It’s only fun if she has on her clothes and, ideally, her shoes as well.

Therefore, anytime I fill or drain the bathtub, I need to stay in the room, or post a guard.

Regrettably, the guards (the older girls) are the sort that would get themselves and their fellow soldiers killed if they were on real guard duty in a real army.

My 8-year-old and 4-year-old are the ones on holiday, getting to eat a dazzling array of sweets and watch appalling amounts of telly at their grandmother’s house, and my 6-year-old and 1-year-old are home with me.

Here on the home front, baby Portia is on a campaign of devastation that reminds me of the credit card commercial where the Vikings (or was it the Mongols?) are trashing a department store (or was it some other kind of store?).  The commercial is a few (or was it many?) years old, but you get the idea.  That’s Portia, battle-axe in hand, making like a Valkyrie and my house is an Irish monastery.

Cordelia, my 6-year-old, is wonderfully helpful, as she always has been, but she’s also been expecting to be treated like a pampered only child in her sisters’ absence, so yesterday after I took her and Portia to the top of the Sandia Mountains on the tram, then to lunch at the restaurant of her choice, then to the public indoor pool (Portia was with the babysitter for that) where she went down the amazingly awesome water slide about a hundred times and played “Drown Mommy” to her heart’s content, she wanted to know, “Okay, where are we going now?”

I guess maybe the other half works hard, too.

In case you’re wondering about the recent lack of “It’s Tuesday, so here’s the link to my new NMI column” posts, it’s because I’m no longer writing for the New Mexico Independent.  NMI has decided to focus more on reporting and less on commentary — or less on conservative commentary, anyway, which at that illustrious publication consisted of me, myself and I.  Their three remaining columnists, Arthur Alpert, Tracy Dingman and V. B. Price, are all good, solid liberals.  Long live diversity.

In many ways, it was a relief to give up the column.  I had really been feeling the time pressure intensely, trying to juggle too many things in too few hours, and another project (besides the homeschooling and childcare and running a household and all that stuff that really ought to take care of itself but somehow doesn’t) has pushed its way to the front of the list, and I really need to get to work on it.  It’s not something I want to discuss on the blog yet, but hopefully I will be able to before long.

What’s new politically is far more interesting than what’s new personally — a resounding Republican victory in Virginia, and what’s looking like one in New Jersey, too.  Two states Obama won easily, now swinging red.  How sweet it is.  This time, anyway, since the swing voters are swinging my way.  When His Own Fine Self is not on the ticket, the Democrat brand doesn’t shine quite as radiantly.  The sad thing is, they’ll swing back again as soon as they get bored or some other sweet young thing comes along and talks pretty.

But at Scarlett O’Hara used to say, I’ll think about that tomorrow.  Tonight I’ll savor the sweet taste of victory.

This week, my four children and I are staying with a friend who has one child, along with another friend who brought her two children.  For those of you who went to school after they started that “new math” thing, that makes three moms and seven kids.  And, I might add, only two bathrooms.

I keep telling myself, the Von Trapps had seven children all by their own selves, so it’s really not that many, right?  Well, sort of.  The Von Trapp children were used to being one of seven (not to mention their parents being used to a houseful of servants) and it’s a little different when the children are accustomed to different sizes of households and different styles of parenting.

But my friends and I knew it would be a circus (those were our exact words) before we planned this crazy trip, and we’re still glad we came.  My back will recover from the air mattress, and we and our children will have the memories.  The good memories will remain, and the not so good ones will go the way of the backaches.

When the news came that Santa Fe’s public schools would get some of the federal stimulus bounty being handed out by a benevolent Democratic Congress and president, few suspected that some of that federal pork would turn rancid.

One of the things the school district did with the federal largesse was to fund an after-school program at seven Santa Fe schools, including E.J. Martinez elementary.  First, grateful parents felt the soothing touch of Uncle Sam’s velvet glove.  Only when it was too late did they feel the iron fist inside.

Click here to read the rest.  If you have children — and maybe even if you don’t — this story will shock and appall you.

It’s hard not to be a misanthrope when you read as many ghastly stories in the newspaper as I did this Thursday morning.  After dropping off the kids at the sitter’s house, I went to get a pedicure, and started reading the paper as the pedicurist got to work.  New Mexico’s appalling drop-out rate on the front page, but I already knew about that sad story.  China executes two men for defrauding investors on page 2.  Heh, maybe we should try that here.   Euna Lee and Laura Ling home, Ahmadinejad sworn in amid protests, and Sotomayor gets more GOP support on page 3 — I’m happy for Lee and Ling, expected as much for Uncle Mahmoud, and am not getting particularly worked up about Sotomayor, since I believe “pick your battles” is as good advice in politics as it is in parenting.

I won’t bore you with the entire contents of today’s New Mexican, so fast-forward to page A-8, where the real ugliness starts:  previously convicted sex offender Kenneth Leon Mills is sentenced to 133 years for kidnapping a 9-year-old girl from her bed and raping her in an alley. I’d link, but as usual, I cannot find a link at the New Mexican’s site.  I know they’re going through hard times, but really, if they’re going to have an online version, they really ought to get their act together and do it right.  Here’s a link instead to KOAT’s story about jury selection for the trial.

Across the page on A-9 was the story of George Sodini, who shot up an aerobics class at a health club, murdering three women and injuring nine more before turning the gun on himself.   Can’t find the link for that one either, so here’s the story in a different paper.  His online diary chronicled years of frustration and anger because women didn’t like him, so he decided to take it out on the ones at the gym who wouldn’t give him the time of day either.

On the same page as the health club massacre was the kind of story that makes any mother get a sick, hideous feeling in the pit of her stomach when she reads it.  It is the horrific story of Diana Schuler who, while driving drunk, high and in the wrong direction, killed her 2-year-old daughter, her three nieces aged between 5 and 8, three adults and herself.  This time, the New Mexican came through with a link.

My head started to spin as I finished reading the Schuler story.  There I sat, getting my nails done of all things, while in terrible world in which I live, little girls were getting raped, women were getting murdered because they wanted flatter abs, and a couple had lost all three of their children and no doubt felt as though their entire world had just caved in around them.  It was all just so soul-crushingly ugly.  And here I was, getting my nails painted red.  Like blood.

Sometimes the ugliness of the world overwhelms me.  Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man reaches such depths of evil that my head begins to ache when I contemplate it.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

So sang a penitent King David in Psalm 51:5, after he had sent a man to be killed in battle so that he, David, might have the dead man’s wife.  Murder, adultery and abuse of power, a story thousands of years old, merely one of thousands — millions — of stories of human cruelty.

Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III proudly inscribing his war crimes on stone, or one of his later successors, Sennacherib, inscribing his on clay:

their strong, walled cities I beseiged, I captured.  People, horses, mules, asses, cattle, and sheep, I brought out from their midst and counted as booty.  And their small cities, which were beyond numbering I destroyed, I devastated, and I turned into ruins.

Cities into ruins, populations massacred and enslaved — Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Mongols…on and on and on went the killings, the rapes, the mutilations.  The massacres of Jews at Mainz and Worms during the First Crusade, and the massacres of Jews a thousand years later at Dachau and Auschwitz.

I don’t remember when I first became aware of the Holocaust, but it was probably when I read The Diary of Ann Frank.  But I read and read and read about it as a teenager, the tears rolling down my cheeks, stunned at the capacity for cruelty in my fellow human beings. For decades afterward, I avoided books and movies about the Holocaust, because they left me too disturbed for too long.  Now that I am a mother, the children of the Holocaust haunt me.

Diana Schuler killed her daughter and nieces through negligence — or whatever it was — rather than through the kind of sadism that made Kenneth Leon Mills rape that little girl, and whatever combination of sadism and self-deception that made Nazi camp guards herd little Jewish girls and boys into the gas chamber.  The self-pitying narcissism that drove George Sodini to snuff out the lives of three innocent women on exercise mats is far removed from the lust for power that made Sennacherib order the butchery of  women and children and men from one end of his far-flung empire to the other.

Or is it?  What makes us sacrifice the lives of others on the altars of our own egos?  Is it, as David wrote in his Psalm, because we are sinful from the time our mothers conceive us?   David, who earned the hand of  Saul’s daughter by presenting the foreskins of 200 Philistines.  David, who prayed in the same Psalm,

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

If Kenneth Leon Mills had prayed for a pure heart, would that 9-year-old girl still have her innocence?  If George Sodini had not felt cast from God’s presence, would those women still have their lives?  If Diana Schuler had felt the joy of salvation, would it have been enough to save her daugher and the daughters of her brother?

I wonder.  And I pray — for all of them.

President Obama shot his mouth off about a white policeman arresting a black professor, sparking an endless debate among bloggers and pundits, but instead of entering the fray, I took the kids to the Plaza for lunch and ice cream.

The internet exploded with a rumor that Sarah and Todd Palin were divorcing, and instead of writing about that, I read to the girls.

The health care and cap and trade bills loom like vultures over our battered and bleeding economy, and instead of posting, I played Risk with my two eldest daughters, whose nonagression pact held long enough for them to crush their father and me like bugs and rule the world between them.

I wonder what stories I’ll get to ignore next week?

This doctor is lying to his patient in the hope he can terrorize her into killing her unborn child(ren). This doctor is doing something very, very unethical. Therefore, in my not at all humble opinion, you lie to him. Tell him whatever he wants to hear so he’ll implant the embryos. Chances are, you’ll only conceive one baby. Outside chance, twins. On the very, very rare chance that all three take and you conceive triplets, they are your children, and you tell him you’re not killing any of them and find another doctor to deliver them.

Good luck and God bless. If you ever come back to my blog, please let me know what happened.

Update: This reminds me of the women I’ve heard over the years tell me that their doctors told them that they had to have amniocentesis when they were pregnant. I had all four of my children at what the obstetrical profession calls “Advanced Maternal Age” (over 35). And I never once had an amnio. I told the doctor “no thanks” and that was that. Well, that was that for the first three pregnancies, anyway, because my doctor was a fellow Catholic who respected my willingness to forego the test. The fourth pregnancy was in a different city with a different doctor who was obviously uncomfortable with my refusing the test, but since I obviously knew my rights and was adamant, there was nothing he could do. Sadly, all too many patients do not know their rights. Doctors act as though their recommendations are mandates, and patients let themselves be bullied into procedures they don’t want.

Perhaps once we have socialized medicine, and the government’s in charge of everything, doctors really will be able to force their will on patients. At the moment, however, the patient is the customer, and the customer is always right. That’s the American way. It saddens me to no end that this is may not always be the case. Please, please, please, my fellow citizens and patients, do not let it happen.

Seems like I spend half the day writing down book titles in reading log books. My eldest two daughters signed up for the summer reading program at our public library, and in the first week filled up the log book that was supposed to last all summer.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to death they’re reading. I just kind of wish it wasn’t mostly Scooby Doo and Berenstain Bears and Arthur books that they finish in five minutes and come running to me demanding I write the titles in the log. It also amazes me that a few stickers and cheesy prizes could inspire so much literacy that they’ve practically forgotten about SpongeBob and all the other horrid cartoons they usually want to watch.

See? Evil right wingers do like some government institutions.

I never wanted my kids to play soccer. I don’t like soccer. I briefly dated a soccer player in high school, but thankfully not long enough to have to feign an interest in the game.

So why are they playing? My husband wanted them to. For years I resisted, but finally he wore me down, as he always does, so here I am. A soccer mom.

The other day at Tessie’s practice, I found myself absurdly proud of how she could dribble (I had no idea they called it that, thought dribbling was only in basketball) the ball faster and farther than any of the other kids. I was happy for her because their uniforms are blue, her favorite color.

I suppose the next thing will be learning all the rest of the ridiculous soccer jargon and actually being able to understand how the stupid game is played. The things we do for our kids.

And I thought c-section recovery was bad.

The same four moms and dozen kids got together again today at someone else’s house, which was more fun for them than my house, because that house has chickens. I’ve contemplated chickens, but I have enough trouble feeding the dog and watering the apple trees. I think chickens will have to wait at least until Portia is no longer crawling and trying to eat things off the floor.

