Not Sure How Much Planning Really Works

11.22.2010

While vegging out, I watched one of those baby programs on TLC. I don’t know what this one was called, maybe it was Bringing Baby Home. Anyway, I watched it because the personality of the new parents reminded me a little bit of me and Rob.

The woman, let’s call her Tina, described herself and her husband, who I’ll name Paul, to be very organized people. Paul, an accountant, spreadsheets everything. This made me laugh out loud because Rob’s reputation as the spreadsheet king is legendary in our family. He, meaning Rob, is also meticulous, organized and methodical. I, on the other hand, aspire to be all of these things. In my head I’ve reached this zenith, but down here, in reality, not so much. I have moments of clarity…but not as many as Rob would particularly like. Being organized is one of my favorite things to be in the whole wide world, and when I’m on top of it, it’s wonderful. I’m also one of those people who has post-its all over the house. Post-its with reminders, post-its with to-do lists, post-its for post-its. But then I forget to read them. See, I aspire.

But I’ve gone off topic. The TV show. The couple. They had all these things about their lives on a spreadsheet planned out along with the different ways they organized things once home from the hospital. This was probably the last time they had peace because when their baby woke up several hours after coming home, Tine realized that getting anything done was nearly impossible. The moment she sat down to have lunch, the baby woke up and cried. The next morning, she peeked in his room, saw that he was asleep, and decided to take a quick shower but the moment she turned on the water, he woke up. She said it was a real struggle to get used to a new way of doing things. She wouldn’t trade it for the world but it was definitely going to take getting used to.

It amazes me how a little baby can wreak so much havoc on people’s lives. And I say that endearingly. It doesn’t matter how many spreadsheets you create, how much you plan ahead, how many boxes you organize, that little baby is like a hurricane. A hurricane of love, but a hurricane nonetheless. I’m sure there are some things you can prep for but I’m getting increasingly convinced that it doesn’t matter how many baby books you read, how many classes you might take, with how many people you might speak, nothing can prepare you for your life with a baby. It’s all trial and error and flying by the seat of your pants.

What a unique and terrifying and thrilling experience it must be.

Fertility Treatment: Is the Bargain Worth It?

09.01.2010

To add to the long list of issues I already have, I now tack on one more: fertility treatments. And I’m deeply divided. I’ve always held my nose up at this but I’m aware how asinine that is especially because I can’t support my snobiness with anything other than a shrug and loud “harrumph.”

I still don’t really know where I stand, but catching about 10 minutes of that TLC show, Quintuplets By Surprise, I began to listen to my range of emotions. When it comes to finances, I have no sympathy for this family. They lost $90,000 worth of income last year and added $60,000 of expenses by having five babies. And these expenses are just for the basics, not counting the extra medical attention two of them need.

The reason they even got these five babies is because they wanted their daughter, also conceived through fertility treatments, to have a sibling. This is often the case. Parents go in wanting one more child and get double, triple or more what they bargained for. Why? If conceiving the first child was so difficult, why chance getting twins, triplets, etc knowing that the cost, energy, and sanity will cost that same amount? And the “you don’t have kids so you don’t understand” won’t garner any sympathy from me either. You already have a kid, right? Is it like everything else in our society: one is not enough?

But let's flip it, who am I to say that a couple who can conceive naturally can have more than one kid while others can’t? That’s not fair. I acknowledge that.

And what about those women who are like me and wait to have a kid when they are older and conceiving may become more difficult? Choosing to wait for financial reasons, for emotional reasons and for maturity reasons becomes a punishment later in life when the chances of conceiving drop over 30%. Should there not be fertility treatments to help older women have a baby? Part of me says that if it’s meant to happen naturally then it will and let nature take her course. It seems like one unnecessarily complicates his/her life by going in with the intentions of conceiving one kid and coming out with five.

I don’t know what I would do and I can only hope that I don’t have to face that decision should we decide to start trying and things don’t happen. Being my age, childless and confused with time pressing only forward is difficult… Incredibly difficult and quite often very lonesome because we only hear from women who seem to never doubt the fact that all they ever wanted was to have a kid and wasted no time getting to that stage of their life. Would I trade my 20s and 30s for a kid? No. Is this fair? No. Will I be OK if we want kids and can't have them? I don't know.

Toddlers as Live Barbies

06.02.2010

TLC has become my drug. It’s disgusting, foul, wrong on so many levels, and yet, I can’t stop watching it lately. Is there a Reality Show Anonymous group meeting somewhere? I need to join.

