Should a Husband Ever Tell a Wife to Breastfeed?

The question actually came up in a blog post on Sunday. My answer outgrew the Link Log.

My answer is, of course, NO. Like starting the baby in the first place, feeding the baby naturally is a personal decision about which only the owner of the body involved has anything to say. 

In the blog post linked below, a young Christian, concerned for his baby's health, spirals into a panic he feels able to express only by trying to bark out orders to guide a process he's not even capable of understanding. His angry rant shows how scared, helpless, and shamed he really feels, and how, like a typical male, he thinks trying to turn his real emotions into anger and blaming someone else is "rational" and "manly." If it weren't so likely to lead to violence it would be funny. Manly? The whole post was written by a kicking, screaming inner infant.

https://toolsofrenewal.com/?p=21026

He thinks he can tell a woman to lactate? Well, every girl learns, as part of the process of growing up to be a woman, that most of the non-lactating half of humankind are incompetent most of the time. Just a peek at just a fraction of the body part that wields the power they don't have is usually enough to reduce them to drooling idiocy. Women have been pardoning displays of male irrationality, not to mention presumption, even blasphemy (only the Creator ever told anyone's milk to flow), for a long time. Perhaps we shouldn't pardon them so easily. At the very least a man needs to know, before there is any chance of his becoming a father, that since men are incapable of doing any of the actual feeding of a baby, that's an indication that they are meant to do all of the getting up at night to bring the baby to its mother, to return it to the cradle, to fetch clean diapers, and generally to do all the other housework unless, and until, the wife reclaims it. And what men have to say, as they bow in awe before the miracle that is motherhood, needs to be "Humble me, O Lord, so I can do Thy Will."

Reading the Bible as a whole, of course, quells the male fantasy that some of the apostles advised wives generally to submit to their own husbands because that was part of the natural order of things. It was not. It's what many of us actually want, bur, like sunshine, it's not naturally available to even half the people who want it.

Adam was rebuked for obeying his wife immediately after receiving instructions directly from God, and disobeying God. Though Adam's choice was wrong, God's response to it was compassionate, because Adam's obedience to his wife was part of the natural order of things. Abraham was not rebuked for obeying his wife, even though she seems to have been the only one in their family who did not receive guidance directly from God--and was that why she was the one who gave orders to other people? In front of strangers, at least, Sarah showed conventional courtesy to Abraham, addressing him by his title (of which she was no doubt very proud); this was how Jewish Christian wives were told to treat their husbands, though there were probably times when it seemed like mockery to Abraham, who, we are told, obeyed Sarah even when it caused him pain. Then there was Nabal, remembered as "The Fool," which is what the nickname "Nabal" meant, for bawling out bad ideas to servants who had learned that his wife's directions were the ones it was prudent to follow...

Paul advised the wives of Greek and Roman Pagans to submit to their husbands with the sort of "fear" that was proper to the authority their laws granted those husbands. Peter advised Jewish Christian wives to speak politely to their husbands in public, as Sarah did to Abraham. They were talking about how Christians could best approach different cultures, not about what every marriage is meant to be.

The idea that women's liberation from abusive marriage laws could wait is enough to offend some readers today. The idea that men generally are entitled to any position of authority is analogous to the idea that, because Moses was directed to speak to a rock and reveal a spring of water behind it, the general method of finding water should be to go out and talk to rocks. Most men are dumb animals who, if women didn't maintain control of relationships with them, would produce babies they'd never even help to feed. The minute we reposition your hands, boys, the game is over. A man who can represent Christ to his household maintains complete control of himself. No haggling for "more" before marriage. No suggestion of starting babies before the wife feels fully prepared for motherhood. No raising his voice or giving orders, ever. No talking back--a woman's No means No and, if the man thinks there is a chance that she didn't really mean it, he should back off and wait for her to realize that for herself. Men who want respect need to be respectable. Responsible. Honorable, even. And one little moment of Nabalite bluster destroys that; presents the man as no more of a godly leader than the screaming infant is. 

