rivka

We have hired a new nanny. She starts the Monday after we come home from SUUSI.

I was pretty confident about her right-ness after our phone interview. I had spoken to a series of young women who all sounded very much the same: an oppositional four-year-old? Time out, followed by taking away a privilege. Tantrums? Ignore them. This one said: "Four-year-olds love games, so I'd probably try to make it into a game somehow." And "I try to be sympathetic even if it doesn't make any sense to me, but then there's a point at which you just have to say 'maybe you just need to be alone for a while to get this out.'" She just sounded... more thoughtful. Less by-the-book.

Then she came into our house for the interview, and both kids were drawn to her like iron filings to a magnet. In about five minutes, Alex was sitting on her lap. She seemed to be one of those people who is just effortlessly good at relating to children, with a calm, low-key, but fun and imaginative energy. She even - and I still suck at this, so I was impressed - found a way to play with both of them at once: she pretended that Colin was a giant baby attacking Alex's dollhouse. She moved Colin and narrated his actions, and Alex played the role of the fleeing dolls. They both loved it.

Religion's not going to be an issue; she's got a rainbow flag button on her bag and her .sig quote is from Thich Nhat Hanh.

Her references think she walks on water.

This time it's going to work, right?

(And if it does, we owe

lyrical1 dinner at the restaurant of her choice.)

One of my favorite developmental psych concepts is "theory of mind." It's a complicated idea, but essentially, if you have a well-developed theory of mind, you understand that people have mental states (beliefs, ideas, desires, perspectives) which differ from person to person and affect how people behave.

For example, here's one of the common experimental tasks for assessing theory of mind: There are two dolls, Sally and Anne. Sally hides a marble in a box and then goes away. While she is gone, Anne moves the marble from the box to a basket. Then Sally comes back. Where will she look for the marble? It seems to be a trivially easy question, but before the age of three or four children universally predict that Sally will look for the marble in the basket. Why? Because that's where it is. Around three or four years old, children start to have the ability to understand that even though they know where the marble really is, Sally will act on a false belief about where the marble is.

I've never run Alex through the Sally-Anne task, but I think she's had the basics of a theory of mind for a while. (A lot of fiction doesn't make sense without it.) It's clear, though, that lately she's really been developing a more elaborate sense of other people's mental representations. She's playing with these ideas a lot, figuring out what you can do with them.

Deception, for example. She's figured out the basic concept, but right now she's hilariously bad at it. She'll get a crafty look on her face and announce, "Mom, don't look at what I'm about to do." Then she'll take some cookies out of the package and run away. She's almost got it! She's figured out that if I don't see her do it, I won't know... but now she has to work out the part about not notifying me beforehand.

Or secrets. She's developed a fascination with keeping pointless secrets, I think just because she enjoys the idea of one person knowing something another person doesn't know. She's always asking Michael and I to keep something secret from each other - "don't tell Dad how far we went on the scooter!" "Don't tell Mom what we got at the store!"

Once I went in to tell him about something she'd done wrong, and she asked me (in front of him) not to tell him. When I said "I certainly am going to tell him," she broke in anxiously with "Don't listen, Dad! It's all nonsense!" Heh. Only four years old, and she's already poisoning the well!

I tremble to think about what it will be like around here when she actually masters this stuff.

She's also doing some neat stuff with perspective taking. At the museum, as we left one room to go into another, she commented: "If someone was out here, they'd think we were coming into the room." At the O's game we went to, which the O's predictably lost: "If someone was from Detroit, they would say 'Hooray, the Tigers won!'" It always comes out of nowhere - she's just doing it for practice, I guess.

Take a look at today's milestone! Colin sat by himself several times this evening, supporting himself on both hands or even, for a few seconds, one hand. He has great core strength. He's also been flipping from back to front this week, so it's been a busy time on the gross motor front. Hmm, maybe that's why his sleep has gone all to hell.

