You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later

Wow, what a week! I am very pleased - and more than a little surprised - by what a great response I've had from You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later.

I originally wrote this as an email to my friend Sommer Browning when she was pregnant with her daughter. I decided to post it on Medium on January 7 and since then it's been viewed almost 200,000 times and counting. And I've gotten so many nice notes and messages from people all over the country, too.  Thanks, everyone!

Magical Thinking

"For Christmas this year, my daughter wants Santa to bring her a magic wand that allows her to enter books and movies, interact with the characters, and change their outcomes . . . She also wants the wand to resurrect the dead, though she adds this bonus feature as something of an afterthought, like a stand mixer that also makes sausage."

I'm back on Medium talking about adult American Girl fans, ontological freakouts, and Lovecraftian horror.

Modeling on Medium and More from the Music Center

"In the nicest shot Beatrice is sitting on an overturned trash can with a giant pink plastic flower in her hair, but somehow she makes it look good, which is probably the definition of a born model."

I have my first piece up on Medium, discussing my complicated feelings about Beatrice's short stint as a clothing model.  So far I'm really enjoying the Medium interface, I think I'll stick around.

 

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Also, there are more Music Center episodes up! Check out #7, 8, 9, and 10.

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Lastly, I've started working with the home automation startup Cliqk, writing some of their web and social media content and generally helping out.

Hot Dish at the Hammer Museum

This Sunday Hot Dish is putting on a special kid's edition with seven wonderful children's book authors reading their work as part of the Hammer Museum's Family Day. 

Come hear stories by Cecil Castellucci, Erin Hickey, Julia Ingalls, Ben Loory, Antoinette Portis, and the writing/storytelling team of Eugene Yelchin and Mary Kuryla.  I'll also be reading a selection of stories about art, artists, and museums, plus we'll have snacks, crafts, and coloring books to share.

In Defense of The Runaway Bunny

Last week I was inspired by Mallory Ortberg's adept and lovely interpretation of The Runaway Bunny to construct a defense of this oft-maligned children's book.  Ortberg's interpretation, part of The Toast's excellent creepy children's story series, was meant not as a commentary or criticism of the original but merely as an exercise in gorgeous perversion. Nonetheless, The Runaway Bunny is widely criticized. In fact, I never read The Runaway Bunny as a child and first encountered it as the butt of grown-up jokes about a children's book that attempted to sweeten up fanatical codependency with illustrated rabbits. 

In the book, the titular bunny tells his mother he dreams of running away, but she counters every fantasy of escape with one of capture.

"I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you."

"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you."

"If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, "I will become a rock on the mountain, high above you."

"If you become a rock on the mountain high above me," said his mother, "I will be a mountain climber, and I will climb to where you are."

He wants to be a flower in a garden, he wants to be in the circus.  On and on, to the ends of the earth, wherever this little bunny goes, his mother will follow. It seems he will never be free of her. At last, he gives up and decides he'll just stay home. His mother rewards his acquiescence with a carrot. Fin.

This mother bunny sounds like the sort of parent who would ride along in your limo at prom, camp out on the floor of your dorm room, who would just "accidentally" bump into you on your honeymoon. She sounds like a devouring succubus, like a Freudian case study. She sounds like a nut.

The first point to make here is that this is a baby rabbit. He's not at prom, he's not in college. He can't even tie his own little bunny shoes. He's young and young children love to run away. They do it because they're feeling angry, or brave, or neglected, or proud, or sometimes just because they can. After all, the physical ability to run at all is still pretty novel.

So they run away, stopping every dozen feet or so to make sure their parents are still back there watching them. This is not The Fugitive. Trust me, if that little bunny were to jump into the trout stream and his mother wasn't right there with the fishing pole, he would freak out.  Then he would drown.

Many children's games revolve around the thrill of being free, but it's only fun to be free if you know you'll be fed. That's why it's called Hide and Seek and not Hide and Perish. Even a toddler is smart enough to know they couldn't survive in the world alone and they don't really want to try. They want to be allowed to think about trying. The mother bunny never says, "Can you shut up about becoming a rock already?" She never even says, "You know, I hate to burst your bubble, but rabbits aren't strong swimmers." She lets him dream.

