I think the single worst thing you can do as a pregnant woman is to ask for advice.


Because people will definitely offer it up. And most of it will suck.

I was at a baby shower this weekend where the poor, naive pregnant lady asked guests to provide a piece of advice with their gifts. Thankfully, most of the older, experienced women in the room stuck to solid, sweet advice like making sure to take the time to appreciate your children because they grow so quickly. And, inevitably someone offered up the nice-but-useless cliche of sleeping when your baby sleeps (right, because the laundry is going to do itself?). One woman said it was important as the mother of a daughter to recognize that it's your main job to raise a strong, confident girl. Which is actually a rare bit of good advice.

And then someone went on an anti-co-sleeping rant.* Because you know that the minute you let one of those nefarious, bed-stealing midgets sleep with you once, they'll be hogging your blankets and ruining your sex-life until they move out. One weak moment of sleep-deprived, baby-smell-drunken laziness that you'll regret for the rest of your life.

When my turn came, I dredged my brain for something decent to say and came up pretty dry. Especially for something that was acceptable to say in polite company. I tend to think that most of my best parenting advice necessarily involves swearing and/or off-colour humour. Two things that have generally defined parenting-survival for me. Bon mots such as:

• Breastfeeding: when in doubt, haul it out. If the boobs don't fix the problem, then start looking for other solutions.
• If you're happy/healthy and your kid is happy/healthy then stick with whatever is working. Ignore any asshole (even the well-intentioned ones) who tries to tell you that you're doing it wrong. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
• If what you're doing isn't working, try something else until you find something that does work.
• Kids are ever-changing weirdos, what works one week may not work the next. It's not you - it's them.
• If someone is trying to make you feel bad about doing what's working for you/your kid, tell them to fuck off and get their self-esteem from sources other than putting you down.
• If someone tries to tell you that if you do X now, you'll be forced to do X forever and ever, they're a fucking liar. As a parent, you never have to do anything - you're in charge. Do something if/when it works for both of you; stop when it no longer does. This applies to breastfeeding, weaning, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, sleep-training, potty-training etc, etc.  

In the end, I just told her that she didn't really need any advice because I knew she'd be a great parent; she's a smart, warm, loving person who is obviously surrounded by wonderfully-supportive family and friends.

I may have gotten a little teary.

It stopped when the next person mentioned the importance of getting kids on a schedule early.




*The best part of her rant, which I only later realized, was the fact that I don't think that this woman had any kids. She was apparently just commenting on her experience as a child whose parents apparently never bothered to kick her out of their bed. Maybe all this time we've been missing out on critical research involving the perspectives of children who regret that their parents let them co-sleep. I want to see someone get funding for that.

"Thirty years later Orwell would echo the findings of the Committee on Physical Deterioration. He states that in Lancashire “you would have to look for a long time before you saw a working-class person with good natural teeth.” In Sheffield, he adds, “you have the feeling of walking among a population of troglodytes.” This he attributes to a hard life and a steady diet of “bread-and-marg and sugared tea,” which he characterizes as the “Englishman’s opium.”

A good percentage of the household budget went to procuring this drug. Orwell notes that mining families “spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence halfpenny on milk, and nothing on fruit.” The rest they fritter away on sugar and tea. If anything remains, the family might invest in “five tins of bully beef,” a pathetic stand-in for the great proletarian joint of yesteryear. Ought they to have spent their money on more wholesome food? Not at all. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; the unemployed man doesn’t,” Orwell reasons. “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’....White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer.” Orwell concludes that the “endless misery” that comes with unemployment “has got to be constantly palliated.” Prewar Britain witnessed nothing less than the birth of “comfort food.”" ~ Christine Baumgarthuber, "Not by Bread-and-Marg Alone", Dissent Magazine 


I had to read this twice to notice that Orwell is actually talking about unemployment rather than employment when he says "harassed, bored and miserable".

Which, ultimately, is the point of this excellent article.

My mother always said that I had to learn things the hard way.


Any other eager novice barefoot runners out there, please vicariously enjoy the fruits of my hard-won wisdom: watch the hot pavement.

Apparently it only takes a few moments for that slightly-too-warm uncomfortable feeling to become a second degree burn with nice blisters. On the balls of your feet.

Now I know. Awesome.

At the risk of being a tad premature with the Nostradamus-ing, I'm fairly confident that being ask to "friend" my poop-bag company is a sign of the impending decline of the current dominant civilization.


I'm ok with it really. In fact, though I'm not about to become good buddies with a shitbag (biodegradable or not), I'm excited to have the opportunity to bear witness to a key harbinger of mass societal collapse.

I come from the perspective that all dominant cultural/social organizing constructs inevitably follow a boom-and-bust cycle. I think somewhere between "The Mote in God's Eye" and "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" lies a fundamentally predicable truth about humanity (and perhaps even civilizations in general): that one can only keep large-scale experiments in mass-living running successfully for so long.

I think it's about time to change the game plan. Maybe even graciously stepping back to allow some benevolent, forgiving, alternative Earth-based or even alien species to take a crack at running the show for a while. Dolphins?

As for what our new overlords should do with us, I really don't think we'd make great pets. I think we've already demonstrated that we don't play well with other species. Most notably: the tasty ones and our tiny bacterial co-inhabitants.

I'm personally hoping for an isolated human preserve on a warmish moon somewhere. And I'd also hope that they'd let us bring a Starbucks. Or two. I'd really miss iced coffee.

These days my brain is absorbed with working out the larger details of my unified theory of persistent personal dissatisfaction and the cure therefor.


So far, a couple of key ingredients for the cure seem to involve:

1. an excellent recipe for banana bread (found on a particularly brilliant blog),
2. frequent running meditation with naked feet,
3. taking a toddler for walks in the woods, poking puddles with sticks and;
4. attempting to focus on living in the present (including, taking time to notice the unicorns).

Before Time magazine decided to hype a fictional version of attachment parenting (and before the Sears published their tome), here's what the real scientists had to say:


"Questions like whether to breastfeed or bottle-feed, or at what age to introduce solid foods, though still important, no longer carry the same urgency. Attachment theory suggests that babies thrive emotionally because of the overall quality of the care they've experienced, not because of specific techniques. A bottle-fed baby whose mother is sensitively attuned will do better than a breastfed baby whose mother is mechanical and distant." ~ "Becoming Attached", the Atlantic, February 1990.