He's not quite as preternaturally easygoing as he used to be. He really wants to be held in a standing position a lot of the time now. Or walked around so he can see things. If we fail to satisfy these urges he whimpers and cries. When I put him on the floor, he twists himself around or flings his body sideways after a toy. He likes to grab onto the toy basket. Or this morning he managed to maneuver himself around until his feet were on the swing, and then happily pushed it back and forth. He's an ingenious little guy.

He is still very happy, just in general. He has a full-force laugh that breaks out at the slightest provocation. I've never known such a laughing baby. Alex has the easiest time making him laugh. (This morning, all it took was his first good sight of her, and he was cackling with glee.) He likes it when we make silly sounds for him. He likes to play peek-a-boo.

The cutest thing he does these days: Whenever I hold a glass to my mouth when he's in my lap, Colin puts up his hand and pushes the glass, as if to help me drink. He is very serious about this and puts in sustained effort.

I just read an interesting article by a mathematician, lamenting the way his subject is tortured and murdered in schools. (Article is here, in a PDF.) Here's his basic thesis:

All this fussing and primping about which "topics" should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

The saddest part of all this "reform" are the attempts to “make math interesting” and "relevant to kids’ lives." You don’t need to make math interesting— it’s already more interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives.

He's passionate, furious, despondent, and very funny, producing gems along the lines of:

All metaphor aside, geometry class is by far the most mentally and emotionally destructive component of the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum. Other math courses may hide the beautiful bird, or put it in a cage, but in geometry class it is openly and cruelly tortured. (Apparently I am incapable of putting all metaphor aside.)

The article is long, but I found it a quick read. It's worth reading to the end, if only to get his truth-in-advertising summary of the K-12 math curriculum ("TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds.") I was one of those people who was very good at plugging numbers correctly into formulas but never felt like I had a good conceptual grasp of math. This article makes me feel sad about what I missed.

Elsewhere on the net, someone posted asking what she should do with a free sample of infant formula. After commenting on how gross and creepy the ingredient list is, she says, "I'm a little uncomfortable with donating it to a foodbank, I'd rather donate MY milk to help other Mamas.

Is it safe to give my cats?"

I replied:

So *are* you donating your breastmilk to a food bank, and in your experience are most mothers who use food banks comfortable accepting donated breastmilk from a stranger? And do they have proper storage for frozen milk, and the resources and knowledge to do home pasteurization? Will places that distribute food to folks who are very poor even deal with breastmilk?

Donating milk to a milk bank is a great idea, but it's probably going to go to a mother who has the resources to keep her baby from going hungry even if she couldn't get milk donations. There's nothing wrong with giving to help that mama and that baby get the really good stuff instead of formula, but it's not equivalent to a food bank situation.

I guess I'm saying: please don't give something to your cats that could be used to keep a poor or homeless baby from having to go to sleep with an empty belly. It's not like a homeless mother living in her car is going to relactate if she finds that the food pantry doesn't have any formula.

Fortunately for my blood pressure, the comments are running 8 to 1 in favor of donation. But that one opposed is a doozy: Honestly, I throw mine in the trash. I figure if that crap wasn't readily available then more women would breastfeed instead of automatically reaching for it. However, PP's have made me feel terribly guilty about trashing it.

I hate the Mommy Wars in all their incarnations, but what drives me furthest up the wall is the idea that we can somehow improve the state of American motherhood by punishing mothers who are poor or desperate. No: by punishing their children.

I understand that privilege, by its very nature, is often invisible to those who possess it. I understand how someone can thoughtlessly say "all mothers should..." or "all children should..." without stopping to consider whether they all have the resources or privilege to do so. But what kind of person still thinks that way even cued with the specific context of a homeless shelter, battered women's shelter, food bank? Who thinks of a mother caught in that situation and thinks that if her kid goes hungry at least she'll finally realize that she made the wrong choice at birth?