But is there some reason to blame a specific person, maybe someone like Gloria Steinem who never dared to be even a foster mother but sets herself up as a career mentor, for discouraging a woman from naturally feeding a baby who is failing to thrive on artificial food? There may be. Still, a godly leader does not squirm around in impotent rage, throwing blame at other people. He says things that are honest and self-respecting, like "Hearing that baby scream that way tears my feelings all to pieces. I know we need the money from your job but, if human milk can make the baby strong and healthy, I don't care what else we have to do without; I don't have to eat every single day," and "I never thought about the possibility that my baby might not live. I feel so helpless I don't know how I can bear it. I don't know what to do to save my son," and "I don't know whether there's a way to reconcile feeding the baby naturally with doing your job, but there ought to be. Maybe someone who knows more about natural child care can help."

If this poor frightened boy ever wants his wife to feel that Christian submission to the likes of him is possible, what he needs to do is exactly what he feels so afraid of doing. He must confess his sin. (Submission to a spirit of selfish egotism, as shown by anyone's demanding his or her own way over anyone else's, is a positive sin too. He sinned by telling her what to do, and she sinned if she gave his infantile bawling any more attention than she gave a bird singing outside the window.) He must confess his shame. (It is a shame for a grown man to demand his own way over anyone else's.) He must confess his helplessness, his confusion, and his fear. (He doesn't know that natural feeding will keep the baby alive, or that artificial food is what's making it sickly. Some children thrive on artificial food. He doesn't say whether his child has been exposed to, e.g., glyphosate vapor drift.) 

He must consciously look for ways to identify what he might want, what would be "his way," and to mortify his selfish ego by giving up that--whatever it may be. Months or years need to go by during which he can be seen to be guided entirely by Revelation, or in its absence by Reason, with no regard whatsoever for his preferences. That is the only way anyone can expect to be seen as a leader whom anyone of his own generation has any reason to follow. Christian men are indeed called to the "headship" of their households...and that is, as Lewis observed, the crown of thorns, because they can get it only by self-sacrifice. The husband and father who wants to channel Christ to his wife and children must love them "as Christ also loved us, and died for us." 

But why on Earth does the foolish boy imagine that "feminists" ever discouraged natural childbirth or natural childcare? Most people who rail about "feminists," these days, have no idea what they are talking about. A feminist is a person who believes that women are at least equally as valuable as men. That's pretty much a synonym for a rational human being. Needless to say, there is room for a lot of disagreement among feminists. 

There have been socialist feminists who thought all women needed to be employed in the service of a totalitarian state, yes. They did not have enough influence, in the United States, to get women strapped down and knocked out and, if possible, carved up by surgeons, to deliver healthy babies, nor to add the anti-lactation injections during the mandatory ten-day hospitalization. Who actually did that was the 1950s incarnation of Big Pharma. In the 1950s the sort of people who have more recently screamed that vaccines were the world's only hope of surviving COVID were screaming that women needed that utterly unnatural, male-directed approach to motherhood...to preserve their beauty! The focal point of 1950s fashion was the perky bosom. There are exactly two ways a woman can fit into 1950s fashions: exercise to maintain muscle tone in her upper body, or wearing 1950s lingerie. Neither of these things was affected by lactation, but apparently a critical mass of Americans, in the 1950s, were clueless enough to think they were, presumably because their mothers thought it wasn't nice to talk about such things with them. Anyway it was very profitable for the doctors and manufacturers concerned, though harmful to the babies.

I don't know whether any of the women who literally had to fight for the right to reclaim control of the natural processes of motherhood would have called themselves feminist activists in the early 1960s. I'm sure the women who were making the most noise, at the time, preferred not to think or talk about those women at all. Women like my mother surely would have made women like Gloria Steinem feel as inadequate as they made them look. Mother didn't need a political movement to "have it all" before that was what other women dared to dream of. She had her own business, with full support from her husband. She could bottle human milk for my brother and me and leave it at home, or take us to the shop, cradle and all, and nurse us in between appointments, as she saw fit. She could also, even as an undiagnosed Irish celiac, work Gloria into the ground before breakfast. She also naturally had the sort of figure poor old Gloria could only say, enviously, "seemed so vulnerable"...to someone who didn't have it. Mother was not asked to lecture to the consciousness-raising groups of that day. Not that she had time for them. She was a La Leche Leader. I think, in historical hindsight, she was a feminist activist.

(Mother, of course, was vulnerable--not in the sense Gloria Steinem had in mind, but as an undiagnosed celiac. After giving birth to my natural sister she was disabled by thyroid failure for the next fifteen years. But in youth, as in old age, she was a real storybook heroine...lovable, too.) 