Poultry or no poultry, I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy having so many children around. My kids have so much fun when there’s a houseful of children. I’ve written before about how people who dislike children, or believe people shouldn’t have them for the sake of the environment, and also about the bad advice women of my generation got to defer childbearing until it was, in all too many cases, too late.

I was thinking about this again recently because while Portia was in the hospital, I spoke with two women nearing forty, one a nurse and the other a nurse practitioner, who both told me they desperately wanted children, but couldn’t find a husband and thought it was probably too late.

It probably is. And that makes me angry. It makes me downright furious how many women have been robbed of the indescribable joy I’ve felt for nearly eight years.

Yes, it’s hard sometimes. Yes, they can wreak havoc with your figure. Yes, I have to face my darkest fears for their benefit. Yes, I often can’t blog because of them. And yes, I do like to get away from them once in a while.

But it all pales in comparison to they joy they bring me in a thousand indescribable little ways. Nothing worth having comes without effort, and children are no exception. They are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I thank God for them every day.

That song has been running through my head because I spent Tuesday and yesterday in the the hospital with my infant daughter, who was severely dehydrated by a five day bout of rotavirus. All the little things that had been preoccupying me — making sure the girls do their piano practice and eat more vegetables than Cinnamon Toast Crunch, making better progress with Elizabeth on her math, getting the blizzard of homeschool papers organized and filed, keeping the floor constantly swept and mopped becaue Portia crawls on it, writing my next blog post, organizing my closet, keeping up with the Obama Administration’s campaign of retribution against the diabolical Bush-Cheney torture mafia — suddenly didn’t matter. All that mattered was Portia getting well. Nothing else mattered.

My heart felt like it was breaking as the nurse was putting in the IV, so piteously did Portia scream. I thought of all the mothers in the centuries before there was such a thing as intravenous infusion. They had been spared that small torment, but suffered an immeasurably greater one when their infants could not be rehydrated, and so died. Today I thank God for allowing my children to be born in the age of modern medicine, when a severe case of gastroenteritis does not mean a death sentence for a baby.

Portia is now, unlike the U.S. economy, genuinely on the road to recovery. As she continues to improve, all my other concerns begin to press upon me again, but I bear in mind that as important as all the myriad concerns of daily life are, when your child is sick, truly, nothing else matters.

Isn’t that awful? I love my children, and of course miss them now when I’m away from them, but eating with them in restaurants is just so much work, and it felt so, so good to be able to have a meal with friends and know that the only person whose food consumption and table manners I had to be concerned with were my own.

Motherhood. It makes you appreciate the little things

Mary Jane Garcia (D-Doña Ana), Majority Whip of the New Mexico State Senate, on Tuesday introduced a bill to abolish daylight savings time in the Land of Enchantment. This Republican is all in favor. I hate daylight savings time. Senator Garcia claims that

Daylight-saving time is a health hazard. It causes us to suffer from sleep disruption and deprivation that is essentially jet lag. You have drivers on the road who are half asleep on their way to work in the morning. Daylight savings can also cause major computer glitches, as we saw this weekend in New Mexico when dozens of people’s unemployment claims were impacted.

I’m willing to take her word for all that. I personally hate it because it wreaks havoc with my kids’ bedtime and makes it harder to get them up in the morning. And because it caused a ridiculous argument between my husband and me at 4:00 a.m. on the night we made the switch this year. Never mind why we were up at four (we have a baby, remember?) but there is not a doubt in my mind that the argument never would have occurred if it was still three o’clock like it was supposed to be.

Daylight savings is supposed to be good for kids, since it lets them play outside later during the summer. Nonsense, I say. Whose kids are outside playing at 9:00 p.m.? If they’re old enough to be outside at nine, they’re old enough to be outside in the dark. And do you have any idea how hard it is to make a younger child go to bed when it’s still broad daylight outside? Of course you do, if you have kids. Unless you’re the type whose kids don’t have bedtimes, in which case there is no point in trying to reason with you.

Anyway, if you’re a New Mexican, Democrat or Republican, I urge you to call or e-mail your state legislators in both the House and the Senate, and urge them to support Ms. Garcia’s eminently sensible bill.

Update: If you don’t know who your state senator is, (a ) shame on you, and (b) find him or her here.

Ah, yes, the Nanny State. Let’s do outlaw implanting more than 2 or 3 embryos. Let’s do make it impossible for anyone but the very rich to have children with the aid of fertility treatments. Obviously these “litters” are causing such terrible problems.

To which a sarcastic reader calling him/herself TCH now replies triumphantly:

I guess back when you posted that you NEVER would have imagined 8 months later some whack job in CA would have 14 embryo’s [sic, corrected to "babies" in a subsequent comment] on the states [sic] tab. Who would have thought you [sic] sarcastic comment would be so, so……moot?

Funny actually.

No, not funny at all, actually. I’m not burning with shame over making such a stupid comment. On the contrary, I stand by that comment. Just because one “whack job” has octuplets does not mean that the entire field of reproductive medicine ought to be brought under the control of the Federal Government. Ms. Suleman is one woman. There are over 4,000,000 babies born in the United States each year, and according to this website, 1% of them (that’s more than 40,000*) are born as a result of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Two of my closest friends have children who were conceived by IVF, and another underwent multiple IVF attempts but never had a child. One of these friends had four embryos implanted on her second IVF attempt (her first, also with multiple embryos, resulted in failure) and conceived twins; one twin died in utero, and she has one child today. I’m not sure how many embryos my other friend had implanted, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just one, and both of her children were single births. Nadya Suleman herself, I understand, had multiple embryos implanted in her previous pregnancies, most of which resulted in single births as well.

The fact is, most in vitro attempts fail, and most that result in the birth of a single baby were the result of implanting multiple embryos. Occasionally, a “litter” does occur, it’s true. But are we going to deny millions of childless couples the right to procreate because of this? Many of the people screaming for Nanny State action on the fertility front don’t in fact know much about reproductive medicine. They see Dr. Phil pontificating about Nadya Suleman on TV, pound their fist self-righteously on the coffee table and say, “By God, we can’t let this happen again!”

Well, actually, we can. This is the United States of America, and despite the best efforts of certain people in Washington and elsewhere, people who think they know what’s best for the rest of us, it’s still a more or less free country. If keeping it that way means that once in a blue moon some unwed welfare mother is going to have a litter, well, I can live with that.

The movie star who wants to be governor of my state and says Esquire misquoted him and he doesn’t really think Vietnam vets are punks. We’ll see what my fellow New Mexicans who are veterans think of that come 2010.

Nadya Suleman. How could I, a mother who blogs about both parenting and politics, have not written about the Octomom yet? And my goodness, where to begin? Of course I don’t think having a baker’s dozen plus children out of wedlock is a good thing when you’re on welfare and sponging off your financially struggling parents. But neither do I think the vicious opproprium heaped upon the woman her critics have taken to calling Octopussy is within the bounds of decency. And the self-righteous clamoring for strict regulation of the fertility business sends a chill up my spine. While I agree that implanting eight embryos in an unmarried welfare mother’s womb isn’t exactly recommended social policy, I am nervous about the prospect of draconian laws that may make it impossible for couples of modest means to avail themselves of reproductive technologies. Amid all the shouting about how “something ought to be done” to prevent more “litters” like Ms. Suleman’s, I think we ought to give serious thought as to what that “something” is, and who (or more likely, which government bureaucracy) is going to be the “someone” doing it.

William Saletin telling us in the New York Times that “This Is the Way the Culture Wars End“: we win and you lose, you stupid Republican rednecks. I’m paraphrasing, of course. He starts off with a bunch of blather about going beyond the sterile debates that aren’t getting anywhere, blah, blah. And his conclusion? On abortion: make it less common by making birth control more common, but of course keep it legal. On gay marriage: not only legalize it (marriage, not just domestic partnership) but in fact promote it, because marriage is good for society whatever the sex of the spouses. Is this really the way he thinks the culture wars end? He tells me what I’m supposed to believe, and I say, “Oh, right, okay. Now I get it. Thanks,” and do an immediate 180 on every tenet of my belief system. And leftists call us stupid!

Parents in Albuquerque being furious because instead of letting their kids go lunchless when the parents fail to pay the school lunch bill, the public schools provide the kids with free cheese sandwiches for lunch. And what’s wrong with a free lunch for kids whose parents don’t pay for lunches and don’t send sack lunches either? Well, it isn’t the same hot lunch the kids with paying parents get. And having to eat a cheese sandwich instead of meatloaf is damaging the kids’ self-esteem. So far the Albuquerque public school parents have racked up $140,000 in unpaid lunch bills, which I guess the school district is just expected to eat. Like a cheese sandwich.

That’s about half the stuff I tore out of the newspaper or bookmarked. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get to the rest. Or maybe I’ll make pizza dough and popsicles instead.

I divide my life into the epochs BC and OMG (kidding!! well, sort of) because having children Changes Everything.

In the years BC, my mother-in-law used to say, mainly when she was trying to talk me into postponing childbearing, “Once you have children, your life will never be your own again. It’s finished. Over.” My sister-in-law would say, if I ever ventured an opinion on anything child-related (I was a teacher, recall, so had the temerity to think I might actually know something about kids), “You can’t possibly understand. You don’t have children.” Which hurt, since I wanted them so desperately, and was having such a damnably hard time getting them. It was only in the years since having children that I’ve come to understand how right she was. I didn’t understand. I didn’t have children.

My mother-in-law was right, too. It did change everything. My life isn’t my own anymore. But what she didn’t tell me – and what most people who make sarcastic, disparaging remarks about parenthood to the uninitiated don’t tell them – is that it changes everything for the better. Really. It’s much, much harder, but it’s also much, much richer in every way. Think about it: did you ever get anything worth having, anything you really treasured, without effort?

Cordelia: “I thought we were going to a museum.”

Me: “This is a museum.”

Cordelia: “Where are the statues?”

Me (pointing at some of the painted folk art statues): “Those are statues.”

Cordelia (dismissively): “Those aren’t statues. They’re dolls.”

Me: “They look like dolls because they’re painted. This kind of art is called folk art, and sometimes the statues do look like dolls.”

Cordelia: “I want to see statues like the ones at the Getty Museum.”

Me: “Those are Greek and Roman statues. They don’t have any Greek or Roman statues at this museum.”

Cordelia: “Well, I like the Greek and Roman ones better.”

I like the Greek and Roman ones better, too, but unfortunately there isn’t a lot of Greek and Roman art in New Mexico, so we make do with what we have. Growing up in LA, I took high culture more or less for granted. Once I moved to Santa Fe, all that changed. Part of me (the Roman historian part) is happy that my daughter is already discriminating enough to think that classical art is better than folk art, but another part of me (the Mom part) thinks it’s a little sad that my child is already too sophisticated to be enchanted by cute little painted folk art statues.

I wonder whether Lew Wallace had young children while he was governor of New Mexico back in Billy the Kid’s day. Wallace was the author of Ben-Hur, and after his stint in the Palace of the Governors here in Santa Fe, he moved on to Constantinople, a city of ancient Greek and Roman splendor if ever there was one, to serve as ambassador to the Ottoman Sultinate. I wonder if he missed high art while he was here, and whether his children did, if he had children. Maybe he had his own collection. I’ll have to get a biography of him and find out. It would be nice to read about another kindred classical spirit who spent time in my new home town.

I occasionally wonder whether any of my daughters will become a classicist or ancient historian. I try not to encourage them too much, since my husband would prefer a more practical path in life for them. My eldest, Elizabeth, says she wants to be an archaeologist, but at the moment she’s more interested in Egypt than in Rome. Both she and Cordelia used to demand, “Tell us about the Greeks and the Romans!” every time we drove somewhere in the car. I told them every kid-friendly Greek and Roman story I could think of, and then moved on to the less kid-friendly ones, bowdlerized as best as I could. Elizabeth’s favorite is the Judgment of Paris, and Cordelia’s the abduction of the Sabine women. Tessie’s still little enough to prefer the Lorax, but I suppose she’ll be demanding the labors of Herakles before long.

