Bumblebee Sweet Potato

This post by daddychip got me to thinking about the subject of kids and books.

My kids both love books, and one of the things that I look forward to most as a parent is introducing them to my favorite books. We’ve read to our kids for almost every day they’ve been alive–even when they were tiny infants. When the Bumblebee was a baby, sometimes I would read aloud to her from books that I was reading myself, because just the way my voice changed when I was reading her a story (versus talking to her) seemed to calm her down.

We have literally thousands of books in our house, that run the gamut from kids’ books, to contemporary trade fiction, to junky mysteries, to scholarly tomes (hello Riverside Shakespeare). We’ve got amateur poetry, family autobiography, literary crit and analysis, theatrical anthologies. We’ve got a lot of books. Once, my mom asked me if there was any room in our house that didn’t have a bookshelf in it, and I told her, “of course not, Mom, I would never store books in the bathroom–water is bad for them.” That was before the cookbooks got moved into the dining room, though, so now there are three rooms in our house with no permanent collection.

Both of our kids have bookshelves that are crammed full of picture books, board books, and lately, chapter books. Over the years, we’ve read the Bee some books that were (at the time) way beyond her comprehension (The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, The Wizard of Oz). When the Bee was born, I started reading kids’ and young adult books again, so that I would be prepared when she was ready to read that stuff, and I’ve found some amazing things along the way (although nothing yet to dislodge my personal favorite, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book I must have read twice a year from ages 8-11). The Sweet Potato is currently in a phase where he drags piles of books (mostly board books) from one room to another, demanding to have them read. And the Bee has gotten to be a good enough reader that she can sometimes read those books to him, which makes him (and me) very happy.

My own parents had very different attitudes about books. I grew up in a house with a lot of books–when I was 6 or 7, my dad built a bookcase from one end of our upstairs hall to the other, to house his own books. He had great, eclectic taste in novels, and was definitely the parent that you wanted to have reading to you at bedtime. I vividly remember lying in my parents’ bed with my two brothers, as he read aloud to us from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, and later Charlie’s Great Glass Elevator. I think we had every Roald Dahl book that was intended for children, and some that weren’t.

My dad played a very important role in my development as a reader, and it continued on as I got older, even as my parents marriage crumbled and eventually fell apart. He always encouraged me to read, and gave me books that he thought would challenge me. He let me read anything on his shelves, although I do remember once or twice having him tell me (when I was 12 or 13) that I should wait until high school to read a certain novel.

His own reading tended to the black humorists. He was a great fan of Vonnegut’s, and had all of John Irving’s early work (the Irving novels were among the books he thought I read a year or two too early). He also had stuff by Woody Allen, and Steve Martin’s first book, Cruel Shoes (which I found hilarious as an adolescent). But I think it was important to his image of himself that he read the work that was contemporary and important. When, in sixth grade, I was given an assignment to write a book report on a biography or autobiography, I went home and looked on his shelf and found The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and wrote my report on that. Needless to say, I was the only suburban white girl in my school who wrote about that book.

My mother had a somewhat different parenting attitude about books. My mom is not really a reader. I don’t remember seeing her ever with a book in my childhood, and even now, she tends to read things like The Pilot’s Wife. While I read a healthy amount of what’s now called chick lit myself, I don’t think she ever really enjoyed reading anything that was really meaty. But the other difference between my parents was in the way they felt about my reading. My mom was the parent who would tell me things like, “you’ve got your nose in a book all the time,” or would try to make me stop reading to go out and play.

Looking back now, I know that she wasn’t doing this out of some malice toward books. My mom is an educated woman, who values literacy very highly. She sends my kids books. But in my childhood, she came off as a parent who was suspicious of books. When I was 13 or 14, I checked out Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People from the library, and she was so enraged when she saw me reading it that she made me stop immediately and returned it to the library herself. I’m not sure what bothered her most about it–the cursing or the fact of Lenny Bruce himself. The thing that I came away from that experience with, though, was that she didn’t trust me to evaluate my own reading. That she thought that just by reading about Bruce’s prodigious drug use and profanity, I’d be sure to head that direction myself.

Now that I’m a parent, I see my own parents differently (of course). My mom, at the time of that incident, was going through a bitter separation and divorce from a person who swore like a longshoreman and drank like F. Scott Fitzgerald. My dad and I had really only one thing in common–our love of reading–and when he moved out, he knew it was a topic we could connect on, and he knew that by treating me as more of an ‘adult’ reader, we would bond more easily.