Late baby-boomers grew up aware of our options and so, while choosing not to have babies of my own, I knew how to induce lactation when a friend was having difficulties feeding a baby who didn't tolerate Enfamil. I expected it to feel nice; it did. I expected it to have an effect on my metabolism; I didn't anticipate how dramatic the effect would be. I know firsthand that, while lactating women usually want to do other things besides lactate, nobody has any right to expect that they will. 

Women, too, can be deceived by our emotions into thinking we're speaking as wise mentors and elders when we're really venting our vulnerabilities. It can sound like "You're not a cow! This is what scientific progress is all about! You have a right to bottle-feed the baby. Never let anyone at the office notice that you have a baby. No baby stories, no baby pictures, no emergency calls from the person watching the baby, and never let the baby be visible from the office door! In order to deserve equal pay women need to be equally as neglectful of our families and ourselves as men do--to put their careers first."

More confident and competent women, however, say "Wrong. Both men and women need to put their and their families' physical needs ahead of any corporation. The traditional ideal for all parents to be self-employed, negotiating their own terms of employment directly with their customers, is still by far the best. People who want to make a career of being employees should think twice about having babies. Even so, employers need to work with employees as human beings, with bodies--finding work for employees whose physical abilities change, or finding ways to help employees put babies first for the short time that the future generation are babies."

Should Christian women who choose to give birth also choose to feed the baby naturally? It's hard to imagine why they wouldn't--if the choice is available. Human milk is the best food for human babies. Lactation is also the most efficient way for the body to get rid of the surplus fat pregnant women store in places where, if it's not converted into milk, that fat does nothing at all for the baby. Lactation also balances the hormones that, when  artificially altered, become involved in postpartum depression. It's empowering; it's a statement of independence from the whole wretched corporate universe. It's also a way of bonding with the baby. (And no, apart from a little temporary increase in top-heaviness, my figure didn't change. It lost its youthful perkiness only after age 50, when I was too sick to eat or exercise for two weeks. The key to a youthful figure is exercise.) And also, although there are no absolute guarantees, lactation is the closest thing we have to "immunization" for breast cancer. Nobody should wait for a baby's health to deteriorate on an artificial diet, or allow herself to be browbeaten by a foolish young husband, to choose natural food for a baby. 

In less technologically advanced societies, where men and women define their value to society in terms of hand-to-hand combat, digging coal, and felling trees, and so it's possible for rational people not to be feminists, the historical fact is that many, often most, babies don't survive. If people living in such conditions are able to keep records, their records will show how many more babies were born than children lived to grow up. Women in such societies have no alternative to natural feeding, but that in no way implies that all women produce enough milk or good enough milk to rear strong healthy babies. Many don't, because the usual thing in such societies is that parents are malnourished, themselves. For humans as for other animals, the absence of an overwhelming desire to keep, feed, and cherish babies is often an indication that the babies aren't going to live. (That's one of the reasons why calling abortion murder is so stupid;  the mother of a viable fetus will usually guard it with her life, so if a woman can say "I choose abortion" there's a high probability that the abortion is more like euthanasia.) Other family members should not blame a woman who is unwilling, and probably unable, to feed a baby naturally. Whether or not she wanted the baby as much as its father and grandparents did, wanting babies does not guarantee viable babies. 

In humans as in other animal families, the baby whose own mother can't feed it may be adopted by another female, may seem to thrive on the natural food for its species, and may then die, just the same, before or after it starts eating solid food. Malnutrition used to be the most common reason for this. Today it's unusual for anyone to be malnourished due to simple lack of food, but we're seeing more infant mortality, across species, where glyphosate and other chemicals interfere with babies' ability to digest food. Even in my cat family I've watched it happen; normal cats don't allow other adult cats to see their kittens for the first six weeks, but social cats often rear kittens communally, like lions; one cat's milk dries up while she waits for kittens to starve out enteritis, another cat feeds the kittens when they seem to be recovering, and then glyphosate vapors blow past them and the kittens die. The only difference for humans is that, because we're bigger, the process is likely to take longer. 

