Not a Stepford Wife

You don't want to advertise the fact that your husband has been out of town.

But he has been. For three of the past four weeks. Six states away. In and around Las Vegas.

He comes home tomorrow.

Here are my reflections on his absence:


1. He does so much more around here than I ever give him credit for.

2. When the little people pull into the driveway, they spy his truck and yell, "Daddy's home!" When John heard a car in the driveway, he yelled, "Daddy's home!" When Ainsley heard someone at the front door around dinner time, she yelled, "Daddy's home!"

We need not worry about Dave's bond with the children.

3. I've noticed this trend before: I cook for Dave; I clean for me. Since he's never been gone this long, we didn't subsist on waffles and eggs, but let's just say, I keep it simple. The whole meat, veg, starch thing? Not happening every night around here. If we have spaghetti, we have spaghetti. No salad. No bread. When we have mac and cheese, it's mac and cheese. We've eaten a ton of cereal -- it's fortified, you know. I've pushed the fruit here or there and been mighty generous with the multi-vitamins. I've played enough Oregon Trail to realize this is the quick road to scurvy that could mar our pristine dental record if carried too far.

4. When your husband is gone long enough, it becomes the new normal. To a certain degree, you get used to it. I understand just a bit of what military wives go through.

5. I pay none of the bills. All the accounts are password protected and, while I know how to access the passwords, it's all a pain in the tookus and eventually we'd lose some major utility out of sheer inertia if this went on for much longer. I am remarkably (and voluntarily) ignorant of many of the details of house and finances, though because of our recent AC problem, I am now clear on what runs on gas and what runs on electricity.

I've had two salesmen (a cable guy and a natural gas vendor) knock on the door with some amazing offer. When I was vague about our current service, I totally got the "Oh, don't worry your pretty little head about that. When will your husband be home?" routine. Okay, so they didn't call me Little Lady or refer to Dave as the Man of the House, but puh-lease. Believe me, you won't sell much with that kind of attitude. Yes, we have our little areas of responsibility and it doesn't all fall along gender lines and I could go on and on about issues related to intelligence, but I'll just cut my bad self off right here.

If you see me on the front lawn burning a bra, you'll know why.

(And just so I don't appear to be a total Stepford Wife, I handled 100% of our finances until John or Kolbe was born. I am not ashamed to say Dave is much more detail oriented than I am and does a far better job than I ever did.)

6. Betty Beguiles issued a challenge a few weeks back: Spruce up your bedroom attire. She wasn't getting all R-rated about the whole affair. She rightly pointed out that here, as in most areas of life, a little effort could be in order.

For me, I realize there's something between army sweats and the lacy stuff. So I went shopping. The fact that I'm posting this after my husband has been gone for two weeks is just now seeming a tiny bit tawdry or maybe just TMI.

(And this on the heels of #5 must have you thoroughly convinced I'm a Stepford Wife).

7. So I used a axe while Dave was gone, but this must leave you thinking I don't use an axe while he's here, and you'd be right.

Stepford Wife!

8. I sent ten of his shirts to cleaners yesterday. Not a Stepford Wife! But does a non-Stepford Wife make her husband take his own shirts to the cleaners? What if he's been in Las Vegas for two weeks?

9. I expect he'll fix clock which, believe me, I do not intend to worry my pretty little head about. Stepford Wife!

10. I miss him terribly and can't wait to see him. (And it's not due to a metal plate in my head. Not a Stepford Wife!)

Seven Quick Tales

1. On the potty training front -- and, I'm happy to say that this time 'round it's not much of a "front" -- we're seeing progress. Not overwhelming success, but progress nonetheless.

We woke up the other day, and I asked Ainsley if she wanted wear panties.

"Okay," she said initially, but quickly thought better of it. "Maybe next week."

Through out this procedure I, too, have adopted a "maybe next week" mentality. And, really, if you want to be potty trained (past tense) as opposed to potty training, (perpetual present tense), you need to steer clear of the "maybe next week" mentality. "Maybe next week" tends to seamlessly morph into "or perhaps the month after."

