I was reading this informative article, see. Because I’m clearly all about seeking out praise about my parenting. You know, by example and all.
And that’s when I realized that I’ve committed all seven cardinal sins. According to Cracked, that is. I give thee:
Terra’s list of shameful parenting deeds
#7 – Give your kids a creative name
Well, Zoë may not be that unique anymore, given the rise in ‘creative’ names that have taken place in the past decade or so (Mercedes, Makayla, Hayden, Etcetera), but it’s pretty widely known that most Zoë’s tend to be Fah-reeaks. Like, those ultra-dramatic girls who don’t wash their hair much or wear matching shoes while they compose monologues relating to the horror their first hair cut left them with psychologically (“At once, I was naked, having had my mane stolen. The perpetrator waved scissors in my face, clip clip, snip snip. My mother sat in the corner while I silently screamed. A balloon, my reward.” And scene)? My kid’s heading for that status. If she can stop staring at her self in the mirror long enough to learn stage direction.
However, we definitely retained douche parent status with her middle names, Jessica and James. You know they call her a cowboy, baby.
#6 – Teach them to be themselves
Again, a clear FAIL. I’ve worked so hard to allow Zoë to stay exactly who she is, with so little intervention or correction from me that this freaking three footer thinks she’s the damn boss. Sometimes, she even acts like a – gasp – brat. Mostly though, it’s that whole “she trusts me enough to be herself and an asshole sometimes” thing. I’m so fucking lucky.
#5 – Make them play sports
Okay, this one doesn’t apply, since she doesn’t. Because I don’t do physical stuff with her unless it’s walking to Starbucks. Because not only would it ruin my cred as lazy-ass-fucker (which is entirely different from lazy ass-fucker) , but it would also call for her needing to put forth some sort of grace.
The kid runs like Phoebe, people. She’s a gecko, at best. I joke, when she dances, that even if I totally fail as a parent, I can be convinced that she’ll never end up on the pole since no one would hire her with those skills.
#4 – Starting them in school early
Well, we’re going to home school. Or unschool. As formally as we absofuckinglutely have to. Basically, come back here in 15 years and just you see. There’ll be a coked up manic girl with the attention span of a three-leaf clover, debating whether the USSR is west or south of Israel. Also, my daughter, who will have become a self-made know-it-all after her mom got a little too friendly with some of the dark, sharp-cheekboned ones in Vancouver’s night scene.
#3 – Warning them about strangers
After Zoë being such a scared, angry little baby, she 180′d and become extraordinarily outgoing. Except if she thinks you’re an asshole. Then she’ll silently glare at the space above your head, not actually at you, for hours until the pure force of her disdain causes you to spontaneously burst into flames. Thus far, only people I’ve actually agreed were assholes have gotten this treatment. It’s like, in-built child-molester protection, right?
#2 – Heaping praise on them
“Are you so proud, Mama?” If I hear that question one more time… Really, my response is always the same: “Are you proud of yourself?” If she says yes, then I say that I’m happy she’s proud of herself; a no would bring about more questions, so I’m pretty happy that she’s really fucking arrogant. I don’t praise her, but I don’t withhold praise, either. WTF?
My father. I’d get 97% on a test and he’d ask why I got one wrong. Not “great! What happened with the one?” or “did the one teach you anything?” just “oh, well that’s kind of bullshit. Quit cutting corners.” I don’t do that. I shudder at the thought of doing that. I even shudder at the thought of the sandwiched criticism , where you provide a compliment, then a critical statement, then another compliment.
What I do is give Zoë what I consider positive messages, like, if she puts on her shoes herself, I say that it’s another thing that older kids can do and it’s so exciting that she’s growing up more every day. Which, I guess, is like a backhanded way of saying “I’m really proud that you can do stuff that you should be able to do, anyway. Score one for like, growing and stuff.”
#1 – Showing them educational movies
I never bought them because I thought they were too expensive and trendy – the Einsteins and so on. However, I have gotten Zoë into the habit of watching documentaries. Mostly because I’d want to watch them and she, like, never goes away. And then, for her birthday, I totally suckered her dad into buying her Planet Earth. Which I still haven’t seen, but she digs more than the Corporation and Fast Food Nation, combined.
She also watches House with me, which is all about anatomy, as you know; Desperate Housewives, which is about the economy and method acting; the occasional hockey game, which is all about cheering for both teams, still, and therefore, sportsmanship; romantic comedies, which teach her that love can be right there, nowhere, everywhere in a slapstick way that you never saw coming and isn’t just for princesses; dramas, to learn about life and loss and acceptance and how so many really incredibly good looking people can be ‘related’ within one two-hour period and then related to others during a different one. That’s like, I dunno, fricking astrophysics or something, right?
Thus concludes my rebuttal to Cracked’s case.
The first time I tried to kick it, it was a reaction to my father’s violence. Or so I was led to assume. I mean, what eight year old wouldn’t try to die after being being beaten with a stick far more times than her memory can remember good to negate?
When I was pronounced anorexic around 12, it was simply a cry for attention. The drugs no one knew about, the same.
At 15, I was presumed borderline schizophrenic by a doctor that everyone else presumed a quack, since there’s no such thing.
The first time I got pregnant, the first time I had sex, after careful administration of a birth control pill for nearly three months before hand, three pregnancy tests said I wasn’t. It wasn’t until a pill was prescribed to induce my period and that period went on forever and left me feeling rather hollow inside that I was told that I had been pregnant.
19, sitting in the office of my fiancé’s family doctor, I was prescribed my first antidepressant. A prescription I filled and was nearly immediately told that I didn’t need by nearly everyone close to me.