My four-year-old daughter loves to daydream about her adult life. She will be a single mother of four children; she will own and operate a 24-hour veterinary clinic; her hobbies will include scuba diving and amateur paleontology; she will serve herself at mealtimes ("serving yourself" is the kids' wildest, most transgressive dream). She also expects that she will do all this while still living at home with me (which, given economic trends, is not entirely unreasonable). She can more easily imagine herself hauling four children around the world searching for dinosaur bones than imagine not waking up every morning to the same four walls.

But she's four. The bunny is little. What happens when the bunny is all grown up and ready to leave home and his crazy mother is still cutting the crusts off his bread?

I was an anxious, fearful child. I was afraid of all the usual things kids are afraid of, plus a lot of bonus things that only I even considered being afraid of. I was like a child prodigy for terror. The world was full of teachers that could punish you and bridges that could collapse and ice cream truck drivers that were really kidnappers and Satanists in the public parks (remember, this was the eighties). But even when I was sick with anxiety (and quite literally so, as evidenced by eighteen years of psychosomatic digestive problems) I knew I could always go home. Home was like the base in tag – it was a neutral zone, a place no one could touch me. I know not every child has a home like that, of course, but I expect every child would like one. 

Have you ever seen a toddler try to use a playground swing? Now imagine that the swing is a trapeze and the toddler is a rabbit. Not a pretty scene, is it? That rabbit is going to want to go home at some point for a carrot break.

But someday that baby rabbit isn't going to be able to go home. He'll be away at college, or on study-abroad, or in hospice, or in jail. He may not be able to make it back to his mother, and his mother may not be able to tight-rope walk back to him. Someday my daughter may not be able to continue living in Los Angeles while pursuing her avid interest in deep-water diving. Someday she may not be able to afford to live in California after she's run her veterinary clinic into the ground going on expensive paleontological safaris. Someday this house will be gone. Someday I'll be dead.

But I'm not too worried about that. In fact I don't feel anxious anymore, even when I'm miles away from home and family. Compared to my childhood self, I'm practically a stunt woman. I blatantly drive on bridges! I boldly frequent parks! Day to day, I rarely feel afraid of anything. I grew up, moved away, and discovered that home was a thing I could carry with me.

In my favorite illustration from The Runaway Bunny the little bunny has turned himself into a sailboat that's floating out on the open ocean, and his mother is the wind that's blowing his sails. She's in the background, part of the landscape. She's wind, so he may not even see her, though he feels her everywhere. The moral of The Runaway Bunny is not that wherever the little bunny goes, his mother will follow him. It's that wherever he goes, she'll already be there.

In Praise of Information

as opposed to Fruitless Pondering.

Don't get me wrong, I love the occasional fruitless ponder.  But one of the things I don't understand at all about the anti-technology sentiments of many parents is the idea that somehow looking things up online is bad, that a more authentic response to questions is to just - I don't know, passively muse on them?

Looking things up is good.  Looking things up is how you learn.  And it's how your children will learn, too, if you let them.

Several of my Facebook friends today posted links to "Mom's iPhone Rules For Son," a set of guidelines a mother gave her 18-year-old son before giving him his own phone.  There are many reasonable pieces of advice in there, but this one struck me as absolutely absurd: "Wonder without googling."

Don't you remember in school when your teachers would tell you to stop and look up a new word in the dictionary whenever you encountered one?  Or when they taught you to use an encyclopedia? So why does this not apply when the dictionary or the encyclopedia is digital and not print?

A few days ago I started thinking about yeast and bread - how was yeasted bread discovered? Where and by whom?  How does yeast work chemically? And so on.  So I looked it up.  I spent about an hour and half online reading and now I know a ton about yeast (go on, ask me).  What if instead I had just said, "Huh, yeast - that's weird," and left it at that?

Sure, a kid might come to a few interesting conclusions about yeast on his own.  And maybe a few of the very brightest kids would concoct independent experiments on yeast.  But most kids, like most adults, would think about it for a minute and then move on, because that's how most people's brains work when they have no information to kickstart their thought processes.  Yes, some truly ineffable things (life, death, justice, love) may be best pondered in the silence of the heart.  But simple factual information about bread is not one of them.