On the other hand, I'm not stressing, and I'm not getting upset with Ainsley.

Today it was systems are go. "I cool," she declared. "I potty training!" She danced around the house naked, all sorts of proud of herself.



2. I offered Tim a generous bribe to fix the printer. Wouldn't you know, he quickly pin-pointed an obvious problem. If we run short on one type of ink, we get a helpful error message. When all four cartridges run dry simultaneously, the printer can only scratch its head.

3. So one of the older set picked up one of our Little People figures and, for no reason I could discern, sent it flying across the room and smack! into a picture on the wall.

"Just my luck, I hit the picture," he said. "I was aiming for the lamp."

I've read that whole spheres of the teenage brain don't, in fact, connect. This is one more data point supporting that theory.


4. Everyone had dental check ups this week. In fourteen years, we've never had a cavity. This says far more about good genes and top notch dentistry than it does about pristine oral hygiene. Whatever the reason, I'm grateful, grateful, grateful.


5. On the optical front, things are not so rosy. John gets his mini-glasses this week. He's four years old! And on top of that  --  (warning: insufferable Mommy comment coming your way!) -- he's so blasted cute! And his eyes are the cutest thing about him!

(Well, there's also the fact that he climbed into bed last night and said, "Mama, I love you! With all my heart!" and then kissed my hand and said, "Now, don't drop your kiss, but if you do, I'll give you another!")


I can't take the thought of covering those brown eyes with glasses. Sniff, sniff.

The doctor assures me that we will have no problem motivating John to wear his glasses because at the present moment everything is blurry. Another sniff, sniff.

This is somewhat reassuring because the idea of handing a four-year-old an appliance that cost us $150 doesn't thrill me. Tim was five when he got his glasses so we've been there, done that. Soon we'll be shelling out nearly that much for a graphing calculator that I hope won't take up residence in the Lost and Found.

God calls us out attachments to created things. I guess we're in for some practice in this regard.

6. School ends next week, believe it or not. This means two important items have moved to the top of my To Do List: 1. Do the happy dance because I won't be packing lunches for three months. 2. Join a pool.

7. The little people have been playing in my miscellaneous utensil drawer. Oh, the fun to be had! Mallets and sifters and ice cream scoopers.

"What's this," John asked, holding up a tea infuser.

"That's a tea infuser," I replied.

"Oh! A tea infuser!" John responded as if he infuses tea on a daily basis. "Do you catch bugs with it?"

Have a great weekend, and head over to Jen's to add your Seven Quick Takes.

Disconnect

My printer is on strike, and I'm ready to torch the wretched thing. It's the end of the year, and I have permission slips and registration forms to print out Like Right Now!

Grrrr!

At moments like this, I recognize how dependent I am on technology that let's us get a whole lot accomplished with a few keystrokes.

As a general rule, I have an anti-technological bent. Take cell phones, for instance. I was one of the last people I know to get one. And my current phone? Tim and Kolbe are forever lamenting the sheer and utter lameness of it.

"You can't do anything," they bemoan.

I point out that I purchased my phone, oddly enough, to make phone calls.  I do not want to surf the net on my phone; I do not want to order plane tickets using my phone; I do not want to examine my conscience with the help of that handy Catholic app; I don't care to watch re-runs of Downton Abbey on a 2 x 3 inch screen.

All this my children find absolutely incomprehensible.

Yes, I have an anti-technological bent, and I freely admit it. This dates back to my college days when I would stroll the streets of Ann Arbor en route to class. I would routinely spot my friend Mary Ann and give her a wave. Without fail, Mary Ann would walk on by absorbed in her Walkman and the alternative music ringing in her ears.

This drove me crazy.

It's the beginning of the end as we know it, I would think to myself. I pretty much still think that way.

Fast forward twenty-five years. I'm sitting around eating chips and salsa with a group of friends. All of us needed to get out of the house and waste some time together. Out of seven women at a table, five were on their phones. Oh, there were good reasons for this. One friend was calling to check on another who hadn't shown up. Someone brought up a recipe she had just tried, and two women felt compelled to look it up right that very second. And on it went.

