a package and has a shelf-life of more than a couple of months, I just don’t buy it. And I just won’t BUY it.

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30 Days of Books Day 7
A book that is hard to read

This could be taken two ways.  But my selection for this one made me have to stop because it was seriously disgusting me, which I am sure is NOT the intention of the author:

First off, I want to let you know that I watched the movie.  As bizarre and disturbing as the movie was, it was NO WHERE NEAR as fucked up as the book. It is NOT easy to upset my sensibilities but Bret Easton Ellis managed to completely destroy them.  I squirmed and gagged and finally gave up because it was so graphic and twisted that I wanted to slit my own throat. 

The writing is beautiful though and in some parts I was actually touched.  Like this passage:

"My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it. I have no surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed"

But Ellis's ability to capture this character's total depersonalization was too much for me. 

My Kid Has "Friends".

At least I know where she gets it...

From some random child psychology study:

Approximately thirty percent of American children between the ages of three and six develop an imaginary companion.

In many cases this fantasy friend is thought of as real by the child, so real in fact that a child will often accommodate for the companion’s physical presence, sleeping on only one side of the bed, for example, so the friend can have room to lie down.
Many children even believe they can see and hear their imaginary playmate while they converse with them.

My kid does not have an imaginary friend.  My kid has an entire troop of them.  Lila has always been a social kid.  She loves to be the center of attention, loves the sound of her own voice (which I believe is why she never shuts up) and is always most pleasant when she is around other children.

Up until a couple of months ago, Lila hated to play alone.  She would beg and cry and throw things when we were trying to do other things and apparently she got the idea that we just had other things to do because suddenly she just stopped doing it.  One day, I was doing dishes and when I turned off the water I heard her talking.  I thought she was just sort of reciting her inner thoughts to no one but then I realized that she was carrying on a conversation, acting like someone was answering her and she was responding.  Not wanting to disturb this precious quiet time, I just stood still and listened.

"Now Max, you and Ruby need to go over here and sit down.  We're going to have tea as soon as Toot and Puddle get here...Yes, that is them at the door, will  you please let them in?...Oh thank you.  You look very beautiful too." 

My kid probably watches too much TV.  But she plays with Max and Ruby and Toot and Puddle (and Caillou and Leo and Clementine and Xavier...and all of Caillou's 16 or so friends) all the time now.  She picks them up and puts them in her purse to bring them to Grandma's.  She makes me set out little paper plates for them when I give her dinner.  She accuses me of sitting on them (which she finds completely traumatizing) and feels the need to open and close the front door 8 times in a row to let each of them in (This last thing was cute in the summer...not so much now that it's freezing outside). 

But cartoon characters are not the only "friends" she plays with.  Since she started school the number of pretend friends has grown into an assembly.  She has pretend versions of the kids at preschool and the two little girls she plays with at my mother's house.  She now plays with anyone she's ever seen on TV, including Tom and Jerry,  Hannah Montana, and Stephen Colbert (I think he's somebody's dad or something).

Occasionally I have seen her get angry at her pretend friends for not coloring on the paper when they are supposed to be coloring together.  She gets upset with them when they want to play a different game than she does.  She tells them to quiet down because Mom and Dad are talking.  She yells at them, fights with them, shares with them and begs me to let them spend the night.  Basically, in all respects, she acts like they are real, living people. 

This terrifies me.  Although I know that it's totally normal to have an imaginary friend, a posse of them is a little much.  Do you know how long it takes to wash everybody's hands in one bathroom sink?  Or get everyone strapped into the car?  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to NOT get pissed and say "NO.  THEY'RE NOT REALLY HERE AND YOU CANNOT GIVE EACH OF THEM A SEPARATE BATH/ PLATE/ COOKIE/ BOOK/ SHIRT!!!"  I have tried to say, "tell your friends they have to play by themselves so that you can come and have dinner," which is responded to with tears and pleas of "But Ruby's hungry too!"

Her preschool teacher assures me that she's seen before and that it's actually a good sign that she is learning to work out her difficulties, fears, and concerns in a safe way that doesn't hurt anyone's feelings.  And I agree.  I hear her practicing her pleases and thank-you's and excuse me's and yelling and pouting and telling them to "GO HOME THEN!"  And I don't interrupt.  Except to occasionally let her know it's time to eat.

Confessions or "I was a total asshole"

Before I was a mom, I was really judgmental of parents everywhere. I was never one of the types who just LOVED kids and in fact I was more the type that thought they were all assholes. So when I would see parents out in public doing certain things or hear about certain trends in childcare, I would rant about how shitty the parents must be and how MY CHILD WOULD NEVER NEED ANY OF THOSE THINGS. And now I TOTALLY get why these things exist:

1. The shopping cart with the car thing.
2. Baby Leashes
3. Backseat DVD players
4. 24 hour childrens' networks
5. Lunchables
6. Time Outs
7. "Inside Voice Please" and 'Use your words."
8. Barney (or Doodlebops or Backyardigans) CDs
9. Noisy toys
10. Martinis during naptime.