The latest disgusting show that I’ve sat through is called Toddlers & Tiaras. Just when I thought that Jon and Kate Plus Eight was rock bottom for the TV station…nope, I was proven wrong. In fact, it’s not just the show. It’s the fact that people do this to their little girls. Look at this picture:

How is this normal? If you’re going to put your kid in a pageant, why does she have to be a Barbie doll? Can’t there be a pageant about how fast a child can run? Or how about whether or not the kid knows her ABCs? I don’t understand the fascination with pageants. I sat through ONE (too many) Miss America pageants in my life – back in the 1980s, I think. It was painful not just because the contestants wouldn’t stop fake smiling or that they couldn’t put a sentence together, but I sat watching them feeling like shit because I didn’t have the kind of body they were strutting on stage.

Just look at these photos:

This isn't cute! Cute is a little girl in pigtails with jeans, Sketchers, and a cute T-shirt with, like, Hello Kitty on it. Cute is a little girl in a polka dotted dress. Cute is not a little girl with the face of a 25 year-old.

And if you watch the show, many of these girls are being taught that they are so special that they are to be waited on hand and foot and that every whim and desire is to be catered to because they are beautiful. Little girls as young as 2 are demanding and throwing temper tantrums because they don’t like something. And not your typical tantrum that 2 year-olds throw. It’s teenaged-level tantrums at the age of 2! It’s gross. One girl insisted on having a stage name that, OK, I get it. Many performers have stage names, but the way this girl was talking about her stage name vs. who she is in “real life,” kept me thinking about the fact that I think she actually had a multiple personality disorder. And if not that, then there was just something off about her. I don’t care what anybody says, sometimes you can just tell.

I know that I’m going to be up crap creek if I ever have a little girl who is a girly-girl. I will have great difficulty relating to her because I’ve always been a tomboy, getting my hands dirty and climbing trees. (Although I always made sure to have the right accessories with me.) Despite being overweight, I was into sports and am way too competitive – much to Rob’s dismay at times. I hate(d) shopping and it wasn’t until college that I discovered make-up. But even to this day I would rather sleep in than get up 30 minutes early to make-up my face.

But I AM open enough that if I did have a girly-girl, that I would do what I could to accept that and support that, but hell if I put her in a pageant. That might make me wrong but I really do think that pageants teach girls all the wrong things. Many of the moms and grandmoms on the show claim that pageants give their (grand)daughters confidence and that’s the reason they put them in. Well, I hate to break it to you…but there are plenty of other ways for girls to gain confidence and NOT be paraded around like pieces of meat from the time they're infants.[1]

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[1] Pictures from Google Images, running a search for Toddlers & Tiaras.

TV Inspires II

04.28.2010

Watched an episode of Parenthood and there’s a scene where Adam’s wife comes back from a weekend away where she helped an old friend on the campaign trail. She was explaining to Adam how exciting it was to be back in the workforce and how great she felt, and that she was offered a full-time position as the candidate’s Communications Director and that she really wanted the job.

At that point, Adam said he supported her and that they’d figure out how her schedule would coincide with the kids’ schedule and that they’d have to make a lot of adjustments (especially with the recent diagnosis of their son’s Asberger’s), but that they’d figure it out. As he was pin-pong-ing ideas of how to make it work, you could see the look on his wife’s face grew more and more long and filled with concern because it was a lot of adjustments just so that she could take the job. At the end of the scene, she decides that it just wasn’t the right time to take a job.

I thought I’d cry a river at this point because that’s EXACTLY how I feel about kids as a woman: Do you have kids and give up a career and 18 years later look in the mirror and ask, Where am I and why? Or do you forfeit the kids and run the risk of 18 years going by and regretting your decision looking in the mirror and asking, Where am I and why?

I guess…either way…you’re asking the same questions.

Flying With Children

04.07.2010

Today I was finishing up breakfast and caught the beginning of The View. I used to watch this show all the time and then they got Elisabeth and after a while, I just couldn’t take her anymore and so I stopped watching. But, once in a blue moon, I’ll catch the show just to check in and see what’s going on. Today was a blue moon and boy was I glad I did.

One of the hot topics was children on planes. Surprisingly, Barbara Walters was all about how kids are annoying on planes and there should be a separate section on planes for parents with children. Well, this comment threw Elisabeth and Sherri into such a tizzy, defending parents who travel with their kids and how wrong Barbara was for her opinions, etc, etc. Elisabeth actually confessed that she hopes that other people on the plane will entertain her children so that she can catch a glimpse of a magazine. (This is how she reminded me of why I don’t like her. “Please, just don’t talk,” I want to continuously tell her.)