If I were the mother of a baby who was not doing well on artificial food, I'd do whatever I could to induce lactation. (It has to be induced, as if it never started, if the woman didn't feed the baby naturally from the beginning.) It would be an inconvenience but 

(1) human milk might save the baby, and 

(2) if lactation didn't save the baby it would at least give me some precious moments of hope and bonding, and

(3) if it didn't work at all, if I didn't produce anything the baby recognized as milk, at least I would know (and the rest of the family would know) I'd tried. 

But I'd be patient with myself, and move away from any family members who weren't patient with me, about the fact that that willingness to let the baby be artificially fed, on the day it was born, may have been an indication that the baby had no chance. I might need to find ways to become healthier, making better food choices, getting glyphosate and glufosinate banned, etc., before trying to have another baby; otherwise the second baby would probably be sicker and sadder than the first one.

Young women may want to keep this kind of discussion between themselves and their husbands, but they don't have to if they don't want to. Bleep is a young man in any position to know about the practicalities of mothering? An organized group of women who've nursed babies, and are willing to help younger women, currently has chapters in 89 countries. If your country is not listed at 

https://llli.org

...they can probably make a referral, even for you.

The Weirdest Thing I Loved as a Child

It's Wednesday! Hump day! Time for another link-up at Long and Short Reviews. Today's prompt is "the weirdest thing I loved as a child." 

It just happens that I did choose a peculiar object to project love onto, for a few months, maybe a year, as a child. 

The summer before my brother was born, my parents went back to California. Not the southern part where I was born. The air there was too bad. Too many of their friends had moved away--or died! But some of their friends had moved to northern California, where they said the air wasn't quite so bad. Some of them were in Folsom, a town best known for the prison. 

I have some jumbled-up little-kid memories of Folsom. I wouldn't recognize the houses we rented (there were a few different ones) or the faces of the family friends, who were all adults and mostly older than my parents. I might remember the occasional arm or knee. Possibly because Mother had a mysterious short-term case arthritis, probably viral arthritis, that year, at age three I'd picked up the idea that the thing to do when older ladies paid attention to me was to crawl onto their laps and massage their forearms. Some of them liked that and some hated it, but they all wanted to be on good terms with Mother so they all sent me lots of lovely prezzies. 

I had learned to read, so they wanted to teach me to write, or at least print capital letters. I could print the words I could read. I could sign letters to all the cousins. What a lot of cousins there were. None of us in my generation ever wrote to each other. There were just too many of us. The parents wrote to the ones in their generation, about a hundred of their closest living relatives. "Thank you" notes for presents would come later, when my writing was more legible and the stream of packages had dwindled down.

We were the complete stereotype of an American baby-boom family where adults who hadn't had much, during the Depression years, bought their children everything. Department stores' mail-order catalogues featured a hundred or two hundred pages of toys. Usually it seemed to be true that people bought me what they wished they'd had as children, because I remember a battleship, a clunky old model vehicle that ought to have been worth some money by now that we called the Bus Or Truck because nobody was positive which it was meant to be, a fire engine, a train, and lots and lots of cowboy-theme junk, because my grandparents' granddaughter ought to be horsey even if neither of my parents was. There were also dolls, of which I remember mostly the paper dolls, and junk jewelry and doll-sized tableware. There were paintboxes and modelling clay and crayons and models to put together. There were dozens of model horses. What I actually chose to play with, having learned to read, were the books. Three-year-old children like simple stories read over and over again but at least I could read those stories over and over by myself, and not bother the adults. Only when adults wanted to pay attention to me did I want to snuggle up and let them read stories to me. Simple, boring little-kid stories. Over and over. But I did watch their reactions and tryn ot to ask the same adult to read the same story every time.

All the toys were supposed to distract me from the trauma of adults having to pay more attention to the new baby. Probably the strategy worked. I don't remember that year as being especially traumatic. I acted like the spoiled brat I was from time to time. I'd done that before the new baby came into view. 

I had looked forward to the baby. Of course he was a disappointment. I looked into the bassinet where he lay in a tiny red shirt and tiny blue-jean shorts. He would later identify as Cherokee and look like it, but for the first few months of his life he had blue eyes like a kitten. "Hello, baby," I said cheerfully. "You can look at the pictures in my new book." I started to read. Baby didn't even look at me. Baby lay there looking at the ceiling, and then he yelled for our mother. What a rip-off. 

"Could we take him back to the hospital and exchange him for a girl? You know, the kind who can play with their sisters and have fun?" The sister I was imagining was, of course, two or three years old. 

