Walking their talk
May 17, 2005 Uncategorized
I know they don’t think they’re heroes but the women who are mothering the kids at From 0 to 5 truly are.
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My smart baby
May 16, 2005 Parenting
I just wanted to add this for the blog-as-baby-book factor.
Today I was a wee little bit tired so I just put my head down for a second while I was lying on the bed watching Madison pull all of the clothes out of the drawer. Really, just for a second, I shut my poor tired eyes and perhaps I dozed for a teeny-weeny minute and then I heard this little voice saying to me, “Pesle! Pesle!” and I opened my eyes to see Madison staring at me intently while chewing the eraser off of one of her brother’s pencils.
She still won’t call me “mama” (she calls Brett and me both “Dada”) but she stands at Noah’s door and hollers, “Bruh-her!” And now she’ll come and tell me when she’s eating a pencil because she knows she shouldn’t.
I love this kid!
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Downwardly Mobile
May 16, 2005 The Story of My Life
Inspired by this question from the NYT posted by Barely Tenured: “Compared with your parents when they were the age you are now, is your standard of living now much better, somewhat better, somewhat worse, of much worse?”
This is what I wrote in her comments:
“We’re both worse — I’m much worse, Brett’s not quite much but still worse.
Brett grew up in a middle-class family that was careful with money. He lived in a tony suburb so always felt poorer than he was but his parents could help pay for college and now are having a *lovely* upper middle class retirement. His dad was in the army in his twenties, retired from the company he started working for after his dischrage and his mom always worked at least part-time. They were careful with their money and are enjoying life now.
My dad made six figures in sales and management and my mom never had a job until after the divorce. My dad went on to invest his money in a restaurant, lost everything and married his former secretary. He will never retire, had two more children but now makes six figures again. He spends money ridiculously fast. My mom worked her way up and now makes a very good living but during our teen years, my family really struggled.
Brett and I make decent money now but for a few years we had a combined income of less than 30K and at one point less than 25K and at one very difficult point, less than 20K. I quit my job to be home with Noah and that loss of income was very, very difficult. We are still now struggling to get out from under it so while we make decent money now, we’re still paying for that hard time. (Paying off debt, catching up on savings.)
I think of our family as being more like my grandparents, both sets of whom struggled a great deal. I guess we’ve boomeranged back to where our families were.”
I definitely grew up with privilege. In fact, I grew up with enough privilege to reject a lot of the values my parents had at this age. See, my father is a total workaholic and very much about keeping up with the Joneses. The pressure he put on himself to get us in the “right” neighborhood and get us the “right” things (like fancy cars in the driveway, over-priced and over-stuffed furniture, a sunken living room with a vaulted ceiling before that was a common thing) meant that he was never home, that his marriage(s) fell apart, and that he only really knows two of the six children he has. So I grew up rejecting that and that, my friends, is a privilege. It’s a privilege to choose to have less without feeling completely freaked out by it. By which I mean that Brett and I both have this middle-class security (and stupidity) about the world. We both have college degrees (his parents paid for his; I have big loans), we think it’s a kick to have trash-picked furniture, and neither of us have ever seriously worried about not having enough money to feed our kids (we both know that our parents will help us if things got dire). This is something my grandparents — either set — did NOT have so in that way, we haven’t boomeranged.
I kind of think that maybe my parent’s upper middle class status was a family anomaly. On both sides the aunts and uncles have done well (in some cases, remarkably well) but I’d say the majority of the cousins are kind of where we are. Not all of them but a lot, and some less well-off. I wonder if my feeling of privilege was a blip in our generational radar? And I wonder how it’ll be for Noah and Madison.
I don’t think I’ll really be able to tell for some years yet because our social world is stratified although solidly middle-class in mindset. (With one exception, our friends are either very well-off or else like us, kind of choosing to “live simply” but with degrees and decent resumes.)
I suppose I’d have more to say about this but Brett is warning me that it’s time to go to Noah’s baseball practice so off I go! Hope this isn’t too scattered and useless.
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Sing ‘em to Sleep: Moobabe
May 16, 2005 mp3
I went through Moobabe’s archives to find out more about her family and about Hannah specifically. I got lost in the pictures they have up and in Hannah’s big, beautiful dark eyes. I loved the family pictures especially and then I knew just what song would sing her to sleep! This isn’t one you can really sing all on your lonesome but it’s perfect for them because the mom and dad are performing and their daughter chimes in — singing a little and giggling a lot. There is a lot of tender love in this performance and in Moobabe’s family so there you go! Perfect!
Here I Am by Tracy Silverman, Thea Suits-Silverman and their daughter Louisa getupgrrl, since I think she would prefer that I wait until “the hypothetical not-bad thing” has happened. But I already have a song picked out!
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Tags: Music
Votes for Women!
May 16, 2005 Uncategorized
From my sister’s latest ebay listings: An altered cigar box covered with 1922 newspaper clippings. Pretty nifty, eh?