Eggmus: A world I would love to live in

Epsilon hates french toast. He hates it with the full force of his fickle three year old psyche. Unfortunately, that is what I made for breakfast Saturday morning. 

An hour of dithering and tantrums chase me from the dining room, leaving my partner at the mercy of the ritual meal time maelstorms. No longer outnumbered by adults, Epsilon turns on his father. "You are a bad Daddy."

"I am." My partner replies calmly.

"Other children at nursery have good Daddies."

"How are they good daddies?" This could be interesting.

"They stay at home and the mommies drop the children off to school." All parents learn lessions in not laughing at their children in the face of their ridiculous statements. My partner paid more attention than I did on the day they went over this detail in parent training school. He remains silent long enough for Epsilon to continue "The daddies clean the house. That is why our house is always dirty."

I would love to be a fly on a wall in the inside of my child's brain. I am not. A part of me would love to live in a world where men stayed at home to take care of the family's needs, and were reprimanded for being bad (dare I say, upity) for entering the work force. 

My partner points out that there is a reason that Epsilon's model of the universe looks like a woman's fantasy of reversed inequality. In Epsilon's world, when we are both in town, I work from my partner's office, so we both take him into nursery. If we are both in town, and only one of us takes him into nursery, it means the other person is working from home. This usually implies that some portion of the work breaks are spent cleaning the house. He observes that he comes home to a cleaner house on days that one of his parents stays at home. He observes that most of his friends parents live together most of the time. He observes that usually only the mothers drop his friends off at school. Our smart little modeler and scientist puts together the data at hand and forms a picture of the world.

I do live in a feminist fantasy. Thank you, Epsilon, for pointing this out.

Words

Early in the morning, a male in my bed announced that I was sexypoo. I did not kick him out. I asked him if he meant if nicely, which he did, so I gave him a hug.

Then he called me a sexy peebin. He had not meant that kindly, so we talked about it.

Sex, for Epsilon, right now, is a game played by people with armpit hair. It is a game people can play nicely, or it is a game people can play meanly. When it is played meanly, it is a REALLY bad thing. (Yes, I will get in serious trouble next time he sees one of his friends' mothers who shaves in a sleeveless shirt.) But Epsilon understands playing games nicely and meanly much better than he can understand rape or sexualizing women's bodies or sexual abuse in relationships. He understands armpit hair better than he understands puberty, and it is less vague than "big people" (he's big, why can't he play sex?)

Explaining sex is easy. Explaining sexy is hard. It is different from other bad words he picks up. Four letter words are scattered about our house with undone dishes and unpicked up toys. Fuck and shit are words that you say when you are really unhappy about something, never say them to a person, only to a situation, and not outside the house, as that will upset people-- a long set of rules, but clear. 

Stupid is not a word one says under any circumstance, even about oneself. Rascal is not nice, but a word we don't make a big deal about. After all, Puff the Magic Dragon is a rascal. One only uses that word nicely, not meanly.

We watched Peter Pan a while ago. His daycare had a pirates and mermaids themed week, the movie seemed appropriate. Ujan has started calling people savages as a result. Peter Pan said it all the time, it must be a good word. We had a long sad conversation about once upon a time people in the country we live in called people who look like us savages, and the depravation of liberties that entailed, and the people who died trying to fight that. So far, there has been a 48 hour reprieve in the use of the word in the household. It will come back. We will have another conversation, but he is starting to understand.

Sexy? What do I do with that word? It is not a bad word in its own right. It is even possible that when one of this classmates picked up the origial phrase "you're a sexy girlfriend" somewhere, the child heard it in a non-offensive context. The child probably repeated it, was told that it is not a nice thing to say, misunderstood the adults admonition, and brought it to daycare as a singsung tease. "You're a sexy girlfriend. You're a sexy peebin. You're a sexy dirty sock."

Like a bout of flu, or orange paint in his hair, Epsilon infected my house with it in all innocence. I never thought I would ever allow anyone to call me sexy, but motherhood has changed a lot of things I thought were immutable axioms in my life. Sexy is not the same as sex, even though it sounds like they should be related. How does one explain desire to someone who still thinks it is funny to fondle my breasts? Sexy is not the same thing as pretty, unless one is trying to give a zeroth level approximation of the word to a preschooler. I viscerally recoil from the idea of him calling one of his female class mates sexy, in order to tell them that they are pretty, while I do not have the same reaction at the thought of him saying that to a male. HE is not objectifying the girl, any more than he is racially motivated when he describes a new playmate at school as black, before he manages to mention that the playmate is male, and weeks before he can tell me his name. At the age of three, he is still truly describing the world as he sees it, in the order of what is apparent to him.