Someone made a snide comment in e-mail the other day about people who have so much time on their hands they can sit around blogging. Well, today I won’t be sitting around blogging. My kids need me. It’s serious stuff, this parenting business. The stakes are so high. I mean, you don’t want your kids growing up and living on skid row, or having octuplets plus six other children out of wedlock, or being governor of Illinois, right?

In a world where it is axiomatic that children love McDonald’s, my friend had managed to rear her son to the cusp of his third birthday without his ever having tasted the forbidden fare that beckons from under the Golden Arches, shining with grease and bedecked with Happy Meal toys. But we were in the car and I needed coffee, sick addict that I am, and to my knowledge McDonald’s has the best fast food coffee there is. So in we pulled into the drive-thru.

It wasn’t anywhere near meal time, so I thought I was safe, but alas, Cordelia and Theresa immediately started a chorus of, “We want nuggets!” Elizabeth, bless her, turns up her nose in disdain at this sort of food. She’ll eat Subway, but loathes any other fast food, which warms my heart. Portia has no teeth. But Cordelia and Tess have the McDonald’s monkey on their back, and they have it bad. Now, I fear, so does that sweet, once pure boy.

I hope someday my friend can forgive me.

I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.

According to the Times Online article, Mr. Porritt says that

curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming

This is pretty shocking. Usually leftists are careful to say they want more birth control but we need to keep abortion both legal and rare. Apparently Mr. Porritt forgot to read the fine print on the talking points. Or maybe now that we’ve all gotten so comfortable with abortion, leftists can dispense with all that “rare” rot and speak their minds on the subject.

Mr. Porritt, coincidentally perhaps, has two children himself. I can’t help but wonder whether he might not have decided one child was the maximum a good environmentalist should in good conscience have, if he himself had decided to stop after one.

I’ve written about this kids-are-bad-for-the-environment nonsense before, so I won’t belabor the point here. Besides, I’m too busy taking care of my planet-destroying children — the two to which I was entitled, and the two I had the bad taste not to abort.

1) My children. The highs are higher and the lows are lower when you’re a parent, but the high highs make the low lows worth it.

2) My husband’s earning capacity and work ethic. Yesterday’s FUBAR would have been even worse if we lived closer to the poverty line.

3) The clever soldier who coined the term FUBAR, which lets me have the emotional release of swearing without having to be unladylike and actually swear.

4) Coffee. Without it, I would have been pleading for some merciful soul to just shoot me.

They are not religious, so they don’t go to church. But they are searching for values and rituals with which to raise their children, as well as a community of like-minded people to offer support.

Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths.

I realize that my secular humanist readers will roll their eyes at the bovine stupidity of what this practicing Catholic is about to say, but I’ll say it anyway: these humanists are trying to reinvent the wheel when there’s a perfectly good wheel already in existence, and their imitation wheels are only going to be tacky Wal-Mart quality reproductions of the real deal.

As I sat beneath the soaring vaulted ceilings of the Cathedral with the gold-leaf painted designs presently undergoing restoration to their original breath-taking beauty, I wondered where the humanists would hold their new and improved rituals. As I listened to the children singing timeless liturgical classics accompanied by trained musicians under the direction of the Cathedral’s talented and dedicated director of music, I wondered what kind of songs the secular children might sing at their deity-free rituals.

Fine, the secular humanists will say, maybe your Cathedral is prettier than our community center, and maybe your “Adeste Fideles” is more pleasing to the ear than our “Frosty the Snowman,” but you’re raising your children with a lie, and we won’t do that.

For a committed atheist, who is dead certain there is no God, it would seem a lie. For an agnostic, however, who is uncertain whether God exists or not, the issue is more complex, and Pascal’s bet may be a good way of thinking about it. 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that even if you’re not certain whether God exists, the smarter wager is to bet that He does rather than that he doesn’t, for obvious reasons. If you bet He exists and you’re right, your reward is eternal salvation, whereas if you’re wrong, you haven’t really lost anything. If you bet that he doesn’t exist, however, your reward for being right isn’t much, but if you’re wrong, you pay the ultimate price.

An atheist might counter that if you bet God exists, but it turns out he doesn’t, you do lose something: all those long, dreary hours you spent in church, all that money you donated, all those earthly pleasures you passed up because you thought God was going to get you if you gave in to temptation. To this I would respond: 1) If all those hours in church were so awful, why are secular humanists trying to come up with God-free rituals to take the place of church rituals? Why not just be happy they don’t have to waste time on stupid rituals? Because apparently the human psyche craves ritual, and when it doesn’t have church ritual, it looks for something else. 2) A lot of that money you donated to the church was used for charitable purposes, and helped make people’s lives better, which secular humanists say they want to do, too. And yes, some of it was spent on church administration and whatnot, but if you hadn’t donated it, you might well have just spent it on DVDs and i-tunes downloads and clothes you decided you didn’t like after you bought them. 3) As to passing up sinful pleasures, if I expire at 80, surrounded by my children and grandchildren, and discover as my eyes flutter closed for the last time that I bet wrong, and that death is the end of everything, I really don’t think that I’ll spend my final moments of consciousness wishing that I’d slept with more guys who didn’t care about me, that I’d partied and drank myself blind more, that I’d gotten farther ahead in life by cheating and lying and stealing. I think that even if nothing but darkness awaits me after death, that I’ll still be glad that I raised my children right, set a good example for them, and helped far more often than I hurt my fellow man.

I know personally a few agnostics who are raising their children in a religious tradition, not because they’re afraid of going to hell, but because they want their children to have a religious tradition (which is far easier to abandon as a young adult than it is to adopt), want to give their children a firm foundation for the moral code they want to teach them, and think that the other children their children will meet at church or synagogue will be better influences than children they might meet elsewhere. The article on secular humanists confirms this:

I’m often told that when people have kids, they go back to religion,” said John Figdor, a humanist master’s of divinity student who helped organize the seminar. “Are we really not tending our own people?”

Across the country, religious observance hits a low for people in their mid-20s and steadily increases after that, “in conjunction with marriage and children,” said Tom Smith, of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has polled people about religious affiliation and practice for decades.

Mr. Figdor appears to see this phenomenon as a problem, whereas I see it as perfectly natural. Charles Darwin himself, a secular saint if ever there was one, thought that the abolition of religion was a dangerous proposition. Like other agnostic intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Darwin believed that religion helped keep the common folk in check, helped reign in their disruptive and immoral inclinations. Not for nothing did Karl Marx call religion the opiate of the people, and while he and Sigmund Freud thought the world would be better off without it, many of their contemporaries believed that it was far better for the world if non-intellectuals went right on believing that God would get them if they stepped too far out of line. Many of these upper-class agnostics kept their doubts to themselves, or shared them only with their intellectual peers, all the while taking their children dutifully to services every Sunday and going through the motions — and the rituals — of being a good Christian.

G. K. Chesterton, that apostle of aphoristic apology, wrote,

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

The secular parents seeking rituals for their children are trying to escape that degrading slavery. Apparently, the human psyche needs the irrational, and when we don’t get it at church, we look for it in trashy vampire novels and the cult of global warming. We seek perfection, and where the believer can seek it in the divine, the secularist has no choice but to seek it in earthly things. Fellow Catholic bloggger Patrick O’Hannigan (whom you can read in the American Spectator as well as at his blog) recently quoted a post of mine in which I wrote,

The thing secular leftists don’t seem to get is that perfection just isn’t possible in this sadly imperfect world of ours. Accept it. Get over it. Live in the real world, not some utopian fantasy land where nothing ever goes wrong and nobody ever misses an arbitary deadline due to legitimate bad luck or the intervention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

We all want things to be perfect. If we believe in divine justice, we can have that sense of perfection, the sense that even if things aren’t perfect in this world, God will even up the scales in his own good time. Without divine reward and retribution, we either have to shrug and accept that vermin like Hugh Hefner live to a ripe and prosperous old age while little girls like Caylee Anthony get killed before their third birthdays, or drive ourselves crazy trying to make an imperfect world perfect. Just as without the ancient and beautiful rituals of the Church we have to manufacture new rituals to satisfy our craving for them. Atheists may mock my Church, but there is plenty in their secular theology and secular ritual-seeking at which Catholics might laugh as well. Though a good Catholic would not laugh, would instead pray that those lost souls might discover rituals of ancient beauty instead of manufacturing new ones, and seek perfection in the divine rather than in political institutions.

So this last shopping trip they were standing where a woman wanted to push her basket, so I told them to move to the side so she could pass, which they immediately did. The woman’s lips were tightly pursed, and she was positively glowering at the children. Ignoring this, since who knows what kind of bad day she may have been having, I smiled at her and said, “I’m sorry.” She hesitated, as though deciding whether to say something, all the time looking grimly past me, refusing to make eye contact. Finally, after a most uncomfortable silence, she sort of huffed and stalked off without saying anything.

In some ways Santa Fe is a friendly town, but I have to say, there is a noticeable minority here who really don’t like kids. I’ve written before about people who think kids are bad for the environment. I thought of that post later in the same grocery shopping trip when the checker filled my grocery bags so full that I could not pick them up one-handed, and left some of my items outside of bags. Not just the gallon containers of milk which have handles, but other things that aren’t convenient to carry. On other shopping trips, checkers have asked if I brought bags, and gotten rather tight-lipped when I said no and they had to give me paper bags, which they then overfilled and did not double even for perilously heavy loads.

With my disposable diapers, my car that’s big enough to transport a family of six, and my stubborn refusal to get my act together and remember to bring canvas bags to the grocery store along with my tribe of children, I guess maybe I am a geocidal maniac after all. But for all the woman in the grocery store whose path my children blocked knew, I could have brought them all there in a tiny electric car, had a cloth diaper on my baby, and my purse stuffed full of reusable canvas grocery bags. Her hostility may not have had anything to do with my raping the earth by having all those confounded kids. It may have just been that she’s a nasty old shrew.

In about a dozen years, that kid who today is singing about his or her excrement is going to be in high school. Do you remember how mean kids can be in high school? If not, did you see Mean Girls? Or better yet, read Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons, a horrifying window on the sick little world girls can make of school.

Imagine your potty-dancing daughter of two and a half when she’s fifteen. She’s sweet, pretty, a little shy, easily embarrassed, and has a mad crush on the same boy her school’s Teen Queen of Mean likes. Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like for your beloved and fragile daughter when that teen virago in her class Googles her and finds your blog, in which you wrote at great and loving length about the contents of your daughter’s diapers and what escaped the diapers, and the initial frustrations and ultimate triumphs of toilet training. Maybe there’s even a picture or two of the naked little cherub standing next to a potty filled with her first outside-the-diaper bowel movement. The Teen Queen of Mean chuckles to herself, and hits the “Share this on Facebook” button.

The absolute prize for embarrassing your future teenage child is this. I’m linking, but I’m not naming the child or parent in question, because I don’t want it to turn up on search engines. You’ll understand why if you read the whole thing. The sad thing is, this father has actually turned his baby blog into a book that has been published. There’s a link to the book on Amazon.com if you explore the website, but I’m not posting the link.

The more Mommy Blogs (and Daddy Blogs, but there are far more of the mommy variety) I read, the more I realize that it probably hasn’t even occurred to a lot of parents to think of their babies and toddlers as future adults. They’re so little now that it’s almost inconceivable, I suppose. As evidence for my hypothesis that hardly anyone thinks about this, I submit the case of Jon and Kate Gosselin.

I’ve written well over a hundred posts on this blog, and only two of those (this one and this one) have been about the Gosselin family. Nevertheless, according to my stat program, this is the top ten list of keyword searches that have brought people to my blog:

kate gosselin
hate kate gosselin
moralia blog
i hate kate gosselin
kate gosselin shrew
reasons to oppose obama
moralia
kate gosselin tummy tuck
hate the gosselins
kate gosselin is a shrew

Two of them are for my blog name, one for Obama (which makes sense, since I wrote a lot more about him than about the Kate Gosselin), and the other seven – seven! – about the Gosselins, and mainly about Kate Gosselin, whom a lot of people apparently (a) hate, and (b) think is a shrew. Keyword searches for my name (in both correctly and incorrectly spelled versions) didn’t even make the top ten list because of all the permutations of Gosselin hatred clogging it up.

