A day of intrusions and interruptions, time managed or not managed or managed badly, phones and calendars and schedules and the usual demoralizing effort to find a stretch of usable time while engulfed by chaos.

The time, even if found, is not always fruitful; so much depends on what goes before. A hard morning can obliterate a perfectly free afternoon, making it useless for anything but errands and busywork.

Knowing I am unlikely to have the opportunity to complete a thought, I struggle to begin. There's always the knock at the door, the doorbell ringing, the phone, perfectly reasonable requests for this or that.

At the same time, Jane is learning, again, where she ends and I begin. On her own, she goes further now than she did at two or four, on trips that require more complex supplies. Her development is relentless. As it should be. I fail to adapt quickly enough, which I know is also fine, and inevitable. Still, the guilt.

Outside, the sky is densely white, holding back a foot of snow.

Labels: mothering, writing

This morning's breakfast conversation began with Jane's question: Why did we go to Iceland if we are not Icelandic?

From there followed a consideration of language, culture and history, culminating in readings from Layamon's Brut. We touched on the Norman Conquest, the Vikings, and why "medieval" does not mean purgatory or, "middle evil." We did not, alas, get to Dante. My wonderful professor Elizabeth Bryan would smile, and cringe -- in the funny way that she has, where she just does manage to do both at once -- at the damage done by the years to my pronunciation of Rather Olde English. Oh well. The point was not to impart information so much as simply to be enthusiastic. I love this kind of conversation, the sort that sends me running to the library, plucking books off the shelf. Making discoveries.

I may not be the world's greatest soccer mom, but all that time I spent in school has certain advantages. As a wise person once told me: Play to your strengths, y'all.

Aside: When Jane plays concentration and she flips the same card over and over, she says, "That card is my Waterloo." To which I can only say, yes, that's our kid.

Labels: jane, mothering

...and the North Pole is really the Pearl River Delta.

In 2002, Li Chunmei died after working sixteen-hour shifts on the Bainan Toy Factory's assembly line to meet the demand for Christmas toys. Hers is not an isolated case; deaths like hers have become so common that even Chinese journalists have dared to coin a word for them: guolaosi, or death from overwork.

Eric Clark, in The Real Toy Story devotes a chapter to Chinese toy factory labor ("Santa's Sweatshops").

See also The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. Important. Thanks, GG!

Labels: china, green, mothering

Jane's been home sick three days solid with a fever.

So I truly sympathize with The Work-Life Cha-Cha, a blog by a mom who blogs about her efforts to "balance" her work, which she does outside the house, with her "life," meaning the work she does at home. Her categories are telling and hilarious. Among them: sick kids, sick day, sick-time, working family, working breakfast, working dinners, diarrhea, ear infections, self-doubt, multitasking, memory loss.

I would add to this: not-napping, tantrums, whining, wiggling, babbling, arguing, insisting, bargaining.

Work-life balance is a bullshitfancy way of saying there aren't enough hours in the day. Let's face it: Work is work. Life is work. A good day in a family with two working parents is not a joyous one; it's not a day that makes you feel vital and alive. No. A good day is when the work gets done. The work-work, the life-work.

For the past three days, my life has been all "life" and no "work," which makes me really, really crazy. The Zoloft dose that used to work for 18 hours now works for perhaps 3. My system can only handle two doses per day; after that, I'm nauseated beyond belief and sometimes I can't sleep. So, in between my carefully titrated infusions of heavy-duty pharm, I drink water and eat dark-chocolate covered espresso beans, which at least help with the lethargy. I count to ten. I breathe slowly. I try to avoid snapping at Jane. It's not her fault she's sick.

Most of my energy is going toward being patient and keeping my mouth shut. I am throttling various urges, knowing they are not productive.

Labels: mothering, writing

Dooce took her kid to San Francisco and it was not a lot of fun:

"Everything that they tell you about the love you'll have for your child is true, but there's all this other stuff that is true, too, stuff that you're afraid to talk about, stuff that you carry around and try to hide. Stuff like resentment and fear and anxiety and longing."