My friend was frustrated because her twleve-year-old daughter claimed to be the only girl in her class who didn't have a phone. Turns out most of these girls have an Ipod Touch -- looks just like a phone, but it's used to text, not chat. Of course this begs a basic question: Why does a twelve-year-old need to text? How do you ride a bike, climb a tree, or jump rope with an Ipod Touch in your hand? Back in the day, if we had an urgent message for our BFF, we picked up the telephone, ran next door, or passed a note during class. So nineteen seventies.

Speaking of the seventies . . . I have never watched That Seventies Show, but I did catch a five minute clip that made me laugh. The husband is describing this new-fangled invention called the VCR that can tape a TV show. The wife gets a puzzled look on her face and asks,"If you want to watch TV, why not just stay home?"

We've all watched people text at Mass on Easter Sunday. We've all attended family gatherings during which teenagers (and adults!) logged hours on their Smart phones doing who knows what. I sat behind a father at a school play and watched him gaming nearly non-stop as his daughter performed. He barely paused to look up.

As adults, you and I are Johnny Come Lately to this digital world. Our children are cutting their teeth on it. Seriously. Have you seen the commercial for some sort of rocking horse that plugs into the TV and provides a video game experience to a baby who can scarcely walk?

What happens when imagination, concentration, and conscience are all formed at a hundred million bits per second?

Who knows? Who knows?

In and of themselves, electronic devices are neutrals. Certainly, there are huge benefits to some of the electronic breakthroughs. I remember with vivid detail the night I ended up with a flat tire halfway between Columbia, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia. It was a terrifying experience to be a woman alone on a highway miles from the nearest phone. This will be a problem I hope my sweet Ainsley (or any of my children) never has to face.

Cell phones have a million mundane uses -- the toilet paper left off at the grocery list, the quick text to say you're running late, the ability to send everyone a timely update on a baby's arrival or the outcome of a surgery.

Yet, there is a flip side to this: Technology can become an ever-present intruder in every conversation, dinner, outing, and drive.

Elizabeth Foss, commenting on all the recent hoopla surrounding Attachment Parenting, penned a sentence that spoke volumes to me: Truly, if we let it, technology can destroy parenting as God intended it. A tool for the good can be used for ill to the detriment of generations.

This was written not by a woman living on an isolated farm, but by a mother of many, an author, an influential online presence, a woman who blogs and texts and tweets and who sees that our ever-connected state brings with it a fragmentation that costs us something.

We can de-fragment our hard drives, but can we de-fragment our relationships and our habits and our minds?

I may not spend hours playing with an IPhone. I'm not exactly sure what Farmville is, and I am fairly confident I can die a whole and fulfilled person if I never find out. I will never (ever, ever, ever) take an online quiz to determine which one of The Seven Dwarfs is my kindred spirit or which character from Gone With the Wind most resonates with me.

But this blogging gig? Listen carefully and you will hear a sucking sound from the ever growing vortex of wasted time wrought by my foray into the world of online self-publishing.

We all have our vices. I certainly have mine.


If I had lived a hundred years ago, I would have lamented that the invention of the typewriter would replace good penmanship. I would have been the person suspicious of TV pushing out radio as a form of family entertainment. Today I wring my hands wondering if the young people in my life will know that K is actually spelled Okay and 2moro is actually Tomorrow.

In the middle of drafting this, Dave called to chat about the kids and to get an update on the household woes that bombard us non-stop when he is out of town. He offered a few quick fixes for the mis-behaving printer, and then added, "If you get desperate, you can print something at the neighbor's."

"Yes," I told him, "but that require using a thumb drive."' Which -- believe it or not -- I have never once used!

He recommended I not go next door with floppy disk in hand

Stirring My Heart This Morning

Psalm 9:1,2

I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart;
I will tell of all Your marvelous works.
I will be glad and rejoice in You;
I will sing praise to Your name, O most high.

