So you also might find that having a daily prompt gives you the structure you need to process what's going on in your life — mamahood included. It was a release for me. One day, I was able to write my son (ten months old at the time!) an apology for being kind of a lame mother. Hmmm...maybe I should reread that one.
Here are the full rules. This year, if you post your daily poems in the comments on Robert Brewer's blog, you can win a completion certificate and possibly be included in an eBook. Snap!
Check in at my writing blog for any updates throughout the month.
I'm sure you've seen this Atlantic article making the rounds: "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" by Hanna Rosin, who decries breastfeeding as anti-feminist and overhyped.
It's engendered a lot of vitriol, much of it deserved and some maybe a little exaggerated, and it's also (on non-breastfeeding-centric sites) gathered a lot of accolades, that someone is finally saying what every mother thinks: that breastfeeding kinda sucks (more on my disagreement with that later).
First of all, the tone rubbed some people the wrong way: It's a sarcastically written article, which alternately amused and irritated me. When she describes how "the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic," it's clearly a hyperbolic artistic illustration, but it comes across as über-judgmental. If you're a friend of Hanna Rosin, you're probably wondering now what she thinks of you — and what she writes about you in The Atlantic! As a fellow sarcasmo, though, I did feel like defending her right to express herself in a creative, if snarky, style.
But of course, beyond the tone was the message. Rosin thinks breastfeeding keeps women at home all day and night with their shirts half-off, while their menfolk and their lucky formula-feeding sisters go off and have fulfilling lives without them — or, as she puts it: "It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way."
There's a lot to unpack there. For me, breastfeeding has not kept me at home or indecent or unfulfilled. I've been able to write a novel while breastfeeding. I've made friends and volunteered and traveled. I've worked in our home business. It's raising a child that's curtailed some of my activities, but not breastfeeding by itself.
On the other hand, I personally dislike pumping. Unlike breastfeeding, where the baby does all the work, pumping is inconvenient to me, and it feels contrived. So, for mothers who work outside the home, I can understand the reluctance to go through the trouble of pumping when an artificial milk substitute is available. I give props to all the pumpers out there (unlike Rosin, who just kind of derides them: "One of them sat on my couch the other day hooked up to tubes and suctions and a giant deconstructed bra, looking like some fetish ad, or a footnote from the Josef Mengele years. Looking as far as humanly possible from Eve in her natural, feminine state."). But mostly I just wish that pumping weren't necessary. I wish that our economy and culture allowed for women (and men!) to take the time they need to be parents, to have families, and to enjoy meaningful work. We made a choice to work from home, but I acknowledge that not everyone can or does do the same, and meanwhile the system as it stands is incredibly harsh toward parents, and mothers in particular. I wish Rosin had addressed that instead of blaming breastfeeding as the cause of the death of feminism.
The other main thrust of Rosin's article is that breastfeeding isn't so great, anyway. She's examined the research, she says, and "the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates."
Here I direct you to a lactation consultant who knows of such things. (Lactation consulting also rated a snicker in Rosin's article.) Tanya at the Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog gave a response to Rosin's article that focused on her selective reading of the literature on breastfeeding's benefits. One thing that struck me as I read the Atlantic article was that Rosin referenced a meta-study on breastfeeding that came up with lukewarm results for breastfeeding's superiority — done in 1984. I thought, There must be something more recent than that! And I therewith resolved to research that. Fortunately, I came across Tanya's post and realized she'd done it for me. Hooray!
The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog post points to a 2007 meta-analysis that "found that a history of breastfeeding was associated with a reduction in the risk of acute otitis media, non-specific gastroenteritis, severe lower respiratory tract infections, atopic dermatitis, asthma (young children), obesity, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and necrotizing enterocolitis." So Rosin can poke fun: "And when I look around my daughter’s second-grade class, I can’t seem to pick out the unfortunate ones: 'Oh, poor little Sophie, whose mother couldn’t breast-feed. What dim eyes she has. What a sickly pallor. And already sprouting acne!'” But, the thing is, she's wrong. So there.