Mother wanted to go back to work almost as soon as the baby was born. Dad was the "house spouse." Nobody dared to laugh. Truth to tell, though, he wasn't very good at homemaking. Mother correctly surmised that he needed practice. Dad kept the house clean enough but cooked like the old-school drill sergeant he was. As for child care, he knew how to hold a baby's bottle and how to change a diaper, and on our best days he stayed in one room, smoking and writing, and left me to ignore my stacks of toys and reread the few of my lovely books that I understood well enough to like. Like most early-reading children, I could sound out a lot of words that I'd heard and even some I hadn't heard, without understanding the words at all.

That was the year I remember asking adults what "passion" was. I'd read it in Alice in Wonderland, where "fly into a passion" meant "make a display of anger." Nobody even seemed to want to ask about the context. People said things like "It's a word that a child your age doesn't need to know!" Nobody even asked how I'd known how the word was pronounced. We didn't go to a church that did anything special about Holy Week, but we lived near some that did. 

Then there was a set of books I liked because they were about hillbillies. Beanie and Tough Enough lived in North Carolina and seemed quite different from people we knew in Virginia--older-fashioned, I was not yet sophisticated enough to say--but they did things I would have liked to be doing, like wading in a cold stream and building little dams and water wheels. I liked reading about that sort of thing while I was moping around indoors, waiting for my nose to start bleeding from the dry heat. For a week or two in summer my nose bled at least once a day. 

I had enough picture books I liked to spend the whole day reading. Some of them were school books, some for the middle grades. I didn't quite understand them but I kept going back to them every few days and trying to figure out more. I remember quite a bit of a middle-grade book called Health Trails because I was able, over time, to make sense of quite a bit of it. That was the most interesting thing, to me, that I did that year. I learned not just to sound out words but to understand them.

But on not-so-good days Dad would remember that he was supposed to provide some kind of guidance to the older child too. Then if the weather was bad he'd try to teach me something, and succeed in teaching me that he was the world's worst teacher. He'd start out reasonably enough with addition facts and spelling words, and then, being incapable of staying on grade level, he'd get carried away on some train of thought that might or might not have been too difficult for college students. Or if the weather was good he'd blather about going out to get some exercise. 

The front lawn was boring enough. Dad and I believed we were allergic to grass. Actually it would have been chemicals other people sprayed on their lawns that stuck to our grass too. Any time we walked out on the grass our legs itched. When my legs itched, I scratched them. Also there was beginning to be a feeling in Folsom that children weren't safe on front lawns. Some people in our neighborhood drove under the influence of alcohol and ran over people's front lawns often. 

So I was sent to the back lot, which Dad called a yard out of habit. It was covered in gravel not grass, was about the size of the larger rooms in the house, was surrounded on all sides by ten feet of redwood planks, and was deadly boring. Exercise? What was Dad talking about? There was nothing to do out there. No garden to tend, no stream to splash in, no trees to climb. Drearily I picked out pebbles in the gravel yard, named them after the characters in some of my picture books, and tried to remember and reenact stories I'd read with them. The only pebble that really looked like anything was a pale stone that looked like a very bad representation of a horse's head. I named it Pal, after Beanie Tatum's pony in Beanie and Tough Enough et seq. From day to day I forgot which of the other pebbles had represented which character on previous days, but Pal was unmistakable.

So it came about that I had several boxes of expensive toys I never played with, and don't remember now, but I actually played with, and formed one of those little-kid bonds with, the pebble I called Pal.

The number of books increased steadily. When she could, Mother arranged opportunities for me to do something besides read and mope. One of her friends had a teenaged daughter who had a real horse to ride; I was taken out to ride with the teenager. I remember the horse, a friendly reddish-brown animal who let me walk under him and reach up to fondle his face. Other times we went for walks in parks, or to visit farms we might be able to buy, or on the beach. In the mid-twentieth century, on the beach near Monterey was a big gnarled cypress tree that clung improbably to a bank just above the ocean. I remember that tree, and the prettiness of fresh wet seashells, and getting saltwater stains on every single pair of beach shorts. But in order to go anywhere for exercise we had to go in the car. 

