Poking Fun at Alpha Parents

Here is an excerpt from an articled titled, “Why You’re Never Failing as a Mother,” from the website/blog Pregnant Chicken.

You are in the trenches when you have a baby. To the untrained eye it seems pretty straightforward and easy – you feed them, you bathe them, you pick them up when they cry – but it’s more than that. It’s perpetual motion with a generous layer of guilt and self-doubt spread on top, and that takes its toll.

Feeling like you also need to keep on top of scrapbooking, weight loss, up-cycled onesies, handprints, crock pot meals, car seat recalls, sleeping patterns, poo consistency, pro-biotic supplements, swimming lessons, electromagnetic fields in your home and television exposure, is like trying to knit on a rollercoaster – it’s [omitted swearword] hard.

We live in a time when we can [G]oogle everything, share ideas, and expose our children to amazing opportunities, but anyone that implies that they have it figured out is either drunk or lying (or both) so don’t be too hard on yourself.

Your job is to provide your child with food, shelter, encouragement and love, and that doesn’t have to be solely provided by you either – feel free to outsource because they didn’t just pull that “it takes a village” proverb out of the air.

In a similar tone, I’ll point you to a recent poem I read in the New Yorker magazine titled, “Goodnight Nanny-Cam,” which is parody of the book, Goodnight Moon.

OneWord: Couch

The couch in the livingroom has a thin film of Yogi slobber. It’s hairy and marred from claws gripping and sharp buttons scraping. But its the couch we got married on. Yes, we got married while sitting on a couch in our living room. It’s not even a full sized couch! It’s a love seat. And our minister, who was on the couch with us, is, according to his mother, June, husky. Sitting between my beautiful bride who was consumed by dozens of layers of crinoline and a plump sweaty semi-stranger was not ideal on a 95* June day. But the couch was important to us.

Our immediate family – six of them – managed to fit on our three-seater couch across the room from us. My sister-in-law (to be at the time) readjusted mid-ceremony and caused the remote control, which was apparently under the third couch cushion, to activate the television. The Golf Channel flashed on at full volume. I did my best not to be distracted during the homily as the immediate family scrambled to mute the television. Their sweaty flesh shifting on and separating from the damp leather sounded like sheets being ripped apart by rabid wolves. Afterwords, even the extended family and friends who were seated outside on the small community lawn along Eighth Street on couches they brought, said they could hear the commotion and feared that I had defected to the “Divot side.” I thought, at the time, that the “Divot side” wasn’t very clever. But what else are non-golfers going to say?

Thanks for the Magazines, Ben

I’d like to thank my friends for signing me up for Opera News and Baby Talk. I am thoroughly enjoying both magazines, and am finding the multiple copies useful as it allows me to keep one in the bathroom and one in the living room making my reading experience nearly seamless. Coincidentally, I was planning on taking up Opera in my spare time and am sure I’ll have a baby some day.