Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's cure for retro gender roles

For those of you that knew me when, you may remember many a conversation - either in the "ding king" '94 Altima, or over red plastic plates long scraped clean of chick peas in a cramped apartment - in which I muddled through problems of gender and power with persistence and perhaps way too much emotion. You know how girls can be.
Ha.
Before we had children, we talked a lot about gender roles and balance and communication. Mike was reading continental philosophy in grad school. I was reading Jane Austen novels over and over and thinking about social work. There was so much to talk about! When I was in grad school, I thought about how policy can address the vulnerability of girls and women. I thought about how men could and should change, and how that change might be facilitated through policy and social programs.
I still think about these things (albeit distractedly). But recently I realized that Mike and I left the more elusive, philosophical conversation about the nature of gender and how it shapes our lives behind; it must have been sometime during Frances' babyhood. Life took over and filled up all the old spaces, leaving much less time and energy for those demanding talks. But I miss them! I miss talking about those things that are deeper and un-legislatable. A mysterious force that leads me to say "sure, of course I can help" or even, "please, what can I do to help?" when I simply have nothing left to give. The inevitable private resentment that follows, the difficulty I have with asking for help and expressing anger.
Perhaps you are wondering what any of this has to do with mothering or my children. Two things happened recently that made me realize I am in dire need of examining gender anew: Edith told me to read Freaky Fortnight, and Frances and I have read a couple of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. I haven't read all of Freaky Fortnight but what I did knocked something loose for me. Becoming a stay at home mother has showed me that the door leading back to the fifties is definitely still open (I even just painted my kitchen pink!!) and if I slept less and drank more, I can easily imagine heading into an outrageous vision of family life straight out of Madmen. If I didn't pay attention, I'd clean all day and feel low-level unexpressed anger and start squeezing my kids' arms a little too tight on the way out of the grocery store.
Oh, it gives me the shivers! Not just for myself, but for my growing kiddos.
When I worked and Mike stayed home, we glowed with self-congratulation thinking about how Frances had a Papa who fed her lunch and took her to the playground, and how she would be so much more flexible in her own ideas about what men and women do. It was part of what sustained me during that time - I believed what we were doing would be of great benefit both to Mike and Frances. Then Mike got a fabulous demanding job in a weird town, and I happily agreed it was my turn to stay home. But it is different.
In Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Frances pointed out to me that "it seems like all the mamas in this book stay home and all the papas go to offices!" and also that "the papas are always reading the paper and not helping the kids while the mamas give everyone breakfast!" and suddenly I wanted to shut the book and throw it into the scary buggy part of the basement where no one ever goes. The worst part is that breakfast at our house is not so different. Okay, Mike is MUCH better about not reading the paper during breakfast these days. I made a request. That worked out pretty well.
But what to do about the gender roles in all our favorite books? I have been so looking forward to sharing Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder ... but now I feel a bit ambivalent. I loved Beth so much in Little Women. It seemed perfect that she died. She gave so much that she DIED. Do I really want to shove this at my own children? Has anyone struggled with this? Beautiful books full of sacrificing women and heroic absent men? Perhaps when I return to work and have something else to model for my kids it won't bother me quite so much.


On another note, here is some Frances-style Halloween. "It's a tiny newborn ghost and a bat who just ate a mosquito, because the mosquito bit the ghost and sucked the ghost's blood. That's why the mosquito is red. And the ghost has a bandaid for the bite. And I don't know who the person is."

And on another, totally unrelated note, here are some little things that I love right now, that perhaps you might love too:
1. My stick blender that we make frozen raspberry-banana-milk smoothies with every day, and also now that it is autumn, soups like this one. So good with a big dollop of yogurt swirled in.
2. Dr. Seuss books. I'm falling in love all over again, except this round is even sweeter because Frances sometimes reads and Gabriel repeats every fifth word she says and he gets very, very excited whenever anyone suggests it might be story time.
3. Getting ready for Halloween with Frances and Gabriel. We make a little bit of their froggy costumes every day out of felt bits. Frances put all the (mostly green) felt scraps into the salad spinner this morning and told us she making some salad. Sabrosa! (Thank you again Dan Zanes for all the new Spanish words in our house).
4. Storynory. Frances had a low fever yesterday and contentedly listened to Natasha read chapters 4 - 7 of Through the Looking Glass. I haven't explored the site much but there are many appealing stories for children, and that Natasha is some reader. Thank you Milena!

back on the blog...

