Maternally Challenged

Wouldn't Have Known Nice If It Bit Her In The Ass

He was five years younger, and very good-looking. I mentally crossed him off the list then and there.

"Too young for me," I said to myself. "Too good looking. He's going to want some beach babe, not me."

I did my best to put him off. I told myself not to get my hopes up (but I bought a new outfit anyway). He mentioned his elementary school; I mentioned going to parent-teacher conferences there (with the son of my previous boyfriend, who was eight years older than I). He asked if I wanted to see a movie, and I said yes (but I picked a grim one, thinking Bet he'll be bored.) He wasn't bored. Neither was I. I kept waiting for the ax to fall, the fatal flaw to reveal itself. Nothing happened. We went on a couple more dates. What is wrong with this guy? I kept thinking. There must be something wrong.

After the third or fourth date--I forget--we wound up back at my place, and he put some moves on me, and I sat him down on the sofa and gave him The Talk. I told him about my delicate emotional life, and what a poor fragile thing I was, and what a disaster the last boyfriend had been, and how I had decided, very firmly, not to Get Involved just now. I was dating around, I said. No exclusive relationships. He would just have to understand, I said.

He sat there for a long moment, looking at his clasped hands. Then he looked at me and said, "That's okay. I can wait. I'm a nice guy. If you stick around, sooner or later you'll figure that out."

This is a cliche, but really and truly, time stopped for a moment. It was like the universe hit me upside the head with a two-by-four and said, HEY. MUSH-FOR-BRAINS! PAY ATTENTION!

Even then I wasn't sure. I decided to run it by some people. Two night later, I'm having drinks with my friend Alison, and I recount this whole incident. "Well, that's worth checking out," she said. Alison, my level-headed friend, so good at keeping her wits when all about are losing theirs. I had zero faith in my own judgment, but Alison's I trusted. Okay, I thought. I'll give it a try.

Fast forward 15 years, to last night. I've been out late, and I come in the house, tiptoeing, and on the kitchen table I see a card that says, "For Tracy. With all my love. #14." It's from the nice guy, who is asleep upstairs, who has put the kids to bed so I can enjoy a night out with friends on what was our wedding anniversary night, except the babysitter bailed at the last minute. And I reflect on how, sometimes, when the universe wants to give you something priceless, it has to pry open your white-knuckled, clenched little fist and press it into your unwilling hand. Words cannot express how glad I am that happened to me, so all I can say is: Happy Anniversary, love.

A Prayer for My Daughter, with Apologies to Yeats

Is hell-fire religion encoded in your genes?

I am wondering about this, because I was raised in a Bible-thumping, sinners-are-going-to-hell kind of religion. It's something I left without a backward glance when I was old enough to vacate the parental home, but by then it was too late. Take it from an authority: if you want to raise a really anxious, guilt-ridden girl-child with major self-esteem issues, the kind of kid who is primed for illnesses like depression the way easy-light charcoal is primed for the match, Fundamentalism is the way to go. Maybe the Taliban could do a better job in this department, but I'm not so sure.

Consequently, I have been scrupulously careful about not teaching my kids that a) they are sinners or b) that God is sitting up in the sky running a tab on their every infraction or c) that they will go to hell if they don't Measure Up. I have, in fact, not even pushed my kids to go to Sunday School or church, being opposed on principle to intellectual force-feeding of any kind. My husband and I have gone out of our way to explain that the world is full of people who have all kinds of beliefs--atheists and Buddhists and Muslims and Baptists and so forth. So explain to me why my 10-year-old announced to me last night, "Mom, I've figured it out."

"Figured what out?"

"I've figured out why I feel so anxious and sad. It's because God is mad at me. I've done something wrong, but I don't know what it is."

Travel back with me in time, to College Park, Georgia circa 1965, and this would be me, saying the exact same thing. Except that I had people telling me this kind of thing three times a week, and my daughter does not and never has. So what gives here? Does bad religion leak out of your pores or something? Do you impart it to your kids with your DNA, along with a tendency to chew your nails?

Aside from assuring my daughter that God is not mad at her, and that perhaps her general anxiety has more to do with starting middle school than with some horrible sin she has committed (and, by the way, do any ex-Fundies out there remember the Unforgiveable Sin? It was "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit," whatever that is, and I was always petrified that I'd done it without knowing it)--aside from this, I have no idea of how to disabuse her of this notion, or whether I should even try. Perhaps she'll figure out for herself that fear is not a healthy basis for any kind of spiritual life. Perhaps she will, as William Butler Yeats said, discover that

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

("A Prayer for My Daughter," June 1919)

Come to think of it, this is something I'm still learning. Maybe we can learn together.