So what does Kate Gosselin have to do with what I’ve been saying about toilet training? Here’s a clip from Jon & Kate Plus 8 that shows one of the sextuplets in training, with all the future-teen-embarrassing elements discussed above.

My point here isn’t to jump on the “I hate Kate” bandwagon, and I don’t make a habit of insulting other mothers. My point is that the Gosselins have allowed their children’s toilet training to occur on national TV, and amid all the choruses of “I hate Kate” there isn’t much said about the public potty training. People (mainly women) criticize Mrs. Gosselin for taking freebies, for being lazy, for nagging her husband, for being too hard on her kids, for being vain, for being this, that and the other, but nobody seems to think anything much of her making the bowel movements of future adults – and, more to the point, perhaps, future teenagers - a public spectacle.

In the video clip, Mrs. Gosselin says she knows some people are offended by the pictures, but insists that it’s part of the children’s history, and that they’re proud of themselves. Now they are, to be sure, but now they’re two or three years old. When they’re fifteen, they’re unlikely to be all that proud of doing what every other civilized member of the human race does as a matter of course. They’re far more likely to be embarrassed because their classmates can watch re-runs of them doing it on cable TV.

I repeat, I do not write this to attack Mrs. Gosselin – or Mr. Gosselin either, since he must approve as well. The point I am trying to make is that no one is talking about the privacy rights of these future adults. Mrs. Gosselin talks about people being offended. I’m not offended by the sight of feces; what mother of four could be? It has nothing to do with being disgusted, and everything to do with respecting individuals’ privacy, even if those individuals are not yet old enough to care about it themselves. I don’t think Kate Gosselin and the army of mommy bloggers bloggging away about their children’s BMs are bad mothers. I think it simply doesn’t occur to a lot of parents that their cute, chubby little cherubs are future adults who will have varying degrees of personal reticence and modesty. Some of them will laugh at the potty dance videos and not care that they were made public. Others will be mortified.

We, as parents, have no way of knowing what kind of teenagers and what kind of adults our toddlers will grow up to be. But grow up they will, and we would do well to remember it.

John Rosemond says that doing all this hands-on kid stuff actually makes me a bad mother, and that good mothers should ignore their kids. Awesome — permission to blog away! Actually, not so fast. Rosemond says (in his condescending, “I know better than you, you stupid Hausfrau” way) that good mothers are supposed to pay attention to their husbands instead of their kids. Yeah, he would. But more on that later; back now to my being a good (bad), attentive (smothering) mother not-ignoring her kids in the kitchen.

Everything you cook with kids takes twice as much organization and prep, twice as much time to complete, and makes at least twice as much mess in the kitchen. But boy do they love it. And they are more inclined to eat the actual lunch or dinner food instead of saying they don’t like it, or that they’re full after three bites and by the way, what’s for dessert?

A blog search turned up a few results for cooking with kids, but not as man as I expected, considering how many blogs on arcane subjects there are out there. I guess it’s because if you’re cooking with your kids, you usually don’t have time to blog about it. What’s Cooking Blog is dedicated to cooking with kids, giving suggestions about what to let the kids do with each recipe. Foodie Mama admits on her blog that she doesn’t really like baking with her kids:

I know, I know, it’s all about the shared experience. But I’d just rather share an experience that doesn’t result in mediocre baked goods. If this is my worst fault as a mom, so be it! Of course I want my kids to learn to love the kitchen as much as I do; I just wish that road weren’t paved with so many rock-like cookies.

So, the bottom line is this: I do invite my kids to bake with me, because I understand that it’s important for many reasons, but I don’t have to like it.

I can relate. Sometimes I enjoy the process, and sometimes I just do it because I know I should, and because the end result — like a three-year-old being able to make pancakes almost entirely on her own. Yes, I know it’s obnoxious for mothers to brag about how wonderful and talented and precocious their children are, but this time I really can’t help it. Yesterday, three-year-old Tess made pancakes practically all by herself. She cracked the eggs without getting any shells in. She mixed it exactly until combined but without overmixing. She poured them on the griddle without too much batter on the non-griddle parts of the stove. She flipped them at the right time without my having to tell her, and without mangling them. She got them on the plate, buttered them and drizzled (as opposed to flooding) them with syrup.

Give a child pancakes and you feed her for a day; teach her to make pancakes and eventually she can feed the family while you take your plate of pancakes to the computer and blog.

The letter-writing initiative was launched by the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which says roughly 1,400 of its members and supporters have contacted 24 leading toy companies and retailers to express concern about ads aimed at kids.

“Unfortunately, I will not be able to purchase many of the toys that my sons have asked for; we simply don’t have the money,” wrote Todd Helmkamp of Hudson, Ind. “By bombarding them with advertisements … you are placing parents like me in the unenviable position of having to tell our children that we can’t afford the toys you promote.”

This is absurd on so many levels, I almost don’t know where to start. First, toy companies have to sell toys, and to do that, they have to advertise. I ask you, who else besides kids are toy ad supposed to target? Personally, I don’t know a lot of adults who play with Barbies and Legos.

Second, since when do parents have to buy their kids every toy the kids see advertised? My mom told me no plenty of times when I was a kid and wanted some toy or other. Sometimes it was, “No, we can’t afford it,” and sometimes it was just plain old “No.” Imagine, telling your child no. What a concept. Apparently, it’s more than some parents these days can handle. According to the AP story:

“Parents have trouble saying no,” said Allison Pugh, a University of Virginia sociology professor. She says parents often buy toys to avoid guilt and ensure their children feel in sync with school classmates.

“Even under circumstances of dire financial straits, that’s the last thing parents give up,” said Pugh. “They’ll contain their own buying for themselves before they’ll make their child feel different at school.”

Amanda Almodovar says she encounters such families in her work as an elementary school social worker in Alamance County, N.C., where homelessness and unemployment are rising.

“I had one parent who said she’d prostitute herself to get what her child wants,” Almodovar said. “It’s heartbreaking. They feel inadequate as parents.

Heartbreaking isn’t the word that came immediately to my mind.

“I want an American Girl doll now, Mommy!”

“All right, dear. Mommy’ll just give this nice man a BJ and I’ll have the money in a jif.”

I really hope I wake up tomorrow and find that I dreamed this article.

Trying to organize my desk and all my homeschooling papers. Organization shall set you free – except when you are a truly sick OCD sufferer like myself, in which case it enslaves you.

Fantasizing. No, not that kind of fantasizing. The School Bus Fantasy. You know, where a big yellow bus pulls up outside the door and takes my kids away to school. Out of the house. For seven hours at a stretch.

Reading blogs. It’s a sickness. But I can do it more comfortably than I can read actual printed material with my stupid bifocals on.

Reading an actual book, now that I’ve more or less gotten the glasses thing sorted out. For short stretches of reading, I use the reading glasses portion of the bifocals, but to really enjoy a long stretch of reading, I switch to plain old reading glasses. But then I have to watch the regular glasses to make sure none they don’t get knocked onto the floor and stepped on (again). The actual book, by the way, is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which I’m very much liking, word nerd that I am.

Reading to my kids, which is easier since the print is bigger and I can read it with the regular glasses no problem.

Practicing the piano. I always wanted to learn, envied as a child my friends who complained about having to practice, wished I could have had lessons too. Well, we bought a used piano las summer, and the two oldest girls are taking lessons, and so am I. I can now play the chorus of “Jingle Bells” and the right hand treble staff part sounds okay, although I’m still shaky on the bass clef chords that you play with the left hand. Not too impressive for a woman my age, I realize, but a few months ago I couldn’t have found Middle C (as opposed to Mittelsee, which is what Middle C made me think of at first) if my life depended on it.

Perfecting my pizza crust. The girls now like mine just as much as Dion’s. I’m more critical, so am willing to say the crust is almost as good as Dion’s. Once it was every bit as good, if not better, but I haven’t been able to produce the same result every single time, so I’m still working on it.

Wondering why I can’t upload pictures to my blog anymore. I had such a good one for the bug post.

Wishing I were brave enough to download WordPress 2.6.3 and update my blog, but (a) I don’t want to go back and read a bunch of WordPress how-to technobabble, and (b) I have this paralyzing fear of messing everything up and having the blog disappear into a black hole in cyberspace.

Thinking about divorce. No, not getting one. Other people’s. Within the last month or two, I’ve learned of three couples I knew back in LA who are divorcing after many years of marriage. Two of them have grown children, and one has children who are still quite young. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad this makes me.

Trying not to think about The Future of the Republican Party, about which the punditocracy cannot shut up. I had been planning one of my long, thoughtful posts about it, but (a) am too depressed about it, and (b) need to think it through some more. Therefore I’ll be posting my thoughts on it until long after everyone else has gotten bored and moved on to something else.

Trying not to think about corporate bail-outs. Hey, speaking of which, there’s a gym here in Santa Fe that just went out of business. How about we bail them out? Jobs will be lost and all that. Plus my babysitter’s mom is really bummed that she’s got to find a new gym. Besides, it’ll be a drop in the bucket next to GM, right?

Cleaning up messes. Especially yogurt messes. Tess goes through something like half a dozen cartons in a day if I don’t hide them behind tall things in the fridge. Sometimes she drops the cartons (full, of course) on the floor and the yogurt splatters everywhere. Not so bad if I find it when it’s still wet and can just wipe it up. Truly ugly if it’s already gotten gummy or God forbid dry.

Thanking God nobody in the house is sick at the moment, and saying a little prayer that it stays that way.

I am not afraid of snakes, or mice, or rats, or spiders. Anything that slithers or crawls is a matter of no concern. But I have a fear of flying insects that is nothing short of pathological. It’s worse if they sting, but I have a horror of even those flying insects that don’t. My phobia is so extreme that I start in horror even when I see a photograph of a wasp or jellow-jacket. When the boys in my grammar school class found this out, they delighted in leaving the science book on my desk, open to the page with the close-up of a bee. When I read that part of 1984 where Winston Smith’s darkest fear, his dread of rats, is used to break him, I broke out in a cold sweat, knowing just how O’Brien could make me love Big Brother in a heartbeat.

Before I had kids, if there was a bee or wasp in the house, I would just trap it in a room that had a door and not open the door, or, failing that, leave the house until my husband could come home and kill it for me. I’m not kidding. But now, with my husband out of town a lot, and four little ones who have only big, cowardly me to protect them from wasps, that isn’t an option.

A couple of weeks ago we started had a wasp infestation in the house. I was killing two or three of them a day. I had cold sweat, felt like Winston with the rat cage on, but my little girls were trusting Mom to fix things, so I had no choice. I had to be like the bug-slaying soldiers in Starship Troopers instead of like Winston Smith melting down in the face of the Beast.

I lit fires in all the fireplaces, thinking they might have a nest in one of the chimneys, and possibly they did, because the enemy in the Great Wasp War retreated. Then yesterday there was another incursion, albeit a small one. And you know what? The fear wasn’t as great. I had that initial stab of panic, that sick feeling, but it wasn’t as strong as it used to be. My heart wasn’t racing quite as fast as before when I killed it, cleaned up the Raid mess, and went on with my day.

It may not sound like a big deal, but to me it was. I still don’t like flying insects, but I feel as though I’ve taken the first step toward conquering my irrational, paralyzing fear of them. And it’s motherhood that did it. Because you know what? When you’re a mom, you really only have one fear, and that fear trumps all other fears of snakes, bugs, rats, high places, whatever. I speak, of course, of the fear that something bad will happen to one of your precious children.

I am the Great Bug-Killing Mother. Hear me roar.