We're talking to a few different nanny candidates. I helped Alex make her own checklist of qualities she is hoping for. This time I'm getting most of my questions out of the way over the phone, so that the interview can focus more on actual interaction between the prospective nanny and each of the kids.

In the meantime, Michael is running down the possibility of hiring a temporary sitter to look after Colin until we hire someone permanent, which should take some of the pressure of the search. We'd keep Alex at school full-time in the interim, because she's a lot more likely to be bothered by changes in caregivers than Colin is.

Colin is at work with me today. Right now he is taking a nap on my desk. I've got his changing pad underneath him, and he's tightly swaddled, and between those two things he is perfectly happy napping surrounded by binders and folders and my tape dispenser. I wish I had a camera.

Every skill can be broken down into two parts. There are the things you need to do, and the things you need to not do. The ability to not do the things you're not supposed to do is called behavioral inhibition, and in many contexts it's an invisible, hard-to-identify component of learning.

Not so when you're four or five months old. When Colin first started to be interested in reaching and grabbing, he spent a lot of time with his hands clasped in front of him. Why? Because when he reached out, pretty often the first thing his hand would encounter would be the other hand. He didn't know how not to grab it, even if he'd initially been reaching for something else.

He's since mastered the ability to inhibit himself from grabbing that other hand, but he's still working on a couple of other inhibition issues. When he tries to put a toy into his mouth, sometimes he'll aim it wrong and get the hand holding the toy into his mouth instead. Someday soon he'll be able to take that as a sign that he should turn the toy so he can chew on his real target. Right now he just gnaws on his hand, the toy hanging in front of his mouth out of reach. If he gets the toy angled right, great! If not, he can't inhibit the chewing response and redirect himself.

Also, he really wants to spend a lot of time these days holding his feet. But his thighs are in the way. He winds up holding his thighs or gripping behind his knees, even when he was clearly aiming for the feet. He just can't stop himself from grabbing on, even if holding his thighs prevents him from what he really wants to do.

I learned about behavioral inhibition in developmental psychology classes, but it has become so much more real through observation.

We fired her. We said that it was a bad fit and not improving. She denied ever saying anything about the devil, recast the God story to make Alex's comment about the emperor of China the beginning of the conversation, and predicted that when we try with someone else we will find that Alex simply adjusts poorly to being left and none of this was her fault.

I can't think of anywhere else that Alex would have heard of the devil. We're very careful about media exposure, and her classmates all come from secular families.

We gave her a week of severance pay.

I feel surprisingly crappy for someone who just did the right thing for her child.

Alexism of the day:

Alex: If you lived in ancient Egypt, you'd really want to have a back windshield wiper.
Me: Why?
Alex: (in tone suggesting that she is too polite to preface her comment with "you idiot") Because it hardly ever RAINS in Egypt!
Me: ...
Me: ...Oh yeah. We don't need a back windshield wiper, because the rain washes our back window clean.
Alex: Yeah.

I really love the way this kid draws connections between things.

In other family news, Colin has found his feet. And his legs, which are also fun to hold. He is very, very, very pleased with himself.

We have to fire our nanny. We have to fire our nanny right now.

She's been great with Colin, but at the beginning of June when Alex started to come home at lunchtime to spend the afternoon with the nanny, there were immediate problems. Alex didn't like her. She cried when Michael dropped her off. She complained to me that Polly told lies. When I asked her for examples, she told me about something that was transparently a case of joking around. So I talked to Polly, in Alex's presence, about cutting out the joking until Alex knew her well enough to tell that she was kidding. But Alex still said she didn't like her.

We thought it was adjustment. We thought it was too many changes too quickly. We thought it was having to get used to Michael picking her up at school and then immediately dropping her off again instead of staying home to be with her. We weren't crazy about how Polly interacted with Alex in our presence, but it didn't seem actively objectionable.

We were wrong.