Friends, it has been awhile since I've posted. Here are a few updates.

re: Elizabeth Mitchell
We went to a show! I traveled to Providence with my mom and the kids last weekend to visit our dear friends Jenny, Michael and Kit. It just so happened that she was playing a children's book festival in Jenny's neighborhood about an hour after our plane landed last Saturday. So we drove straight there from the airport and jostled into a little auditorium that eventually filled itself to the rafters with adorable messy children and their sympathetic-looking parents. It was one of the first times I've felt reassured - almost relieved - to be so clearly part of a demographic. (Yes! Messy can be adorable!) Gabriel was exhausted and wanted to nurse. Normally I would hesitate to lift my shirt for my enormous 18 month old toddler, given the sardine-style seating...but then my eyes rested on a mama in the next row who was nearly naked from the waist up, nursing her little one, and so I exhaled and figured it was okay. And of course it was.
I was near tears during the show, wanting to hold Frances' hands and snuggle Gabriel (Frances had to shake me off a few times). When Elizabeth Mitchell invited children to come and dance in front of the stage during the "rock and roll songs" Frances, in her enthusiasm, tore off and climbed onto the stage itself. I sat trapped in the middle of our row nursing the big boy, watching the whole thing, watching Miss Mitchell say no no no! unsafe unsafe! and directing her back down to the designated dance area, then watching Frances in the midst of many children dancing and gazing up at the musicians. She seemed so solitary somehow, so vulnerable in her fandom; I wanted to run up and hug her and squeeze her and dance with her, so she wouldn't be alone, but the funny thing is I feel certain she did not want me to be there with her. She wanted to learn the sign language for the words to "Peace Like a River" alongside the other big kids and move her arms like water and have it all for herself.

Re: Sleep
Yesterday Gabriel slept until 7:15!!! Today he woke up at 6:15. But still. This is SO MUCH BETTER than the past months I can't believe it. I think I just had to vent and complain in this semi-public forum in order for things to get better. Bedtime is now around 6:45 or 7, and the evenings are much sweeter, because we are able to read together and do bathtime together. For the most part the children seem to feel some heading-towards-sleep solidarity that is very satisfying for this mama to witness.

Re: Apple picking
We loved it so much. An apple cake, a bubbling pot of applesauce, and many many slices of apples and peanut butter later, Frances drew a picture that I thought was great - "this is me picking Ida Reds and putting them in a big bag":


What else? So much else. We had a lovely time in Providence. I felt utterly at home. My family lived in the same neighborhood where we were visiting when I was Frances' age (moved away when I was six)and I couldn't help indulging fantasies, wondering what life would have been like had we stayed, had I grown up there.
I hope I find a way to live in Annapolis without the deep-down sense of alienation that seems to color all our trips to beautiful communities with a bit of sadness for me. I wish I could simply enjoy these visits to Rhinebeck and Providence and Vermont and Lancaster - enjoy them without the quiet pouter in the back of my brain encouraging me to compare all I see (unfavorably) to my new home on the Chesapeake. But even with my private background bouts of adolescent grump, the shared foreground proved too delightful to be compromised. Jenny and Michael have two adorable dogs that kept the children busy and happy; we went to the zoo and freaked out over the giant anteaters; we frequented a playground that featured a graveyard of plastic toys left by neighborhood families, strewn about haphazardly and surrounded by the vivid newly fallen leaves. Perfect.





But no amount of plastic toys, cookies, big-hearted friends and attractive playground-goers can make up for a gaping absence. There is nothing in the world like being all together, and so we were very, very happy to be reunited with Mike at the end of our trip.

no words necessary!