I don’t know how I’ll react when my kids want to read something that I think is “too old” for them. I get to make those choices now–I’ve read the BB the first of the Lemony Snicket books, but not yet Harry Potter, because I think she’ll find the Potter book scary, while the Snicket books are not. But what would I do if she wanted to read The Cider House Rules at age 12? I’m not really sure. I’m open to advice, though.

well, so much for yesterday’s venture into pop culture. Cause I just got smacked back to reality.

I was originally going to title this post “What’s Wrong with Congress?”, but I decided that was too narrow. Because I’m really pissed off right now, and mostly it’s at my fellow whitefolks out there in the country.

Last night, the US Congress voted for a budget resolution that added $70 billion more in tax cuts than they’ve already doled out over the past four years. And they also voted to cut $10 billion from the Medicaid budget, and $3 billion from agricultural programs, part of which will come from food stamp cuts.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

Now, I’d like to just be mad at Congress about this–but how can I? After all, they’re just doing what they told us they would do, running up to the last election. What’s it to them if poor people and the working class don’t have hospitals or food? It’ll be a cold day in hell before a member of Congress needs to go on Medicaid–given that as a result of our electing them, they will get free health care (did I say free? I meant paid for with our tax dollars) for the rest of their lives.

It’s the rest of us that I wonder about. Those of us who have to use hospitals, which are more and more reliant on federal money to stay open, since fewer and fewer of us have private health insurance. Those of us who think, “well, why should they (meaning the poorer and mostly darker folks) have health care for free, when I have to pay for it?”

Why are we letting these fools in Congress do this to us? Why are we letting them use issues like guns, abortion, gay marriage and race to split us off from voting our own best interests? Why have we let them convince us that letting Bob and Dave marry each other is going to do more to undermine the American family than greedy corporations, that every year push us to work more and more hours, staying away from our kids and our families?

I live in a suburb outside one of the ten biggest cities in the country. In the city that I live near, there are nationally known hospitals that get upwards of 40% of their funding from Medicaid. What’s going to happen to those hospitals when they lose 40% of their funding?

It’s not as if there are doctors in those hospitals who see poor people, and different doctors for the rest of us. If those hospitals lose half their income, it will cripple their ability to provide service to everyone in this community–not just to the poor. Not just to the elderly.

I’m starting to worry that, in my lifetime, we will lose every gain made in the New Deal, and in the Great Society. We will have to organize just to regain ground that people fought and died for at the turn of the last century.

It’s said that every generation wants to leave the world a better place for their kids. I think we just made it worse.

Okay, I’m departing from my usual blogging about the politics of raising kids and/or telecommuting to channel my inner 13 year-old.

SQUEEEEEEEEEE!

I feel much better now.

Backstory: I’m in the hip hop generation, and I love it. Yesterday, the opening strands of “Hate It or Love It” (50 Cent/The Game) came on the radio. I turned it up, because I really dig that song, especially the part where 50 Cent sings about his mom kissing a girl.

But holy crap!? It wasn’t “Hate It or Love It”! It was the remix–”MVP” with Mary J. Blige.

MARY J. BLIGE, people! Can I just say that I’ve been a huge fan since like 1994?

How is this not yet available on iTunes?

The Sweet Potato calls me Daddy. He calls his daddy Daddy, too. Somehow, at nearly 21 months of age, he’s never once managed a Mama or Mommy, or even anything that started with M when looking my way.

I still think he’s adorable, of course. Sometimes, when I come home and the kids are playing in the yard, he’ll come running toward me screaming, “Daddy, Daddy!” in that excited way that toddlers get. I’m so happy that he’s that excited to see me that I don’t really care what he calls me.

But it leads to some odd experiences occasionally. Like last Saturday. I took both the kids to get their hair cut. The SP hates getting haircuts, and he resisted mightily–I ended up having to hold him on my lap while I sat in the haircutting chair, and the hairdresser whizzed around, poking me in the eye with a comb, and trying to cut his hair as fast as humanly possible.

Finally, there got to be a point where he realized that resistance was useless, and he just sat there whimpering, “Daddy, Daddy.” The woman cutting his hair said, “oh that’s cute, he wants his daddy.” And I said, “no, he’s talking to me, he calls me Daddy too.” And then she didn’t say anymore.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately. I was reading W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks last week, and there’s a line of it I can’t get out of my head–describing Atlanta, he writes, “It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream…”

That made me think of Hughes, and also Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous I Have a Dream speech, and the line of Fitzgerald’s about Gatsby, “(He) paid a high price, living too long with a single dream.”

Du Bois is talking about the “untrue dream” of the confederacy–the untrue dream of white supremacy. But it made me wonder what other untrue dreams our society, our country is haunted by these days.