Having made the decision to educate my children at home, I am committed to providing them the very best education that I can, and that makes it difficult to find time to read, exercise, keep up with the news and politics, check my e-mail, cook, keep the house from becoming a disaster area, work on my book and blog. It’s all too tempting to park them in front of Animal Planet or Tom and Jerry while I write or surf the internet or experiment with some complicated new recipe. For the record, the TV is off right now. They’re playing some sort of game that involves a lot of blankets, pillows, couch cushions and kitchen utensils. They do play independently quite a bit, which I think is good for them, but it goes in spurts, and there are times when all they want to do is play computer games or watch DVDs, and grumble when I say no.

At the risk of allowing Brigette Russell’s blog to sound like Bridget Jones’s Diary, I’ll also admit that I’m having a devil of a time taking off those last 6 or 8 lbs. of baby weight. I’m hovering between p + 6 and p + 8, with p = pre-Portia weight. (Can you tell I used to be an algebra teacher?) No Joanne Watson am I, clearly. I suppose 8 lbs. isn’t too bad after only a little over three months, but still, it’s frustrating when I spend all those hours on that cursed elliptical machine that I could use in so many other ways. Now, of course, I’m not doing it at all, since I’m sick. I’ve had laryngitis for days and literally cannot talk at all, can only whisper a few words at a time. Try making a housefull of small children mind when you can’t talk to them. I won’t even go there. Back to time…

I keep thinking, if only I could find the right schedule — no, the perfect schedule — then everything would fall into place. Except there isn’t any perfect schedule, and maybe not even a right schedule either. I realize that the answer is to prioritize, and eliminate those things that can be eliminated in order to do a better job on the rest, and this past week Moralia almost got prioritized away. It still isn’t completely out of danger, but I’m leaning toward clemency.

But as I’m sitting on the couch watching the news and feeding Portia, Cordelia comes walking into the living room with a stack of books, plops them down on the coffee table and announces, “Can’t sleep.” Moreover, she’s hungry, and wants me to make her breakfast. Fat chance. I tell her to go back to bed. “Not sleepy,” she says. The baby has now been fed, changed and put back down to sleep again, and I’m dying to get back to sleep myself. Stupidly, I offer to let Cordelia come sleep with me, since her dad is out of town.

“Hungry,” she declares just as I’m starting to drift off again. If I ignore her, maybe she’ll go to sleep and stop bothering me. Or maybe not. “Want breakfast.” Although she’s been speaking in full sentences since she was a year and a half old, she has recently developed the annoying habit of truncating her sentences to the bare minimum of words needed to get the point across. Maybe she’s seen too many You Tube clips of The 300 with her dad, and is trying to be Laconic. Maybe she’s practicing for when she gets her own cell phone and will need to keep it short and sweet for text messaging. Maybe she’s just trying to annoy me.

Eventually she went to sleep and let me do the same. I think it was around 5:00. My alarm, of course, was set for 6:30 so I could get up as usual and do half an hour on the elliptical and as many abdominal exercises as possible before Portia wakes up, trying with desperate vanity to un-wreak the havoc wrought by a fourth pregnancy and c-section.

None of this is meant as a complaint, by the way. Having my four daughters has been the most wonderful thing ever to happen to me. They’re worth the lost sleep, the dieting and exercise, the cost of diapers and formula and pediatricians and piano lessons, and the acres of pulverized Cheerios and dessicated Play-Doh I’ve swept up over the years.

If I don’t get to sleep again tonight, well, that’s okay. They’re worth it.

A reader who commented on my blog wrote to tell me about her own blog, which is a spoof of the “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” called “Tom and Trix Plus Six.” I checked it out and found it quite clever, especially the three-part Trading Spouses spoof where Trix Googler (Kate Gosselin) trades places with Esther Goddard (Michelle Duggar). The spoof is satire, and not particularly mean-spirited, though the author said she’s received hate mail. This hardly surprises me, given my own experience.

Apologies to my husband, who likes long, meaty posts here at Moralia, but I have to get back to work now. I have a second grader to teach, a pot roast to make, and the incredibly depressing economic crisis news to watch during baby-feeding breaks. I still haven’t completely sorted out my own thoughts on the bail-out, but watching Harry Reid talk about it on CNN this morning, I do know that I don’t trust that guy as far as I could throw him.

That’s why I keep saying no food outside the kitchen and dining room!  That’s why we mothers have rules that we harp on day and night, driving our kids (and often our husbands) crazy and making them mutter under their breath that we’re mean (kids) or compulsive (husbands).  I couldn’t resist saying, “I told you so,” to Tessie.  Like she cared.  It just made her hungry for a fresh banana.

I also couldn’t resist Googling the bugs.  They’re called vinegar flies, a very small variety of fruit flies.  Now I know why they liked the Chianti so much.  Don’t you just love the internet? 

Only problem is, how much more vinegar fly bait did Tess deposit in the nooks and crannies of our home while I was online?

Reading the exchange you and Slackonomics author Lisa Chamberlain had about the challenges of parenting (and noting that you haven’t had much time to blog because of the needs of your own children), I’m curious what you think about Gov. Palin campaigning for – and possibly becoming – Vice President having a four month old special needs child.

And this comment was sent to me in e-mail by someone I know personally:

Maybe if she stayed at home and watched out for her kids her 17 year old daughter wouldn’t be preggers. Now this stupid 17 year old has to get married b/c her mom would get slammed in the press if her kid got an abortion or gave up the baby for adoption. “Bristol, take one for the team.”

Where do I begin? I feel like I’m in some kind of Orwellian dream world, where 2 + 2 = 5 and we’ve never been at war with Eurasia, but always with Eastasia.

For years I’ve been hearing things like, “Why are you wasting your talents staying home with your kids?” and reading books and articles by feminists lamenting the fact that so many other educated women are doing the same thing, setting aside their careers, squandering their talents, wasting their time taking care of children when they could be doing something meaningful and hiring a housekeeper, nanny and cook to do the grunt work at home. Women are just like men, only with ovaries instead of testicles. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. If men can have children and careers, by God, so can women. Anybody ask John F. Kennedy how he managed to “have it all” with a baby and a toddler in the White House? And yet here we are, more than 40 years later, demanding to know what business Sarah Palin has being Governor of Alaska — let alone Vice President, God forbid — with three kids and a baby at home. And, irony of ironies, since she’s a Republican, the very feminists who have demanded full equality for women all these years are in the position of having to oppose Palin’s candidacy, and are faced with the temptation to jump on the “How can she possibly do it all?” bandwagon when their own principles insist that of course she can.

First, the question of what I, often too busy with my children to blog, think of Palin’s ability to balance family and high political office. To that I reply:

1) My children are 7, 5, 3 and less than two months old. They are all very young, too little to be left alone at all, too little to be of any substantive help to me. Even though she’s my age, Sarah Palin was smart enough to get an early start having children, so hers are now 19, 17, 14, 7 and four months. Big difference. The 19-year-old is grown up and in the Army. The two teenage girls do not need 24-7 supervision, and are old enough to be of real help to their mother in caring for the youngest children. 17-year-old Bristol Palin, who is expecting a baby herself, was holding her baby brother all during their mother’s maiden campaign speech on Monday, and I have little doubt she’s a tremendous help to her mother. I have a 17-year-old niece, and when she visits it’s a dream having an extra pair of grown-up hands around the house. Even the 7-year-old is old enough not to be quite the physical drain that younger children are. My own 7-year-old is far less difficult than she was just a year or two ago.

2) I homeschool my children, while I’m assuming Governor Palin’s children are in school.

3) Mrs. Palin must have domestic help. Until I hired some part-time help last week, I didn’t, and was being run ragged by doing everything around the house myself. Part of what makes housekeeping so time-consuming for me is that I love to cook, and cook just about everything from scratch. I don’t know if Gov. Palin makes her own moose stew from scratch, but I can’t imagine that governing Alaska allows her to spend as many hours a week cooking as I do. Sometimes I really wish I could just pop open a can of chili instead of making the real deal, but alas, I can’t. I’ve spoiled my family, and now they wrinkle their noses at pre-packaged food. When I was sick and pregnant, I tried to foist frozen lasagna on them, but no dice. After all, would you eat Stouffer’s when the only lasagna you’d ever known was made with creamy whole milk mozzarella, fresh basil, and onion-and-nutmeg-infused bechamel?

4) A Down Syndrome baby isn’t any more work than any other infant. The difficulties begin when the child is a toddler, and by that time Palin’s daughter Bristol will be married and on her own, and the other two girls will 16 and 9, not exactly toddlers demanding their mother’s attention every moment.

5) Given her 80%-plus approval rating in Alaska, Palin has been doing an outstanding job as governor. She doesn’t seem to be bleary-eyed and frazzled now, and while it isn’t the presidency, the governorship of the largest (in terms of territory) state in the Union, a state which borders not only Canada but Russia, a state in which the governor must be an expert in the field of energy policy, isn’t exactly an undemanding job. As McCain’s vetting team found, she’s been performing it competently.

Now, on to the question of Bristol Palin having to “take one for the team” so her mom can get elected, and of her mother’s culpability for the pregnancy in the first place.

1) If Sarah Palin had been a stay-at-home mother, her daughter might still have gotten pregnant. No mother, be she a SAHM or working mom, spends every moment of every day with her teenage child. If she did, people would call her overprotective and smothering — if not downright psychotic. The youthful sex drive is a powerful force, and one that’s been triumphing over parental proscriptions for millenia.

2) A related criticism that my e-mail friend did not raise is Palin’s culpability because as governor she backed abstinence-only education rather than sex ed that taught students about contraception. This is a non-issue. Show me the teenager that actually learns something in sex ed. Kids learn about sex and birth control from their more precocious classmates long before they hear about it in the classroom. That was true when Sarah Palin and I were teenagers, and it’s still true today. In addition, today’s teenagers have access to all the information on the Internet, which kids in my day didn’t have. Believe me, any girl who knows about sex also knows about the existence of birth control.

3) Poor Miss Palin has to get married because her mom would get slammed in the press if she had an abortion or gave up the baby for adoption? In the first place, I think many people would find it admirable if she allowed a childless couple to adopt her baby. In the second place, given her own willingness to carry to term a Down Syndrome child, Mrs. Palin would no doubt oppose her daughter’s getting an abortion even if she wasn’t in politics. Finally, this analysis makes marriage sound rather like a death sentence. If she didn’t get married, Bristol Palin would likely go off to college where everyone would be getting drunk and high and hooking up, and she’d either be a social outcast by rejecting the sex-drugs-booze college culture or she’d become a part of it, likely ending up depressed and degraded by all the sordid experiences with guys who used her for sex without caring a bit about her. So many people today assume that marrying young is a mistake — even a tragedy. But I know couples who married and had children young, and they are doing just fine. I have a friend here in Santa Fe who got married at 18 or so and had her first child at 20, now has two and is planning a third. She and her husband (who is her age) are so mature that I often forget I’m nearly old enough to be their mother. Both of them say that marrying and having a child really made them grow up, and that they’re glad they did things the way they did. I realize that this isn’t the way a lot of young people’s marriages turn out, but that’s an argument for people working harder at their marriages, not for eschewing marriage in the first place. I really don’t think it’s a terrible thing for a young woman to be married and a mother instead of being cannon fodder for horny frat boys.

McCain’s choice of Palin as his running mate has created some strange political bedfellows, putting traditional, conservative Republican women in the position of defending a working mother’s ability to have it all and do it all, while forcing feminists to sit tight-lipped and silent while Palin’s opponents question her ability to balance political power and family responsibilities. As feminists, they want to say, “Yes, she can!” but as liberals they want her and McCain to lose the election, so they need to make difficult choices.

Truly, this has been one of the most interesting elections in decades. During the primary season, when it looked like Mitt or Rudy or some other candidate who didn’t inspire me, I thought, here we go again, Bob Dole all over again. Then McCain came out of nowhere to snag the nomination, and I thought, great, Mr. Bipartisan, just what we need. But Mr. Bipartisan surprised me, and gradually won me over. Then, with his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, he proved that he really deserved the “Maverick” reputation I used to scoff at. My husband and I have opened our hearts — and our checkbook — to McCain and Palin.