Okay, Leslie, Let's Call It a Draw

A while back, I posted something about Leslie Bennett's book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? , in which Bennetts argues that women who drop out of the salaried workforce (note the adjective) to raise kids are making a dumb decision because they will be forever economically penalized. I was pretty hard on ol' Leslie because I thought she was placing the blame on moms and not the culture in which we live; Bennetts responded to that criticism (which was made by many others besides me) by saying basically she wasn't taking sides, she was just a reporter reporting the facts. I think it boiled down to a question of tone, and the fact that maybe Bennetts underestimates the difficulties some mothers face in combining career with child-rearing--a feat she was able to pull off herself rather successfully.

Anyway, all this made me rather interested in today's Kojo Nnambdi Show, on WAMU (88.5 FM) in which the panelists were discussing the benefits of marriage. The panelists included Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and who wrote, among other things, the book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992). Here's my question:

"I just heard somebody refer to marriage as a 'wealth-generating enterprise'. I'm curious as to how this squares with the fact that educated married women who drop out of the salaried work force to spend time with their kids suffer a long-term blow to their earning potential, if in fact they ever make it back into the salaried workforce at all. Are women like me just exceptions to the "wealth generating' rule?"

Here's Stephanie's answer, which I took off the air just now:

"That's a problem we don't have an answer for, frankly, and I don't think we ever will....There IS a penalty for women dropping out of the labor force."

 

So, okay, Leslie, you got your facts straight (though the existence of this phenomenon was never anything I took issue with). This is a reality I'm living with right now--though I have to say that my life has resembled Leslie Bennetts' life in many ways, the chief one being that I have never entirely dropped out of the labor force. I quit my job at the Washington Post when my oldest daughter was born 10 years ago, true, and I did not go back to the job that was waiting for me there after my year of maternity leave. My reason was really simple: I did not want to work at a job that would require me to devote roughly 12 hours out of my 24-hour day, with commuting and everything else, when I had a baby at home--and there were no flextime, telecommuting or job sharing options available to me (note to Leslie: please re-read this sentence). I took on contract work with my former employer. I freelanced extensively. I wrote a book. I did the math just the other day and, on average, I have contributed roughly $23,000 a year to the household income for each of the 10 years that I have been "not working" and home with my daughters. But still, in dollar terms, there's no doubt I have paid a price.   

In human terms, the jury is still out. When my oldest daughter was three--about the time I was thinking hard about returning to the full-time work force--it began to become apparent that there were Issues looming. She had tantrums--all kids have tantrums--but these were mind-boggling tantrums the likes of which nobody had ever seen. She'd been a high-strung kid from day one, and with that gut feeling that moms develop, I was getting the vibe that rough times were ahead. And they were. Over the next four or five years, she was a part-time job all by herself. Either I was dealing with a meltdown, or recovering from the effects of one, or looking up stuff on the web to explain them, or talking to school officials, or finding the right testing and psychologist, or going to therapy sessions, or....Trust me. It's a long list. Anybody who has a kid with ADD or Sensory Integration Disorder or autism or any other neurological issue is going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Her exact diagnosis doesn't matter here; suffice it to say that today she has a therapist, a psychiatrist, an occupational therapist, a pediatrician and several highly involved educators--all first-rate, all actively involved in helping her find her way through the mine fields she's been given to negotiate, and they have all made a huge difference. Yesterday, her therapist said to me, "Who could have done more for her? Look at what you've hooked her up with." My husband has told me much the same. The fact is that being a person with way too much experience with mood disorders and psychiatry provided me with tools to a) detect a problem at the very beginning and b) figure out, eventually, ways of dealing with it. Had it been up to my husband alone, it wouldn't have happened--not because he loves her less, but because his life has not included anything like the experiences I've had. Could I have done all that and held down a full-time job? Hell, no. That combination would have taxed a person of robust health who could get by on six hours of sleep every night, and believe me, I do not fit that description. It was either me, or nobody; it was a career or her.

So here we come to the big question, the one Leslie Bennetts asks: did I give up too much?

