Advice for Mothers

[marydell]

Dear more-experienced moms, here are some tips to keep in mind when talking to a new mother.

1. "Expensive" means the same thing to everybody, regardless of income or priorities. Be sure to point out if her choice of formula or clothing brand is too expensive.

2. Your stroller, sling, and other carrying devices are empirically better than hers. Help her to understand why her choices are wrong. Disregard any height/weight differential between yourself and her.

3. For any parenting choice she's making that's different from yours, say "oh, we'll see how long you manage to stick with that!"

4. If she adopted her child, any choices she makes differently from you can be explained by her "not having hormones."

5. Working is ok, but dedication to a demanding & lucrative career isn't appropriate for a mom. Suggest that she change to some other kind of work, more like whatever you do. Her husband should, of course, continue his similar career without modification...someone has to pay the bills!

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

on some of the mommyblogs i read, they call that sort of thing "ass-vice". can't remember where i saw it, but it charmed me, so i've kept it.

p.s. keep your demanding and lucrative career! says the woman who just got paged out of bed to fix intermittent high commit times on a db she's not familiar with when she's not a db person aaagh where's my caffeine.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'll remember that. And hey, your job sounds like mine! All these years of getting paged in the middle of the night have made it easy for me to go back to sleep after getting up with the baby, so there's your silver lining.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

It's, ahem, nice to know that the world supply of arseholes has not gone down. Two decades ago, a man carrying a baby in a Snuggli® was just as likely to get unsolicited advice from women in public places, who were sure that they knew what they were doing and he certainly did not.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh my, a father visibly caring for a baby? Must be lost and need help, clearly. My brother (a SAHD for 5 years) got that a lot too.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Especially if the father and baby are *different colours*. This gets old fast.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that, myself. I plan on saying "I'm the nanny!"

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

That's a good strategy!

[vcmw]

Ick. Good luck in keeping your patience with all the other mothers.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thanks. They're mostly ok, but there are those few who are driving me nuts and need to go away!

[unhappytriad.livejournal.com]

Not having hormones????


Good grief, my youngest is 16, and my milk glands still twitch if I just hear a cute baby in a restaurant! Hormones don't give a damn whose uterus a baby grew in!

Deep cleansing breaths....(for you and me both!)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Well, I do believe that post-birth hormones are powerful things, and probably affect parenting style, particularly in the first couple of weeks. But saying so to an adoptive mom is just tacky. Particularly when the issue in question--how to handle sleep--is philosophical.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

They definitely are powerful in some ways--mostly involving fatigue and emotional volatility--but we just got to compare the experimental and control conditions on this one, and it seemed like there was plenty of oxytocin to go around. Most of the the reaction-to-baby stuff seemed evenly divided according to exposure-to-baby, and not according to either genetic relationship or recent pregnancy. This included nesting urges, ability to handle sleep dep, willingness to run towards rather than away from a crying baby, the Mommy Sway, and conviction that a baby is the cutest one in the world. FWIW.

What on earth did she think was a good way to handle sleep during the first week? We didn't manage to find one.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

For the first 5 to 7 months she was sleeping him on top of her and feeding him whenever he would stir--not cry, just make noise. She said he would wake up every 45 minutes no matter what. But she's not calling this "practicing attachment parenting," she's just saying it's not possible for *her* to let the baby fuss because of all the hormones.

I'm doing a very mild Brazleton-ish thing, which mainly involves putting the kid in their own bed while they're drowsy instead of asleep, and then patting them and talking and stuff until they're settled. You can't really do this successfully as early as I'm playing at doing it, so if he fusses I pick him back up again very quickly, but if he just makes a face or two or says "mleh!" I pat him and tell him he's ok and to go to sleep. Because I am a mean, heartless non-biological mother!

Really I have to do this because I don't get maternity leave--I've been lucky to get to take 5 weeks off, but I can't afford any longer. Mike has another week & a half at home and then he goes back, too. So Charlie has to be able to sleep at day care, which means crib sleeping and as strict a schedule as he can manage. C'est la vie.

So are you going to write an academic paper about your parenting experiences? Sounds like it'd be a good one.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Clarification: I'm not saying that grabbing the baby every time he snuffles is attachment parenting, just the part of letting the baby lead the way about sleep and feeding and so forth. I think she really is practicing attachment parenting (without knowing the term), which is fine, but she's also practicing butt-in parenting, which is not so great. Did I mention that I'm using the wrong kind of sling? Because her babywearing consultant told her that hotslings are good, so I should be using a hotsling instead of the perfectly nice sling I'm using.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

My crazy maternal hormones say ohgodyou'llrolloveron thebabyohnoes, but I'll resist bugging her about it. We must have been just awful co-parents, as we had a tendency to stick him in the vibrating chair when our backs hurt from bouncing him. He went right to sleep, but I don't think that goes with any of the capitalized Parenting Philosophies. (If he actually fell asleep on us, we tended to hold him and stare at him rather than put him down and get him used to sleeping in the crib as we ought to, because no resistance to cute baby.)