Still, sex and race are suh topics of power and abuse in this world, navigating this ground, teaching him to use the word sexy, fills me with unease.

Confidence

It took me a long time to really feel comfortable in my new skin of being an academic and a parent. At my last post doc, I would feel apologetic about interrupting a skype session to put Epsilon back to sleep, or about only being available to meet in the evenings after his bed time.

I've always known that I shouldn't be apologetic. I've heard all the rhetoric about not explaining that I can't attend for family reasons, and just being point blank about having other appointments. Knowing doesn't imply feeling. I tried to follow all the "don't apologize for procreating" rules and watched what I said to colleagues, but that didn't change the fact that I felt apologetic.

I'm realizing that this is changing. I don't know if this is because I am changing, or I am interacting with a different set of colleagues, or something else completely. I feel no guilt saying I am available from 8:30-4 pm and 7-10 pm, knowing full well that chunks of this period are unthinkably early, or dinner time for my colleagues.

Last night, Epsilon came out of his bedroom and curled up asleep in my lap while I was mid meeting. It was nice being able to excuse myself, turn of the bedroom light and continue the conversation in hushed tones. It was even nicer when my colleague apologized for eating while skyping, I was able to give a rejoinder about snoring three year olds. Much of the credit goes to how comfortable I feel with this colleague, but I think I could now do this for people I keep a more arms length relationship with.

I think for me, confidence is not marked by when I can confidently excuse myself from an obligation without giving a reasons, but when I CAN be honest about what my life looks like, even in a mildly hostile environment.

I'm not all the way there, but it's good to see that I'm making progress.



*Epsilon is 3, and I'm just writing this post. 

Two bits of Eggmus

Categories. Epsilon is really struggling with categories.

"Hot dog means sausage?"
"No, a hot dog is a type of sausage, but there are other types of sausage."

Epsilon, in his continued love of all things scary, is trying to figure out the difference between Dragons, and Demons and Giants and Monsters.

"Dragon means monster?"
"Giant means monster?"
"What's a monster?"

My partner, brilliant man that he is, pulled out our Monster Manuals, and pointed out different monsters and what they are called.

Epsilon, my sweet little boy, of course, wanted him to read ALL of it. They compromised on reading the "nice dragon book" for bedtime.

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Whatever his confusion with categories, 3 year olds are really good at pattern recognition.

"Why do all the babies go out with their Mommies and not their Daddies?" Epsilon asked my partner when a string of women pushing baby carriages got onto the bus.

When my partner told me this, it struck me that I think I've seen one man pushing an under 2 in a stroller while not in the company of a woman in His Town. It's rare in My City, but not as shockingly rare. Biased sample, but it's what I have.

"Um, because sometimes they think they Daddies don't know how to be Daddies, so they go out with the Mommies instead," my partner stammered out.

Before this offends anyone, I should point out that "being a Daddy" in this context means what Epsilon knows his Daddy to be: The same as a mommy, but the nipples are harder to tweak. Also, Daddies are hairier and bigger.

As in the world of three year olds, questions tend to repeat themselves. We're trying to come up with a better answer for him next time he asks. We are open to suggestions.

What's the opposite of Eggmus?

Epsilon said something heart breaking the other day. He pointed to a black man and said that "he isn't pretty." My partner and I were floored. When we pushed him, he said that he wasn't pretty because he was black. To his credit, upon further pushing, he admitted that if he took off his jeans and put on a pink dress, he would be pretty.

We've had a lot of issues with Epsilon (who is big into princesses and dresses right now) and whether or not boys can be pretty. We've tried talking to the school about it, to no avail. I figure that our views on gender roles are far enough out of the societal norms that we shouldn't risk traumatizing the teachers at the school by insisting they make a point of it. But this new racial aspect is very different, and we both feel like we need to come down firmly to the school.

Beyond a general feeling of "AACK!", we'll talk to the teachers. I want them to incorporate messages about pretty girls (I'm going to give up on the gender issue here) of all colors, and read stories to the kids that unselfconciously incorporate characters of all races in them. Unfortunately, judging by the public library here, books like that are much harder to come by in His Town than they were in the last place we lived.

This shouldn't surprise me. But it does.

No Responsibility

A stream of comments from a recent post has had spillover into Real Life. Whatever. Fallout like that happens. However, this made me think about the offending language in that post. Here's the scandal: One commenter said that a male colleague of her's, who she presumed not to be a parent, to have no responsibilities. This offended a male reader who vehemently believes that single male scientists work very hard.

I'm going to specifically ignore the gender aspect of this controversy. I want to address the parent dimension of this. I want to do this, because 5 years ago, before I had a child, I believed that I worked REALLY hard, and that I had no time for extra responsibility. If someone implied that I had it easy while in grad school, I would have been somewhere on the spectrum between confused and pissed, depending on how bad a day I was already having. So I sympathize, to a point.