Only Mother ever drove the car. It was a Plymouth, Mother had astigmatism like me, and in theory she disapproved of cars like Dad, but somehow in spite of those things she liked to drive. Long before Lyn St James and Danica Patrick were born, someone had had the idea of putting a glamorous fashion model in a racing car. Mother had been offered the job; while mulling, she'd witnessed a wreck and taken it as a sign that racing was not for her. Dad worried even about her driving. What had convinced him to sell the house outside Los Angeles had been a near miss when another driver, coming around a sharp blind turn as fast as Mother was going round it, had barely been able to stop his car slamming into Mother's. 

In Folsom, on one of those sultry summer days when my brother was almost a year old, there was an actual crash. We all heard the metal crunch and the glass shatter. Mother was inside with the baby. Dad and I were being quiet in other parts of the house. We all sprang up and rushed out to the front window to see one of the local drunk drivers walking away from Mother's beloved Plymouth.

Mother didn't often use Army language, never used some of the words the Hillary Rodham sort of feminists thought it was liberating to say, but she used all of the swearwords she did use. She did not call the drunk driver a female dog. Mother was capable of saying "dam' DRUNK!" in a way that sounded much worse than what the drunk was calling the Plymouth. 

"Don't go out there," Dad said.

"I'm not going out there."

"She's too drunk to know what she's doing."

"I know that!"

"We'll get another car and go back to Virginia," Dad said despondently.

If I'd been ten years older I might have gone out and knocked the drunk down, for what she was doing to the parents...but for me that was a wonderful day. My nose had started bleeding again. I was just one more week of nosebleeds and itching away from home.

The parents packed and made arrangements. I continued rereading Health Trails, tried a few of the Christian magazines Dad wanted me to read with him, was sent out to the back ayrd to try to reenact stories with pebbles. 

At last the day came to climb into our new car, actually a rather heavily used Chevrolet, and--I started back toward the house.

"Where d'you think you're going? Everything's been packed and shipped. The doors are locked. You can't go back into the house.

"I don't want to go into the house," I said. "I wanted to go to the back yard."

"Well, you can't, but why?"

"I want to take Pal." 

"Get in the car now."

"Kids!"

For at least the first fifty miles I missed the pebble I'd named Pal.

Other book reviewers' odd choices of things to "cathect," to practice loving on, are linked at Long and Short Reviews. Other readers? Was there a toy you loved as a child? Why not tell us about it in the comment section?

Book Review: See How They Run

Title: See How They Run

Author: Lorilee Craker

Publisher: Waterbrook (Random House)

Date: 2004

ISBN: 1-57856-488-3

Length: 199 pages plus 3 pages endnotes and advertising material

Illustrations: black-and-white author photo and drawings of toddlers’ toys that look like Ken Westphal’s cover drawing

Quote: “Toddlerhood scares me. I’ve been through it all the way once with my firstborn…I have three months to go before Term Two ends…)Term Three is just a twinkle in our eyes right now as we fill out the paperwork to adopt…) Right there in those parentheses, you can see that toddlerhood must not be that bad if I’m actually going…through it a third time.”

This is a mildly witty, unobtrusively Christian review of what Modern Psychology tells us about two-year-olds, as vetted by the author’s friends. If the jacket drawing is not enough to turn you off the idea of giving birth to a future toddler, on the grounds that you and your spouse are likely to produce a child who looks a little less like a butterfly-fish than that, you might want to read the actual toddler tales inside the book.

Baby-sitting for sprogs at this stage of life is probably the key to success with abstinence-focussed education for teenyboppers. With its frank discussions of screaming and kicking toddlers, fighting and biting toddlers, toddlers at the stage of self-control where the male or Maximum Gross-Out Model can gush flu virus in at least three directions all at once, See How They Run seems like an ideal gift for any teenaged girls you catch showing any interest in teenaged boys. If Craker’s and friends’ anecdotes don’t extinguish every trace of Teen Romance, someone might have to volunteer to take the risk and leave the girl in charge of an actual toddler.

I was not thrilled by reading See How They Run. Due to my mother’s poor health, I started to be held responsible for infants and toddlers before puberty (even my brother occasionally earned a quarter by baby-sitting for half an hour, at age six), and it was a tremendous aid to celibacy. I can vouch for some of the tricks Craker and friends describe using with their toddlers, firsthand or at least secondhand. Careful reading of this book would be a good way to prepare for your first encounter with a two-year-old if you’ve not lived with one before. But who wants to live with a two-year-old?