Is it a “truthful dream” that everyone can get rich, if they just work hard? Is is a “truthful dream” that everyone has equal opportunity to succeed here, regardless of their immigrant status, race, religion, gender, economic class or sexual orientation? I don’t think those dreams are truthful. I think they’re the untrue dreams that our country is haunted by today. And I think they’re leading in an awful lot of instances to the deferred dream of Hughes’ poem.

But not always.

You know how some days, you leave the house and you think, “now why did I wear this? It’s way too hot/cold/orange/PMS-y for this outfit!”

If you telecommute, it’s much easier to deal with morning clothing mistakes like the one I made today, which involved capris & sandals. On a side note, I must point out something I’ve been trying to work into my blog for weeks. The Bumblebee calls capri pants “pre-kays.” It’s one of my favorite of her malapropisms.

On the other hand, yesterday I had to drive about a 200 mile round trip to attend a meeting. When I got to the meeting location, I realized my folly in not having checked the temperature at my destination, which was easily 20 degrees colder than when I left my house. I had to make an emergency run to Dress Barn, which was the only clothing store I could find that was still selling sweaters. I’ve never shopped at Dress Barn before, largely because of the name. But when I got inside, I realized it’s also because I’m just the wrong age. I was easily the youngest person in the store by about 20 years, and that’s including the sales staff, who probably themselves took 10 years off the average age (before I walked in). Yikes!

To all my working sisters out there, today is the day that our pay finally catches up with the men’s. Yes, it’s true Virginia, there still is sexism.

That sexism isn’t as visible to most of us as it once was. But it’s still institutionalized in many kinds of jobs. As my celebration of Equal Pay Day, I offer the following example:

About 8 years ago, I went to work for a local union in California where I represented classified school employees. Classified workers are secretaries, janitors, school bus drivers, food service workers, instructional aides–basically anyone who works in a school or school district who is not either a faculty member or a boss. In one of my shops, I represented a wall-to-wall unit, which included both the service and maintenance unit (traditionally male) and the clerical and food service unit (traditionally female). After I had been working with these folks for a few months, I had to bargain a wage reopener, and I took a good long look at their salary schedule for the first time.

What I found when I did that was that the positions that had historically been held by women (secretary, instructional aide, food service worker) were paid on average $3.00 per hour less than the jobs that historically had been held by men (janitor, groundskeeper, delivery driver). There were not that many differences in the job requirements for these positions (janitors had to be able to lift a certain amount of weight, secretaries had to type a certain amount of words per minute)–essentially, they had always been held by people with the same basic educational requirements. Mostly, working class folks with a high school education–possibly an associates degree. Some of the higher skilled jobs occupied by both genders had more requirements (certification for bus mechanics, advanced computer training for bookkeepers), but no position in the entire bargaining unit required a college degree, or any advanced education.

The main difference that I could determine in the positions was that historically, the women who had filled the clerical, food service, and aide positions had taken those jobs so that they could work on the school schedule while their kids were in school. They didn’t have reliable summer programs, or after-school care–it was just easier for them to work in the district, and have the flexibility that came with that schedule. But it ended up costing them a lot.

$3.00 per hour times 40 hours in a work week is $120 per week. Now most of these folks were school-year only employees–they didn’t work a full 52 weeks, but closer to 36. What it basically boiled down to is that, for these women, their choice to work in a clerical job meant they lost about $4,320 per year. Not because they were less skilled than the men. Because they took pink collar jobs.

The district’s argument, when we brought it up to them, was they had to pay the janitors and other ‘male’ positions more, because they did things like handle chemicals. I’m not trying to disparage the work of janitors in any way–I had some great janitor members working in that district, and they were hard working people. But even those janitors would admit that their jobs weren’t harder than the clerical jobs–just different from them. The men in those jobs knew they didn’t deserve to make $3.00 per hour more than the women in the clerical jobs–they knew that sexism (although they wouldn’t call it that) had put them in a position to make more money than their sisters in the pink collars. And ultimately, they knew that to make a more just situation for their co-workers, they were going to have to accept less themselves. That if the district had only so much money to go to raises, and they wanted to begin to address the issue of parity, they would have to take a smaller percentage raise, with the ‘women’s’ jobs getting slightly more.

Parity didn’t get achieved with that wage reopener. We made small steps toward it, and small steps the following year. I left the union after that, but I know that for at least the next year, they made some small other progress, because the person who replaced me called to talk about it. I hope that progress is still being made there.

For more info on Equal Pay Day, get a cluw.

Mr. Bear
Originally uploaded by landismom.

Mr. Bear is an important member of our household. He’s the Sweet Potato’s comfort object.