Here's what also bugged me about the article. It kept comparing breastmilk to formula. Not breastfeeding, the act of transmitting the breastmilk, but the precious "milky elixir" (read in snide tone) itself. When she does mention breastfeeding, she dismisses the holistic benefits:
"In his study on breast-feeding and cognitive development, Michael Kramer mentions research on the long-term effects of mother rats’ licking and grooming their pups. Maybe, he writes, it’s 'the physical and/or emotional act of breastfeeding' that might lead to benefits. This is the theory he prefers, he told me, because 'it would suggest something the formula companies can’t reproduce.' No offense to Kramer, who seems like a great guy, but this gets under my skin. If the researchers just want us to lick and groom our pups, why don’t they say so? We can find our own way to do that. In fact, by insisting that milk is some kind of vaccine, they make it less likely that we’ll experience nursing primarily as a loving maternal act—'pleasant and relaxing,' in the words of Our Bodies, Ourselves and more likely that we’ll view it as, well, dispensing medicine."
This reminds me again of In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, where he discusses nutritionism's deconstruction of food into discrete nutrients, each having more or less value depending on the current dietary whims. Ever since I read that book, I've seen nutritionism's hold everywhere. I hear well-meaning diet gurus rejecting, for instance, grapes because of the type of sugar in them. They're grapes! They're good for you. People in the Roman Empire already knew that. What have we learned since then? That we're kind of stupid when it comes to eating, that's what, and that we should stop thinking so hard. It's not each separate part of each separate food that's important — it's food itself. It's the entire package — eating a variety of fresh, whole foods. Of course grapes can be part of that!
It's kind of weird, because I do agree with Rosin in the above quote that it's pointless to think of breastmilk in such medical terms, because such deconstruction misses the point of feeding our young. But I disagree with her conclusion that it's some other disparate action instead (cuddling). It's all of it! As she's scrambling to prove that it's not the breastmilk alone that confers the "magical" benefits of breastfeeding, with the air of someone debunking the "secret" of breastfeeding's powers, I want to say: "So?" What's wrong with that? Why can't it be everything together — the milk, the antibodies, the fats and proteins, the sugars, the warmth, the closeness, the hormones, the time investment, the cuddling? None of those things by itself is enough — babies crave it all. And there are probably even more factors than that. Why think so hard about it when it should be perfectly obvious that feeding our babies the way mammals have fed their young for millennia just makes good sense?
Now, as to some people's positive responses to this article — I've been fortunate that breastfeeding has come, mainly, so easily for Mikko and me. I have heard of other mothers' struggles through mastitis and low milk supply and premature births, and I hear their disappointment that they were unable to breastfeed the way they wanted, or sometimes at all. I can understand that, for those women, an article like this might help them feel less guilty, and that's cool. Why judge yourself for a medical condition and a good attempt? And I don't mind someone telling it like it is for them, even if that means popping the rosy bubble of beautiful mommyhood (especially then). What worries me most about this article is that I foresee women who were wavering on the subject of "to breastfeed or not" will read a blurb of "breastfeeding isn't all that hot after all" and will swing toward not, without ever looking into it further.
As a final thought, it bemuses me that Rosin seems to be stuck in an (admittedly very fashion-conscious) attachment-parenting crowd out there on the East Coast, and here I am stuck in a conventional-parenting crowd on the West Coast. She would never hear condemnation of her formula-feeding ways in my group. Maybe we should switch places?
I'm going to need some tight jeans and oversize sunglasses, though.
When I was pregnant, I blithely nested by buying used prefolds from consignment shops and WAHM-made diaper covers off eBay and assumed I'd get over the hating-laundry part.
Fast forward to having a newborn. Nine weeks in, after all the relatives have left and helped me with housekeeping...um...not a mite, I turn to the hamper to do my first load of laundry. And find that the items at the bottom have mildewed. Yuck (in so many ways, yes, I know).
Fortunately for me, a dear friend anticipated my need and gave us the gift of a cloth diaper service for our first month of newborn life. To be honest, my pregnant self was slightly dismissive — sure, I thought, it will be nice for that one month, but then I'm using my own diaper stash.