Well…I spent considerable amounts of time with some of The Nephews when one of them was two years old. I must confess…I enjoyed it. At an age when most children make their parents want to run away, that one was a pleasure to know. But he was a very special two-year-old who snacked on raw vegetables, rarely watched television, and kicked and screamed only on two occasions all year; and during at least one of those two tantrums I think he was right. Some people do produce two-year-olds as precociously congenial with humans as that child was. Nobody can afford to expect they’ll have one. Even my brother, in many ways “the perfect kid” my natural sister bitterly called him, had mostly given up biting and kicking but was still a howler at age two. My natural sister was a little monster and, based on what I remember about myself at less disgusting stages of life, I’m sure I was another.

The ones that screech? If I’m on the jury, the maximum charge of which a person who killed a screeching two-year-old is guilty would be third-degree homicide, an involuntary reaction to pain, for which having to listen to a counsellor explain the concept of ear plugs is probably as much punishment as anyone needs. (So I’m saying it here.) Craker doesn’t say it but, if obliged to spend time around a two-year-old, bring ear plugs. They leave enough brain cells in a functional condition that you can remember to lock the screecher in the nursery and go to the far end of the house until quiet lets you know that the little beast has either worn itself out and gone to sleep, or made itself sick and become interested in ways to spread the mess over the entire room, or maybe managed to sonic-sweep out its own brain. But most likely it’s asleep, looking angelic as it dreams of more diabolical ways to torture adults.

I prefer kittens. I say this on a day when the kittens in residence still think it’s terribly clever to show off that they’ve learned how to foul the path. If you do not have a big estate to keep in the family, you'll probably agreed after a few days' baby-sitting that almost any other lifeform is easier to live with than a human toddler. 

If you are determined to have a baby, there are all kinds of ways they annoy and embarrass people that this book doesn’t even mention, but on the other hand they do sleep a lot. Craker mentions this but at less length than she describes the many ways toddlers gross us out. The tot’s early-to-bed time and nap time will become the high points of the day. You can’t count on them lasting long enough for a really good re-creation of what you did to get stuck with this toddler in the first place, even if you did it the oldfashioned way and didn’t fill out forms—but you might be able to get through your e-mail, or a book, or a simple household chore.

It gets better, of course, in another year or so. Toddlers learn to control their hands and feet better; in hindsight it seems that they turned into children who could walk and talk and use the bathroom even to bathe, all by themselves, too fast, and you barely had time to enjoy the brain-picking munchkin stage before they were in primary school and the next thing you knew you had teenagers to deal with. There is a tendency to feel nostalgic about toddlers, which must be resisted. At least, if you do have three or four bedrooms to fill up, Craker's  provided the good example of filling those rooms with adoptive or foster children. 

Book Review: Wishes Lies and Dreams

Book Review: Wishes, Lies, & Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry

Author: Kenneth Koch

Date: 1970, 1980

Publisher: Chelsea House (1970), Harper & Row (1980)

ISBN: 0-06-080530-7 (1980)

Length: 309 pages

Illustrations: some black-and-white photos

Quote: “I had told Mrs. Wiener to ask the children not to use rhyme...There are formal devices which are more natural to children, more inspiring, easier to use. The one I suggested most frequently was some kind of repetition.”

There are children who are turned off by being asked to do something that somebody thinks will be “easier” for them. I was that sort of child. I, like many children, liked rhymes and had no trouble free-associating nonsense to go along with rhymes.

Then again, I may be less bigoted than Kenneth Koch was. He wrote, “When I read ‘red as a rose,’ I don’t see either red or a rose...when I read ‘orange as a rose’ or even ‘yellow as a rose’—I see the flower and the color and some­thing beyond.” Indeed. Well, when I read “red as a rose,” I have no trouble picturing red roses; if I take the time to think about it, I find myself mentally seeing many different roses, and wanting to ask which one: tight bud, half-opened, wide open, or losing petals? a plain five-petal rugosa or a highly bred multicolored mutant? on a vine, a bush, a little tree, a young stalk, or a cut stem? The answers to such questions would determine the shade of red I would visualize. I think Koch’s imagination may have been as impoverished as his stereotyped beliefs about the abilities of children.