My daughter is too young to read, but whenever she asks me one of those typical toddler "why?" questions and I don't know the answer or can't clearly explain it, I say, "Let's look it up online together," and then we read about amphibians or watch a YouTube video on how to make glass.  Actual information about glass-blowing seems to me far more valuable and interesting (and educational) than fruitless low-tech pondering.

You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later: Unsolicited Advice for the Mothers of Newborns

 Beatrice at three weeks old



I originally set out to write this post as an email to my friend Sommer Browning who is due soon with her first baby. I preface this and all things I write by saying, I'm not an expert in anything, and who the hell am I to give advice to anyone? Still, if you will indulge me, I offer some unsolicited advice for new mothers:

1. It's only .004% of your life.

If I could only say one thing to every pregnant woman out there, it would be this: it's only a short time. The sleeplessness and the feeding and the crying and the leaking and the general overwhelming crappiness, it just goes by. Everyone knows this intellectually and yet it's really hard to have that perspective when it's 3am and you haven't eaten and you haven't showered and the night just seems to go on and on forever and you find yourself thinking, This is my life now, my horrible, horrible life. Know that this is not the new normal, this is a blip. Just buckle down and get through it and it's over. Unless and until you're stupid enough to do it again.

2. Don't do any big stupid things.

For the first year of this baby's life, don't make any major decisions. Now is not the time to get married, get divorced, quit your job, start a new job, buy a house, sell a house, move across the country, or do things involving big sums of money.

I hesitate to put this out there, because I think a lot of the talk about pregnant women and new mothers and their "mommy brain" is infantilizing and sexist and reductive and yet—it's true, you are really tired. You are tired even if you do not know you are tired. I am an incredibly high-energy person, I had an easy baby who slept through the night from a young age, I had a flexible job I could do from home and a partner who wasn't awful all of the time, and yet despite these things, I was still tired enough to find myself standing on my porch trying to open my front door with my car clicker and—get this—when it didn't work, actually thinking, It must be out of batteries.

Almost the entire first year I had my daughter I felt like I felt fine—it was only around the one-year mark that I looked around and realized, I have been totally out of it for the last year of my life.

And yes, there are hormonal fluctuations to deal with, and maybe also issues with recovery or feeding or postpartum depression or your work leave or the absence thereof. And it's not just you, either. Your partner, if you have one, is tired too, and stressed out, and also you may slightly hate him or her most of the time now but you probably won't forever. So what I'm saying is, maybe now is not the time to drop out of school, leave your husband, and buy that dilapidated farmhouse.

3. But feel free to do plenty of small stupid things.

Use this as your excuse to get a tattoo, buy a butter churn, shave your head, or adopt a partially blind rabbit. Hey, who's going to judge you? You're tired.

4. Go out with your baby.

Immediately. Go. Right now. By now I think most everyone knows that the grandmotherly wisdom about taking young babies out of the house is wrong, and sure, if it worries you, you can drive a few miles over to that other Starbucks where the patrons look a bit less tubercular, but seriously, leave the house early and often.

5. Go out without your baby.

Go out with your friends, go out with your partner, go out by yourself. I know this isn't easy—in fact,
I always get annoyed when people glibly advise you to have a "date night" every week as though everyone in these economic times can afford to spend an extra $50 a week on optional childcare. But seriously, try. Hit up relatives, take turns watching your friends' kids, drop your kid off in the ballpit at IKEA and go eat meatballs in the cafe without her, just do something. If you really can't get away, at least invite friends over to your place after your baby goes to bed and go sit outside and light some candles and pretend it's a sidewalk cafe.

Also, please don't call it "date night." That is the worst phrase.

6. Serve alcohol at your baby's first birthday party.

Obviously.

7. Don't bother reading to your baby.

Okay, fine, read to him if you want to, but don't kill yourself over it.

Some people swear that their very young infants love being read to, and it may be that some babies (especially pre-mobile ones) enjoy the sound of the reading voice. Beatrice had a brief flirtation with Fluffy Chick and Friends around four months old but once she could crawl and then walk, forget it. I spent countless evenings doggedly reading Goodnight Moon to an empty nursery while she raced up and down the hallway beating the dogs with an empty paper towel roll. Until she was about eighteen months old, Beatrice would absolutely not sit still while being read to; now at three she has memorized all the words to every book she owns, reenacts scenes from her favorites, and is starting to sight-read some words. In other words, she's fine and your baby will be, too, with or without Goodnight Moon.