Ha ha — that little laundry episode showed me that I really, really liked the diaper service after all. And, hey, while we're at it, how's about a laundry service in general? (And, yes, I found one on craigslist! I'm so spoiled.)
Ugh. Well, I've been trying for a week to break this monster below into smaller chunks, and all I did was succeed in adding on to it with a couplerelated posts. But this is about our ambivalence in enrolling Mikko in preschool, and I'm running out of time to get this posted before he starts already (as I post this six days after I first began writing it). So, as Sam assures me, writing can be any length you want on the internet! I will try to break it up with catchy subheadings and pretty pictures.
Well, I haven't sent in the deposit yet. You can see the ambivalence there.
This isn't my post only on the preschool itself (though I do get to that later) but on the advisability of sending a 21-month-old to one in the first place, when there's no real need for it.
Daycare, schmaycare, or enjoying a devil-may-daycare attitude
I've had the luxury of being ambivalent about daycare. Granted, it's a luxury our family of three deliberately cultivated, but we're blessed to be in a situation (personal, cultural, financial) that's allowed us to make such a choice.
Sam and I have worked from home since our marriage, first telecommuting (Sam) and doing contract work (me), and now running our own home business(es). We initially considered it temporary, that eventually we would become normal and work in an office, but we grew used to it. And we really, really liked it. So when Sam's salary job ran out, we found a way to keep the experience of working from home if not the stable paycheck.
It's meant sacrifices, although I don't usually think of them that way. We're not even close to the amount of income needed to buy a house, even in this crappy economy. We've had to borrow money from relatives on occasion (hooray for no-interest loans), though we've repaid it all. We've had stretches of eating pasta that we could pick up on clearance from Big Lots (59 cents a box for cheese tortellini, baby!). I remember the day I considered the holes in my socks and wavered on whether I could afford a new pair. That's when I knew I was truly hobo. Well, no, maybe that was when Sam came excitedly back from taking out the trash and said the Dumpster was ripe for the picking — someone had moved out of our apartment complex and inexplicably tossed all his belongings; Sam sold them on eBay for a few extra bucks (without mentioning their provenance).
I've been interested in the idea of multilingualism ever since we moved to Berlin for several years when I was 10. I had visions of rattling off a new language with fluent ease, and everyone who spoke only English would wonder what fabulous things my German friends and I were talking about. I practiced by babbling to myself, pretending I was saying something insightful.
The dream didn't come true. German has never been easy for me like English, and I think the main reason is I started too late. My first year in Berlin was spent at the American school, and then I transferred to a German-American school. The second was much better at teaching German, but the rest of my classes were still in English. And, as traveling Americans rely on, everyone speaks English, so I didn't have a problem navigating the city with my limited skills.
I took another year of German when we returned to the States for my high school years (the only year that was offered at my schools), and then I minored in German in college. My college classes especially helped me progress in my abilities, but I've remained self-conscious about speaking German with actual native German speakers. Americans at the same level as I am — sure. But real, live Germans or Austrians, etc.? Not so much.
So the wish remained, a regret that I never did become fabulous in another language.
And I realized — it could be so much easier. My German friends who are fluent in English started learning English in preschool. Why do Americans, by and large, wait until high school? It's so much harder then.
And there are so many benefits to multilingualism: increased cognitive skills, better proficiency at reading and writing (there seems to be something about learning more than one language that makes you aware of language as a construct and helps you decipher the parts more readily, so therefore:), ease of learning additional languages, acknowledgment and appreciation of cultural differences, and greater creative thinking in general, among more practical possibilities like having an easier time in foreign-language classes at school or in getting a job in a language field.
So when I was contemplating having a baby, I thought — I'll make it easy for him. (Forgive the masculine pronoun use, but I ended up having a boy, so it makes sense to me in this case.) I'll start him at birth, before birth even.
But was it even possible? Could a non-native speaker raise a native-level speaker?
I found a book at the library that inspired me no end: Bilingual Children: From Birth to Teens, by George Saunders. It looks to be out of print (and holy-cow expensive), but maybe your library also has a copy or you can access it through interlibrary loan.