There are children who do school assignments in such a way as to express their dissatisfaction with teachers who assume that they won’t be able to do something they are, in fact, already doing. I suspect it was such a child who wrote “What It Feels Like to Be a Mr. Koch. If I were a Mr. Koch would feel tall and lumpy. I would get the flu...you know why he would be lumpy because he’d get small pox!” My adult mind has shrunk too far to allow me to imagine how it would feel to have smallpox and flu, but I can imagine being a child who wishes a patronizing, belittling teacher had both.

Some of the poems in this collection are more helpful to adults who want to understand, or remember, other moods children have: “I wish all my teachers would disappear. And I wish we didn’t have to go to school. And I wish my little sister would find her nightgown. And I wish even if she didn’t she wouldn’t wear mine.”

Most of them are, however, so extravagantly free-associated that all they communicate is some doubt about whether the children have any idea at all what they’re trying to say. “My hair is redsilver / My eyes are greensilver / My teeth are bluesilver / My body is orangesilver / My skin is graysilver.” Something of interest to adults is going on in this fourth-grader’s brain, but whether she has serious eye problems, or is in some confusion about the meaning of the word “silver” (but in grade four?), or simply thinks that writing rhymeless “poems” that mention a color in every line is a stupid assignment, is less clear.

Kenneth Koch claimed that his students created delightful sound patterns. I find remarkably few of them in this book. I’ve heard children say things that had delightful sound patterns. I’ve heard a child use dactyls more effectively than Longfellow: “Nightmares of horrible slippers with eyes, and a mouth, and it talks, and it whispers horrible things...” I’ve heard many children discover rhyme, or alliteration, or puns, or even spoonerisms, all by themselves, and use them to good effect. I’ve heard children use simple repetition in ways that had a poetic, even hypnotic effect. In this book the inspiration seems to be missing. Nonsense lines like “I used to be a brush; now I am a flower,” don’t fall into a context with either a sound pattern (“I used to be a fish; now I am a banner”) or a pattern of meaning (“I used to be a pencil; now I am a poem”). They just plop, and go on plopping, until the child runs out of time or paper or both.

For about twenty years this book was recommended to all teachers as a wonderful book about how to get children to write. I can’t remember ever feeling impressed by it, or having shared anything in it with an elementary school student who did. Many other people, however, obviously did, so if you missed your chance to read or use or share this book, here’s a chance to buy my copy.

In a sequel to this book, Rose Where Did You Get That Red, Koch asked children to write sestinas in which each line ended with the name of a color. I had to try knitting those colors, with the result discussed below: 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/05/knitting-sestina-afghan.html

How Little Children See Fantasy and Reality

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on April 28, 2014. Image credit: FidlerJan at Morguefile: http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/f/FidlerJan/01/l/142254712953aq5.jpg.)

Right...on Chatabout I promised to share a story about little children's sense of reality. The question was how to get little children to tell the truth. People had replied to that question in the sense of how to get them not to tell stories they've made up as truth. The received psychological explanation for this behavior is that little children "don't separate fantasy from reality." I've never been sure that that's the correct explanation though.

When I was a little child, I knew the difference between what I made up all by myself, what I read in books, and what I saw in real life, as well as I do now. What I didn't know was whether other people would know the difference.

And a little child I baby-sat, as a teenager, said something that convinced me that what she didn't know was whether other people knew the difference. Older children in the family were talking about their day at school. Both mentioned their official school friends and enemies. 

The youngest child waited, semi-patiently, for about an hour of this and then said something like, "And then I went up in the woods and visited my friend Suzy Strawberryful, and we went for a ride on her horse Brownie Hayful, and we visited her cousin Tracy Cakeful and played parchesi..."

"Bosh," said one of the older children, semi-patiently. "We know you stayed home all day, right? We know nobody has a name like Strawberryful. If you didn't do anything real, you shouldn't pretend you did."

The youngest child's face turned red, her face crumpled, her lip came out, and she retorted, "Suzy Strawberryful is just as real as your old Mrs. Pertaters" (one sibling's teacher had a name like Tate or Tatum) "or your Smelly Kelly or any of those people you're always talking about!" 

I learned something about the mind of a child that afternoon. If you are four or five years old, you probably have to spend a lot of time listening to other people's stories about things, places, and people that you never see. How do you know that those stories are true? Why can't you make up stories and tell them as if you were reporting facts, too, just like everyone else does?