Will It Ever End

After much anguishing and circular discussions, we have decided to buy a house in a better neighborhood and put our home up for rent. While we love the many quirks of our home: the handmade shelves supported by a crankshaft, the door covered in license plates, and a bathroom counter made from an old crib, it is time for us to move on.

In all of our discussions I have had to separate the emotional from the logic while not downplaying my attachment to the first house that I've made a home of my own. My parents still live in the same house that they raised me in, which admittedly made me have unrealistic expectations for my young family to do the same.

My husband proposed on our front steps, we've brought our two children home to this house, and bit by bit we've made this random house that we could afford our home. After frankly assessing the realities of our neighborhood and the local school, we see that sentimentality is not in our budget. Besides, our family will continue to be a family and any house we live in will become our home. Right?

What's Cheaper

A second mortgage or private school tuition for two?

As a life-long member of the 99%, I am just as angry about our country's financial situation as everyone else. My husband and I did everything the way we were supposed to according to the American Dream--if only a little out of order. We moved in together, bought a house that we could afford, got engaged, got married and had our first child almost two years later followed by a second child exactly two-and-a-half years later (give or take three days).

Up until now, the decisions that we have made for our daughters have had their best interest at heart and have been relatively simple. This meant that made countless decisions about feeding, sleeping, education and safety that worked best for our family and our efforts to raise children that people enjoyed being around. But now the days of simple decisions that are right for our family are over. We are now having to contemplate a decision that will change not only where we live but how we live and our general stress levels and it's being done with our childrens' best interest at heart.

Like millions of other Americans, my husband and I are underwater on our mortgage. Unlike millions of other Americans, we are underwater on our mortgage in a neighborhood that no longer shows even hints of being "up and coming" and in a neighborhood where the local school is not an option. Our neighborhood school has a history of being a failing school. One consequence of being a failing school in Florida is that money and resources are taken away from your school and given to charter schools or private institutions. This means that a failing school in the urban core of Jacksonville, Florida, is populated by some of the most vulnerable children and doesn't have a library where they can checkout books.

That is not acceptable for any child. Much less my child. However, I cannot change the reality of the world for any child. But I can change it for my children.

Right now, my husband and I are faced with the daunting decision to purchase a new home in a better neighborhood with a good school while renting our house at a loss; praying that our kids get accepted to a magnet school and lying about our address if they don't; or paying private school tuition for two girls. Can you tell me where the right and easy answer is? Because I don't know. I just know that in our situation there is certainly not an easy answer and there may not even be a right answer. Prayers and neon signs showing us the way are welcome.

Comfort at Wally World

In my last post (or rant) I claimed that your delivery choices won't fuck up your kid but your decision to breastfeed or formula feed will. I hope it was obvious that this was a joke. Especially because you will never do anything right in the eyes of some people, so you might as well give up now.

Whenever the parental doubts start to creep up on me and I start to think that maybe I'm a terrible mother after all, I take a quick trip to remind myself that short of abuse (which I don't do) it's actually pretty hard to fuck up a child. I pack up my daughter and we go to the trashiest Wal-Mart in town. We don't go to the new Wal-Mart with spacious aisles, no. We go to the Wal-Mart that has trash and broken carts and a possible meth-head or two in the parking lot. Bumper stickers like "Stand up for America, Be an American" or "Hunt Life" abound. This is not an enlightened Wal-Mart, this is the Wal-Mart made famous by popular culture.

Chances are that you'll start feeling better about your parenting skills as soon as you pull into the parking lot. It will become increasingly obvious once you get inside that if all these people can reproduce and raise children that you can do it too. It's an instant confidence booster and you can pick up some cheap DVDs since you know you're not leaving the house ever again after this little foray.

My Natural Pet Peeve

I'm going to come right out and say it before my first cup of coffee really kicks in and I think better about sharing my opinion.

I absolutely abhor the phrase "natural childbirth". All too frequently it's used as a benchmark of superiority and it isn't even an accurate phrase. If you want to accurately describe your childbirth experience use phrases such as: intervention-free, non-medicated, medicated-to-the-gills, doctor-assisted, cut open like a holiday bird, etc.

The choices for delivery are not, contrary to popular blogging belief, natural or unnatural. The choice isn't even natural or medicated. Your ONLY delivery options are vaginal or cesarean section (c-section) and either way involves humans. As far as I know, we can't send a pregnant robot in our stead.

The other reason that the phrase "natural childbirth" rankles my already-fraught nerves is that many of the pain-relieving drugs used to alleviate the pain of childbirth are a form of narcotics, which are found in NATURE, which makes them NATURAL. By this reasoning, if you have an epidural, which uses a combination of narcotics and other drugs culled from nature, you had a "natural childbirth".

Either way you slice it (or push it), childbirth hurts. Throughout the ages, women were kept from pain relief during childbirth. The turn to more medical interventions and pain relief became a matter of women's rights. Much like the right to own property, vote or have access to birth control. Instead of seeing medical interventions and pain relief as a way for doctors to make more money and have more control, we need to see it as an option for women who want it based on the long history of women not having many choices.

In the end it doesn't matter to me what you choose. But it does matter that you have a choice. Just remember, you won't start fucking up your kid in the delivery room. You will begin when you decide whether to give you child formula or breastmilk.

Yes. I am a bad mother.

The truth is that I haven't given up my morning cup of coffee (or two), sweet tea or the occasional fountain coke (heaven), while pregnant. I gave up beer. I gave up wine. And I can't give up the juice that gets me going in the morning. I wake up anywhere from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every day of the week for the twenty minutes to an hour of the day that I have ALL TO MYSELF. Some days the two-year old will wake up when I'm halfway through my cup of coffee and other days I get through two cups of coffee before the fun begins.

Considering that I wake up early to (hopefully) work from home while wrangling a toddler, I figure that if this growing baby can't handle some caffeine than I can't handle this baby. Besides, I drank coffee throughout my first pregnancy and continued throughout our entire nursing relationship and was blessed with an inquisitive, curious and busy daughter that I wouldn't trade for the world. Mostly.