I don't know. All I do know is that today she graduated from fifth grade, and she was beaming. She made the honor roll; she has friends; she is (mostly) a happy kid. Next fall we start middle school, so stay tuned, but today the sky is blue and things look okay--not perfect by any means, but definitely okay. And, yes, there are days when I miss my old life; there are days when I yearn for the independence and sense of mastery I got from bringing in big bucks. During the dry spells that every writer goes through (this one has lasted about a year--so, note to the Cosmos: enough already!) I sometimes think, Boy, what an idiot I was. What a dumbass. If my kid turns into a heroin addict someday, I guess I'll know I made a bad bargain; if she wins the Nobel Prize, I'll know I did the right thing. And who knows what lies in between? Not me, not Leslie Bennetts, not anybody.

Anatomy of a Marital Dispute

Forget the details. The details are not important.

He's been working extraordinarily long hours and I've been covering the homefront, which can be tough, because at the moment we have two very high-maintenance kids. Our 10-year-old will soon be making the transition to middle school and has major angst; our six-year-old happens to be in a major whiny phase. There there's my ongoing health issues, and the fact that I am facing a big fork in the road in terms of my career, and don't know what to do. His career, meanwhile, is going great guns; he is in high demand. I confess I sometimes find the stark disparity painful. He needs a break. I need direction. The kids need attention. We all have needs that are not getting met, because there is this thing called Life, which feels like a marathon, and which we must all get up every morning and run all over again or risk....what? I don't know. I just know that we have to run.

And then this morning he makes a comment that a bystander might classify as passive-aggressive, and I rip into him about it. So then the kids are out the door, and he and I are having one of those conversations all married couples have at times--one of these "It's always--" or "You never--" And I'm saying to him, you have a pattern of doing this, and he's saying to me, You always notice every tiny little mistake I make, and I say heatedly, That's not true, there's plenty of things I don't comment on--oh crap, where did that comes from?--and he says, Then I guess I am just a lousy person, and I say with exasperation, Come on, that's not true, it's just that sometimes little things bug me. I'm sure you could come up with a list of things I do that bug you, too. But the fact is, I realize even as I say this, I don't know what those things are. He's never mentioned them.

There is a pause. And he looks at me and says, I just feel like you hold me to these high standards, and I never measure up--and suddenly we are on the same page, I know exactly how he feels. There is not a day that goes by that I don't feel that way, I say, with deep conviction--like I'm falling short.

You should give yourself more credit, then, he says, because you work really hard. And I say, Maybe you should give yourself more credit, too.

And then there is this long silence while we look at each other, having reached a point of impasse or understanding, it's not clear which, and then he sighs and reaches for his car keys and goes out the door, and I retire to my study to cry for a while. And gradually it dawns on me that really, he is not the person I need to forgive; there's nothing he's done that's so awful. The person I hold the most grudges against is myself; the person I most need to forgive is me. Because maybe if I were better at admitting that I am only human, it would be easier to let other people be only human, too.

And with this realization comes an unexpected sense of peace. And I know that somehow--I have no idea how--things will be okay.

The Martyred Mom Resigns Her Post

I loved my mother dearly, we were in some ways soul mates, but in the interests of journalistic objectivity I am obliged to report that at times she could be a real pain in the ass. One of those times was when she would walk around the house with her hand on her back (it was hurting), with a vertical crease between her eyebrows (that meant a migraine), heaving heavy sighs (that meant she was being Taken Advantage Of). She was a True Martyr, and we were all to blame. No amount of compensation could lighten the load. My mother leveraged her martyrdom to the hilt. She got a lot of mileage out of it. It was, in some ways, the most potent form of power she had.

At some point this past weekend, it occurred to me that I was following in her footsteps.

I think it was as I was walking home from the pool, after having asked my husband to drive me (it's half a mile to our house) and having met resistance to this idea ("Can't you walk?"--well, yes, but I'm in flip flops, and its hideously hot...). This was after I had a) mowed the lawn; b) trimmed the hedge; c) swept the driveway; d) put together a meal for seven members of his side of the family; e) arranged three playdates; f) made four trips to the grocery store and g) endured one half-hour meltdown from my high-maintenance 10-year-old when she was prevented from going to the pool right at dinnertime.

I absorbed. I dealt. I refereed. I put everyone's needs ahead of my own....until this epiphany, about five blocks from my house, when I suddenly decided: this sucks. It sucks not just for me--though especially for me--but it also sucks for everybody. What kind of example am I setting here for my daughters--that being a wife and mother means being everybody's Step-n-Fetchit? This is the maternal version of "shufflin' and grinnin'." In fact, if I were a black person, and white people were treating me like this, I would file an employment discrimination claim so fast it'd make your head swim. But no, I am a mom, which means I'm supposed to absorb the shocks. I'm supposed to deal, and look happy doing it.  It also puts me in a rotten position in my marriage; it makes me resentful, which makes me distant, which erodes the bond that is marriage. Admittedly, there are short-term pleasures to being a Living Saint. It can be perversely intoxicating---addictive, in fact, which is why so many of us get into the habit. But those pleasures are like benzodiazepines: in the long run, you pay a price. And it's a bitch of a habit to break.