A paper on this stuff, unfortunately, would be enough Not My Area as not to be a good idea to spend time on this year. Unless I could come up with a brilliant breakthrough method for studying sensorimotor cognition. Which I haven't managed yet.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Charlie hates anything that vibrates (he certainly didn't inherit that from, um, never mind) but has progressed to liking rocking, so we probably will get a swing for him. Just not one that replicates a human womb.

I don't really subscribe to a parenting philosophy yet, except that I like schedules and boundaries and stuff, and I don't like to load up on things that seem to do the parenting for me. But that's more of an adoption thing than a general parenting thing. Singing to him makes me feel like a mom; playing a cd to him doesn't particularly, so I'm more likely to do the first one.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Charlie hates anything that vibrates

And Bobby adores them. It's amazing how they come with such specific preferences. (And more amazing how people who want to tell you about the One True Way of child-rearing manage to miss this.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, and sensorimotor cognition sounds super cool.

[(Anonymous)]

Don't forget how selfish you are for not nursing the baby. Oh, you can't? He'd starve? Well, you're probably just not trying hard enough, but if you insist on being that way, get you're terrible-mommy-self down to a breast milk bank, pronto, or he'll grow up to be a serial killer!

If they keep yammering, I give you permission to throw the bag of dirty diapers at their heads. Tell 'em some lady on the internet sent you.

Sarah

[marydell.livejournal.com]

The same person who made the "hormones" comment is offering me her spare breast milk. Um, thanks, but over my dead body.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

That which doesn't kill you makes you strong? Good heavens, Fragano has it right (again) - what a bunch of arseholes.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Mostly everyone has been lovely, but there are those few who are not. And of course those are the comments that sting.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, I was in the Bay Area last week and I taught my 1.5-year-old nephew the thumbs-up sign.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Next you can teach him the "terrorist" fist-jab!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Well, his parents might object to that, but who knows, since he's growing up in a family of Democrats, which means he'll be brain-washed into hating America, of course. For now, his dad has already taught him how to do a high-five.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

Criminy.

When I had Puppy I was 24, but looked about 12. OMG you would not believe the strangers who believed it was so appropriate for them to tell me how wrong I was at EVERYTHING maternal. EVERYTHING. Never surprises me, really, the level of "you must do this THIS WAY" women are willing to push off on other women. I remain convinced that this is because we put so much pressure on mothers in our society that when any mom observes another mom, say, you or me (or a SAHD) doing something differently than she did it or does it, the observing and commenting mom immediately takes the very fact as a non-verbal assertion that how they had done it was WRONG, and so they need to correct your (and my) behaviors in order to self-justify. No one can accept the fact that there could be, you know, a range of very valid parenting choices.

I still get this with the "parenting the teenager" decisions I make.

My current strategy is to put on a very wide-eyed gaze, a big fake smile with too many teeth, and say in an obviously fake chipper voice, "Wow, thank you so much for taking the time and energy to correct my parenting form."

I have also said, "Hey, thanks for that, but we're good," and "Oh, but see, I'm not intimidated by my son's choice of hairstyle (music, reading material, etc.), so that's not really necessary for us. I'm sure it's different for you."

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was dumb comments from random strangers, since mine is now a conspicuous family. I like your responses. Unfortunately these comments are coming from people who are technically my friends. I mean, who were.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

I get these from friends now about the teenager parenting. The funny thing is, none of them even HAVE a teenager. And yet, they are still convinced I am Doing It Wrong.

I did have a friend do this to one of our other friends who just had a baby. She had a single cappucino a few months after she had a baby, and our friend, commenting on the fact that she's nursing, said, "I hope you know that you're killing your baby."

Srsly. Our new mom friend was in TEARS. How do you justify something like that and call yourself a friend (or, you know, a human?)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

That always boggles my mind. I mean, I'm sure I'm as judgemental as the next person, but why say stuff to people? Either it's not really important, or it's not going to make a difference anyway. I'll *sometimes* speak up if I'm really concerned about a safety issue, but even then I'm really, really careful. Saying something like "hey, I noticed the wheel on your stroller is loose" is generally received well, because it's just info, not a statement of philosophy like "your baby should wear restraints when they're in their stroller."

Also, statements like the one you cite drive me crazy because they're not even accurate. If you're going to say horrible things to people, at least be RIGHT.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thinking a little more on this...I think the difficulty is that parenting is an expression of 1. personality and 2. philosophy, and unlike sex, which is also an expression of those things, is performed in the public eye. So people who dislike your personality and/or philosophy can see them on display and take shots at them, when otherwise they wouldn't get that chance.

Teenagers and babies seem to particularly bring this out in people--possibly because everyone seems to love babies and to hate teenagers.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

That should read: I was prepared for dumb comments, etc. Typing while feeding the kid no work so good! (ooo, bad mommy, multitasking!)