Sorry for all the times I was an asshole. I just didn't get it.

Blind Dates and the horrors of the MOMMIE friends

I feel like a total dork. Ever since someone planted the idea that making new friends is like dating, it has stuck and now I keep thinking what a total idiot I am sometimes.

I have known since about 2001 that what I really needed was to reach out and make some new friends. Not that my old friends were bad or anything, but they were old friends. They had moved across the country or gotten real jobs or grown up and over me and I still called them my bestest friends. But something about having a kid made me realize that maybe my long-distance email myspace yahoo facebook selenaland contacts weren't really working for me anymore. Maybe it's because spending too much time in my own head is bad, but attempting to spend time in the head of an infant is really really bad. Besides the fact that I have no idea what I am doing as a mom and I believe that I am doing everything wrong, I also spend too much time not knowing how to entertain a baby. I just knew that I needed some perspective. So my "friend dating" life began.

I was determined to find some kind of "Mommie and Me" group. I joined meetup.com and after joining several of them, managed to make it to one meeting in a month. It was nice. We had coffee. Their kids were all cute. But did I feel that "magic" with any of the moms? No. I decided I was content just to get out of the house, and if once and a while I got a meal out of it, then awesome. Man, I felt like I was dating boring IT guy again.

I read some of the profiles of the other moms. Blah Blah Blah...Married...blah...LOVE HAVING BABIES...Blah blah...Manicures and fashion and shopping addiction...and on and on. Not really interested. A couple of the moms and I exchanged some emails. It went no where.

Then today I had a good "Date". It was her that referred to it as a "Blind date" and I appreciated the humor in that. See how fucking insane I have become? But here's the important thing: I finally met another mom who doesn't get her nails done...Who admits to being medicated during (two of them) her pregnancy. She calls her kids demons (one of them) and totally knows that when I say Lila is the Spawn of Satan that it only means that I adore her. We hung out at the bookstore and talked about things. It feels so good to just connect with someone out here. I admit, I didnt realize how bored and miserable I had become (become????Hahahahahaha).

It's sad that I feel all happy like I would if I went on a good date. Seriously. Just to have a mom friend is a very exciting prospect for me. And to have one that is actually not a soccer mom is quite a find out in these parts.

I have become the lamest dork in the universe and it's all because I had a kid.

I have become one of "those moms"

Shit. I realized that I am one of those moms that I hate. Before I had Lila I worked at a bookstore and simply hated the storytime moms. They would come in, sometimes two or three times a week with their spoiled brat kids who never wanted to sit still and the moms would let them run wild without supervision while they perused the magazines. I hated the idea of play dates. I loathed the whole "Gymboree" phenomenon, reasoning that babies don't need social stimulation. They only need to eat, sleep and poop.

And yet, here I am, trying to get Lila to nap so that she will be all awake and chipper for storytime today and Ben is debating getting me a membership to the Gymboree so that Lila can meet "other kids her age". Where, oh where, did I go wrong?

Just after Lila was born, I realized that I have not one mom friend. And I never thought much about it. I hated being pregnant and thought that no one would relate to that because every story I ever heard treated pregnancy like it was just one small step down from God. I didn't want to talk to those moms who felt instant love the minute the little slimy thing popped out of them. I just wasn't one of them. And then Lila started being a baby and I decided I would not go back to work full time after all.

It only took about 4 days for me to realize that this whole "stay at home" business was nothing if not monotonous. Since they say babies thrive on routines, every single day was exactly the same-wake up, diaper, eat, nap, play, diaper, eat, nap, play, etc. And I had a really fussy one so "play" mostly consisted of me doing various tricks to keep her from screaming at me. Most of the time, I failed.

One day, out of sheer boredom I brought my then 8 week old baby to storytime. It was ridiculous, I know. The kid can barely see 10 feet in front of her and has no idea what is going on, and yet there I was, sitting in the mommy circle with my tiny floppy headed baby on my lap hoping that she would be, if not attentive, at least quiet. And as I looked around the mommy circle it suddenly made total sense to me. These moms didnt come to storytime because their kids enjoy it. Most of the kids ran around and yelled and ripped merchandise apart. The moms came to storytime for themselves. I was not there because Lila needed to be literate at 2 months old. I was there because I needed to identify with someone other than the blob that didn't quite smile yet, except when she was passing gas. I needed to see that I was not alone. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to talk to grown ups. And so I became one of those moms.

And today, as I struggle to get Lila down for her morning nap in time for her to be rested enough to go to story time, I get frustrated-not because she will freak out if we veer from the routine- but because I will freak out if we veer from the routine. I need to have her out around people so that I can blank out for a few minutes while other people goo and gaa to her. I need to get her out of the house so that she is tired enough for her afternoon nap, because the truth is that it is REALLY difficult to amuse a 7 month old for 8 hours straight until dad comes home.

I hope that today is a day where she does something incredible like crawl or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But in all likelihood, it will just be a day. And hopefully I will make it through it with the help of Miss Marty's storytime.