Having decided to do just that, however--break the martyr habit, I mean--I was left with the question of exactly how. For the time being, I sulked. The emotional temperature of our home hovered around -14 degrees Celsius last night. My husband left for work with a cursory goodbye; one of my children left for school in tears. The whole family was out of kilter, and after awhile, when the basic chores were done, I fired off an e-mail to my husband listing my grievances. It was a looooonng list. It was, in many ways, unfair to unload on him all at once, including my feelings about events that took place weeks ago. No doubt there was a better way of going about this, but hey: I'm new to this. I couldn't see any middle ground. It was either unload with a mighty thud or....be a martyr.

I didn't see him until after softball practice tonight. Part of me was bracing myself to hear, "I'm filing divorce papers tomorrow." But no: he said, "You're right. I didn't answer because I have a hard time hearing this, but I know you're right." (Being on the receiving end of an e-mail from me when I am pissed is apparently not for the faint of heart; I write really well when I'm mad.)

This learning to take care of myself is a skill I'm coming late to. I am not good at it; nursing grudges is never good. But at least I can say I'm not nursing them anymore. They're out there, in the open, and now that they are out there in the open they don't look nearly so big. I will, no doubt, screw this up again sometime, but at least by making a note of this I will have some reference point--some way of saying, "You know, standing up for yourself is a good thing." And no, my husband is not henpecked or pussy-whipped or any of those other unflattering terms men apply to these things; he's my partner again. I'm not Harriet and he's not Ozzie and we are a lot better off being who we really are. I only wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I'd learned how to do this from my mother; I wish she'd known how to teach me. But we learn what we can, when we can, and do the best that flawed humans can do. And that's enough, because it has to be.

Chemotherapy for the Mind

That's what ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) reminds me of. Strictly speaking, taking antidepressants better fits that description, since there are chemicals involved in that and none in ECT (except the ones they use to put you to sleep, and powerful chemicals they are), but somehow the image of chemotherapy seems better suited to a procedure in which it is a mighty close call which is worse, the cure or the illness. I don't wish to scare anybody away from ECT--it's clear to me that it can be a lifesaving procedure in certain circumstances--but let us be clear here: whatever it is that causes ECT to lift depression also comes perilously close to messing around with the essence of what makes us human.

I knew going in that ECT was apt to have an effect on some of my short-term memories. I wasn't prepared for the fact that last weekend I took my daughter to see "The Bridge to Terebithia" and that I do not recall a single frame of the picture. I even went to the website, hoping that some stills from the movie would jog my memory--but no. It's as if it never happened.

That's a disappointment I can live with; after all, I can always go see a movie again. But it did raise the issue of what other memories I might lose if I kept this up. And I have to admit to some serious disappointment with is the way the psychiatric profession has handled this whole issue. On one hand, there's my doctor, who hasn't kept up with the news on what is a valuable therapeutic procedure, and who dismissively refers to doctors who use ECT as "shock jocks." My doctor is a good guy, and I expected more open-mindedness from him; it's disappointing to see bias creep into his professional judgment. But that, in the end, paled in comparison with the disappointment I felt at the hard sell I got from Sheppard Pratt. When you think about it, it's clear that ECT is an extremely cheap therapy--a few cents worth of electricity, a few minutes of an anesthesiologist's time, somebody who can interpret an EKG and monitor vital signs. This is the medical equivalent of restaurant iced tea--something you can create for pennies and sell for dollars, and did they ever sell it. I heard stories about people who kept coming back for 20, 30, 40 treatments, about people who loved it so much they had to be turned away. I heard about the benefits of "maintenance ECT." I heard marvelous stories about the wondrous curative effects of ECT. What I didn't hear was any serious discussion about a) its specific applicability to me and b) the particular concerns about memory loss posed when you make your living from observing and recording what you see. There's no doubt in my mind that I could have signed up for twice-a-week treatments for the indefinite future and the only thing that might have thrown a monkey wrench into things would be if Blue Cross began to raise some objection, thus interrupting the money flow.