24. In the midst of (my only) manic break, the psychiatrist told me that I’d stop hearing voices, hallucinating and thinking that men on the street were planning to rape and murder me if I just started eating more and cut back on my caffeine. Different doctors called me schizoeffective and also claimed me to have another made up disease, full-spectrum personality disorder.
At 25, knocked up and suicidal, dreaming of losing a baby that I was convinced never would be, a doctor agreed with what my scrupulous notes had told me, I was cyclothymic, with a twist – obsessive compulsive personality disorder and attention deficit disorder.
The gates opened.
Finally, even though the Ex didn’t agree, even though most everyone didn’t, I had a thing and that thing could be dealt with. It wasn’t just in my head anymore and I wasn’t just doing it to myself. I was no longer helpless to the illusion that maybe something was wrong with me, or maybe I was just too weak a person to be able to make it through life without being a royal fuck up who needed a thing to blame it on.
After Isobel was born, when PPD had kicked in and so had colic and I was forced to hold her while she screamed sometimes ten hours a day, when again I fantasized about killing myself, I didn’t question if something was wrong with her. In fact, it took the Ex asking the doctor during her one-month checkup to find out she had colic. I’d thought, hey, babies cry. Mine does a lot. I just can’t handle it.
When that went on until she was nearly six months, something clicked into place with me and I started actually worrying about her. When, at 13 months, she showed a level of violence usually attributed to three-year olds with personality issues, I took her to the doctor and was told she had a severe case of the terrible twos. 13 months old. Severe.
When I’d had at least one black eye and more bruises than I can ever count, she started hurting herself intentionally and I demanded she be referred to a pediatrician. I did my research. I knew going into pregnancy that there was a large chance I’d pass on my…fragile state of mind to my children – I’d like to think that’s part of the reason my father told me to abort when I was three months pregnant, not just because he was a twisted fuck – and I read up in the 18 months between her birth and her first (what’s considered in Canada) appointment with a specialist.
I knew the signs and symptoms of early-onset bipolar disorder, ADD, OCD, autism, Aspergers. I also knew that some of the symptoms of those conditions can be attributed to food allergies – typically wheat and dairy. Coupled with her propensity to get sick roughly every three weeks, having had 14 ear infections within a 12 month period, it seemed, on paper, that allergies were the culprit.
Her blood tests came back clean. No allergies.
I was told to bring her back when she was 3 for reassessment for what the doctor figured was bipolar or ADD. I was scared as fuck, having conversations already with the Ex about how I wouldn’t medicate her, how I refused, until it significantly affected her life or until she was old enough to make an informed decision herself.
Mostly, I was scared that there was actually nothing wrong with her and I was just too fucking weak to be a parent. I couldn’t handle it, so I attributed my failings to her and some phantom condition, I thought. I mean, come on, my whole life’d been made up of people telling me that there wasn’t anything actually wrong with me – it was all in my head.
A year went by, but during it, I decided to throw caution to the wind and remove milk from her diet. There’s a heavily rumoured link between dairy and ear infections, see. She’d still have cheese and yogurt and butter, but just drank rice or soy milk instead. She didn’t get one single infection after that.
But her tolerance to dairy products quickly broke down, so that within two months, she couldn’t digest a few spoons of yogurt any more. In the midst of this, her dad and I were non communicata possibila, basically threatening or screaming at each other whenever we had the chance. And I was still documenting every single thing he did wrong, so as to bring back into court the proof that I might need one day for him to not have more rights to her until he changed himself and his life.
I took her to the doctor when the reactions got particularly severe and he was still giving her just a little bit of dairy products. He referred her to a new pediatrician. Said pediatrician spoke dejectedly about false-negatives on allergy tests. Apparently, they’re common in young children especially. Enter the elimination diet.
Wheat and dairy showed a crystal clear reaction – her mood swings would increase and deepen, the bags under her eyes darken, she’d become sleepy and quite frankly, kind of a bitch. We didn’t go back to the doctor, since the culprits’d been identified.
Then she started getting these rashes. I thought it was berries she’d suddenly become allergic to and prayed that it wasn’t corn. Nothing in our environment had changed, so it didn’t occur to me that she might be getting them as a result of something at home. And well, she had the other two big-players for food allergies. So.
In all honestly, I was a little happy that there was an actual physical manifestation. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I was making the puzzle piece fit into the wrong hole as a means to correct my lack of abilities. This was the Scarlett letter of not-bad-parenting, to me.
After a little while, she stopped getting as many. Even though she had berries and corn. I couldn’t figure it out. I went to BlogHer, leaving her with one of my best friends and her family, with a side-request that should Isobel become spot-laden, my friend make a note of what she’d eaten.
Not one damn spot in the four days I was gone.
By Monday morning, she had 11.
By Monday afternoon, about 19, if you included the 11 from the morning which had almost disappeared. One wrapped nearly all the way around her wrist, others cluttered around her elbows. They aren’t itchy, or painful, they don’t bother her, and actually, she seems to like the hey, look at me phenomenon that plays out when she announces she has a rash.
We went to the clinic. The doctor took one look and said it was an allergic reaction. I said, to what? And he gave me a form to give to the receptionist. Isobel’s getting a scratch test done.
Tuesday, no call back with an appointment time. Another 10 or so spots.
Wednesday, still nothing, and nearly a quarter of her back is affected with whateverthefuckthisshitis.
Thursday morning, I see on one very tiny forearm, one three years old and still too small to fit into two year old clothes, over 19 spots. All different sizes, all just the same, none indicative of what’s bringing them on.
This afternoon we went back to the doctor to find out what the hold up was with the appointment for the scratch test. We got our appointment time.