Yesterday afternoon Polly called me at work. She told me a rambling story about Alex's behavior: she had suggested they go to the park, Alex didn't want to, she persisted, Alex said she was being mean. I was nonplussed that an experienced nanny would call the mother about something like this, but I listened, and it was a good thing I did. Because in the course of her explanation of what she said to Alex and what Alex said to her, she came to this:

Polly: You made me feel sad when you said those things to me.
Alex: Well, you should treat others the way you want to be treated.
Polly: Where did you hear that?
Alex: In a book.
Polly: Well, you know, God doesn't like it when you say mean things to someone.

...

I listened to the rest of her story and then brought the topic back to God. I told her that she. Could. NEVER. Tell our child what God wouldn't like or what God would do. And she said, essentially, "okay, fine, now I know that's how you feel."

I came home and told Michael that we needed a new nanny. I simply didn't trust the judgment of someone who would think that was a good thing to say to a child. We decided that the best thing to do would be to line someone else up as quickly as possible and then give Polly abrupt notice and two weeks' severance pay. He called and left a message for the person who had been the runner-up for the job, in case she hadn't found anything better by now. And this morning I explained again, firmly, to Polly that she may never mention God in any kind of monitoring or punitive context. I walked her through the methods we use when Alex is difficult or oppositional. And they seemed to have gotten through the afternoon okay. ( Read more... )

I don't know that I have anything profound to say about it, but I wanted to copy and preserve this bit from a sermon by my friend the Rev. Lyn Cox.

One of my professors in seminary, Rosemary Chinnici, told us that we come to a time when we realize the faith we have inherited is inadequate for what we are facing. She called this religious impasse. I don’t think she meant that everyone changes religious affiliation when hitting a rough spot, I think she meant that we have to change how we relate to our faith.

Another of my professors, Rebecca Parker, writes what she learned from Professor Chinnici about running into religious impasse. “[A]t such moments we have three choices: We can hold to our religious beliefs and deny our experience, we can hold our experience and walk away from our religious tradition, or we can become theologians.” Parker and Chinnici both recommend the third option.

I worry most about people who make the first choice, both for the sake of the effects it has on them and for the sake of the people around them, whose experience they must often loudly deny as well. I remember the woman who came onto a miscarriage support board to share a story about her near-certain miscarriage which was miraculously stopped by prayer - complete with quoted testimony from the Christian ER doctor, who said it had happened in many other cases that he had seen. It never occurred to her, I guess, to follow her particular version of faith all the way through to the end and see what it implied about every other woman on the board.

I know plenty of the second kind of person as well, of course, people who were once taught a cardboard set of beliefs and found that they didn't hold up very well to the weather. I don't worry about most of them. I may find it annoying to listen to the ones who say that they're atheists because it's stupid to believe in an old white man in a long nightgown sitting up on a cloud somewhere and peering into people's bedrooms with disapproval, but they're entitled to exclude the middle if they want to, and most people who have walked away from their religious traditions are more thoughtful than that anyway.

In Unitarian-Universalist churches, and I'd guess probably among some Pagan groups and other minority religions-of-choice as well, people of the second kind can pose a problem for the spiritual life of the community as a whole. What they want from religion is Not-Christianity, and it's hard to define something positive solely in terms of what it isn't.

I think the third option, "becoming a theologian," is what people are sneering at when they talk about "cafeteria Catholics" or make fun of people who pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe. That's supposed to be taking the easy way out, but in my experience it's a hell of a lot more complicated and difficult to work things out for yourself.

Okay, I'm rambling. I'm tempted to just delete everything here but the quote, but I'll go ahead and post it. And then I'm going to bed.

Last night I picked up a new chapter book to read to Alex. "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy."

We read four chapters before bed, stopping - with difficulty - at the end of Edmund's first trip to Narnia and his meeting with the White Witch.

This morning, after breakfast, Alex picked up the book and asked me to read the next chapter. At various points I tried to suggest that we stop. When we finished chapter twelve, just before "Deep Magic From the Dawn of Time," I let her know that if we read any further we wouldn't be able to stop until the end of the book. She wanted to keep going. With some difficulty, I extracted myself long enough to shower. Then we plunged back into it.

