Friday, May 27, 2011

Mommy Cam/Nanny Cam - Or How To Fire Yourself

A few days ago there was an segment on the news about the many ways to spy on your nanny.  From nanny-cams ton an online site in NYC where people take pictures of nannies doing "inapropriate things" and post them so parents can scan them in case their nanny was caught in the act of doing egregious things to the children in their care.

Now, having gone to a liberal arts college in the 90's I am programmed to be "fight for the rights" of the worker/nanny and yet I also completely empathize with the mother who wants to make sure her child is in the right hands. When I went to that developmental movement class from the last post there were two care-givers there with children.  One of them was basically the Mary Poppins of nannies, well possibly Mary Poppins meets Piaget.  She was engaged, asked questions, practiced on her child, shared in detail the developmental milestones of the kid.  Basically she was like a very involved mother, well in some ways better than most of the other new mothers there because she evidently knew what she was doing and let's be honest, the rest of us are still kind of in the trial and error stage.  She was the "Top Chef Master" equivalent to my "Let's turn whatever is in the refrigerator into a one-pot wonder."  Not that those one-pot wonders aren't delicious and filled with heart but they sometimes lack some technical knife skills or a recipe/plan.

And then there was the other nanny.  I don't know if she was tired, having a bad day, or really just mediocre, but she spent the entire class texting, even when her ward army-crawled over to my immobile babe and tried to claw his eyeballs out with saliva-drenched fingers and then promptly spit-up up on our swaddle.  And for those of you not schooled in the mommy and baby events, laying down the swaddle in front of you pretty much creates a territorial spot of sanctity.  It is the baby equivalent of pissing on your section of the rug.  It is the layer of germ protection, sleep inducer, baby comforter. . well you get the picture.   And even then, bad nanny didn't move, so, I did carting my baby and swaddle to the other side of the circle as the kid went after his next target.

And this is when I had the us vs them moment.  I thought - my god I wonder if her the mother knows how bad her nanny is.  And furthermore I understood that if I knew who that mother was, I would tell her.  GASP!  I recognized within myself the potential to be a nanny-tattler.

The aforementioned news segment said that nearly 100% of people who install nanny cams fire their nannies within 24 hours because they are so horrified. Now I do realize that these numbers are probably fairly unscientific.  In the first place, probably few people who have Mary Piaget Poppins who bother to install a nanny cam and second I'm pretty sure anyone responsible for watching a colicky infant for 14 hours straight would have at least one "fire-worthy" moment a day.

And today - if someone was "nanny-camming" me, I'm pretty sure I would have been canned.  This is roughly what they would have seen.

7-7:30 breast feeds baby while watching Sister Wives on-demand. (okay ignore the fact that it would be weird if your nanny was actually breast feeding your child since the whole wet-nurse thing went out a few decades ago not to mention the fact that no one should be watching Sister Wives at 7 AM  -we'll let these go)

7:30-8:30 plays with baby, does some great yoga exercises, encouraging tummy time with the techniques learned in developmental movement class while watching Good Morning America.  Now potentially there is room for nanny failure since one should focus completely on the baby and not divide one's attention between the baby and the screen but to be fair Lady Gaga was on GMA and any employer should be sympathetic to that.

8:30-9:15 baby naps. . none of your business what I was doing here. .oh wait, it would have been caught on nanny cam. . fine.  I ate breakfast and checked facebook

9:15-10:00. . baby nursing .. . (blah blah - nothing interesting here fast forward the tape)

9:45-10:45.  we play, dance around the room, go look at ourselves in the mirror

10:45 - 2:00 I'm not going to break-down this timeline further because it is all a part of the hysteria section and the minutes become a blur. . a very, very slow blur, but a blur nonetheless.