In the end, I walked away with two lessons here. One is that yes, ECT can be helpful in some circumstances. It is by no means the blunt instrument of mind control that its opponents have made it out to be. If anything, its peril lies in the fact that it is so cheap and easy to administer--and, oftentimes, so fast and effective. Why? Because it's not something anybody should undertake casually. The potential for misuse calls to mind the old United Negro College Fund motto: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." Or another, from Roman times: "Caveat emptor"--buyer beware. And that's sad: you'd think that if ever there was an endeavor that should be insulated from the brute forces of the marketplace, it should be the so-called healing professions. Yet if anything, here is where they seem to be magnified.

The Nuclear Option

For about four months now I have been slogging through a prolonged period of depression. It's actually not the worst I've ever had, in the sense that I have not been actively trying to destroy myself and I've been capable of doing routine work, but it's been bad. The phone rings, and I don't answer. In the mornings I count the hours until I get to go to bed again. I am detached and flat with my kids. My libido is--pffft! Worst of all, I cannot think of a reason why I should continue to be here, what possible interest there could be for me on this planet for another five years, let alone another 25. I have started and put down a dozen books; my concentration doesn't last past chapter two. And if reading is impossible, writing is even more so, which is why there haven't been many blog entries lately. My career as a writer seems over; every day, I feel a little bit deader.

A lot of things have led to this, none of them anybody's fault; it's just the way life is sometimes. My mother died just over a year ago, and I miss her acutely. I published a book I had poured the last three or four years of my life into, and--unlike my first book--the interest from the mainstream media was nonexistent. (Which is not to say that I regard it as a failure or not worth doing; whoever is reading this has probably run across my book; the fact that the mainstream media didn't pick up on it has nothing to do with the importance of the topic; and I know it's helped some people.) But still: the book was written against long odds, and I guess I had hopes that it would spark more of a public conversation than it did about the topic of depression and motherhood, so there's disappointment, to say the least. This year has also been a year of health issues, probably not coincidentally: surgery on my knee, an unusual number of colds and stomach bugs and fevers, arthritis in my neck and lower back. This was the year we established a health club membership and I was going to finally lose those 20 pounds (again). Didn't happen.

But mainly, it's just the fact that it's winter--February, to be exact--and this has always been my worst month. It comes every year without fail. This year it came early. And every day for the past three or four months, I have felt a little bit deader, a little bit less like ever coming back to life. I upped my meds, and that didn't help. I started in on the benzodiazepines again, even though they are addictive, for the same reason that you reach for morphine when you're having surgery: it blocks the pain of constant anxiety...even though there will be hell to pay later on.

Depression takes a toll, and not just on you. Repeated episodes of depression have been associated with decreased volume in the hippocampus, the area of the brain where emotion and memory are integrated. For people who think antidepressants are a crutch, here's some news: a lifetime of untreated depression can literally leave you brain damaged. And that's saying nothing of the damage to your family: the husband who gets a hologram for a wife, the children who beg, " Mommy, can you spend some time with me?" only to hear, "No, I can't, I'm sick." They get fooled, because the person they know as mommy is still making dinner and picking them up at school--she's not on life support in a hospital anywhere--but she's not really mommy. She's the person who is inhabiting mommy's body, and, increasingly, that person is a ghost. (Which is why I chose the title I did for my book,The Ghost in the House.)

All of which comes as background for my reason to take a step which may sound extreme: electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. Yeah, I've seen One Flies Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I know that what people think when they think of ECT is of a drooling Jack Nicholson at the hands of a punitive medical establishment, a shell of his former self. ECT began a bit that way, but even in the 1960s it was nowhere near as barbaric as Ken Kesey described. Today it's often done on an outpatient basis, and among its more famous consumers is Kitty Dukakis, wife of former Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who has written her own book (with co-author Larry Tye) entitled Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. Mrs. Dukakis' experience is extremely atypical, in some ways: she gets "maintenance" ECT about once a year, since her experience with depression follows an extremely predictable pattern (which, come to think of it, mine does too). I also have two friends who have gone through ECT, one of them twice and one of those times back in the bad old days before they sedated patients or gave them muscle relaxants to mitigate the physical effects of the artificially induced seizure, and before techniques were developed the minimize the (usually temporary) memory loss associated with ECT. Even so, both of these people said it helped them.

