Lysistrata's Daughter

When I was 20, I spent the summer in Berkeley, learning Greek. My cousin and I sublet an apartment on the border of Berkeley and Oakland. He was learning Chinese. We both studied like demented ants, snarfing our Ramen noodle or cold cereal dinners, while learning flash cards or completing grammar exercises. The neighborhood we lived in, as I said, was on the border of Berkeley and Oakland. It was part students like us, part long-time Bay Area denizens, and part crazy homeless people. By the end of the summer, we were a little freaked out. Our sublet was a tiny one-bedroom built in the 40's and remodeled in the 60's. Yum. It also smelled mildew-y in the kitchen. We took everything out of the cupboard under the sink, trying to eliminate whatever it was that was stinking. We looked with a flashlight to see if the pipes were loose and to try to locate a drip. After a particularly long sojourn struggling with our stinky sink, my cousin marched into the living room, where I ...

I was watching YouTube tonight and playing a free online version of Bejeweled. (Don't laugh. I used to stay up til all hours reading really smart articles, whose arguments I have mostly forgotten.) Because it was a free game, I had to put up with advertisements. What was being advertised, you ask? Fish sticks, oddly enough. A blonde girl, maybe four years old, accosts her mother with a generic box of minced, minced fish sticks and demands, in sarcastic disbelief, "Have you ever seen a minced fish?" Does the mother inform her that she can keep a civil tongue in her head? Does the mother suggest that the child make a polite request regarding the fish sticks rather than this snotty rhetorical questioning? Or inform the child that her options are to eat what's been made or help herself to bread and butter? Apparently not. In the next scene, we see Mommy dearest placing before the tow-headed angel a plate of Van deKamp's fish sticks. Does the little girl ...

Awhile back, I read Sandra Tsing Loh's article about her divorce. It is certainly not the best thing Loh has ever done. The article is a litany of all the hardships of modern, two-income motherhood, which, evidently, led to an affair and ultimately a divorce. It's a bit whiny for my taste, as well as poorly argued (three examples in her own life, plus a sprinkling of statistics does not an argument make). One of my main problems with the article is with the contention that the ultimate failure of her marriage is down to the fact that she didn't want to 'work' on her marriage, which prescription is found on the pages of women's magazines. Call it what you will--date night, rekindling the spark, pretending for a few hours that we don't have children. Nothing wrong with any of that, but I don't think the presence or absence of date night is what sinks a marriage. More fundamentally, I take issue with the idea of 'work'. As Loh conceives it, i...

So, I'm doing this home school thing. It's hard. Really, really hard. I do remember how to do basic addition and how to sound out words. That's not the hard part. What's hard is that I get to deal with Mr. A all day long, every day. He is an exhausting child. The level of concentration it takes for me to stay a few steps ahead of him, teach him, get him dressed and try to keep his temper directed in a positive way AND to make sure everyone gets fed and dishes and clothes are occasionally washed AND take care of Vuk (as the new baby is being Web-christened; pronounced to rhyme with 'kook' and Serbian for wolf, because this kid can howl ) rivals the concentration it took for me to pass my master's exams. I'm really tired, all the time. I also try to exercise a bit, so as not to lose myself in a fat duvet, and read a bit, because Thomas the Tank Engine, while lovely if you're five, is not so great if you're 28. And in the midst of this strug...

The Padre and I made the decision to put Mr. A in the local public school for kindergarten. It looked like a nice little elementary school--plenty of play space, a garden, a good score on the standardized tests. It was a nightmare. The way some people carry on about public schools, you might think that I'm going to follow up that last sentence with a litany of horrors about BDSM demonstrations on the play ground and the bowl full of strawberry flavored condoms on the principal's desk. Actually, no. Perfectly ordinary parents took their children there every day. Our problem wasn't with some kind of moral outrage, but rather with the education itself. Let's start with what was missing from Mr. A's kindergarten class room: blocks, any toys at all, finger paints, those little math manipulatives for patterning. What was there, you ask? A few computers, which frankly, rank second only to television in terms of "kiddie speed" for Mr. A; worksheets; desks; ...

No one ever tells the whole truth about motherhood. We hear a lot about how much love you have for your children, how you'd do absolutely anything for them. This is true. I won't deny it. But why doesn't anyone ever talk about the fact that sometimes, marbled in with the love that is so great it breaks your heart, is a massive dollop of irritation so great that you just can't bear to hear their sweet little voices any more? How, after a monologue by your five-year-old, that's lasted twenty minutes, you feel that if you hear, 'and Mommy, do you know what?' once more, you will just rip your own face off. Or, when your infant has been screaming for almost four hours, and your ears are ringing with the sound even when he's quiet, you wonder how it was that you never got around to scheduling that hysterectomy after the first one was born. You were warned, after all. There are nights when I look at my sleeping children, and though I know, objectively spe...

So I'm almost 42 weeks pregnant. I've had a lot of time to think about the rather strange state of childbearing in this country. On the one hand, since the decision Roe vs. Wade in 1973, every woman is guaranteed the right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, at least through about 20 weeks or so. To be honest, I can think of no circumstances under which I'm likely to take advantage of this. I think, though, that there are a lot of reasons that people feel the need for such a provision. Arguments are made about the difficulty of caring for severely deformed or mentally deficient children; about victims of rape; about women who have been abandoned by the child's father. Many people have the sense that pregnancy can be an unbearable burden for women, particularly those who do not have a partner or access to resources such as good health care and child care. Along with this is the sense that men should not be able to tell women what they can or cann...