Baby goes into the swing for a nap, I vacuum to lull him to sleep (look a nanny who cleans bonus!) He does not fall asleep but is calm so I go to the bathroom.  While there, I get mesmerized by the mirror, examining all the baby weight I have not managed to slough off through the "miracle of breast-feeding" (I'm pretty sure this would be considered 'ignoring a child' in nanny-cam world but probably still not fire-worthy.)  The baby starts to cry.  I leave my reflection in the mirror, pick him up, rock him, dance him around, re-swaddle him, burp him, change his diaper. He is having none of it and is now screaming so loud he's choking and turning red.  I put the vacuum back on with one toe so I don't put him down.  He screams more.  I feed him again, he starts to spasm and grunt and cry WHILE his mouth is attached to my breast.  I decide to go for a walk.  Now the nanny cam could not follow me here but if it could it would see him momentarily calm down and then start to scream again.  I pick up my phone to text my friend to not to meet me at the park because our mission is being aborted (yes while the baby is crying) and I'm sure someone would be taking a picture of me to post on 'nannywatch' if I didn't look so, well, white. I pick him out of the stroller, put him in his carrier and walk the stroller back with one hand while jiggling him up and down and patting his back. We get home, he eats again, and he is STILL crying.  It is at this point that I kind-of-sort-of scream at the baby.  It wasn't a full scream but it was surely a "fire-worthy" scream that went something like "PLEASE BABY, PLEASE STOP CRYING. . OH GOD I JUST NEED A MOMENT!!! PLEASE STOP!!!"  Okay, so it was a scream.  Not a 'god what a worthless piece of cr*p baby you are (shake-shake) moment'  but a 'God I sure am glad my bad mommy/nanny moment was not caught on tape moment.  Note to my husband: If you ever put a nanny cam in our apartment I will divorce you.  I promise for the most part I am a wonderful, loving, giggle inducing, creative mom.

So I am torn between having sympathy/empathy for nannies and also understanding that when you leave your kid with someone it is hard not to want hold them to higher standards than yourself, meaning I would probably fire her if she was me.  And this is not self-judging, As indicated, I think that I am doing a bang-up job.  But looking at a tape of anyone doing their job over the course of sixty hours would probably lead them to being fired.  So we'll see. For now there will be no nanny-cam because of course there is no nanny, and probably unless I win the lotto, never will be one.  But if I do have a nanny, well, I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Please Eat My Tummy - And Other Ways To Scar Your Children

I love to eat Owen's tummy.  Not actually bite, digest, etc., but I love to take little nibbles off of his tummy several times a day.  It is one of our favorite ways to play.  I say, "Oh no, I have to eat the tummy.  I'm going to eat the tummy, I love to eat the belly," and then I make little growling noises as I "bite" his belly.  And then the payoff- he giggles and smiles, and on occasion laughs.  

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with this.  Most of my friends with babies seem to have a predilection for some part of their baby's body. Some swear by cheeks, others by toes, but for me it's the belly.  The other day as I was talking to a friend on the phone she asked how Owen was and I said, "He's so cute, I can't stop eating his belly."  Then after a pause I added, "Now of course, I'm probably scarring him for life and when he grows he's going to develop some bizarre fetish during sex and not understand why he has to beg people to 'please eat my belly, oh I love it when you eat my belly.' "

Of course, I am 95%  sure this is not how sexual fetishes are created, but who knows?  Did our friends the furries have mothers who innocently tickled them one too many times with their plush stuffed animals? Did our foot fetishists have moms who went after those cute little toes one too may times?  Highly doubtful.  I'm pretty sure that it's more likely that too much exposure to Sesame Street is the root of making one want to dress up as a mascot in in bed than it is that one's parents caused it.  Still, as parents it is overwhelming how much we have the ability to scar or help our children.

I went to a developmental movement class the other day where I learned that apparently everything I have been doing with Owen is delaying his "development."  From the way I pick him up (under his armpits) to the way we move into tummy time (I flip him over and place him on his belly)  to the coup-de-wrong (holding him under those same armpits to let him 'stand' on his feet.) And oh yes, I know these sound innocent, in fact I see evidence of these parental failures everywhere I look.   These actions are obviously from lack of knowledge rather than any pernicious intentions- how was I to know that letting a baby stand before his time would prevent him from crawling? Yet, now I am illuminated with the fact that everything I do has a potentially instructive or destructive effect on my child. The instructor actually said at one point that while these 'failures' as a parent (she of course did not say failures) could not be traced forward to developmental delays such as.. wait for it, wait for it. . cognitive impairment, learning delays, physical delays, that all of those developmental failures (no she did not say failures here either) COULD be traced backwards to babies missing these developmental milestones.  In other words, their failures later in life could be traced back to the parent, or in this case my husband. (just kidding honey)