George Saunders is an Australian who learned German well enough that he figured he'd give raising his children in German a whirl. He's also a linguist, so this sort of thing amused him. I'm so glad that it did! And that he documented his experiences.
He followed what's known in bilingual circles as OPOL, or one parent, one language. (I learned a lot of such terms when researching these things.) That means that, in his case, he spoke only German to his kids, and his wife spoke only English. You can see from the cover two things: (1) One of his kids did the illustrations, and (2) his kids learned to speak English to his wife and German to him and to expect responses in kind. I'll add a third thing that you see from the cover: George Saunders is very hairy and well-built.
I was encouraged by the positive results of George Saunders's little experiment on his children. They all grew up speaking German with near-native accents and breadth, and their German writing skills were only slightly behind their English skills. There's always debate about what being "fluent" in a language means, or what standards to set for being bilingual (or tri-, etc.), but that was more than successfully bilingual in my book. I'd be happy if Mikko had a decent passive understanding of spoken German and could carry on conversations, preferably without any of my paralyzing social fears.
I wasn't too keen on the OPOL idea, because I'm just so much better in English. As a writer, too, I love to express myself in my mother tongue, and as a singer, most of the songs I cherish and want to pass on are in English. You come to realize when you're considering bringing up a baby with a minority language just how much culture and language are inseparable. Your books, your stories, your songs, your nursery rhymes, your proverbs and catchphrases, your jokes, even your slang and the cutesie nicknames you give your child — all require a wide and deep experience in the language you've chosen.
I checked out a range of books from the library and started reading articles online, and I found out that there's a debate about how regimented you have to be in your language use with your child. There's a large camp that says very and suggests strategies like OPOL or both parents speaking a minority language at home, which wouldn't work with us, as Sam doesn't speak a word of German (he literally refuses). There's another side that says kids will figure it out eventually, and you can be a little more laid-back. They point to a lot of Spanish-speaking enclaves in the United States where the children grow up speaking a Spanglish conglomeration, mixing words and grammar casually, but at school the children are able to separate out the English rules and vocabulary.
At any rate, the latter appealed to me more. Maybe it's my unschooling, they'll-get-there-eventually philosophy, or maybe it was just my reluctance to speak only German. I figured I'd speak German sometimes, and that I'd start during pregnancy.
Boy, did I feel like a fool. I could barely speak to my little one in English during pregnancy, let alone in a language that no one around me could understand. Even when Mikko was born, I found it strained. It was like talking to the cat, or to myself. When I spoke English, I knew that Sam at least was catching what I was saying, and any little jokes I was throwing in. Speaking German felt very isolating, since Mikko wasn't responding in any case. And, since Sam couldn't join in, it felt a little rude as well, as if I were purposely excluding him.
I bought German books and CDs and sometimes remembered to use them. I joined a Seattle-area German-speaking parents group, but here's the sad part — I've been too shy to meet any of the members. I signed up for the email list, and I follow along and mark invitations to church festivals and coffee groups and toddler story times on my calendar, and then I never show up. This goes back to being self-conscious about speaking German to actual German speakers, and I feel doubly bizarre for being a non-native speaker who's interested in raising her son to be bilingual. Most of the other families have one or both parents who are native German speakers, sometimes on contract assignment in the U.S., sometimes a mixed marriage that's relocated to the area. I kept wishing I had someone like me, an American who's just trying her best to understand and speak and who's interested in the language but not an expert. My usual social copout of bringing Sam along won't work, since he doesn't know German.
I also failed to find support among my family and friends. For my family, this is just one more weird parenting thing I'm doing (I can hear them sighing right now). For my monolingual friends, they can't see why I'd bother. For my friends raising a bilingual baby, they're in the same shoes as the native German speakers above: They have a reason to be doing so. One half of the couple speaks another language, or the grandparents do, or so forth, and they've been a little dismissive of my attempts to create from scratch an artificial bilingual environment. It doesn't help, either, that German is not considered a practical language in the U.S. If I were teaching Mikko something "useful" like Spanish or Chinese, I think I'd get some more understanding, but my high-school Spanish is execrable, so German it is. I understand, I do, that what I'm doing is weird. I just wish I had more gumption to do unusual things when I'm not getting support.
