All the Horrible Girliness

I've gone past the threshold. I always thought that, if I could just read enough on a subject, I'd get it. Understanding would occur.

So, since I found out I was pregnant, I've been reading. I read the week-by-week updates on the bug's development on iVillage; I read What To Expect and What To Eat When You're Expecting. I read dozens of baby and pregnancy magazines (to my credit, bags of these were given to me, free, by doctors and nurses and at every birth and child prep class). I read The Happiest Baby On The Block and Supernanny: How To Get The Best From Your Children, and now I'm reading The Baby Whisperer, and I think the Whispering lady is the final straw. I am the beast of burden, and my back is broken. Because when you read a lot about babies and parenting, you do not learn more. Instead, you reach a level where you've learned everything, and you apply it to the best of your pert little new-parent ability, and then the experts start to argue. And then their advice doesn't work. Maybe it works for every child they've come across, but apparently your child is a space alien, or some odd strain of baby, or straight from the cabbage patch, and you begin to wonder if you have a baby at all, or if you are really in a padded room somewhere, encased in a straightjacket, and this whole parenting thing is just the whacked movie playing in your head.

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I don't know how it started. The War On Terror? A.D.D.? Columbine? But this British childcare fad has to stop. I mean, I love Supernanny. She's kind of hot, and you can tell she digs kids, but what's with the Nanny 911 bitches? Especially that one with the droopy eyes. They just stand around shaking their heads at the madness, forgetting that the shaking heads thing is our job. The viewing audience. Their job is to fix things, for fuck's sake.

When I was in Spain, I visited Benedorm, where many British people hang their bleachy white skin out in the sun to be burned during holiday, and their kids are just as fat and annoying as ours these days.

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The Baby Whisperer is one such annoying British broad. You get into the book, initially, because this woman is said to be able to interpret baby cries. And the book starts out nicely enough. She's calling you luv and ducky and calling diapers nappies and that's very cute, very reassuring, very Mary Poppins. You plod through a few chapters of acronyms and advice that sounds pretty right but is starting to put you on edge just a tad, because those luvs are sounding the slightest bit self-righteous. Then, with relief, you get to the page with the chart on it that shows which cries mean what and it's worthwhile. Finally, the magic key!

It's after this chart that the Whisperer's true colors flood forth. The duckies fade and you go from feeling wary to downright violent toward this bitch. "You wouldn't like it if someone came along and threw your legs up over your head without asking, would you? Then why would you do that to your baby?" Yeah, honey, that would suck, but then it's a baby. I would use the fucking toilet. Then she's off on how music should be age-appropriate, which I guess means I should stop rocking him to sleep with Tori Amos. Then her sidebars get touchy, and now she's doing nothing but discounting all the other experts' advice. The pediatrician who wrote Happiest Baby On The Block notes often that in Bali, babies are held 100% of the time until they're over three months old, and they still grow up independent and strong. Her comeback? "Well, we aren't in Bali, now are we?"

If nothing else, isn't babyhood the great equalizer? Babies are babies. They don't know whether they're American or Balinese or Martian; they just know they're hungry or uncomfortable. They don't even know when they're tired, or, at least, they have no idea what to do about it when they are. Miss Whisper implies that if your kid falls asleep in your lap, you may as well forget about him moving out of the house. Ever.

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It probably isn't The Whisperer's fault that I'm having this nervous breakdown. Her book was in the wrong place at the wrong time, is all. I've simply read too much. It's probably really a very nice book, and I'm sure that droopy-eyed nanny is doing all the solid work off-camera, but I'm tired of it all. I think it was Dr. Spock who said something like, "You know more than you think you know," and it's true. The bug's first couple of weeks were harder than they needed to be because I wasn't feeding him enough; my mother had told me that after five minutes, he wasn't really eating anymore and I was just being used as a pacifier, so off he went after five minutes, whether he was done or not. Then I'd walk the floor with him for two hours, mostly asleep and shoving a pacifier onto his tongue, when all he wanted was a little more to eat and we both would've slept.

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In other news, I force myself not to post zillions of pictures here. I may set up another blog just for that purpose.

posted by Samus @ 2:35 PM