Beat the Clock

If you see me at Home Depot buying a sledge hammer, my husband's alarm clock is the intended target.

We have developed a complicated love-hate relationship, this clock and I.

I love it because the numbers are oversize -- as in huge, as in me with my ever-worsening far-sightedness can figure out the time in the middle of the night. And that's what clocks are for, right?

Then there's the hate side . . .

I had to be up and at 'em at oh dark thirty for a field trip last week, so I attempted to set the alarm . It wasn't easy, but at 4:45 on Wednesday morning, the alarm went off without a hitch.

Thank you, clock!

The following morning clock did the same. And I pressed what I thought was the off button. And the alarm sounded again. And again. And again. After I managed to press (bang, slam) every switch on the beeping thing, I was met with blessed silence. Clock was inexplicably blinking 0:08, whatever that means, but at least clock was mute.

But of course the story doesn't end there. Oh no. See, this deluxe model has two alarms -- one for weekdays, one for weekends. On Saturday mornings long about 4:00 a.m., my dear husband goes on prayer watch. He gets together with another neighbor from Alleluia Community. They spend an hour praying together while driving through our neighborhood, checking Alleluia's office, and walking the grounds of our school.

So at 3:50 Saturday morning, Dave was out of town, but faithful clock sounded the alarm. Once again I tried every button and switch I could toggle or smash. No luck. Most clocks have a snooze button -- this one has snooze, sleep, and nap. What these terms mean, I couldn't tell you. I think there's a unlabelled button called Primed to Irritate the Stuffing Out of You. Apparently I nailed that one repeatedly.

Meeting with no success whatsoever, I unplugged clock.

The dual-action alarm is not clock's only amazing feature. It's also equipped with battery back up in case of a random power outage, natural disaster, or nuclear meltdown. I'm telling you, the great brains behind this machine left no stone unturned.

I carried clock to the dining room table at the far end of the house, shut the doors in between, and attempted to go back to sleep.

Wishful thinking.

About ten minutes later I was met with Beep! Beep! Beep! And you know what the really insidious part of it all was? The volume kept getting louder and Louder and LOUDER! Our smoke detectors have nothing on this baby.

I got out of bed, removed the batteries, and successfully fought the urge to curse, fling clock out the front door, and hurl the batteries.

Clock is barred from crossing the threshold of my room until Dave returns and can get its bad-self back under control.

Sometimes You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover

I won't be reading Time magazine this week.

Never mind that I don't read it most weeks. This week I'm Taking A Stand.

You may have seen the provocative headline and cover. "Are You Mom Enough?" the headline screams. It's accompanied by a picture of a mom standing with a defiant look on her face. Her three-year-old son -- who looks remarkably like a second grader -- is on a step-stool with her breast in his mouth.

We all know the old adage You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover. This time, I would just bet I can.

Time supposedly wanted to explore Attachment Parenting. No doubt they sought the most extreme and militaristic examples of this type of parenting. O omniscient me says the article makes a mother who practices Attachment Parenting look like a fringe lunatic, but at the same time manages to load another mother down with a ton of shame because she's Just Not Mom Enough, darn it!

Truly a Win Win situation.

A few days ago Elizabeth Foss posted this to Facebook:

I'm taking a social media sabbatical for the weekend. I'm tired of seeing that Time cover. I distinctly remember the email asking me to consider that photo shoot. I recoiled at the thought of exposing my three-year-old to a media circus and reducing our relationship to a marketing gimmick. I feel sorry for that little boy. One day he will be 15. What happens when someone digs that photo up and posts it to Facebook? Attachment parenting is about nurturing trust. I think those moms made decisions that betrayed a child's trust. But those are their decisions. My next decision is whether to keep talking about it.

Kate Wicker also declined to participate in the photo shoot and is very glad she did. She puts a very different face on toddlers and nursing.I have friends who practiced extended breast-feeding. I would imagine this involved nursing a toddler at nap or bedtime, curled up on a couch or bed. It was a time of cuddling and stories and comfort. One of my friends nursed a child until he was four. She faced a fair amount of criticism for doing it. When she talked to me about it, I had two pieces of advice: Do what you want and don't poll the neighbors.