I hope many of you do the same. I hope some of Hillary’s PUMAs realize that there’s more to being a feminist than the right to get rid of a baby you don’t want, and that being a Republican doesn’t make Sarah Palin any less of a role model for their daughters.

Has the US Secretary of State got her cassette stuck? For a week now she has been reiterating the same phrase “Russian forces must leave Georgia now” and for a week now the world has been informed of Georgian war crimes against Russians in Ossetia. The war crimes happened, the Russians call the shots now, Ms. Rice. Like it or lump it.

This isn’t the first time Pravda has insulted Secretary Rice. A 2006 article in called “Condoleezza Rice’s anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems” quotes Vladimir Zhirinovsky as saying that Rice made anti-Russian statements

“because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status.”

While I certainly do not agree with Zhirinovsky’s sexist and simplistic psychoanalysis of her, I have to say that there is one way in which having children might have helped Rice to understand the Russians better, and to realize that some people — like Russians and two-year-olds — see right through empty threats that aren’t backed up by swift and serious consequences. After we saw Will Farrell’s “Good Copy, Baby Cop” You Tube video, my husband and I started calling our daughter Tessie “The Lieutenant.” That kid was is a tough cookie. Some children are docile and agreeable. I was, according to my parents and all my relatives. My children aren’t. I have three (still too early to tell about the fourth) very strong-willed children. I suspect that Teddy “Speak softly and carry a big stick” Roosevelt may have had his political philosophy honed in the hard-knocks school of parenthood. TR is said to have said about his strong-willed daughter Alice, “I can be president of the United States or I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

Condoleeza Rice may not have had an Alice Roosevelt or a Theresa Russell to teach her that empty threats get you nowhere, but she could have learned the same lesson by reading Machiavelli or Sun Tzu. Either way, our nation’s highest diplomat ought to know better than to keep threatening loudly when all her sticks are busy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Off-line, out in the real world, I got a visceral reaction to a casual remark about Kate Gosselin recently. I had taken my children to the park and there was a woman there who had twins somewhere between one and two years of age. We talked a bit, and I mentioned a friend of mine who had triplets a few years ago, and said something to the effect of, I know it must be incredibly hard, but just imagine what it’s like for those families with quadruplets or more, like the Gosselins with their twins and sextuplets. The woman at the park immediately retorted, “Those people are insane. No one should be having that many kids. I mean, it’s crazy. Don’t you think it’s crazy?” I didn’t say anything, because the only alternative to having triplets or sextuplets or whatever is to have selective reduction, and like Kate Gosselin, I wouldn’t have done it, would have taken my chances with the sextuplets despite medical advice to the contrary. From her reaction, I got the impression that perhaps this woman’s twins had started out as a larger set of multiples and she and her husband had decided (or their doctor had convinced them) to undergo selective reduction. My friend who had triplets was pressured by her doctor to reduce, and so was Kate Gosselin, as the Gosselins relate on their website. Another woman I know did undergo the procedure, allowing her doctor to abort two of her quadruplets so that she could carry twins to term. The twins were fine, but the mother later attempted suicide, and I cannot help but think that looking at her children and asking herself, “What if the needle had gotten this one?” might have contributed to the despair that drove her to try to take her life.

Obviously, there are a lot more people who hate Kate Gosselin than there are women who have undergone selective reduction of multiple pregnancies. Much of the antipathy stems from other causes: Kate’s a TV star and those women aren’t; Kate makes a lot of money off her kids and other women either think it’s exploitative, or wish they could make some cash from the kids themselves; Kate got a free tummy tuck as a result of the TV show, and the rest of us are just living with the ravages of childbirth; Kate gets testy and loses her temper on camera, and since nobody’s filming the rest of us, we can be sanctimonious and pretend we never do asinine things ourselves.

My excuse will be one month old tomorrow, and she never stops eating, especially at night. She’s growing like a weed, and no wonder, with all that formula she’s putting away. Yes, I said formula. I’m one of those awful mothers who doesn’t breastfeed her children. Go ahead, call CPS. But if my husband wasn’t doing some of the night feedings, I think I’d have had a nervous collapse by now. As it is, I’m tired enough, and my ability to focus on serious issues is suffering. Fortunately, I’ve been through this three times before, so I know it will pass. With my first and third daughters, it passed when they started sleeping through the night at around two months of age. My second daughter woke up hungry in the middle of the night until she was a year and a half old, and I was seven months pregnant with my third. God help me if this child does the same.

Today I can’t write anything substantive because I have a Barbie cake to make. I made one for my 7-year-old’s party last month, so naturally my 5-year-old insisted on one for her party tomorrow. Making something that labor-intensive was a foolish precedent to set. Plus I got sloppy and didn’t level the tops of the layers carefully enough, so poor half-dressed Barbie is listing dangerously to starboard at this point.

Speaking of foolish, I also agreed to host a political fundraiser in two weeks for our district’s candidate for Congress. My husband and I have attended our share of these things, but this is our first time hosting one. Timing could have been better than six weeks post-partum, but the election is fast approaching, and this time around it looks like our heavily Democrat district might actually have a fighting chance of electing a Republican, in part because there are five candidates running, three of whom are likely to take votes away from the Democrat. In addition, Dan East, Republican candidate for New Mexico’s third congressional district, is a strong candidate who, besides having solid conservative credentials, is personable and makes a very favorable impression that may well sway independents and undecided voters.

Okay, time to go check on Barbie in the fridge and the meatloaf in the oven. Hopefully Portia will start sleeping through the night soon and I’ll be back in full blog swing again. In the meantime, I’m keeping my head above water with the help of the most wonderful plant in the world. Yes, my dear readers, my taste for black coffee returned the day after I gave birth. I have no explanation, either for the pregnancy-induced aversion or for its abrupt disappearance, but I am a very happy woman because of it. The Lord is, indeed, kind and merciful.

At the time, I had heard of the Duggars but not the Gosselins, but hadn’t seen either family on TV. Curious, I searched the TV listings, found the Gosselins’ show John & Kate Plus 8 (a regular series) along with a show about the Duggars (who do not have a regular series; I know of only two documentary-type shows featuring the family). I watched the Duggar documentaries and a couple of episodes of John & Kate, and did some online reading that revealed some of the similarities and differences between the two families.

Differences: John and Kate Gosselin only (did I say only????) have 8 children, a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, while Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar have more than twice as many, with two sets of twins but the rst single births. The Duggars homeschool their children, while the Gosselins do not. The Duggar children behave so well and their parents are always so calm and relaxed (at least in the two documentaries) that it’s enough to give most normal parents an inferiority complex, while the Gosselin kids often run their parents ragged.

Similarities: There are a lot of people out there who really, really, REALLY hate these people. A lot of people have spent a lot of time online venting their spleen against these two families, and in particularly against these two mothers. The “lazy shrew” part of this post title refers a blog characterization of Kate Gosselin, while the “breeder pig” part refers one of the many vile epithets about Michelle Duggar that pollute the internet.

Let’s take the lazy shrew first. There is a blog called Gosselins Without Pity in which fans (if people who watch a show obsessively and then complain about it can be called fans) of the show post their comments, which frequently take the form of long, detailed explanations of what Kate Gosselin did wrong, why she’s (a) a control freak, (b) lazy, (c) mean to her husband, (d) mean to her kids, (e) all of the above. Jon gets either sympathy for being henpecked, or contempt for not setting his carping shrew of a wife straight.

I have to be honest and say that I simply haven’t watched the show often enough to know whether these criticisms are justified or not. I am too busy taking care of my own four children to watch any non-news TV regularly. In the two episodes I did see, Kate did nothing especially reprehensible. And if she gets testy sometimes, well, I can see how that might happen when you have two 7-year-olds and six 3-year-olds in the house. My one 3-year-old alone is enough to drive anyone to distraction.

In addition to the Gosselin-specific blogs (there are more than just the one I mentioned) there is much discussion of Jon’s and Kate’s (but especially Kate’s) shortcomings elsewhere on the web. This post at imperfectparent.com from last October has garnered well over 13,000 comments so far. A more recent article from a few months ago has 3,500-plus comments and they’re still pouring in.

Now for the breeder pig. Online haters of Kate Gosselin have nothing on the crowd that picks on Michelle Duggar. Adlyn Morrison posted on her blog last month a collection of particularly vile comments posted at You Tube after the Duggars announced they were expecting their 18th child.

One comments,

Nice f***ing hair, breeder pig.

Another writes,

oh god…twisted fundamentalist midwestern Christians…bah all the girls have those ugly long hair styles and they’re all wearing dresses…”cough…these people must really hate gay people.. [sic; all capitalization and punctuation errors in original]

How wearing dresses and having long hair signify hatred of homosexuals is beyond me. A third opines,

This family disgusts me. I’m surprised this woman’s uterus hasn’t fallen out while walking down the street. [Misplaced modifier alert: the uterus isn’t walking down the street; the woman is.]

Personally, I think the state of Mrs. Duggar’s reproductive organs is her own business, and far too private a matter for internet speculation, but alas, all too many people don’t agree. A particularly offensive photo crops up frequently on websites and blogs discussing the Duggars. It is a formal studio portrait of the Duggar family, on which some devilishly clever and classy person has added the caption, “VAGINA: It’s not a clown car.” The photo appears, for example, here, where still more people are spouting off with great wit and verve about Mrs. Duggar’s reproductive organs and hair (one comment eloquently opines that Mrs. D’s hair is “f***ed up”).

Earlier this month, there was a discussion on the Pregnancy and Parenting bulletin board about the Duggars, and while many of the comments were either supportive of the Duggars or expressing the view that it’s no one else’s business how many children the Duggars have, there were a few making comments like this one from Kathy on July 11:

Personally, I think that BOTH Michelle and her husband, Jim Bob, need to be rounded up and FORCIBLY STERILIZED!!…Can you imagine the ABSOLUTE DRAIN on the environment that this ONE FAMILY creates???…No wonder that the environment is in such terrible shape and Global warming is increasing with SELFISH people like Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar (doesn’t that name just SCREAM hilbilly hick??) draining the Earth’s natural resources with their endless brood! [ellipses mine; original post was longer]

The “kids are bad for the environment” argument is something I’ve posted about before. This is strictly an affluent Westerner’s line of thinking, the sort of reasoning you get from the kind of people lampooned on StuffWhitePeopleLike.com.

While one does find defenses of big families online, one finds far more of the obnoxious and insulting attacks, like the question posted on Live Journal asking, “do you think the duggars are batshit insane?” Needless to say, many respondents did.

By allowing TV cameras into their homes, the Gosselins and Duggars have opened themselves up to this sort of thing, just as I have opened myself up to it by starting a blog. I now receive insulting comments (mainly on my political posts) but that’s the price of being in the public eye. The negative comments people make in cyberspace about Kate Gosselin are sometimes mean, but they focus primarily on her parenting style, whereas the comments about Michelle Duggar are often truly beyond the pale.

Update 12/28/08: This post has been updated to show longer quotes in block quote format. None of the content has been altered.

Martha Brozyna, the nation’s foremost expert on sexual deviancy in medieval Poland, one of probably about twelve people in America besides me and Victor Davis Hanson who have PhDs in history and are not leftists, and a stock trading guru, is always a wonderful source of bizarre news items. The latest from her is this little gem about a New Zealand couple who named their daughter Talula Does The Hula. And I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was a nut job for naming her daughter Apple. Makes me feel sort of silly for worrying that I had given my daughter Portia a name that was too unusual. Even Itzel and Meadow aren’t sounding too bad after hearing about Talula Does The Hula. Poor kid was so embarrassed she wouldn’t tell her friends her real name and asked everyone to call her K. The article doesn’t tell how the case came to court, but does say that the judge made 9-year-old Talula Does The Hula a ward of the court, and ordered her name to be changed. The new name was not revealed so as not to embarrass the girl. You have to wonder what her parents were thinking. Were they on drugs? Mentally ill? Or just plain sadistic?