We went apple picking with Milena, Nathaniel and Caleb today. Such fun. So what if we're tired?















p.s. Here's what we did with our apples, day 2. Simple, just right.

sleep woes

Lest you think our life together is all peace and happiness, punctuated by slightly rocky moments that lead to valuable Lessons Learned, I am here tonight to tell you about 18 months of waking up at 5 am. There is no lemonade to be made of this enormous lemon. We are all tired, and being tired for so long can lead to serious grumpiness, general confusion, impaired multitasking, and if you are a toddler, many head clunks and face plants.
At Gabriel's last check up, our pediatrician suggested we move his bedtime later, endure a week or so of an exhausted baby, and then in theory, one morning we would wake up to his happy morning shouts at 7 instead of 5. Sounds great, I said. We'll do it, I said.
Yesterday afternoon, day #4 of this particular round of sleep training, ended in me shouting STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP CRYING STOP!!! to the saddest, reddest, rumpled up toddler face you've ever seen. I am not proud of this. In fact I feel awful about it; it was a very low point in my mothering career. In the immediate aftermath it felt like the absolute nadir.
He was so unbearable, asking to be picked up, put down, picked up again, put down again, crying, biting, throwing hard objects. I had to fetch Mike from the Aeneid to come take the boy away from his ragged, scary mama. Mike bathed him and sat with him and when I came into his room I saw the two of them calmly sitting on the glider together, Gabriel's pink cheeks and wet eyes shining. The minute my son saw me his eyes locked with mine. He slowly lifted his arms toward me and softly said: Mama.
Oh, the tears. (Mine, that is.) The vulnerability of children is downright painful to witness. I had been so mean to him, and here he was before me. Parents can be awful to their children, yet children need them and love them and form unshakable attachments. This hurts to ponder.
So there is my sad tale. The boy is exhausted. Getting down to the nitty gritty: his old bedtime was between 6 and 6:30, and he would wake up between 4:30 and 5:30. We've been putting him to bed at 7. This is night #5. Does anyone have ideas/thoughts about this? My Weisbluthian history/past success is telling me to go earlier instead of later at night, but there have definitely been nights when bedtime was as early as 5:30, and it didn't seem to alter the wake up time.
I have this intuition that the boy wakes up at 5. He just does. I'll keep at our later bedtime experiment for a few more days, but maybe a 6 pm bedtime is the best we can do in order to preserve as many nighttime sleep hours as possible.
But I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this one.
In happier news, Frances is reading. Tonight she read the entirety of Hop on Pop to Gabriel, who was captivated. About a week ago I was reading to her from Stuart Little and she asked if she could read some. She read an entire paragraph! She hit a difficult word and passed the book back to me. I was amazed. She's been doing this work kind of secretly - focused on words and letters and writing - while making it clear she does not want us to take notice or discuss it with her. Too much pressure. But now, I think she's arrived, and it makes me cry and laugh at once to hear her sounding out words with confidence.

our very own giving tree

Thanks to my mother's reminiscence about creating a 'fall tree' with me and my friend Scotty Devorin nearly 30 years ago (see her comment after my first post), we had the makings of a new project. Our own fall tree. Here it is:



My thinking had been that Gabriel would be able to participate and enjoy sticking leaves onto the branches too. Oh, was I feeling proud of myself when I went to bed the night I made the tree. I was imagining the two children finding this masterpiece in the kitchen the next morning, hugging me in gratitude, and getting right to work. Then I would, of course, actually sit down with my coffee, and drink the entire mug while it was still warm.

Fantasy! They did like the tree. Yes. Gabriel likes it too much. Turns out it is just as much fun to take leaves off the tree as it is to put them on. Our resident Destroyer discovered that in fact one can actually rip entire branches off with ease. Such fun! As you can imagine, some screaming ensued. I almost joined Frances in her protests, sad as I was to see my work defaced. It took me the entire broadcast of The World to make that tree, kid! At one point I calmly squatted down to his level, took his chubby little hands in mine, and gazed into his soulful brown eyes. With great feeling and solemnity I explained that this is a special tree and we like the leaves, we like the leaves ON the tree Gabriel, so please don't take them off, okay? Let's hug on it. And we did. And then he grinned at me and ripped four more off, crumpled them in his hands, and threw them up in the air.

So this explains why the topmost branches are the most leafy on our fall tree, and why I took a picture now - this may be as full and colorful as our tree gets. But - yes - this became another lesson in Valuing Process Over Product (tell me when these stories get old). We've been going on afternoon leaf-finding walks, looking for actual leaves to add to the construction paper leaves. It takes us about 45 minutes to go around the block. Sometimes we bring our maracas and sing on the way, we usually meet up with some neighborhood dogs (a thrill), and all three of us are pretty happy. We bring funny old lady purses from the dress up box and end up filling them with acorns and pine cones and the like, and now have "nature bowls" on our little craft table.