Some things -- many things -- are nobody's business.

We practiced many tenets of Attachment Parenting -- breastfeeding on demand, extended breastfeeding, and, to some degree, co-sleeping. I would have done the baby wearing thing -- Lord knows I tried -- but I'm five foot two. We tried nearly every baby-wearing device out there and met with limited success and one aching back.

I can jibe with Attachment Parenting to some degree, but let me say that Tim, my oldest, was a high needs baby, and I would have given my left, um, arm if he had taken a pacifier. Nursing 24-7 was not liberating or freeing; it wiped me out and not in any healthy way. Further, I will tell you without hesitation that the weekend we did what AP would call "sleep training" with Tim was the best thing we ever, ever did as parents. While I eschewed schedules for itty-bitties, let me say with dogmatic fervor that toddlers and young children absolutely thrive on routine, and the only way you get to routine is to be a bit inflexible with the schedule.

So we're hybrids around here. And what worked with number one wasn't how we rolled we number four.

I have two beefs with Attachment Parenting. First, the name. You can be just as attached to your children without baby wearing, without co-sleeping, even -- brace yourselves, now -- without breastfeeding.

Second, I recoil at any parenting philosophy that provides a laundry list of Musts and puts pressure on mothers (and fathers) to do what they very well may be incapable of doing. The passion many AP adherents show for babies, I have for mothers as I wrote about last week (If you kill the cow, you kill the calf).  I take significant umbrage with absolutists who try to make mothers do the impossible. Why? Because at the end of the day, everyone suffers. In truth, the most official AP website I could find wasn't at all militant, purist, or dictatorial. The authors presented their tenets and offered alternatives or modifications for nearly all of them. I've stumbled on an AP blog or two that set a bit of a rabid tone, but I suppose the same can said of most topics related to parenting.

I have never watched Nineteen and Counting, the show peeking into the lives of the Duggar family. I have read lots of articles and seen plenty of news clip about them. God bless the Duggars and their quiverful brethren. Maybe they are as happy as they seem. Maybe the kids' needs really are met. Maybe the girls don't mind wearing those long skirts.

Maybe.

If their goal is to put a face on one type of large family, fine. Apparently they do that and do that well. If their goal is to evangelize other families into thinking that having nineteen children in roughly twenty-five years is The Only Way To Go, Sister!, I say wait just a minute. Few women could do what Michelle Duggar is doing and emerge healthy and sane at the end of the day.

(Just to clarify . . . Does she have a right to live her life as she chooses? Absolutely. Do I think children are a blessing from God? Yes, I do. Do I think some couples are called to raise large families through birth or adoption? Of course. Am I not an observant Catholic who disagrees with artificial birth control? Yes, I am. Do I embrace the quiverful mentality? No, I do not. Am I providentialist? No, I am not.)

My experiences with La Leche League were overwhelmingly positive. To any mother with any sort of nursing problem, give your local chapter a call. They, obviously, are pro-breastfeeding. I've heard writers chide them for their "Gestapo tactics," but in my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. Their mission is to help mothers breastfeed successfully, and they are committed to meeting mothers where they are. Take what you want; leave what you don't -- to me, that is a balanced and healthy organization.

When a parenting paradigm is offered as an ideal with the flexibility to suit individual families, great. When it becomes a dogma -- when one way of life is pitched as the only way of life -- I say steer clear.


We are all fearfully, wonderfully, and differently made, and every family is a unique reflection of God's creative genius.

I think we're all quite capable of discerning what's best for our families without incendiary articles, false guilt trips, mommy baiting, or provocative photos.

I Triple Dog Dare You

We're headed to the eye doctor this afternoon. At his four-year-check, John bombed both the sight and hearing tests. Apparently it's not uncommon for four-year-old boys to fail the hearing test, and this typically has more to do with the test than the hearing. But the sight test? The pediatrician turfed us over to the opthamologist.