How does it work? Doctors don't know. But then, they don't know much about how antidepressants work, either, just that they usually do. The brain is still very much a mystery to science, even though we know more about it than we ever used to, and it may well be, as a scientist at Eli Lilly once told me, "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it." About all we know is that a low-voltage electrical current, when passed through a portion of the temporal lobe, will induce a temporary seizure, and that this in turn changes the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain (which is what antidepressants do, by a different mechanism). Still, it remains extremely controversial. My own psychiatrist was not thrilled with my idea; he calls the ECT doctors "shock jocks." But one of the things you learn when you have a chronic illness is that, in the end, it's not your doctor who will be living with the results of what you do or what you don't do. It's you....and your family. In the end, my psychiatrist wrote the referral, and said he could understand my decision even if he didn't agree with it.

I had my first treatment yesterday. It was like getting hit by a truck (and I can say that with some authority, having survived being hit by a car as a teenager while getting off a school bus). Today, I have some muscle aches. It also gave me the mother of all migraines, and for an hour or so I was extremely disoriented. But then things slipped back into place, and now I can even remember the anesthesiologist saying, "You're going to sleep now" as he pressed the syringe into my IV. I also know that last night I looked at the sunset with real appreciation, and that after I went to bed I cried for a long, long time. They were healing tears. I felt much better after I was through.

Am I doing the right thing? God only knows; I don't. All I know is I have two little girls that I love, and a husband I love, and things I want to do. And when I die, whenever that day comes, I don't want anybody to be able to say it was for lack of wanting to live.

The Problem Ain't Cinderella

Peggy Orenstein has written a piece in the December 24, 2006 issue of New York Times Magazine (sorry--I'd give you the exact URL for the article but you have to pay to see it now--cost is minimal, though, and all you have to do is enter "Cinderella" as a search word to find it) entitled "What's Wrong with Cinderella?" Orenstein is lamenting the staggering number and variety of "princess" items being marketed to young girls these days. The craze began about six years ago when Disney (who else?) came up with the idea of packaging all of their most famous female characters--Ariel the Mermaid, Cinderella, Snow White, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even Pocohontas--as a "princess" product. Little girls ate it up, to the tune of $3 billion (that's billion with a "b") this year, up from $300 million in 2001. Mattel has brought out a slew of "princess" Barbies (which is confusing; I thought Barbie always WAS a princess), and even Dora the Explorer has debuted with a FairyTale Dora doll. All of which makes an old-line feminist mom like Orenstein apprehensive. Is all this Prince Charming crap going to sabotage her efforts to instill feminist values in her daughter? Will her daughter take this retrograde role model seriously?

I think Orenstein is missing the forest for the trees. Yeah, there's a shitload of princess stuff around, but it just happens to be pink and sparkly. Let's not forget the success of Bratz dolls (I call them Slutz, but I've also heard them referred to as My First Trollop dolls, which I kinda like), who are not "princess-y" at all but who have been pulling in big bucks from little girls, via their mommies, for about three years now. And let's not forget Build-A-Bear Workshop, which is one of the slickest ways I've seen lately to suck money out of your wallet: a store that caters to little girls and their desire for their very own teddy bear (or cat, or pink poodle, or whatever) with its very own heart inserted during the production process, with special noises that you can pick out, with a registered name all its own....and, naturally, lots and lots and lots of clothes and accessories to buy to go with. Just walking past that store will cost you $50; if you actually go in, you risk having to get a second mortgage. My kids over the years have conned me into going in there on three occasions--the last time, ostensibly, to spend their own allowance money, but of course I ended up ante-ing up too, being the craven idiot that I am--and guess what: the creations they walked out of there with, the stuffed animals they could not contemplate living without for one more hour, that's how bad they needed them, are now gathering dust on various shelves in their rooms.

It doesn't matter a hill of beans whether people are out there selling princess stuff to our little girls. They could be selling Wall Street Tycoon Barbie, or Greenpeace Activist Dora (hmmm...that might not be so bad) or Diane von Furstenberg bean bags--WHAT they're selling doesn't matter half as much as the fact that they are selling it, and in such staggering amounts. Kids these days are expert consumers at a mind-blowing age; my daughters' consumer savvy has already far eclipsed mine, if by "savvy" you mean awareness of brand names and logos (as distinct from value). The other day I was brushing my hair when my 10-year-old joined me in the bathroom to do the same. She looked at my jeans and said, "Nice logo, Mom. Very cool." I looked down and saw a swan. I had to read the tag in the back before I understood that this was Gloria Vanderbilt's logo. I'd bought the jeans off the sales rack at Kohl's for about $15, and I guarantee you I had no idea they were Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, nor would I have cared. But Rebecca knew.