I hate to say it but those two (Elisabeth and Sherri) have quickly forgotten what it’s like for those without children to be on plane with children. First, before I go on, I want to say that I know that, in the end, parents do have it worse than I while traveling with their kids. I only have to deal with and listen to the child while flying, but the parent has to deal with the child before the flight, during the flight, and after the flight. I get that. But, now having said it, as a passenger, it sucks.

My sister and I got stuck sitting behind a woman and her two children on a direct flight from Paris to L.A. Let me repeat: Direct. One child was a toddler of about 2 or 3 and the other was about 1. The mother got so tired of dealing with her hyperactive toddler that she eventually just let him lay on the floor in the aisle blocking the path so passengers and the attendants had to climb over him if they wanted to pass by. The mother did absolutely nothing to curb his behavior or to make any kind of a gesture to move the child. When he wasn’t on the floor, he was standing in his chair either kicking it or staring at me in between the cracks of his chair and his mother’s. You would think that on a 10 or 11-hour flight a toddler would want to nap, but apparently that was too much to ask for. I won’t even go into the child across the aisle that was crying for a good portion of the two hours that we were waiting to take off. Again, I know that it’s hardest on the parents but if they’re in a different section or a completely different flight for parents only (as suggested by Whoopi), then there can be a child-parent party where everybody understands where the other is coming from. It’s kind of like when I go to a restaurant and a child is screaming and yelling or running around and the parents are doing nothing about it. I am not out to be a witness to this. Flights are getting increasingly expensive and people are getting increasingly cranky. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with separating parents and kids from the rest of the passengers.

TV Inspires

03.31.21010

Rob and I have a number of favorite TV shows that we watch – mainly my picks, hee, hee, hee – and, last night, we were catching up on one of them, Parenthood. At one point during the show, Rob turned to me and said that the show builds up your stress and then eases it by having some touching moment that makes you want to cry. I agree. There have been very few shows, in my opinion, that were worth watching. Most family-oriented TV shows throughout the 90s and 2000s were so demeaning to family and, as a matter of fact, I just saw a blurb in the LA Times about how family shows are now changing to softer dialogue. I think this is great. Shows like Everybody Loves Raymond, for example, I thought was a good show at first, but after watching it a bit more closely, I realized how demeaning it is to men. This is a step backward. Feminism isn’t about putting down men and making them feel worthless, it’s about acceptance and fairness.

But back to the show. My favorite part of the day is when we all settle in for the evening after dinner and watch a little TV or catch a movie. We convene in Rob’s office (because that’s where I insist the TV be) and our two cats follow us in there and settle themselves on my lap, sometimes on top of each other, sometimes next to each other, but always on my lap. It’s a lovely feeling to be there with everyone I love and I sometimes wonder how much a child is going to alter this picture. I’m not saying this negatively.

There was a scene toward the end of Parenthood where everyone’s hanging out at the grandparents’ house and the guys were playing some basketball, the women, of course, were by the food and with the children, and the scene just brought me so much contentment. It made me think about all the x-mas holidays when we went to Chicago and how on x-mas day we’d go out to Indiana to my cousin’s and spend the day there with, like, 50 family members. Those big family gatherings are something I miss more than anything. There’s something about big families and holidays and the feeling of “belonging”. There’s a routine, there’s a system, and, as a kid, I never realized just how important this all was. It made me think about how empty I’ve felt since my grandmother moved back to Lithuanian in 1998 and that part of my routine came to a complete halt not to be picked up again, most likely, until we have kids.

Rob and I have a ton of friends here in LA and they’ve definitely become family so much so that when we talk about moving to another city it gives us both pause when we realize exactly who we’d be leaving behind. But these friends have their own families that they go to during the holidays or birthdays or other special occasions. They don’t come to our house. And now that my mom lives in Lithuania, my biological family has shrunk even more to just me and my sister; something I don’t want to ever lose but might. It makes me wonder why family becomes more important to us as we get older and becomes of the utmost importance to us when we have kids. When we’re teens we want nothing to do with our families but at some point that switches and, if we’re lucky enough, we still have them around and we can appreciate them. For all the havoc that families create, it’s those little precious moments we have with them that stay in our minds and hearts and maybe that’s a contributing factor to why people have kids.