So here I am with Owen only eleven weeks old and but for the grace of this class, I could have been taking the first steps in ensuring my son would be forever grounded in mediocrity. I in no ways mean to say that the class was the instigator of my anxiety, or that it was alarmist in nature. As a life-long educator I was actually fascinated and intrigued by the class.  The instructor was informed, intelligent, and compassionate.  And what she said made sense and I do want to try the things she was teaching.  I just need to find the balance between learning things that will help my son develop into the most fabulous human being that he can and also just letting myself be an occasionally, if unintentionally, mediocre parent.  Also, holding him under his armpits and letting him 'stand' is kind of fun and it makes him happy, even if he crawls a little bit later.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Are You My Mother? (a picture book for the modern age)

The other night my husband and I were sitting on the couch playing with our son.  I was doing something intensely fascinating like saying, "Who is the best baby in the world?  Is Owen the best baby in the world? Yes, he is!  Does Mommy love Owen?  Of course she does!" etc., etc., when Owen actually laughed out loud for the first time, cackled in fact.  Now, Owen has smiled before but this was his first official laugh, around seven o'clock, smack dab in the middle of week ten and eleven of life.  I responded in the way any normal new twenty-first century parent would, I squealed, I cried - and then I tried to videotape it with my phone.  I should have just stuck with the first response, the pure enjoyment part of it.  Not only because I in fact failed at videotaping this, or should I say digitally recording a mini-movie, but because I left the moment of it.

Now, I don't feel that this separation happened in any dramatic way.  I did not feel disconnected when it happened and in retrospect I can't even pinpoint a real "lack of being in the moment" feeling.  But without a doubt the most pure moment was the first few laughs, not only for the sheer miracle of watching him verbally express joy for the first time but for the heart-wrenching, if narcissistic knowledge that it was my connecting with him eyeball to eyeball that made him laugh in the first place.  The camera/cell phone does not make him laugh.  The proof is that whenever I take it out to capture the moment of a smile, a particularly happy, funny, or expressive moment, he pretty much stops what he's doing.  I try to encourage the moment back by peering around the camera to re-inspire him but the moment never comes back, he's a little too fickle for that.

One of my favorite childhood books was, "Are You My Mother?" where the baby bird wakes up alone in his nest without his mother and starts walking around trying to find her.  He encounters many things, including several different animals and even a bulldozer, asking each of them, "Are you my mother?" until at the end he finally finds his real mom.  I picture the babies of our generation are moving through their own disturbing version of this book, asking video cameras and cell phones, and web cams the same insistent question.  I'm pretty sure that if the first time Owen says 'mama' he is looking at our digital camera it will break my heart.

Obviously, I know this is not going to happen, that Owen and I spend hours of time together, and I do mean HOURS AND HOURS, where cameras are not present.  And I also recognize that there is a magic of catching these moments on 'film' even if film really doesn't exist anymore.  But I want to be a little more aware that it's actually I that made Owen laugh, not our Sony Digital, and I wonder if the laugh would have lasted a little bit longer if I had not bothered to pick up the camera.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

You Can Never Shake A Baby but Sometimes You Have to Kick a Cat

One of my favorite party tricks while pregnant was to put my hands on either side of my stomach and shake my stomach while saying "Never shake a baby".  (Okay I swear it played better in real life than in writing.)  Occasionally someone would be horrified but for the most part everyone knew that I was not "the type of person" who would shake a baby. The people who did this were one step away from the people who left their babies in trash cans on prom nights, or left them alone for hours while they drank beers with their friends and watched marathons of Jerry Springer. But on the other side of pregnancy, six hours into an intense, and as far as I could tell "causeless" crying jag, I realized that I was one breath away from being that person.

Now I like to consider my self a fairly self-possessed and restrained person.  I admit I have a red-headed Scorpio type temper that was first evident when as a seven year old I apparently stomped a chandelier off the ceiling in a fit because I was not allowed to eat French Toast while recovering from a tonsilectomy.  But I felt that as an adult who has developed both self-awareness and self-restraint through years of yoga, mediation, and my fair share of therapy, that when I became a new parent I would have so many coping mechanisms I would fly through parenting 101.  This is not the case.

