Blaming mother

As a single mom, not by choice, it has long irked me the way the media constantly blather about the problems suffered by children of single mothers, as though it is the mothers who are lacking, and not the fathers who abandoned their responsibilities in the first place.

For example, I recently attempted to read The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian, a book about parenting boys which apparently is intended for families in some parallel universe, where the chief problem experienced by boys is that they expected to act like (stereotypical) girls. (The solution is to accept their stereotypical boy qualities. Of course this doesn't seem to have much application for the universe I live in, where stereotypical boy qualities are not just accepted, they are often forced onto boys, and woe betide the boy who is sensitive, or likes ballet, or otherwise transgresses against the "boy code", as Elaine Aron put it.)

Gurian tries to be nice to us poor single moms, but his attitude is, sorry ladies, you haven't got what it takes. No where (as far as I can tell; I didn't finish the book) does he take the absent fathers to task for their actions (or inaction) which affect their children.

Of course, Gurian's approach is pretty standard these days. But CTV reached a new nadir today in mother blaming.

On March 6, Alnoor Amarsi threw his daugher Inara off a bridge before jumping after her to his death. Incredibly, Inara survived, though she is still in critical condition. In his suicide notes, he said he was going to kill Inara because he hated his estranged wife, Shamsha Amarsi.

To me, it's pretty obvious which is the problem parent here (duh). But evidently not to someone on the CTV.ca news staff, who wrote:

Earlier this month, CTV News Toronto reported that the incident started when the 48-year-old man asked his estranged wife for more time with their daughter.
She said no. That appeared to trigger the tragic chain of events—one which he had apparently threatened before.

Ah. So despite appearances, it was mom's fault that Inara was dropped off a bridge. I guess she shouldn't have selfishly refused to let dad spend more time with the kid. So what if he had already threatened to kill Inara before? Fathers have rights, you know.

Guillotines

Today I succumbed to temptation and put Google Ads on my site.

Of course, because of the way the ads are chosen, some of them contradict my views.

The worst one is, however, is for guillotines to kill lab animals

They sell two models: a small one for rats and mice, and a larger one which will also handle cats, rabbits, and "larger subjects". And they invite vivs to ask them to custom make an even larger model!

Well, I'm hoping that these dumb ads will help bring out why vivisection is bad.

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Originally posted on the late great Vegan Porn.

Today is Shrove Tuesday

A great excuse to make pancakes for supper!

Here's my method:

Put a cup of flour or so into a liquid measuring cup.
Add a heaping spoonful of baking soda and a smidgen of salt.
Add enough soydrink to make into a batter. Thick batter=thick pancakes, thin batter=thin pancakes.
Heat frying pan on low, put in a blob of margarine, then pour on the desired amount of batter. Flip the pancakes when the top looks dry.
I add more margarine each time I pour in more batter.
Serve with real maple syrup.

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Originally posted on the late great Vegan Porn.

Does institutionalized schooling help disabled kids, or create them?

The current vogue for cochlear implants, and the associated difficult finding classes in Sign for intact Deaf children, is yet another example of how institutionalized schooling (and mainstream society) inevitably ends up imposing conformity on students. All kids assigned to the same grade (based on their date of birth) are expected to do and learn the same things at the time. Those who are on a different timetable, if they differ "too much", are diagnosed with "learning disabilities" (or "giftedness"). The ones who are too active to put up with sitting at a desk all day are drugged, and now the deaf kids are surgically altered to suit the system.

I know there is a big desire to mainstream disabled kids by getting them into the same schools as nondisabled kids, but the more I learn about institutionalized schooling the more I am convinced that it will always be problematic for everyone. Even the best teacher in the world cannot truly know and meet the needs of the 20 to 30 kids in the class.

I am determined to continue unschooling my son.

Recently, my landlord asked me, how can unschoolers know if their child is learning disabled?