Another crazy parenting story was sent to me by the lovely and charming Kathryn Rubenacker, a fellow alumna of Culver City High and the wife of my husband’s best friend. This one is about parents who can’t bear to send their kids off to summer camp the old fashioned way. Most camps don’t allow the campers to have cell phones, so some parents are sending their kids off to camp with two cell phones, one to turn over to camp counselors as required, and another to stash away so they can text Mommy and Daddy on the sly. Kathryn observes that much of the fun she had at summer camp as a child would now be fodder for lawsuits. I didn’t go away to summer camp as a child, but I did have a lot more freedom of movement than kids do these days. When I was fairly young I’d be out playing with the other kids on our street, free to go where I liked between within certain limits, and by the time I was 12 or 13 I was riding my bike or the bus all over the west side of Los Angeles while my mom was at work, with no cell phone to let her know where I was or what I was doing. As much as I enjoyed having that freedom when I was young, and as much as I want my children to be resilient and independent, I also don’t want to be that one mom in a million who ends up sobbing on the eleven o’clock news when something awful happens to one of my children. As I’ve said before, I strive for moderation in all things, and will have to find a happy medium between the moms who hide cell phones in their little campers’ backpacks and the laid-back moms of the 60s and 70s who made my generation’s childhood so much fun.

BTW, if you know what this post title paraphrases, you’re probably at least as old as I am and spent your childhood Saturday mornings the same way I did — and had a lot more adventures as a kid than your own kids are having now.

I don’t put on much weight during each pregnancy as I don’t have a huge appetite and afterwards the excess goes very quickly.

I suppose I’m running around a lot after the children, taking them to school, making their meals and taking them shopping or for walks in the park so they keep me pretty fit.

I can imagine the eye-rolling and under-the-breath cursing this may elicit from some mothers who labor nearly as hard taking off the baby weight as they do pushing out the baby.

While I don’t have quite as easy a time of it as Mrs. Watson, I can say that having four children hasn’t left me any heavier than before my first was born. Or having three didn’t, anyway. I’m only 12 days postpartum at the moment, and weigh 15 lb. more than I did when I got pregnant this last time, but that’s a manageable amount to lose, and some of it is probably still retained fluids and will come off on its own. Like Joanne Watson, I have found that running around after my children does keep me busy and active enough that I don’t have a lot of trouble with my weight. I actually had to work harder at staying slim before I had children than after. The only physical downside has been the result of having them by c-section, which means your lower abdomen is never really the same again without a tummy tuck, something I used to think wistfully about but at the moment, still having pain from the c-section, the idea of voluntarily undergoing another abdominal surgery does not appeal in the least. Besides, as I’ve mentioned in the past, taking the plastic surgery route to middle-aged Barbiedom isn’t a road I want to travel.

In general, my philosophy of life is an Aristotelian “moderation in all things.” I deplore our society’s sexualization of everything, including mothers. The images of madonna and whore, once polarized in the Victorian male imagination, have become fused. Where once there was the madonna on her pedestal and the whore in her boudoir, we now have the madonna as whore. The most vivid icon of this new ideal was the August 1991 Vanity Fair cover on which Demi Moore posed nude and seven months pregnant. Not long after, the most daring mothers-to-be were posing for artsy (and not-so-artsy) photos as nude and pregnant as Demi, though without the benefit of professional airbrushing. I learned of this when I was pregnant with my second child and on an e-mail list with other expectant mothers who were all due the same month I was. One of the women on the list posted very casually that she’d had some photos taken, and sent the link for the rest of us to see a number of nude photographs of herself in the late stage of pregnancy, accompanied in some by her two-year-old daughter. From what I have been able to gather since, this practice has not become mainstream, but neither is it as rare as some might think. Some expectant mothers who are not ready for the full monty settle for “belly pics” with shirts lifted to expose their future progeny but nothing more. I personally have known a number of mothers to exchange these with their girlfriends by e-mail or on internet discussion lists, and I’ve seen them hanging on the walls of people’s homes. The latest maternity fashions include pants and skirts that rest below the belly worn with cropped tops that leave the protruding middle exposed. Even full-coverage maternity clothes tend to be increasingly form-fitting (I noticed the change over the course of my successive pregnancies) and the maternity shops in the malls sell thong underwear.

In The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, Vicki Iovine says the bounce-back time for her and her girlfriends to get their figures back was generally around ten months (“ten months on, ten months off”). As if to prove the rule, Demi Moore was back on the cover of Vanity Fair a year after her nude and pregnant cover, buck naked again but this time adorned with a “suit” painted on her slim, ten months postpartum body. Not only are women supposed to be sexy while they’re pregnant, but they were supposed to be sexy again almost immediately after having the baby. In addition to a slew of vapid magazine articles, a number of books have hit the shelves giving new moms their marching orders: Hot Mamma: How to Have a Babe and Be a Babe (2003), Sexy Mamas: Keeping Your Sex Life Alive While Raising Kids (2004), The Hot Mom’s Handbook (2006), I’m Too Sexy for My Volvo: A Mom’s Guide to Staying Fabulous! (2006) and across the Atlantic British mums are instructed how to be The Yummy Mummy (2007).

Not every woman swallows whole the pop culture mantra that we all ought to look and act like the Sex and the City gals even with two toddlers and a newborn at home. Some women make a conscious decision to reject the ideal of the pregnant pin-up girl and the post-partum sexpot in favor of what I call an “Earth Mother” ideology. This ideology rejects the mainstream cultural ideal of thin, youthful feminine beauty, celebrating instead the female body as the site of childbirth, lactation and maternal nurture. It views breasts as beautiful not because they are firm and shapely, but because they provide the only natural source of sustenance for babies. The ideology accepts and indeed embraces those physical consequences of childbirth and lactation that the mainstream culture stigmatizes: weight gain, sagging breasts, stretch marks and all the rest. A woman I knew from an e-mail list (not the woman with the nude photos), used to end all her e-mails with the same signature line, one that included a mini-manifesto on maternal beauty that began with something to the effect of, “The beauty of my body lies not in the slimness of my thighs or the firmness of my breasts, but in . . . ” I cannot recall the exact wording, but it continued in the same vein, waxing poetic about the deeper meaning of her stretch marks, broad hips and breasts that sagged because they had fed four children over the course of many years. The image those lines always evoked in my mind was of the so-called Venus of Willendorf, a prehistoric stone figurine with enormous breasts, thick thighs and a more than ample midsection. This figure is interpreted by some as a sacred image of the Mother Goddess, the nurturing deity some people (mainly women, and not academic historians) believe was worshipped in an idyllic past before the harsh rule of God the Father subordinated women to his patriarchal rule.

No doubt there are any number of husbands who cherish their wives’ “beautiful because they give and sustain life” bodies, men who don’t mind having the baby and/or toddler sleeping in bed with them (or with their wives if they themselves have retreated to the guest room), who accept leaking milk as a natural part of foreplay for years on end, but I suspect a lot of them aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the Earth Mother mystique as their wives. Some of these are good sports about it, especially if they’re only planning on a few children and they can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but for others the challenge of living in a society as sexualized as ours must be difficult for a man whose wife is unwilling to make any effort to conform to society’s standards of feminine beauty.

Somewhere there is a happy medium between the expectation that mothers should all look like Joanne Watson five days after bearing a 13th child, and the defiant refusal of the Earth Mothers to make even the slightest effort to keep up their figures.

That last line was incorrect too, by the way. One isn’t supposed to end sentences with prepositions, as I just did — on purpose, may I add, to make a point. I ought to have written, “the one to which I’m used,” but who on earth talks like that? “The one to which I’m accustomed” sounds better, and for writing it’s fine, but in conversation it sounds pretentious. Same with who and whom: those of us who know the difference will in most cases write “Whom did you see?” but in conversation say “Who did you see?” Of course, which to choose, the correct but pretentious-sounding or the incorrect but normal-sounding, depends upon who you’re speaking to (which should read “to whom you are speaking”).

I realize I fixate on grammar more than the average (or ought I to say normal?) person, but my recent hospital stay kept grammatical errors in the forefront of my mind. Just about every nurse in that hospital told me to “lay down” or “lay still” or “just lay there,” when in fact each of those verbs should have been lie rather than lay. I have no idea why, but this is the error that irritates me more than any other. I have said “lie down” to my children from birth, but they all say “lay down” since everyone else they hear, including the teachers and aides at preschool, says lay rather than lie. Now that we are homeschooling (i.e., not paying other people to teach our children to use incorrect grammar in place of the correct grammar they learn at home) perhaps that will change.

A grammatical error that bothers a lot of people oddly enough doesn’t bother me: can vs. may. I know the difference of course, but grew up in a family that used can (be able) instead of may (be permitted), but that’s no excuse, since my mother says lay instead of lie and I broke that habit. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I say may sometimes and can sometimes, but I know my children always say “can,” except Cordelia, who says “may” a lot but misuses it, asking, “May you…?” instead of “Will you…?” I’ve explained a thousand times that “may” is for “May I…?” but she does right on saying “May you…?” and “Can I…?”

In her controversial book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris made the point that children speak like their peers, not like their parents, which is why children of immigrants speak perfectly unaccented English and when they do speak their parents’ native tongue, they never reach the level of proficiency they have in English, and English is the language in which they dream. This is true of class-based accents as well; the example Harris gives is Margaret Thatcher, who came from a working-class family but spoke with the upper-class accent of her classmates at the elite school she attended on scholarship. The linguistic arguments aren’t the controversial part of the book, by the way. The uproar over the book was because Harris argued that it was peers rather than parents who were responsible for shaping not just language and accent, but personality and behavior as well. The book sparked reviews with titles like “Do Parents Matter?” and much passionate insistence that in fact they do. I finally got around to reading the book only recently, and it’s worth it’s own blog post, so I’ll say no more about the socialization debate here, and say only that I think she’s dead right as far as language is concerned.

Nevertheless, I will not take my children’s poor grammar lying (not laying) down, and will continue to go boldly (not to boldly go) on trying to fight the good fight as well as I can (not may).

When I was pregnant with my firstborn, I had none of those dreams of heroic labor. I was in my late thirties, had had trouble conceiving, had repeated miscarriages, and was afraid I’d missed the boat and would never have a child. Under those circumstances, I saw birth as a means to an end, and didn’t much care how I delivered. The doctor could take the baby out my left ear for all I cared, as long as the child was healthy and safe. So when I’d been in labor all day and things didn’t progress as they should have, I wasn’t upset when the doctor said he needed to perform an emergency cesarean. The recovery was painful, but it is after any abdominal surgery, and after a few days of bad pain and a few weeks of limited activity, I was as good as new. I experienced none of the guilt or depression I’ve heard about so many other c-section mothers having. The idea of feeling guilty because I had somehow “failed” at the test of true womanhood strikes me as ludicrous, and yet I’ve read a fair bit about it, and even heard it from women I know personally. I’ve also read that postpartum depression is more common after surgical delivery, but I was lucky enough not to have it, and I know a number of women who delivered vaginally — some completely unmedicated — who had postpartum depression anyway. I’m no expert on this subject, but it seems to me that if the incidence of depression is higher after surgical delivery, part of it stems not from the surgeries themselves but from people making c-section moms feel bad (intentionally or not) for failing to live up to society’s ideals about childbirth.

I have a friend who, like me, has four children. Our firstborns were actually born on the same day of the same year; our seconds were born in the same month, my third a few months before her third, and her fourth a few months before my fourth. Both of us labored with our first and had emergency c-sections. Both of us had the choice of scheduling a c-section for the second or trying for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). I opted for a second c-section because the admittedly slight risk of uterine rupture in that procedure scared me. My friend, who was pressured by family members to try for a “real” birth (her sister-in-law came right out and said that she wasn’t a “real woman” if she couldn’t deliver her babies vaginally) tried for the VBAC, went through a horrendously long labor but was still unable to deliver, and ended up having another c-section after all. My recovery from a scheduled section was fairly easy, while hers after a traumatic labor followed by surgery was difficult.