I’m not really sure when we realized the importance of Mr. Bear. It was pretty early in the SP’s life. Since that time, Mr. Bear has gone nearly everywhere the SP goes. He travels to daycare every day. He visits grandma with us. He gets carried around our house. He doesn’t get to go to the grocery store, or places like that, because we fear losing him.

He’s been left in the yard once. He got thrown in the trash at daycare by an overzealous toddler helping to clean up one time, and was (fortunately) saved by Miss Evelyn. He gets a bath once a week, and he can be truly grimy by the end of the week.

Once, I tried washing him more frequently. I thought, if I wash him at midnight while the boy is sleeping, he won’t notice. Unfortunately, the SP woke up just after I had put Mr. Bear into the wash, and then we were doomed. He wouldn’t go back to sleep until after Mr. Bear was dried and in his crib again.

Since the SP is a kid who has been largely sleep-problem-free, we’re happy about the presence of Mr. Bear.

The Bee never had a comfort object, per se. Instead, she had my thumb (or thumby, as she called it). We lived in an apartment when she was a baby, and to keep her from screaming all night (and keeping the upstairs neighbors awake), one of us had to sit with our hand in the crib, so that she could sleep with her hand gripping onto the thumb. It was the only thing that comforted her.

When she broke her leg (at age two) and we were in the ER, she held onto my thumb and stopped crying. The attending nurse said she had never seen anything like it. While very endearing, it became a real problem, especially once it came time for her to sleep on her own.

I’m happy about Mr. Bear, because he gave the SP something to hang onto at night that isn’t attached to me. There’s something about this bear that just really does it for him. Know what it is? The tag on its butt. The SP sticks the tag into his ear, and then all is well with the universe. I can’t explain it–I once stuck the tag into my own ear, to see if I could understand the attraction, but it eludes me.

So I was feeling pretty proud of myself this afternoon. I was out mowing the lawn, while landisdad was inside, making dinner. Doesn’t sound very transgressive, does it? But in my neighborhood, it’s weird for a woman to cut the lawn. There’s only one other married woman on our street who cuts her own lawn–even some of the single women hire it out. But I think it’s important for the Bee & the SP to understand that women can do shit like that too.

In our house, the division of labor is pretty ungendered. Landisdad does 98% of the cooking (the other 2% occurs on nights he has to work late, and I don’t take the kids out to dinner), he cleans the kitchen, and does a fair amount of childcare (also known as parenting, in our house). I do most of the laundry, clean the bathrooms, manage the money, and do the big picture thinking about the house (i.e.–calling painters, dealing with repair people, making major purchases).

Some of those things (like the cleaning of various rooms) were established early in our relationship. Some of them (like the managing of money and the parenting) have developed over time. A lot of them boiled down to, which one of us cared more about the way a thing looked or was. The lawn, for example. I grew up in the Jersey suburbs, where people whose lawns are overgrown are somewhat akin to serial killers, in the eyes of the neighbors. He grew up in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, where the idea that you could legislate vegetation is pretty limited to controlled substances. I’ve done a lot to cast off the shackles of my suburban upbringing, but I still cringe when our grass gets to be more than knee-high on the kids. So I’m the prime mover of lawnmowing.

On the other hand, I hate to cook. I’ve never liked it at all, and one of the main reasons that I agreed to marry landisdad (as opposed to just living in sin in perpetuity) was that he actively likes to cook, and is really good at it. If it were up to me, our kids would never eat vegetables, because I’m not a big vegetable eater. But thanks to him, we have healthy, well-rounded meals nearly every night of the week.

Most of the time, I never think about the fact that for many women, the idea that their husband would do all of the cooking is just plain weird. Earlier this week, however, I ran smack up into the fact that our arrangement is not the norm. I was dropping the Bee off at school, and another mom, who is coordinating a multi-cultural dinner at school, asked me what we were bringing. “I don’t know,” I said. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” “No, landisdad’s cooking it. I’m sure he knows what he’s making–I just haven’t asked him.” {strange look} “Okay.”

It’s nice to feel like you’re living on the edge once in a while. But after I came in from mowing the lawn, I sat down to read the latest issue of Bitch. And I realized that what I know about genderfucking could fit in a teacup.

As a follow up to my post on the suburbs and race, allow me to recommend a book that I just finished reading: Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson. It deals with the racially-motivated murder of Henry Marrow in Oxford, North Carolina in May 1970. The author is the son of a local (white) minister, and was himself a ten-year-old witness to events leading up to and following the murder (but not the murder itself).

For me, one of the most compelling things about the book was that he never shied away from the issue of white liberals (including those he is related to), and their failure to overcome their own racism in dealing with African Americans in the book. Check it out!