I replied that the concept of learning disability is controversial. Kids vary a great deal in when they are ready to learn different things--for example, my son learned to walk when he was 16 months, but my landlord's daughter learned to walk when she was 10 months. This doesn't mean that my son is "walking disabled" or her daughter is "walking gifted"—they both learned to walk, and in the long run who cares what age they started? Kids also vary greatly in when they are developmentally ready to learn to read—some kids teach themselves at 4, others don't get it until they are 9 or 10 but in a few years you can't tell the teenagers who were early readers from those who started later. But by putting them in the institutionalized schooling system which demands that everyone do the same thing as their agemates, these differences suddenly become a problem, and are pathologized.

I would like to dismantle institutionalized schooling and the associated societal attitude that everyone should learn the same things and have the same abilities. Instead society seems to be moving in the other direction, with more drugs, surgeries, genetic screening, etc. to ensure our children are more uniform. And here in Canada there is talk of extending the school system to younger children. Maybe at some point in the future the 16-month-old walker will be diagnosed with some kind of disability because he isn't following the system's timetable.

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This article first appeared in a slightly different form on the Bioethics Yahoo! Group.

Babies who love too much

The other day, I was reading an article by another single mom about her son's infancy. She described waking up in bed with him, and how he gazed at her as if she were bliss personified.

My glow at remembering those own heady days when Nick was a baby were shortllived. The author concluded that her son was getting too attached to her, and that if she didn't get him out of her bed now (aged 6 months), she would be sleeping with an 18 year old! Her solution to the imagined problem was to force him to sleep alone, and ignore his heartrending cries.

I do not want to seem like I am trashing this mom, because I think this is a typical fear in our society. Indeed, I myself wondered at times if Nicky and I were too close. It is clear that she acted in what she thought was his best interests in pushing him to be more independent, even though it was something of a sacrifice for her.

Isn't our species messed up? What other mammal expects its infants to sleep alone? A six month old human cannot be independent--he is utterly dependent on adults for all of his needs. Does a mother lion or bear worry that her cubs are not independent enough when they are so little that they need to snuggle up to her at night? Do lions and bears grow up to be sissies?

When Nick was around 5 months old, I attempted to participate in a mothers' support group. The babies were expected to spend an hour and a half in the childcare room down the hall, which met all official guidelines, etc etc. Nicky was confused the first time we went. The second time, he had to be brought to me a couple of times. The third time, he freaked, screaming so loudly that everyone came out of their offices to see what was wrong.

The experts who ran the programme assured me that he would get used to it, that this stress now would prepare him for stress later on, he needed to be more independent, yadda yadda. It was obvious to me they were wrong. Nick was not getting used to it; he was getting more and more distressed each time we went there. He was clearly not ready to spend that time apart from me at such a tender age.

We didn't go back to that group.

Was Nick somehow harmed by my not forcing him to be more independent? Hardly. At 18 months, he was ready to enjoy a whole day at his daddy's house, by two he could handle me going out in the evening (which means bedtime without me and my magic sleep-inducing milk) and now he is taking a dance class with big kids (4 year olds)!

Why do we have so little faith that our babies will grow up? Why do we see intimacy, nurturing, and responding to our babies' needs as damaging rather than wholesome? Maybe it's the whole no pain, no gain idea - if the child is getting what he wants rather than screaming with despair, he won't learn what the "real world" is like.

I like to think that by letting Nick move to independence at his own pace, he will be more self-confident (by having success the first time he tries, rather than the difficulties that come from trying before he is ready), and that he will learn that he, and other people, deserve to be treated with respect.

Save the morula!

Someone left a copy of the Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) newsletter on the subway today (probably hoping that a curious person like myself would pick it up--I do the same thing with animal rights magazines.)

The lead story? "Ontario easing access to abortifacents", referring to the emergency contraception pill (ECP), a.k.a. the "morning after pill".

Now, obviously, this newsletter is intended to preach to the converted, for they don't really explain what is wrong with the ECP. Their objection is that because the ECP, which is taken within a few days of possible conception, prevents a fertilized egg from implanting, which they consider a form of abortion.

I am not without sympathy to some "pro-life" claims--certainly, in my experience, my son showed signs that he was a sentient being with his own lively temperament by the second trimester. But the ECP does not abort a baby--it keeps a ball of undifferentiated cells (the morula) from implanting!