No, the problem isn't that little girls buy princess stuff. If Disney didn't market princess stuff, my kids (and lots of other little girls) would find lace curtains to dress up in, or one of my old bridesmaid dresses, or something, and they would make themselves princesses, or brides, or something of the sort. Little boys will dash around wearing Superman capes, too. As a generation of two of feminist ought to have learned by now, some behaviors like this are genetically hardwired: little girls tend to play with dolls, no matter how many trucks you give them; little boys tend to play with trucks, even when you give them dolls. What kind of fantasy role model kids imitate at 6 or 8 or 10 is of concern to me, but it's ultimately of less concern than the fact that my daughters are both being bombarded with the message that in order to be happy, and popular, and socially accepted, they must buy, buy, BUY! baby. It's a message I strenuously try to counter every single day but it's like bailing out a boat with a tippy cup when the waves are washing over the sides. I get help in that regard from a fantastic organization called the Center for a New American Dream, which is always coming up with ideas to live more simply, buy less and fight the proliferation of junk in our lives. But it's an ongoing fight. The amount of pure-D crap marketed to kids these days will blow you away.

Princess, schmincess. This is not a feminist issue, Peggy. If you look past the sparkles and the tulle, you'll see that it's really an environmental and moral issue. Those Cinderellas you're so worried about are made of plastic--that's a petroleum product--they are manufactured most likely in Third World countries by people who make shit wages, probably via production methods that contribute to global warming, and they are marching into the stores by the millions. When the money has flowed out of our wallets and into the coffers of Disney Inc., and their top executives are enjoying the good life along pristine stretches of Malibu beach that the rest of us are banned from, and our little girls outgrow their princess phase--which they will--where do you think all those tons of plastic will wind up? Melted into a park bench? Now, that's a fantasy world for ya.

How We Met

Just read a post on Dooce about relationship deal-breakers, and I can safely say that my dating history is a vivid testimony to the fact that you can have too few. I have friends who spent the better part of two decades slapping their foreheads and saying to each other, "What is she thinking?" when they met my boyfriends. Well, I was lonely. I wanted to get laid. These are horrible, terrible reasons for dating someone, and they are at the top of my advice list to my daughters when they reach dating age, but I was a sloooow learning in the dating department and accumulated more than my share of painful, awkward, stone-stupid moments in my quest for Mr. Right. Here are a few:

1. I, too, dated a Handyman. He was the son of my doctor, who set us up, and if you don't think THAT's wierd--having a boyfriend's father who has already peeked at your nether regions--well, you just don't know what weird is. Mr. Handyman was nice, and gave me a flashlight on our first date. I think we went out three times. What can I say? It was just too weird to last.
2. Then there was the guy who, after an argument, went into my bathroom, raked my nail file across his wrists enough to get a little blood flowing, and then announced that he would die before he would live without me (or some melodramatic pronouncement to that effect). I dated him for several months after that. Yes. I know.
3. The psychologist who grabbed my hand as I was gnawing on a thumbnail during a movie--this was our first date--and said, "Don't do that" and then couldn't for the life of him figure out why I never wanted to see him again. Operating principle: You can slit your wrists in my bathroom, just don't tell me not to chew my nails.
4. The sweet Jewish guy who told me on our first date that he was was willing to talk about marriage providing I converted to Orthodox Judaism, where I'd keep kosher and have a ritual bath every month after my period was over so we could resume having sex. Which, mind you, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with. But I was raised a Southern Fundamentalist, and the culture warp this represented, not to mention the thought of our families in the same room, threatened to fry my synapses like a mess o' squirrel brains. Plus: first date??
5. The genius writer who slapped me around, cut me off from my friends, routinely humiliated me in public and once threw a public tantrum because he had caught a band member in a nightclub looking at me. (My eyes were closed at the time; I was sleepy.) Operating principle: you can slap me around, humiliate and isolate me, but DON'T, goddamn it, tell me not to chew my nails.

Finally, like an alcoholic, I reached a point where I realized that my dating life was out of control, that I couldn't fix it, and I asked for help from a Higher Power: i.e., a dating service. Here I rapidly learned that a) the Washington, D.C. metro area is full, I mean FULL, of approaching-retirement civil servants who have ditched Wife #1 and are look for a newer model; b) most of them live at least 40 miles outside the Beltway; and c) they really think they can get away with lying about their age and weight. This was an old-fashioned dating service (Internet dating was still in its infancy), and the way it worked was that after I'd signed up and put my profile in their books, anybody who saw your profile and was interested in you would tell the dating service, which would then send you a cheery little postcard in the mail that said, "Somebody wants to meet you!" The first time this happened I schlepped down the road to the dating service office, opened the book to my admirer's profile number, and was greeted with a 60ish looking guy with a combover and a truly enormous beer gut, whose profile said he weighed 180. (Yeah, but which half?) Another time, I was leafing through the book, looking for a particular number, happened to see a really odd picture and thought, "Well, thank God, at least it's not the guy in the Star Trek costume." Oh, yes it was the guy in the Star Trek costume.