We're having a good time here in Beijing. But I've been having these feelings, too. One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was confront this stuff -- figure out why I sometimes feel this way, and what it is all about. Travel is good for this kind of exploration-- I am alone with Jane for long stretches and without babysitting options so it's critical that I just learn to deal.

One thing that's occurred to me: I love Jane for her innocence and beauty (I admit it). I also love watching her in new situations, because I feel like I am discovering who she is. But she is not only some kind of sui generis entity. She needs to learn things, important things about how to be with other people and how to give and take. A certain, uh, reciprocity is missing from our relationship. I am starting to think that it is my job to help her learn this.

I suspect lots of parents feel the anger and resentment Dooce mentions. Mostly no one talks about it. Our ideas about motherhood and childhood do not include this discourse, or if they do, it's only in the context of illness, like postnatal depression or valium for stressed-out mothers or ritalin for off-the-wall kids.

Which is what they all are, sometimes.

Speaking of walls -- the Great Wall is on the agenda for tomorrow.

Labels: china, mothering, travels with jane

For a while I've been skeptical of the magic elixir theory of breastfeeding -- the idea that, if only you pump enough breastmilk into your baby, you will secure superior health, longevity, and especially intelligence for your child.

Now a recent, large study has concluded that ingestion of breastmilk has no effect on a kid's IQ.

What matters is the mother's background, education, and social class. Strangely, earlier studies linking IQ to feeding method failed to take these things into consideration.

From the article:

Breastfed babies are smarter because their mums are clever - not because mother's milk boosts brain power, according to new research.

Scientists say many previous studies claiming breastfed babies are brighter than bottle-fed counterparts have failed to consider one important factor - maternal intelligence.

They found mothers who breastfed tended to be more intelligent, more highly educated and to provide a more stimulating home environment.

And when they compared siblings where one had been breastfed and the other not there was no difference in their respective IQs - showing the key to brainbox children is the mum and not the milk.

In the largest study of its kind researchers looked at 5,475 children in the US - and their mothers - and found omitting mothers' intelligence can "seriously over-estimate the effects of breastfeeding."

The researchers from the Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh said their findings showed when considered in isolation breastfeeding did appear to have a beneficial effect on a child's intelligence.

But once other factors were considered – including maternal intelligence, home environment and socio-economic status - breastfeeding made less than half a point difference to children's intelligence scores.

Labels: breastfeeding, mothering

One weirdly frustrating aspect -- for me, and for my students -- of teaching writing has been how to answer the question, "What is biased writing?" Exposure to biased writing often makes me too angry to coolly dissect the bias and explain it.

Thanks to today's piece in the NYT about how companies fail to provide working women with sufficient support for continuing to breastfeed their children at work, I now have a great example. Take a look at this assertion, and the evidence on which it's based:

Pumping breast milk has one benefit that cannot be quantified: it makes working mothers feel less guilt-ridden about leaving their children. 'There is a lot of satisfaction in knowing I am doing right by him,' Ms. Wurster said of her son, James.

We may infer from this that Mrs. Wurster is having a good time pumping her milk at work. She believes breast is best, and she is happy to be able to choose her infant's diet in accordance with her values. But can we really conclude, from what she has said, that she "feels less guilt-ridden about leaving" her son in order to go back to work? No, we can't. Her statement implies only that she is pleased with her infant feeding arrangement. She expresses no dissatisfaction at all about going back to work.

By framing the quote in this way, the author of the article implies that when a mother goes to work, she is abandoning her child. This position is patently sexist -- after all, fathers who work are good providers, and no one accuses them of abandonment.

Later: Had a couple more thoughts on 'bias'. Students tend to see it only when they read something based on beliefs with which they disagree. They don't take the next step, which is to generalize this insight to eliminate their own bias. Maybe here's a good rule of thumb: A biased article is based on or contains beliefs that -- whether one agrees with them or not -- are not supported by sound reasoning and evidence.

Labels: mothering, writing