Writers and grad students, in particular, love to talk about what adorably inappropriate thing they read aloud to their precociously appreciative infant, and maybe Baby Edgar really does sit rapt for whole chapters of your thesis on Being and Nothingness, but it's more likely he just lacks the dexterity to unfasten his bouncy seat. Or perhaps young infants simply respond well to voices pitched at a maximum level of self-satisfaction.

8. Get over yourself.

No, this is a big deal, I get it. I, personally, am genuinely glad to hear all about it. Call me up, I can talk about babies all day. But respect the fact that your non-baby-having friends have news, too. Yes, you're ragged and puffy and sore and newly and wholly in love with a being whose waste has suddenly turned a worrying shade of green, and maybe you aren't actually all that riveted by the story of how Cary's boss was such a bitch to her in that meeting, but fake it. Cary doesn't care all that much about latching either, but she'll fake it, too, because you're friends.

And please, while we're on the subject, do not tell people without babies what they are missing, or how they can't possibly know how parenthood feels until they try it. No, of course they don't know how being a parent feels. I don't know how it feels to be a man, or a hemophiliac, or a Hugenot. No one can know how anyone else feels, that's the tragedy of existence, but having a baby doesn't make you a guru, either. Go to any Babies R Us on a Sunday afternoon and look around: does it look to you like all the people in this store have access to a hidden well of radiant cosmic knowledge?

9. Children aren't always babies.

I was shopping alone at Target when I was pregnant with Arthur and a woman, incorrectly assuming this was my first baby, actually came up to me and said, "Enjoy it now! Go shopping, go to the movies, because after the baby comes you'll never do any those things again!"

Leaving aside the obvious point that people with babies can and do go to the movies, I also like her assumption that the baby I was about to birth would remain one-month-old forever. My next-door neighbors have two boys in college and they seem to go to the movies whenever they feel like it.

Maybe it's just the media I consume, but I feel like there is a huge emphasis on parenting young children, those under five or so, and then markedly less attention placed on parenting after that. I imagine some of this is just demographics—the people who write the articles I read are around my age and so they have kids around the ages of my kids. But the effect is to make you forget that these are your children and you'll have them forever.

Inevitably there's someone on Pinterest who made a photo album of her infant daughter dressed up every day like a different kind of desert finch, and I will look at my youngest child, who is fifteen months old, and seriously find myself thinking, "Well, it's too late, you've blown it now, it's too late to make a film of Arthur and all his hospital nursery roommates enacting tableaux from Labyrinth, so I guess you're done forever."

This is seriously insane. We've barely even started making memories, we're not running out of time. It's just that no one on Pinterest is making felt collages of their kid's eighth year.

10. You don't have to cherish every second.

You will be out with your baby and some well-meaning person will tell you, "Savor every minute of this time, it goes by so fast!"

This is a terrible thing to say. It's true, but it's still a terrible thing to say.

"Savor it!"  What if I'm not savoring it enough?

I really like babies—plenty of people don't, maybe you don't, and that's fine, too—but even I can't savor a baby 24/7. Yes, with both of my children there were times when I felt truly enraptured by my love of them, totally connected to the wonder and joy of their burgeoning personhood, but there were also times where I was a little burned out on their burgeoning personhood and would really rather have just read the New Yorker in peace. But every time I would put the baby in his highchair and let him amuse himself with some Cheerios while I caught up on "The Talk of the Town," I'd feel guilty.

Savor it! Why am I not savoring it?! This is his brief, fleeting infancy, a time I will spend the rest of my life longing for, a time to fill to brimming with memories, I should be wringing every ounce of irreplaceable joy out of this afternoon instead of feeding him handful after handful of Goldfish crackers so I can finish reading Adam Gopnik's twee musings on Parisian deadbolts.

Yes, it goes fast, and then it's over, and then there are whole new phases and problems. And yes, you'll feel bad when they aren't babies anymore, but you would have felt bad anyway, so at least you got to read that magazine. Don't kill yourself. Have fun when you can, get through it when you must. Relax. You have plenty of time to love them later.

11. Get a dog. Your life is ruined anyway, you might as well.

Arthur at one week old