Of course, the CLC does not mention that the morula is not even remotely a baby, has no nervous system, no "beating heart" to be stopped by abortion. Probably they are counting on the ignorance of their readers, or maybe they are ignorant themselves (consider the riduculous image at the left, purported to be an 8 week old embryo, at the Nuremberg Files anti-abortion site, and compare to an actual image of an 8 week old embryo. At this stage, the embryo is only 15-20 mm long!)

So why is the CLC wasting its energy worrying about this--a treatment which would prevent abortions of more developed embryos who do have the beginnings of nervous systems and beating hearts?

I don't know for sure, but I have my suspicions.

On page 2 of the newsletter, they have an article titled "Provinces extend same sex 'rights'". What does this have to do with abortion? You would think that anti-abortion people, if they had a stand on homosexual relationships at all, would encourage them--how many exclusively homosexual people get abortions?

But no. (Surprise.) CLC says,

The unique position that marriage has traditionally held in society has been slowly eroded and this is the most aggressive attack on our most vital institution; when the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman is broken, any sexual coupling (or, as some have argued, why stop at marrying just two people) becomes worthy of recognition and rights in the eyes of the law.

So this is what it really comes down to. The CLC is concerned not so much about the "rights" of the morula which will not implant if the woman takes the ECP, but rather wants to enforce its view that sex is only legitimate if the participants are married and willing to have a(nother) child.

The CLC has a couple of "Action Items" which I would like to counteract with Action Items of my own:

1. Ontario residents should contact Health Minister Tony Clement (clement@titan.tcn.net 80 Grosvenor Street, Hepburn Block, 10th Floor, M7A 2C4. Fax: 416-326-1571) in support of the Ontario Women's Health Council study on the use of the ECP when provided at pharmacies without a prescription. The study currently involves 40 pharmacies in Toronto, and is funded by the Ontario Health Ministry.
2. Manitoba and Saskatchewan residents should right to their MLAs to support the recently introduced same sex rights bills (which the CLC refers to as "expansion of special privileges for homosexuals").

Is parenthood a career?

Many parents who spend most of their time caring for their children, in lieu of paid employment, speak of parenthood as their career. In some ways, the description is apt: we work long hours, doing physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding tasks. A lot of us also engage in "professional development" by reading extensively about child development, psychology, health, nutrition, and education, and attending parenting support groups and conferences.

Despite these parallels, I feel there is a danger in analogizing parenthood to a career. Treating parenthood merely like a job can lead to the misconception that, like other jobs such as programming computers or fixing cars, it doesn't matter who does it, as long as it gets done. In some jurisdictions, this leads to low-income parents being pressured to place their children in the care of strangers, so that the parents can seek paid employment. If raising children were only a job, this wouldn't matter. But of course it does matter, a great deal, to the children and parents involved. This is because parenting, while hard work, is not a job, it is a relationship.

Nonparents seem to have trouble understanding why I insist on staying at home with my toddler, at considerable economic hardship, instead of seeking paid employment and placing my son in daycare.(1) After all, they seem to think, anyone could feed Nicky(2), change his diapers, play with him, read him stories, so what's the big deal? (Indeed, before I got pregnant I had planned to return to full-time employment when the baby was three months old, and put him in daycare.) But to Nicky, it is a big deal. He has always been more separation-sensitive than many babies. He wants mommy, and when I tried placing him in a daycare setting for an hour and a half a week so I could attend a mother's support group, he made this need loud and clear. Now that he is older, he spends more time with daddy, 16 hours a week, but he still needs familiar, safe, people, and lots of one-on-one adult attention. And it matters to me that he spend his infancy and toddlerhood forming deep bonds to me and his father, not an employee (which is not to denigrate parents who are comfortable sharing their children's love with a good, qualified, loving caregiver).

Right now, I consider motherhood as my primary occupation, as it occupies the vast majority of my time (152 hours a week). But motherhood is not my career, it is a relationship, one that will last our lifetimes, regardless of how much time it occupies.

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Notes

(1) Actually, I have chronic health problems which interfere with my seeking employment, but I would probably not want to seek employment anyway.

(2) They wrongly assume that at his age (21 months), he is no longer breastfeeding. Actually, breastfeeding is an important part of his diet (we do not use nonhuman animal milks for ethical reasons) as well as being a signifiant source of comfort.