Finally, after I'd gotten completely jaded, I got one more card in the mail, put off going to see who it was for a week or so and finally went down to take a look--expecting, maybe, a Klingon this time. When I saw the picture my first thought was, "This guy is much too handsome to have a Ph.D." (the old "nobody good looking has any brains" bias, though usually it gets applied to women). The second thing I noticed was that he was five years younger. My third thought was: "Too young and too good-looking to be interested in me. There must be some mistake."

He was my first dating service date; I was his second. Exactly one year later, we got married. Today, after 12 years and two kids, he still puts up with me and my manifold neuroses. And he's still better looking.

My Birthday

My husband and I have gift-giving issues. As in, he never really needs anything except, occasionally, new underwear and (currently) a new pair of shorts to replace the ones he's been wearing since college; and I always want things we can't afford. Like a Vespa. The consequence of this is that I never know what to get him, and he usually winds up giving me jewelry (much appreciated, but when you work at home the Fed Ex man is just about your only audience) or electronic gadgets that he really wants to play with himself.

So anyway, my birthday is on Sunday, and what I really, really want is a new entertainment center for the living room. This annoys my husband, who is of the opinion that there is Absolutely Nothing Wrong with our current entertainment center. His standard for Nothing Wrong is "still standing"; mine is a little higher. The piece in question was bought at Ikea pre-kids, which makes it roughly 10 years old. Ten years is nothing in furniture terms, except if you're dealing with the low-end Ikea stuff, in which case it's a looooong time for something made out of cardboard with a fake wood veneer. The back of our entertainment center gave out several years ago; the glass doors have never hung properly; the drawers have lost their little slider supports and now just sit forlornly on top of each other (if you stack them very neatly you can almost not tell), and in general I have gotten so tired of this fake blond wood (what WERE we thinking?) monstrosity that some days it's all I can do to not walk over and kick it. But if I did, it would fall over and that might hurt the TV.

Not long ago I found a gorgeous entertainment center at a furniture store that was going out of business. We didn't have any extra money in the bank then, either, but this thing was $600, marked down from something like $1,500, and when I saw it I wanted to lie down on it and say, "Mine! Mine!" I immediately whipped out my cellphone and called my husband, whose job is to say "no" to me at such moments. (Hey, what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine, and he gets a vote on major purchases, so spare me the feminist empowerment speech.) David did his job. He did it that day in such forceful terms, citing the giant sucking sound that was our checking account that month, that for a few minutes afterward I felt like June Cleaver after a spanking by Ward. But you know what? I'm sorry now I didn't buy it anyway, and damn the torpedos.

Because here we are, six months later, the publisher is taking its own sweet time getting the next installment of my advance to me (it's August, everybody in New York is lying comatose on a beach, so I'm not even bothering to call up and ask when it's coming), the Ugly Entertainment Center is still uglifying our living room, and I want a new entertainment center for my birthday. Which is Sunday. So, as you have figured out by now, I am not getting my birthday wish.

I caught David the other night looking at new Plantronics headsets for my desk phone, which was tempting, except that to truly upgrade the one I have would cost about $300. I should have let him buy it anyway, because it gives him such pleasure to buy electronic gadgets, but what I suggested instead was that we not spend that $300 on a new headset and instead put it aside for....a new entertainment center. So now I have accomplished the trifecta: I'm not getting what I want, I'm not even getting anything I don't want, and David didn't get the pleasure of hitting the "one-click" button on Amazon (which is always a thrill).

Instead, I put in a request that on Sunday night I be absolved from childcare duties so that I can watch the entire Spike Lee documentary on New Orleans (I missed the first two segments), and David has agreed. Usually, Sunday nights are reserved for ESPN or whatever baseball game David can find--so that's my birthday present this year: this Sunday night, I get to hold the remote.

Oh, yeah, and I guess while I'm watching I can remind myself that my biggest problem is that I don't have a new entertainment center, as opposed to having a house held together by a few molecules of mold. Puts things in perspective, don't it?