The first time Owen cried for six hours in a row I was home by myself.  I started out capable:  I sang, I burped, I rocked, I nursed, I walked around the block, I nursed, I put him in the carrier, I nursed, we watched Chuggington, I nursed, gave him a pacifier, I nursed and he did nothing but scream.  He cried until he was choking.  I cried until I was choking and sometime in the middle I found myself screaming at him, "There is nothing wrong with you!!  What is wrong with you?"  His answer was of course to cry louder. And then came the moment where I felt my hands twitching and wanting, more than I could ever have imagined, to shake the baby.   I might even have begun to do it, just the first arc of the shake, not the actual shake, because right before it happened I was able to stop myself.  I'm not sure if it was due to all the videos I had to watch in high school, a deep sense of self-awareness, or just luck but I did not shake him.  Instead I put him down in the stroller, both of us still crying and turned away.

It was at this moment one of our two cats had the misfortune of adding his wail to the mix, and running between my feet almost tripping me.  And it was also in that moment that I kicked the cat.

I am not proud of the fact that I kicked the cat.  I realize that some pet activists or well anyone who has not futilely tried to calm a screaming baby for six hours in a row might argue that kicking a cat is almost as bad as shaking a baby but let's get real - it's not.  It was a one-off.  The cat was not injured and has apparently retained no ill feelings from the mild kick. It didn't make me feel better, that is not the point.  The point is that being a parent is hard and too often it's so easy to draw a huge divide in our minds about they type of people who would hurt their babies, intentionally or not, and those of us proud, together parents who would never, ever, ever do that.  But the truth is, much of what parenting a newborn, particularly a fussy, cranky, colicky newborn is like is akin to how governments torture prisoners: sleep deprivation, lack of ability to control your environment, loud high stress noises, and ISOLATION!  And none of this facilitates your ability to always respond carefully and calmly.

So when a friend of mine asked me what it was like to be a new parent I very honestly said.  "Part of the day is filled with the greatest joy I have ever felt and the other part is filled with moments where you tell yourself that you can never ever shake a baby but sometimes it's okay to kick the cat."

Friday, May 20, 2011

Diaper Music - Learning To Find Music In The Dirty Parts of Parenting

Diaper Music  - I'm not sure who created the term first, my husband or I, but I'm pretty sure it was created around 3AM one morning when we were trying to put a positive spin on the rather loud and liquidy noise that had woken us both from our sleep.  Now it's pretty impressive that a little nine pound creature can make a noise while going to the bathroom that is loud enough to wake two sleep deprived adults from their desperate slumber.  And while I would like to think our son is extraordinary in this way (yes parents will brag about almost anything their child does that can be counted as "exceptional" even if it is emitting particularly loud poos) but the digestive system of a newborn is something to be admired, if not emulated. Food passes through their sysems at a speed and force relatively akin to a person on a diet of prunes, coffee and ex-lax.  And here was the proof, an excretion so fabulously loud it could have served as an air-raid siren.

 "So that was some diaper music," one of us said.  I'll let my husband take credit, not because I am generous at granting credit but because I'm pretty sure I would have said something like, "Holy shit, that was a loud crap!"  Or I would have pretended I did not hear it so I would not have to be the one to change it.  (The first step in creating effective co-parenting is to force the other person into action by your own denial of the urgency of a situation UNLESS you are the partner who did not push the child out of your womb this strategy is just called being an a**hole.)  Either way, there it was 'diaper music' the ability to melodiously name what is really a rather disgusting but militantly insinuating thing.  And I think this is what parenting is really about - the ability to be proud of your sons ability to poo so loud that it wakes you up in the middle of the night, to pee so hard in the middle of a diaper change that it hits not only the wall but the ceiling (okay that never happened but imagine it did.)

So now there is diaper music.  I don't know how long this term will last.  Most likely it will die out right about when the poo stops smelling like breast milk and starts smelling - well, like, poo.  But for now, it remains a cause for elation, a sign he's eating enough and processing enough that his gas won't make him cry for another six hour jag.  

And his diaper music has inspired some of my own.  These are the first tracks from my first album "Diaper Music"

(To the tune of Don't Cry for Me Argentina - my apologies to Andrew Lloyd Weber (or not) )

Don't pee on me Owen Thomas
The Truth is I don't deserve it
All through your colic, your mad existence
I kept on rocking
Now keep your piss-tance! 

(and from when he HATED having his diaper changed)
A stinky stinky diaper - what do you do? 
It's a catch twenty-two when you're covered in poo
A stinky stinky bottom, everybody's got em
But if we don't change it pee - u , pee-u
You may fight it, you may scream
But trust me this is no one's dream

(And yes I realize this second 'song' contradicts my argument that poop does not smell but this is for the formula babies out there.)