I love our eye doctor. I'm not, however, too crazy about how his office is run. Do you ever go into a store or an office and find one Warning! Warning! Warning! sign after another, all nicely laminated and posted on every door and surface? Such is the case here.

Payment is expected at time of service! Perfectly reasonable. Don't place your kid on the counter! Okay. No children in the restrooms unattended! I'll inform my fourteen-year-old son. And then the real kicker . . . Parents are responsible for any restroom damage!

 Puh-lease!

Are my kids disabling a lavatory smoke detector? Wetting paper towels and sticking them to the ceilings? (Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my kids did this once. Thankfully, I caught him before it became a habit.)

They keep the bathroom locked. You have to go to the front desk and ask for the key. I'm surprised it's not attached to a hubcap like some scene from a sitcom. All this leaves me feeling a tad . . . like an outlaw. Do they think I'm going to stuff the extra roll of toilet paper into my purse? Use an excessive amount of soap? Really, the bathroom isn't that big or interesting.

I had to take a quick trip downtown a few weeks back. A certain department store seems to have a monopoly on the white Good Humor Man pants required for this event. This store is a relic from 1950. Creaky wood floors. An elevator that leaves you worried about spending an afternoon between floors. A lingerie department that sells bras and panties I swear my great-grandmother would have worn.

And then there are the signs. No returns without a receipt! Hats are not returnable! Underwear is not returnable! Don't open packaged clothing! Beware of the dog! Trespassers will be shot!

I have a confession to make: Signs like these make me want to spray paint the walls. Really, they summon the inner rebel in me Big Time. It's hard to explain, but I've seen this dynamic before.

When I was high school teacher, I took my students to a play. We walked into the lobby, and this man started reading my students the riot act. Do this! Don't do that! I hope you know this is a theater! Blah, blah, blah. My students had done nothing except walk into the lobby. The other chaperone was so taken aback, she threw her arms up in the air and said, "Don't shoot!"

This man treated my class like they were a bunch of vandals.

And you know what? A really awful exchange involving one of my students took place during the intermission. And I can't help but to think the undeserved chewing out as we entered fed the event that followed.

Now, I've been that man in the theater. I get that people in charge want to side step trouble and sometimes go about it the wrong way. I gave plenty of briefings before field trips -- no short shorts, no gum in the theater, best behavior, representing our school, yada, yada, yada. But this was over the top. Every teenager isn't a potential vandal, but if you treat them as if they are, you just might get what you're looking for.

I spent twelve years in the Army reserves. My first unit was a badly run outfit with poor, poor leadership. Every edict came with a threat. We were a hospital unit full of nurses, doctors, and therapists, captains, majors and colonels -- and we were treated like twelve-year-old truants or bamboozlers out to rook the government out of a day's pay. Trust was non-existent.

I joined a second Army unit that couldn't have been more dissimilar from the first. I worked an odd day one week and was trying to explain to my boss how he could verify that I had worked when I said I had worked.

He looked me dead in the eye and said, "If I thought you were defrauding the government, I wouldn't come up with a plan to prevent you from doing it. I would fire you."

How refreshing was that.

The commander and his staff set a tone, a tone that said we were competent, hard-working, talented soldiers who were there to do top notch work. And you know what? We did.

As I go through my day, I realize how often I put up virtual signs and issue actual threats. At least three times this week alone, I heard myself saying something that I fully recognized as idiotic before it even left my lips.  And why is this? Frustration, fatigue, control, all of the above. None of this is effective, and it probably summons the inner rebel in my children just as it does me.

(Issuing the threat of the day is, I think, very different from pointing out the natural consequences: You can't go to your friend's house until the dishes are done and your room is straightened.)

I want to steer away from Threat of the Day of parenting. Truly I don't want to foment rebellion where there isn't much (that would be Kolbe) or stir the pot where it's ever present, lurking just beneath the surface (that would be John).

If you look an impish four-year-old in the eye and say, "I triple dog dare you," the results are fairly predictable.