So, all in all, I've really been a slacker at the German thing. Now that Mikko's starting to speak, I really can't put it off any longer. I read a statistic that children need to hear a language at least 30% of the time to take it in. I recently resolved to pick days of the week and speak only German to Mikko on those days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and whenever I feel like it the rest of the time. That way, it's finite, and I know I can enjoy English the other days if I want to. And it takes away my forgetfulness, because I have no idea how often he heard German before this. I've kept the German books and music handier now, because I need them on our German days. So, despite my love of all things loosey-goosey and unscheduled, I found out that I needed to be more definitive about when I would speak the minority language if I was going to speak it at all.
Our other big change is that next week Mikko will start attending a half-day German preschool two days a week. I have more posts in me about that decision. But the basic reason for it is that I've determined that I can't shoulder the responsibility of raising Mikko to speak German on my own, after all. I don't mean that I'm giving up. I don't mean that I need to be better at German. I just need more outside resources. Ideally, eventually we'll maybe connect with those German-speaking families for free, but for me, this preschool is my less threatening entry into the German-speaking world. I'll pay someone else to do for Mikko what I've been putting off for close to two years — surround him with German speakers.
Even though he hasn't started the school yet, I already feel more natural speaking German with him. I have renewed confidence that he's understanding me, or will come to. (I even do find myself speaking to the cat in German!) And now I have his teachers and the other parents and children to interact with, so maybe I'll be thrown head first into an immersion environment myself. I'm even finding myself wanting to speak German on my English days, which I go along with whenever the urge strikes.
And it's perfect: If Mikko will talk to me in German, then I'll have my friend — my American friend who's learning German just like me, and who will go with me to the playgroup outings!
Or maybe he'll be embarrassed by my German and leave me behind...
In case you were wondering, I present you with internet evidence that, apart from George Saunders, I'm not the only freak monolingual trying to raise a bilingual kid:
Bilingual Parenting in a Foreign Language has this excellent FAQ that answers questions such as "Do I know enough of my second and non-native language to try and teach it to my children?", "If I want to teach my children my second language, how can I compensate for my non-native language abilities and help my children learn beyond my abilities?", "If neither my spouse nor I speak a second language, how can we help our child become bilingual?", "Isn't it unnatural to try and use a non-native language as the primary communication with your children?", and "Will my children pick up my mistakes and is that a problem?" — basically, all the questions that come to your mind when you consider non-native bilingual childrearing! Besides the FAQ, the site has survey results from real-life families using a foreign language(s) in the home, and links to various resources.
Bilingual Babes asks the question: "Should I speak a non-native language with my child?" (not to spoil it, but the answer is yes). She includes links in her sidebar to profiles of other non-native parents raising bilingual babes. She also talks about the usefulness of baby sign language as a bridge for spoken bilingualism, which was one of the reasons I started baby sign with Mikko. (As a plus, her blog has a gorgeous header photo!)
On the WordReference Forums, ILT in the second post down relates her positive experiences as a Spanish-native mother speaking English with her son.
The Multilingual Children's Association asks the question "Why would you speak to baby in a language not your own?" and answers "Why not?" This resource and others confirm my experience in gradually feeling less silly speaking a minority language to my kiddo: "So, what about the awkwardness of speaking a foreign language to your child? The only way to find out if this is a problem is to try. The general consensus from parents who have, is that the first few weeks are awful but after that things get easier."
I hope to put together a list of some more general multilingual resources another day. Viel Spaß!
I realize my 21-month-old was being rather boisterous at times. He had had a long day, and here he was in a hot-chocolate shop, being pretty dang good, we thought (whatever "good" means). He was amusing himself and not physically accosting patrons at other tables, as he has done in the past. He was periodically making noises, but they were happy noises — babbling to himself, singing a line of a song only he knows the lyrics to, pointing out the air conditioner and lights to anyone who was as interested in such structural minutiae as he was.
For much of the time, he wasn't noisy at all. And just before you walked by us, I had realized that his voice was louder than usual, and I was trying to tempt him toward me with a singsong call of his name and an offer of raisins.