Yesterday our walk ended in the three of us sitting on a sunny acorn-laden spot of sidewalk, throwing acorns as high as we could in the air. Don't knock it; it's pretty fun! Our friend Chester rode by on his way home from the college and stopped to chat. Frances sang him 'Pollito Chicken' (off Dan Zanes' Nueva York album. WE LOVE IT.) and then soon after that Mike biked past and joined us and we all walked the rest of the way home together.

So, the fall tree gave us our new autumn nature walks. I can let go of a few branches for that.

Here are some recent playground pictures...fall here has been so beautiful, I can almost forgive Annapolis for being Annapolis.

the simple pleasures of a weekend at home

We have traveled quite a bit over the past month. We had three weddings in five weeks, and while all of them were extraordinary affairs populated by people I love, I was in dire need of a homebody weekend featuring unscheduled expanses of time and perfect weather.
That is just what I got.
So though I have nothing exciting or impressive to share, I wanted to tell you about the little mundane bits that were satisfying in a homey way:

1. I discovered baking soda as a household cleaner. Okay, I can already feel your eyeballs glancing up to the address bar, wondering if you should be returning some email right now instead of reading about housecleaning of all things but really, friends, this stuff works! I usually use white vinegar but you can't really scrub with the stuff. Enter baking soda. Sprinkle some on your bathtub and get out the sponge. As Gabriel would say, woah. Are those awful and basically useless cleaning products filling up aisle after aisle Madison Ave's nasty gift to us? Thanks, Don Draper. Thanks but no thanks.

2. In my quest to do such household chores during my children's waking hours (so I can read more than 6 pages of the New Yorker at a time once they do go to bed) I spent some time this afternoon outside with Gabriel washing windows. I know, at this point you are thinking what has happened to Meagan? Washing WINDOWS?! Well, it was that sort of day, and I don't think we ever did clean them when we moved into this sad neglected house. Ew.
I gave Gabriel some of the newspaper I was using, and we merrily scrubbed away together. Occasionally he would say: Keen! Keening! Yes, yes, thank you for helping me to clean. We are cleaning. Eventually he got bored so I filled a bucket with water and he rushed to get out his special old paintbrush. So industrious, this child!
Please do try this at home, especially those of you with toddlers. When we first discovered it, painting with water on the sidewalk was nothing less than a revelation! (Thank you to Milena for loaning us her great book First Art). Gabriel loves to paint the walls of the house, the railing of the back deck, you name it. We started working on letters today, painting big As and Bs and of course Gs. At the time Frances was taking a super long nap - sleeping off a cold - but usually she joins in, drawing elaborate 'stories' with water on the ground. Quick, while the beautiful weather lasts. Hit the sidewalk with a bucket and brush, and bring a novel for yourself.

3. You may know that I love the Goya aisle in the grocery. I love all the dried peas and beans in their bags snuggled up next to one another. I love the colors. I love the bulk foods section in Whole Foods. (Frances recently explained to an adult acquaintance that "we're really into bulk foods.") I would like to stick my hands in all the bins and feel my fingers submerged in the cool smooth navy beans and yellow pellets of millet. Weird, I know.
So how could there be a new legume, something I hadn't yet tried? Somehow I never brought home those enormous white beans. The bag I bought was Goya, labeled Giant Lima Beans. They are surprisingly quick to cook, very creamy and buttery, and the cooking liquid makes a hearty, seasonally just-right broth. I simmered them with a little olive oil, salt, and a lot of sage leaves from the almost-all-done herbs growing outside. Tonight I added some of them to sauteed eggplant, bell peppers, and mushrooms with some beany broth and half a jar of leftover Trader Joe's pizza sauce. Really, really good! A little hill of parmesan on top (not for my man Sin Queso, of course) and brown rice below. Some of you are snickering. But this is the sort of meal I adore; makes me feel so good. I'm out for some more huge white beans right now.

Okay, not really.

I think what this weekend was good for was realizing there can be pleasure in these everyday tasks if I can do them without feeling rushed and in the company of my family -- that is, if Mike is around to help and lend some solidarity to the whole domestic endeavor, if it all feels like part of something greater and beautiful, even. There actually is something beautiful about washing windows with an almost 18 month old on a sunny October day. Now, how to bring that feeling into the slog of a dreary Wednesday afternoon?