We finished the book a few minutes ago. Solidly, since breakfast time, we worked through 140 pages of dense, exciting, scary fantasy. When Aslan died - I debated putting a spoiler warning here, but come on - she sobbed and writhed on the couch in misery. I promised that it would have a happy ending and read inexorably on. Michael came in and held her while I read.

We spent some time afterward reviewing the plot. She kept coming back to the same couple of questions - why did the Witch want to kill Edmund? Why did she kill Aslan? I think it was less that she didn't understand the book and more that she was grappling with the Problem of Evil.

"That was such a saaaaad book!" she complained. "Can we read the second one?"

[Poll #1422136]

"The Factory Tour Capital of the World" is York, PA. Unfortunately Alex and Colin are too young to tour the Harley-Davidson plant, but we're thinking of touring the Wolfgang Candy Company, the dairy, and perhaps the Utz potato chip plant. I think it will be fun.

Is there something wrong with me?

I work very hard at having a positive view of humanity, and recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. I continually fall short, but I do work hard at it.

And then I read about the people who are making hate calls to the family of one of the DC Metrorail crash victims, because just from seeing her name and skin color in the newspaper they've decided that she must be an illegal immigrant. Who, they apparently fear, has unjustly stolen a death that could've belonged to a decent white American citizen.

And all I can think of is, man. People suck.

[Part I]

Alex was fussing this morning about wanting me to stay home, so I suggested that this afternoon she could show Polly (our nanny) all the cool stuff at the museum. Like the mummy. Alex immediately went into Full Didactic Mode, explaining to Polly:

"The ancient Egyptians believed in life after death, but they thought it was only possible if the body did not decay." So far, that's almost a word-for-word quote from Ms. Frizzle Adventures: Ancient Egypt. But then, apparently, it occurred to her that Polly might not know what 'decay' means. So she continued helpfully. "Do you know how, when you pick a flower, after a while it sort of falls apart? The same thing happens to a person's body when they're dead."

God help me, we're going to wind up mummifying a chicken before all of this is over, aren't we?

It's been two weeks since I had an anxiety attack.

I am still having occasional irrationally negative and self-critical thoughts, but no more than I ever did - I'd say that they now fall within the normal range. I haven't had to marvel at my own craziness in at least two weeks.

Probably not coincidentally, it's been two weeks since I increased my Prozac dose. It looks like I've found the right level for me. It's quite a low dose - 10mg, which is the smallest pill they make - so I'm not too worried about side effects or milk pass-through.

I go back to the psychiatrist at the end of July. From what she's said before about nursing hormones mediating my anxiety, I'm guessing that she'll want me to stay on the Prozac at least until solids start making up a significant portion of Colin's diet and/or I stop pumping. I'm okay with that.

I post this partly to encourage other people. Postpartum mental illness is treatable. Don't delay seeking help.

Lydia and I got invited to come to the clinic where we do our research and present our data to the staff. That was this morning. When it was my turn, I introduced the basic concepts underlying my study, focusing on the HIV conspiracy beliefs because that's what I already have data on.

"Conspiracy theories have been found to be common in the general African-American population," I finished, "but no one has ever looked at whether patients in treatment have conspiracy beliefs. I think the assumption has been that once people are diagnosed and come into treatment, we give them education, they talk to their doctor, and they adopt accurate beliefs about HIV. But no one has ever checked to be sure that's what happens, until my study."

Then, before I put up my preliminary results slide, I asked them how many clinic patients they thought would endorse conspiracy theories.

"I have some patients," said one of the nurse practitioners.

"How many?" I asked her. "Five percent? Fifty percent?"

"No, no, just a few."

The nurse manager chimed in. "Early in the epidemic, I would say a lot of people. But not that many anymore."

I put up the results slide. There was a brief silence. Then the clinic's medical director asked quietly,

"This is from our clinic?"