And then you, with your snide, "Some people are trying to work here, you know," and your storming off down the stairs...you left me feeling like a red-faced doofus with a handful of raisins.
There were so many things I could have said to you, if you had stuck around instead of scurrying away like a name-calling coward.
I could have asked you to whom you were addressing your complaint — our group of four adults talking in conversational tones, or the toddler letting fly his glee. I assume it was the latter, but I couldn't really confirm, because you had hightailed it after delivering your parting shot. I couldn't have any sort of conversation with you, or explain our side, or point out that I was in the process of quieting him, because all you seemed to care about was shaming me and my child in front of my friends, and ruining the rest of my time out with them.
So let me take this opportunity to tell you a few things:
1. Chocolati is not a library, and it is not a private office. If you choose to work in public, then you need to be prepared for, you know, the public to be there with you. Your 8-ounce Dark Vader does not rent you four hours of a table, free wi-fi, an electrical outlet, and perfect stillness. Bring an iPod like everyone else, or learn to tune it out — or go somewhere that is expected to be quiet. Such a place is not an establishment made expressly for people to gather and get somewhat giddy on chocolaty goodness.
2. I'm going to assume you don't have children, because I would hope that people with children would not be so judgmental (ha ha...OK, but seriously). As evidence for how bad Sam and I would be in a court of law, I recalled you as in your late 20s, so pre-reproductive, and Sam thought you were in your 40s, so post-. Either way, you came across as self-righteous in your certainty that you were doing the other patrons a favor by driving out such pesky hooligans as families who dare to emerge from their dens without benefit of a babysitter. As Sam said about you later, you think you're making the world a better place, but you're what's wrong with the world.
3. If you know of a toddler volume control, please let me know. It would come in handy in church and all those other family-disapproving places. You didn't see the aftermath of your little snit, but we tried unsuccessfully to hush Mikko, in all our shame-facedness and our worry that the other patrons were hating on us as well. It ended in Mikko screeching in protest — was that better than his happy babbling? Of course, neither would have satisfied you, but at least in this case we were making Mikko suffer as much as you apparently were.
4. Let me tell you a little about my life, something you neglected to consider when you dehumanized me into A Bad Mother who can't control her child. I had just received a notification that we were selected (oh, joy) for an audit on our last four years' state excise-tax returns. I was trying to forget it and enjoy my one weekly evening with friends. This regular night out together is restorative, and having my child with me, making connections to my friends, is something I cherish.
5. You don't know my financial or familial situation, and whether I can afford or choose childcare. Regardless of whether alternative care is available to any particular parent, families have the right to exist outside of their homes. They have the right to be seen in public. They have the right to be heard in public. We try to follow the noise code of whatever particular place we're in, but embarrassments like this make parents feel like pariahs, and children feel unacceptable being children.
6. From now on, I'll be self-conscious going to my weekly get-together. I'll cringe at every peep Mikko makes and wonder whether we're offending someone. I'll worry that you complained to the management instead of just walking out in a huff, and that they might ask us to leave what has been a welcoming spot. Maybe you meant to make me this anguished. If so, you succeeded.
7. I'm trying not to hate you the way you hate me. I cut all the swearing out of this post. I hope that someday you'll have children (if you're the age I thought you were) and realize that parents could use some tolerance and love directed toward them as they raise the next generation.
Despite not getting to tell you face to face what's on my mind...here's hoping we don't meet again.
I'm Lauren Wayne, writer and natural parent. I embrace attached parenting with an emphasis toward green living.
Riding the rails with my husband, Crackerdog Sam, and our hobo kids, Mikko Lint Picker (born June 2007), Alrik Irontrousers (born May 2011), and Karsten (born October 2014). Trying every day to parent intentionally and with grace.
I'm sure you've seen this 
, by Michael Pollan, where he discusses 
, by George Saunders. It looks to be out of print (and holy-cow expensive), but maybe your library also has a copy or you can access it through interlibrary loan.
.
I'm Lauren Wayne, writer and natural parent. I embrace attached parenting with an emphasis toward green living. 