There are a few experiences in my life that I had to have to understand. No amount of reading about, listening to testimonials, or watching movies could have (or did) prepare me for the shock of the event. These are, in chronological order, living for a few years on a food stamp budget, being the victim of a violent attack, becoming a parent. None of these three are comparable to each other, all of them have been life changing. Each of them have offered me a glimpse, or more, into the lives of a large swath of humanity I did not have any chance of understanding before the critical event.

I hang out a lot on blogs on academic lifestyle blogs. Many of the people I read are parents. The majority are female. There is tension in this tiny community surrounding the issue of having children, and how it fits into academic life. Saying that a non-parent has no responsibility is deep in the land of hyperbole. Saying that becoming a parent is a choice we undertook that we should accept responsibility for and stop whining about is deep in the land of oversimplification.

Conferencing with kids

Epsilon has accompanied me to 4 conferences so far, and I must say, switching between Mother and Academic is even harder at conferences than at home. But, as I've had more experience, and Epsilon is getting older, things are getting better.

The first thing that makes a world of difference is being able to trust the person coming with me. This is more than just "don't drop the kid off with someone you wouldn't want to babysit." For instance, when I invited my mother to accompany me on an international conference, I neglected to take into account that she is not the best traveller. I ended up having to skip several sessions that time. Another time, because of visa troubles, a friend of mine local to the country of the conference stepped in at the last minute to watch Epsilon. However, she was not comfortable enough in a city as large as the conference venue to be able to entertain herself. So, instead of spending evenings with other academics or reading up on relevant literature, I showed her around town. Neither of these were disasters, and there were external reasons why bringing Epsilon along was the right thing to do, in spite of the added complications it would bring. My take home message from those two experiences is that 1) travelling is hard 2) travelling with a child is harder. Bring someone along who is a good enough traveller to be able to manage the extra difficulties of travelling with a kid.

This is not to say that the problems faced in previous conferences with Epsilon are all due to other people's weaknesses. I have a very hard time separating my roles as mother and academic. My usual solution to this is to separate them temporally. This trick doesn't work if the conference, meals and hotel rooms are located in the same venue. In other cases, it is "simply" a matter of my lack of discipline.*

At last week's conference, I was somewhat of an outsider. My interest and approach to the topic at hand, while not unknown to the other attendees, was not of primary interest to other attenders. As a result, my need or ability to network was diminished as compared to other meetings more germane to my area of research. As such, I felt like I was able to engage as fully as I wanted to, which was nice. This was of course helped by the fact that a trolley line runs in front of our hotel room, so Epsilon was actually excited to have me go off to work so he could ride the train with his father.

My next conference is more central to my work. We'll see how that goes.




*In much the same way that Special Relativity can be described as simply linear algebra.

No good very bad day

Yesterday was a day filled with annoying details, mostly pertaining to moving, but some pertaining to why my current project is not as straightforward as I'd hoped. Nothing devastating, but annoying and stressful all the same.

At the end of the day, I go to pick up Epsilon in the hopes that running around with a 2 year old will burn off all the excess stress, and clear my head for a couple hours of work after his bedtime. I talk to the day care provider, again, about how we will only be bringing Epsilon by for 3 days in June, and could we please know how much she would like to charge us for those 3 days. I go home, we cook dinner, we all run around some, and sit down to dinner.

So far so good. And then the phone rings, at 5:50 pm. It's Karen, the daycare provider. She's sorry, but she just got in touch with the moms that were going to join in June, and they all want to start on June 1, so she will not be able to take Epsilon at 8:30 am the next morning. No, she does not have a backup person she could send us to.

GRAAAAAAAHHHH! My partner and I spend the rest of the evening trying to make the next few days work. It occurs to us how this is a akin to a bad breakup. There's sadness (Epsilon really had made some friends at daycare he now doesn't get a chance to say goodbye to), there's anger (What the hell type of notice IS this?!) and the cherry on top is the need to go back to her house to pick up Epsilon's stuff.

I hope today goes better.

Sick

I remember as an undergrad, most terms would have a point in them when things started to slide; I'd taken one more class (again) than I could realistically handle; the post teenage drama that filled my social life exploded; my depression flared out of control; I came down with pneumonia during midterms; I signed up for one too many extra curricular activity that I didn't realize far enough in advance that I needed to cancel. It was always something or another. As an undergrad, I had not realized that part of good study and self care habits was working with a buffer for all the things the inevitably go wrong in life.

