Best of the Fray

Re: How To Kill Your Baby

libertyforall — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:44:44 GMT

Funny, the post reminded me more of this:

http://www.c00lstuff.com/1133/Do_s_and_don_ts_with_babies/

Don't Give in to the Baby Industry.

rundeep — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:03:43 GMT

My theory of infants and young children was as follows: really stupid dirty people still manage to not kill their children. In fact, despite stupidity and dirt, they survive in droves. Even people who intend to kill them often find it difficult to do. They are intended to live and the whole of their minute bodies are dedicated to survival. Exposure to dirt and viruses early makes them stronger. My niece is about to have her first, and I am trying in vain to get her to repeat the mantra:

Cuddle more, feed constantly, change frequently, and worry less.

But the industry, it make us fear so it can sell us special pillows, nightclothes, binkies, nightlights, childproofing, and ultimately, Xanax. While the selling is being done, we can learn to fear blacks, Muslims, or whoever.

Maybe, just maybe, the Industry is flagging a bit in that respect too. I hope so. Fight the power.

Thanks all

august — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:16:33 GMT

infant crying -- otherwise I'd respond to more

Re: How To Kill Your Baby

august — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:14:54 GMT

Also, I'm pretty sure everything we see is really the interaction of light with the object.

Okay, well, imagine how my daughter must see things. She probably can't discern objects, but the light she sees is of course reflected off of them. You could imagine this as either kind of abstraction. But imagine you are trying to represent that vision as specifically as you can -- not the light reflecting off the object, but the light surrounding the object.

Re: Breaking the baby.

august — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:30:56 GMT

I'm not sure what will happen with kid, only that no matter what, if it is bad, it will be my fault, and that there are lots of people looking to make money from the fact that they know that I know this. The knowledge of fault (not guilt, but potential guilt) is so intense -- rather like labor pains -- that it kind of shapes me despite myself. Naturally I find that annoying.

awes (eom)

august — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:27:57 GMT

OMG that's an awful story

topazz — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:45:59 GMT

but I laughed all through it.

Thanks for that link. [eom]

FieldingBandolier — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:44:52 GMT

Re: How To Kill Your Baby

alexa-blue — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 23:42:01 GMT

well, not much consolation maybe, but your post reminded me of this

Re: How To Kill Your Baby

Keifus — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:51:28 GMT

1. They're incredibly fragile, and yet surprisingly resilient to the attentions of caring parents. I expect she'll be just fine, and if you're sleeping, you're doing it wrong.

I remember hearing that girls are more likely to be born during times of stress. It was sort of an appealing handwavey evolutionary biological argument, and I have no idea if it's a well-accepted one, but I have built up some convincing anecdotal evidence.

On the plus side, my daughters are now old enough to make cookies, which they're doing now. It's all good.

2. Write down the date of the gallery. Next time you want to do something, it'll be with a thousand strings attached: sitters and schedules and worries, and the high expectations for enjoyment will threaten the actual enjoyment.

Also, I'm pretty sure everything we see is really the interaction of light with the object.

This entire thread deserves a checkmark

dumb_blonde — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:43:18 GMT

What a great top post & thread. Thanks everyone!

I still haven't killed my daughter, but now I have the joy of watching her kill the grandkids.

babies are remarkably unbreakable.

topazz — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:14:21 GMT

especially to first time parents, thank God. I remember my brother-in-law completely freaking out when he tripped and almost dropped his first newborn, wailing that "Now she knows what fear is" (and so did he when the fall issue of Vogue came sailing straight for his head for saying something so lame.)

Mine are all having an absolute blast of high school senior year while I'm ready to strangle them over this whole goddamn college application process. We've been at it since mid-August, a total of 34 applications went out to fourteen different colleges. (Don't even try to do the math)

Anxious much?

skitch — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:37:45 GMT

I remember that kind of anxiety. Not that I might do something that could kill my children but just that I wouldn't be able to protect them sufficiently. My baby boy is 13 now and it seems more likely at this point that he will kill me. My baby girl is 17 and has had a steady boyfriend for a year. Now that's anxiety inducing. But I trust my kids and we have a pretty honest relationship, so on occasion I'm actually able to relax a little bit.

But even still I occasionally have the dark thoughts. I suppose I'll have them until the day I die and I (completely selfishly) hope that I won't have to deal with the kind of loss those dark thoughts represent before then.

Thanks.

Breaking the baby.

FieldingBandolier — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:22:52 GMT

I remember those days - the days of heart wrenching fragility. For me they might've been mitigated by my son's colic, and the strategies I learned to calm him ("You're going to scramble his brains doing that!", my great aunt once said), but maybe not - when he was screaming, he was already broken, it seemed.

I have terrible news - it doesn't get much better. There are periods of relief (the period between rolling and climbing, for instance), but ambulation leads to bloody lips and knees, and I don't think I've ever met a child who escaped some sort of preschool head trauma (and knowing the potential consequences of such traumas rather exacerbates the panic).

My daughter is now fourteen. She has (another) boyfriend - this one with a lovely air of passivity I've decided is a definite plus in potential boyfriends. She's a petite thing, but boy, has she developed - I watch my beautiful, curvaceous, dynamic little girl walk out of the house every morning, and I cringe. She's finding her power, but the vulnerability I remember when I was afraid of "breaking the baby" is still there, under that shell of chutzpah and sparkle.

My son is twenty. He's still living at home (a scenario that seems to suit me much better than him), isn't going to school, but he's got a good job, is taking some chances socially, and is in general finding his feet. I think I might have him enrolled in the junior college next semester (and certainly next year). He towers over me. But I see that vulnerability and uncertainty, as he talks to me about friends, and girls, and what he wants. And in him too, I see the echoes of that vulnerability, under that shell of post-adolescent jocularity and his growing sense of his own competence.

Knowing things can be a terrible burden, particularly if you know something about the risks and associated consequences of childhood trauma. It exacerbates the problem posed when a parent is faced with their own child, in distress, and it falls on them to parent - to set their fears aside for a moment in favor of competently managing their child's distress. That is the great challenge of parenting - your knowledge of the microbes on your hands, and knowing that no matter how many times you wash them, that you might pass on that one fated, terrible pathogen your child's immature immune system can't manage, and it might make it's way into the fragile, elaborate system that constitutes her biological integrity. But you hold her anyway, because that's what she needs you to do.

I read your post just after I got off the phone with my mother. One of the things she said today - that her children have all proven to be better parents than she was. She was speaking in reference to my pathological brother, whose many faults have gravely undermined his paternal instincts. Yet she focuses on his good qualities nonetheless. This is my mother, who is just finishing the latest round of radiation treatments, after we discovered the cancer had metastisized to her brain (one tumor, on her occipital lobe, was the size of a golfball, and was almost certainly the culprit for her emerging language problems, and her sudden stumbles). My mother who I dare not visit, with my cold, knowing that the steroids she's taking to quell the radiation-induced inflammation in her brain have for now obliterated her immune system.

The best medical prognostications, from the people who "know" such things, scheduled her demise for a dozen years ago. Yet she continues battling along, teaching by example one lesson my brother desperately needs to learn.

Babies do break, sometimes, and sometimes there is aught we can do to prevent it. So we take what we can, on faith, and muddle our way through. Just like our parents did, and theirs, all the way down through the lineage of remarkable successes we all share, despite the odds against them, whether they were aware of them, or not.

Re: How To Kill Your Baby

another_liberal — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:02:22 GMT

Wow! A truly original post.

BTW: I love the Blue Ridge Mountains, can you see the Blue Ridge?