I freely admit that often VBACs are successful. I know a lot of women personally who have had them, and were thrilled at being able to deliver naturally after a previous surgical delivery. I’m happy for them, and I agree that the choice ought to be the mother’s. But in all too many cases the choice means pressure to make the right choice: to choose the kind of delivery that will validate your credentials as a real woman, much as the choice of feeding by breast or bottle means that making the wrong choice marks you as a substandard mother.

As I wrote before, my first three c-sections were performed at a hospital in California where a nursery was available. Most of the mothers who delivered vaginally there kept their babies in their hospital rooms with them, and after the first 24 hours after surgery, I kept my baby with me most of the time too, except when I wanted to sleep or shower. But for that first day after surgery, I really could not take care of a baby on my own, and because there was no nursery staff to help, what that really meant was that for c-section moms, the hospital policy was BYOBN: bring your own baby nurse. Pretty neat racket for the hospital, which doesn’t have to pay a nursery staff, and for the insurance companies, which have to pay out less for each hospital stay since c-section moms are eager to get the heck out of the hospital and go home. I stayed four nights after each surgery in California, but only three this time, because what was the point of staying in the hospital when I couldn’t rest? I had to have someone stay with me every night I was there, my aunt the first and third nights, and a good friend (and Portia’s godmother) the second night. The logistics of the BYOBN policy bring me to yet another way this hospital made me, as a c-section patient, feel like a second-class citizen.

St. Vincent’s hospital has two types of rooms in the maternity ward, one for mothers delivering vaginally, and another for patients recovering from c-sections. Because a woman delivering vaginally remains in the same room for her labor, delivery, and recovery, the rooms are large and spacious. They have a table and chairs in addition to the bed, plenty of room for walking around, wood (or what looked like wood) floors, big windows with nice views, and big flat-screen TVs on the walls. The rooms for c-section recovery patients are about a fourth (that’s being generous; it might even be closer to a fifth) of the size of the nice rooms the real mothers get. The window in my room looked out onto the machinery on the roof of a lower level of the hospital, the old TV had a remote that didn’t work (eventually they managed to find one that did), and the baby nurse I was expected to provide for myself had to sleep on a small chair that pulled out into a very uncomfortable and undersized facsimile of a bed. When this “bed” was pulled out, there was barely enough room to get around, and we had to keep moving the baby’s bassinet in order for my aunt (the BYOBN) and the hospital nurses to get to my bed. I was still hooked up to the IV and other unmentionable attachments so wasn’t doing any walking around myself. On the second evening they let me move to a regular two-bed room in the pediatric ward next door (no way they were letting me into one of those posh rooms saved for the real mothers) and the rest of my stay was more comfortable.

In her book about motherhood, actress and c-section mom Patricia Heaton called the cesarean “the kindest cut of all” (for those of you who think I named my baby after a car, that’s a play on a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — Caesar, cesarean, get it?). After my California deliveries, I agreed with her completely. If enough hospitals go the way of St. Vincent’s here in Santa Fe, I’m afraid we’ll have to put the “un-” back in that line.

First, the name. Portia is the name we had in mind when I wrote my earlier post about baby names, but I was keeping it quiet just in case we chickened out and named her something more conventional. We had considered Portia for our third daughter, but ended up naming her Theresa after my mother-in-law instead. I’m glad we did, both because Terry (MIL) was so pleased, and because the name seems to suit Tessie (our daughter) so well. Several of our relatives aren’t mad about Portia’s name, but not everyone liked Cordelia’s (our second daughter) either, and they’ve all changed their minds and love it now, so we’re hoping for the same result this time. Reactions from hospital staff who asked the baby’s name really ran the gamut. It was immediately obvious which ones had heard the name before, and which upon hearing Portia (which is pronounced POR-sha, as some people pronounce the name of the car Porsche) clearly showed by their dumbfounded expressions that they thought I had named my baby after a sports car. One nurse actually laughed. To her credit, she tried to stifle the laugh, but it was too late and she didn’t quite manage. It reminded me of the scene in that 1980s comedy film, A Fish Called Wanda, in which Jamie Lee Curtis and John Cleese are having a laugh at the expense of Kevin Kline’s character after Curtis tells Cleese that Kline is so stupid that he thinks Cleese’s daughter Portia was named after a car. I was surprised by how many people had never heard the name Cordelia either, but at least it can’t be confused with a car. I really hope I haven’t done something awful to the poor child by giving her such an unusual name. To me, it was just mainstream enough, but to the vast swath of humanity who hasn’t read much (any?) Shakespeare, it obviously isn’t.

Second, the delivery. Like all the others, it was by cesarean section, and recovery this fourth time around has been slow going. The hospital stay was not as restful as the ones I had in California, where there was a nursery available, and I had some bad reactions to the pain medication. Having experienced this, it makes me shudder in dumbfounded wonder that anyone would want to take narcotic drugs for recreational purposes. Bad enough when you have to take them for pain, and can call the doctor when bad things start to happen. The idea of doing it just for fun, and not being able to call a doctor if something goes wrong…well, it just boggles my mind. I’ll have more to say on this delivery in particular, and c-sections in general, tomorrow or the next day. Right now I just want to get this post up.

Finally, the baby herself. She was 7 lb., 4 oz., and 21 inches long. She has dark blue eyes and an abundance of jet black hair, as all my babies have. The other three all have different hair and eye color now, so it’s anyone’s guess how Portia’s will end up. As a c-section baby, she has perfect features undamaged by a traumatic trip through the birth canal, and to my maternal eyes she’s the most beautiful creature in the world. Not that I’m biased or anything.

They say babies don’t make eye contact until they’re a week or so old, and my second and third daughters didn’t. My firstborn Elizabeth did, however, and so did Portia. I cannot even begin to describe the effect that had on me, having my newborn child look right into my eyes within an hour of delivery, and knowing (I don’t care what anyone says; I’ll always believe it) that she wasn’t just looking, but was really seeing me, and perhaps even recognizing me as the owner of the voice and heartbeat she’s been hearing muffled by amniotic fluid all these long months.

Welcome home, my Portia. Welcome to your family.

A lot of my friends who don’t work — and it was the same for me when I didn’t — indulge in a willing suspension of the world of ideas and immerse themselves in the rather dull world of kids’ trivia. You find yourself at a dinner party and, instead of talking about novels or politics, the discussion is about whether it’s important to make your own baby food. Even fascinating and brilliant women can revert to this incredibly mundane topic.

This has never been a problem for me, and frankly, I don’t even understand it. I’ve had a child every two or three years for the better part of the last decade, worked part time for the first few years and have been lucky enough to be a full-time stay-at-home mother for a little more than two years now, but I have never felt that my brain was atrophying. I have never stopped reading good books or following politics. I have never stopped thinking about books and history and politics, nor stopped talking about them with my husband and my friends. I’ve been working on a book for the entire time I’ve been a SAHM, and while it is certainly true that taking care of my children has prevented me from finishing it by now, it hasn’t prevented me from working on it, or thinking about it as I go about my domestic tasks. Do I think about what to make for dinner, too? Of course I do, but it doesn’t take all day, and I can cook and listen to talk radio or books on tape at the same time. Not all the time, of course, because my daughters like to help (and talk, talk, talk) some of the time, but other times they’re off playing in their room or outside, and my mind is free to do what it always did before I had children, even as my hands are busy with food or laundry or whatever.

Roiphe’s article was a bit hard for me to follow at some points, not because my brain has been damaged by obsessing over homemade babyfood, but because the article could have used a good editorial once-over. Moving on from the brain-atrophy problem, she writes:

In the 1930s, Winifred Holby, a journalist friend of the writer Vera Brittain, wrote about what she called the “rich unrest of family life”. I think that we’re supposed to embrace that rich unrest. It evokes a different attitude to the difficulty and chaos of child-rearing. We seem to be so oppressed by all these basic aspects of child-rearing, and I wonder if it is not self-imposed.

It also displays a lack of imagination and tolerance. Is it okay if someone raises their children differently, if a mother, instead of giving them art projects, puts them in front of videos at 8am so she can get dressed? Our judgments contain our own insecurities and a lack of imagination.

What is she talking about? And what does it have to do with (a) SAHM brains atrophying, or (b) letting your kids rule your life? I had never heard of Winifred Holby, but looked her up (finding that her name was actually Holtby, with a T) and learned that she never married or had children. I couldn’t find a reference to the “rich unrest of family life” and am still not sure whether Roiphe thinks that embracing it is a good thing or a bad thing for a mother to do. Similarly, I’m not sure if she’s defending or criticizing the moms who put their toddlers in front of the telly so they can get dressed in the morning. Why she thinks that videos or art projects are the only options is beyond me. Hasn’t she ever heard of children amusing themselves by playing? Truly, it is possible. Mine do it every day for at least a few minutes and often a few hours.

She wraps up the piece by observing:

I would be a terrible mother if I didn’t work — I’d go crazy. And I the fact like that my daughter sees me working. I want her to do whatever she wants in life.

If she wants to work, that’s her business. After all, she has only one child, and that child is already in school. But please, Ms. Roiphe, don’t assume that those of us who do want to be home with our children are mindless dolts who are “going crazy” or losing the ability to think about intellectually stimulating topics. For a great many mothers I know, it simply isn’t so.

I don’t even like the idea of DVD players in cars. When my husband bought a car that had a video player in it, I wasn’t thrilled. When the video player broke, and he decided it wasn’t worth spending the money to fix, I was quite frankly relieved. When I was young, I spent car trips either reading, playing “the license plate game” with my brother (whoever spots the most out of state plates wins) or bickering and arguing with my brother. I wanted my children to learn to entertain themselves by reading, and having a DVD or video player would make that less likely. Of course, not having the videos means that they bicker and argue more, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay, because now that two of them are reading (one pretty well and one learning but getting there) they do read in the car.

Melanie’s post also describes her husband’s two young cousins

who I have barely spoken to because they show up at dinner parties or holiday parties with their little portable video players and proceed to spend their whole time at the party occupying their time that way. They do not even play together or near each other.

This, as she comments, is truly sad. It is so important for children to get to know their adult relatives, and to learn to interact with people of all ages as well as with other children. Yes, it is easier to stick them in the corner with a Game Boy or a movie and enjoy some adult conversation, but easier is not necessarily better.

A new NBC series, The Baby Borrowers, thows teen couples into the parenting pit and lets the world watch as they squirm. I didn’t watch the show, but the LA Times review of the premiere reported that contrary to what one might expect, the young men did rather better with the babies than the young women, who frequently dissolved in fits of tears and frustration. I doubt I’ll bother watching, since (a) I don’t like reality TV in general, and (b) I’m going to be reliving the madness myself in a little over a week, when our new addition joins the household, and any TV I do watch is going involve things to take my mind off the crying baby in my own house, not provide back-up in stereo.

Having just visited the show’s website to obtain the URL for my link, I saw that it contains a poll asking at what age couples are best suited to become parents. The results of the poll when I voted just now were: Teens 27%, Twenties 31%, Thirties 41%, Forties less than 1%, and later than that less than half a percent. The fact that 30s ranked highest didn’t surprise me, but I would have thought that 20s and 40s would both have garnered more votes, and teens far fewer. In case you’re curious, I voted for 20s as the best time, even though (or more likely because) I had my own children in my late 30s and early 40s. One of my earlier posts (and one of my favorites) will explain why.

Lisa Chamberlain, author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, which will be published in a few days, writes on her blog about the effect getting “knocked up” (her term, not mine) has had on her life. So far, not much. She doesn’t feel any pressing need to marry the boyfriend who knocked her up (like so very many others today, alas) and doesn’t think the baby is going to affect her career all that much. Okay, stop laughing, all you mothers out there. You see, Ms. Chamberlain is a member of Generation X, which is far superior to those stupid Baby Boomers (you know, the ones who for the most part did think it was important to get married before they got knocked up – or at least before they started showing) in that Gen X couples practice Shared Parenting, that is, Gen X guys aren’t hamstrung by outmoded ideas about gender roles, and they really do half of everything house and kid related, fifty-fifty, share and share alike. Personally, I can’t wait to read Ms. Chamberlain’s blog a year or so from now to see how her boyfriend is doing in the fifty-fifty department.