Here's what the slide said. The numbers indicate the percentage of patients who agree or strongly agree.

36.8% The government created HIV.
42.1% A secret cure exists.
43.9% Drug companies don’t want a cure.
21% HIV is a genocidal plot.
22.8% Doctors experiment unfairly on minorities.
17.6% Doctors give experimental treatments without consent.
17.5% HIV does not cause AIDS.

"Okay," I said after I reviewed the results and gave them time to sink in. "Now imagine that you hold these beliefs, and you come to the clinic, and your doctor tells you, 'I want to give you these medicines, and it's okay because they've been approved by the government, and besides, the government is going to pay for them.' "

There was uneasy laughter.

And here's the scary thing: this is probably the best-case scenario, because these are the patients who actually come to clinic. If I surveyed people who aren't connected to care at all, I'm guessing that the numbers would be even higher.

"That was fascinating," said the medical director afterward. She still looked kind of stunned. "You're definitely going to get this published." I'm planning to write it up and submit it to journals this summer, instead of waiting for more data to trickle in. Because, yeah, I think HIV medical providers just have no idea.

Last night at the dinner table, Alex looked lovingly into my eyes and said, "Mom, when you die, a bunch of grownups can help, and we'll make you into a mummy."

What can you say in response to an offer like that? I decided to go with "Thank you."

Later on I remembered what I should have said.

"Alex, did you mean it when you said you would make me into a mummy when I die?"

"Uh huh."

"I don't want you to take my brain out through my nose."

She gave me the gentle but firm look that I gave her when she told me she didn't want to get her vaccines. "But that's how they do it."

End of discussion.

It poured rain all day here in Baltimore, and then the sun came out and made the streets sparkle just in time for the Pride Parade. As if it weren't already clear which side God is on. (After all, Jesus had two dads.)

Baltimore's parade is fairly small and low-key. We watched until our church came by, marched with them to the end, and found another spot to watch the rest. Alex had the bright idea of wearing her princess costume. (We firmly vetoed the shiny plastic high heels, much to her chagrin.) She got a lot of positive attention for it, including a shout-out from the reviewing platform.

Most surprising parade hand-out of all time: child-sized neon plastic handcuffs, actual locking ones that come with a matching little neon plastic key. The guy giving them out made a special delivery right into Alex's hands and into the hands of the little boy sitting next to us. Handcuffs. Huh.

Pride always makes me nostalgic. Riding on the back of my friend Emily's motorcycle with the Dykes on Bikes in Portland, the summer we graduated from college. The Dyke March organized by the Lesbian Avengers the night before the Pride Parade, tramping down the street chanting "We're DYKES! Don't TOUCH US! We'll HURT YOU!", eating fire at the rally afterward, having the Boys' Auxiliary bring us cookies they'd baked. Going to Seattle and seeing a Pride Parade there that took three hours to march by, including six-foot model vibrators from Toys in Babeland and the Queers With Corgis (accompanied by one non-matching dog wearing a sign that said "Spaniel But Not Narrow"). My first Pride in Iowa City, where the gay community was so small that everyone marched and no one was left over to sit on the curb and watch, and my stats professor was giving out cold drinks with PFLAG. Going to my first Baltimore Pride with friends, realizing that I should've thought out in advance how I would handle being greeted by clients at the parade.

I still think of Pride as my holiday, and it's kind of a jolt to go to Pride now and feel like such an outsider. I mean, you know, I'm there with my husband and kids. It's entirely reasonable for people's eyes to slide past me without that smile of fellowship. Still feels kind of weird, though.

Wow, I was really behind with uploading pictures, wasn't I? More so than I realized. There are about 45 new ones up at my Flickr page. Here's a preview:

( and more under the cut )

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rivka

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Third time's the charm?

Theory of mind, in practice.

Colin at five months.

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I leave comments.

Nanny search.

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Oh. My. GOD.

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Mummies, Part II.

State of the mental health.

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