Grad school was different, and I was a much happier and successful academic there. Somehow, it feels like all those lessons were unlearned with Epsilon. No, unlearned is too harsh. Neither of us realized how much went into being a parent. And we can't exactly punt Epsilon the same way we would pull out of organizing a big social even in college.

So here I am. Two days of grading until after midnight followed by getting up at 6:30 with Epsilon, while he is sick has me in bed with a flu bad enough that I spend Saturday in bed, Sunday asleep, and practically voiceless on Tuesday. One of my classes takes approximately 0 prep time. The other takes 12+ hours/week. I cancelled Monday's lecture of the latter. Today, I think I am well enough that I can stand in front of the board for 2 hours, but nowhere in my fog have I had the coherence to learn and prepare lectures for this class. It is being cancelled again. My 20 year old self is dismayed that it is that time of term again.

This time, however, I seem to have the flexibility and wisdom to take care of myself during it.

Happy face

I'm determined to write happy-ish things today.

I wrote a few days ago about not being able to communicate with my greater in-laws the importance of taking this postdoc position even though it didn't solve our 2-body problem. When my mother in-law called me a few days ago, and I told her that I had officially accepted, she gave me a whole hearted congradulations, and the wishes that the position will be everything I hope it will. It was nice.

Vi Hart has a series that thrills my inner botanist. She is such an awesome communicator. Stay tuned for part 3.

I've called in the reserves, and have a long list of friends and family staying with me during my partner's absense. First up, a friend from GradSchool City who I haven't seen in 2 years. Last we talked about kids (when I was pregnant) she was pretty sure she didn't want them for then next long while. I'm curious what her visit with me will do to her opinion.

The really nice thing about having accepted this post doc is that I can look at these next few weeks and know that this distance is only very temporary. I'm not going to be in another situation like this next year. That makes this upcoming 3 months more tolerable.

I have a nice dinner planned with our neighbors and their twin toddlers tonight. I hope this means that Epsilon won't realize what hit him until tomorrow morning, at which point, he may be able to skype with his father.

Hm... maybe that wasn't purely happy-ish. I'll stop with something sappy while I'm ahead.

Potty issues

This is a parenting post. If you don't care for TMFI about Epsilon's toilet habits, skip this post. It's a bad sign when I can't let toilet training issues roll off my back. But I can't right now. So you get you read about it.

This last week I finally got to spend several days in a row with Epsilon, and he mastered potty training. We are all very proud of this. Diapers are expensive and annoying and not having to worry about whether he will pee on the floor when we go to the library over the weekend (the only time I've had so far to work on potty training with him) is a huge relief.

He has his quirks. He finds stalls terrifying, is convinced that the toilet at his daycare bites, and thinks it is hilarious to pee on the floor of the bathroom. The last issue is solved by letting him aim at a small beat up skillet that my partner and I refer to as his piss pot. When he wants to pee on the floor of the bathroom, I can always  talk him into using his piss pot instead. As far as I can tell, all of this is perfectly normal behavior for this stage.

What is perhaps less usual is that Epsilon has been pretty good about not having soiled diapers since he was 4 months old. At that point, our in home day care providers would put him on the pot, and he would try his damnedest to hold it. Our daycare provider in Chicago worked with him, and would send the occasional soiled cloth diaper home in a plastic bag. Our local daycare provider found it funny and odd that he poops on the toilet for us, and either never tried very hard to figure out how to work with him, or he just wouldn't work with her. Whatever, kids have different behaviors with different people and that's normal. It means providing disposable diapers, which is annoying, but okay. After a few traumatic messy diapers/baths, and a few attempts to leave him on the toilet and cry it out, Epsilon just decided to hold it at daycare.

When we started working with Epsilon on controlling his pee, she didn't work with us at all. When I told her on Monday that we had successfully toilet trained him at home, explained the options we give him, and handed her the piss pot and Epsilon in underwear, she agreed to try. It seems that trying means taking him to the bathroom when he asks to go. When he refuses to go to use the toilet (because it bites, after all) letting him out of the bathroom, at which point he pees in his pants, and gets put in a diaper.

When we ask her if she offered him the piss pot, she replies "Do I have to?"

Well, no, you don't. If you want to train him to go in the toilet only, more power to you. We haven't gotten that far yet. Personally, I think that training is going to take more than giving him one shot at it a day. On one hand, you do amazing creative things with him to get him to do things that I can't get him to do at home, so maybe it'll work. On the other hand, you seem to have shown a pattern of not wanting to invest any effort/creativity in toilet training Epsilon.

When / if I get a flyout(s) in a couple months, I've made arrangements with my daycare provider to keep him overnight if I can't get family to come out and watch him on short notice. I'm going to come home to a really constipated cranky kid.