You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  In fact, our family was required to evacuate in 2007 during the fire season. I managed to grab the cat, a pair of Dolce & Gabbana shoes, my grandmother’s silver, our important legal papers, and our kid. True, I forgot to pack panties, but I had the best footwear of the evacuees in our neighborhood.

  Jeff and I never agree about the direction to follow for our son’s health. This polarization plays out in a general way in most households, as every parent who has ever uttered the words “go ask your father/mother!” can attest to, but when your child’s health is on the line, the stakes are raised. That’s why the percentage of unions that fail when a child has a chronic illness ranges at upward of 70 percent. I know of at least one fellow VACTERL mom whose long-term boyfriend checked out the very day their daughter was born. He had been a little wary of fatherhood to begin with, and when he learned about his daughter’s condition, well, it was beyond his ability to cope.* So with all of our madness, we’re bucking the odds.

  This might just be the twenty milligrams of Cymbalta speaking, but I am willing to entertain the thought that just maybe, by never agreeing we work harder to evaluate and more thoroughly weigh our options, and this pushes us to make better decisions. This ersatz strategy is our own mini checks and balances system. We’re what the founding fathers envisioned and the Bush administration successfully chipped away at! What is it they say in the military—no man gets left behind? None of us—Jeff, Ezra, or I—would last one minute in the military, but we live by that saying and we mean it. Especially the behind part.

  “The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.” —Clarence Darrow

  why do we do it?

  “Whether they [parents] believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference; outside influences such as popular culture, friends or street gangs have a much greater influence on children than family life or even genetic makeup.”

  —Psychologist Judith Rich Harris,

  writing in the Telegraph, UK, 2008

  top five things couples argue about in order of frequency

  1. money. 2. sex. 3. work. 4. children. 5. housework.

  A University of Michigan study showed that once parents stop making time for each other, recovering the relationship that made them want to have children to begin with most often proves impossible.

  Only 38 percent of mothers of infants report having high marital satisfaction compared to 62 percent of childless women.—Pew Study

  A growing number of Americans are choosing to have children but not marry. This group, commonly referred to as “committed unmarrieds,” numbers approximately 5 million. These co-habitating parents represent a number five times the amount as in the 1970s. In Europe, unmarrieds stay together longer than married parents. —Time magazine, 2009

  * One benefit to hiring Seventh-Day Adventists is that they don’t celebrate New Year’s, Christmas, or even birthdays, so they’ll work on most holidays. We didn’t even mind the pamphlets we’d find around the house, and we cried when she left to go on a mission.

  * They’re not just mothers’ little helpers anymore. In 2005, Americans made 169.9 million antidepressant purchases, according to health care researchers.

  * If you need any evidence of the lunacy of the American health care system, our insurance company initially declined payment for Ezra’s surgery, determining it was an elective procedure. I guess if you consider consigning our kid to a progressive wasting of muscle tissue, chronic severe leg pain, loss of motor function, and incontinence as small inconveniences—then, yes, it was an elective procedure.

  * VACTERL occurs in approximately 16 out of 100,000 births. That’s around 640 in the United States. Tethered cord has a rate of maybe .25 per 1,000 births, so it’s much rarer. As of the writing of this book, children born with VACTERL get screened routinely for TC.

  * Eventually, after meeting other VACTERL moms who’d never so much as tried sushi in their lives, he gave up on that postulation.

  * This mom, Michelle, is now a full-time caregiver as her daughter, Emily, has struggled with health issues far more complicated than Ezra’s. Just to blow the Lorenzo’s Oil devoted-parent stereotype, when I asked her recently if she wanted me to come over and babysit, she said, “Thanks, but what I really need is to get laid!”

  7

  • • • •

  The Eighteen-Year Plan

  “The surest way to be alone is to get married.”

  —GLORIA STEINEM

  Since the dawn of time you could probably sum up the universal parental aspiration as “wanting my kid to have a better life than mine.” Each generation hopes that the next generation will have it easier. The shoes found on the 5,300-year-old “Iceman” in the Tyrolean Alps were made of skins and braided-bark netting and stuffed with straw and moss. Very homemade. His parents probably made them for him. No doubt they argued about the ratio of straw to moss, the proper fit, and if the shoe needed goatskin insoles because their son had flat feet. We would have. The Iceman died crossing the Alps and scientists have long been stumped as to what prompted him to leave on a journey with no water or food to speak of in an attempt to cross the mountains at a time of year when several feet of snow made his trek perilous. We bet if his parents were even remotely like us, he was probably trying to get away from them.

  She Says

  In the first few years of Ezra’s life, we spent much of our time shuttling in and out of doctors’ offices and surgeries. In spite of all of his reconstructive surgery, our child was busy with his own agenda: being a baby who was going through all the normal developmental stages. That left us with the question of how we were going to be that postmodern, cool new family. We could barely go a few blocks from home without having some kind of emergency. Neither of us ever figured out exactly what the hell this concept was supposed to mean anyway.

  The only thing I could come up with was to try to distinguish our family from my own upbringing. In terms of parental supervision, my 1970s childhood was something like growing up at the intersection of Laissez-faire and Benign Neglect. This has worked out just fine for my sister, who has always had the work habits of a highly efficient attorney, which is what she became. I’ve always had messy closets, I crammed for tests, and I dropped out of the college I was lucky to be accepted to in the first place. Only the right combination of pharmaceuticals and the pressing and constant need to earn a living have allowed me to manage a modicum of order (barely) and a smattering of accomplishments (dubious). So to ensure that our son has every advantage, despite our own admittedly ad hoc lifestyle, I’ve been striving to provide him with a solid foundation on which to build an orderly life. There’s only one thing standing in my way: my husband.

  Jeff didn’t support the idea of a family philosophy or a single one of my plans when we got pregnant and so it’s not surprising that when I suggested, “We should really get educated about what we’re doing here,” Jeff balked. It’s ironic, because Jeff was a history major. Every major undertaking in history has a plan, right? There was the five-year plan, the seven-year plan, the Marshall Plan—damn it, I thought if it was good enough for the rebuilding of Western Europe, it’s good enough for us! Sadly, if it’s not a plan that involves de-panting me, Jeff doesn’t want to hear about it. However, if I even casually mention that I might be able to squeeze in some sex at, say, 8:30 p.m., at 8:29 p.m. and fifty-nine seconds, Jeff will be in the bedroom with his cock out, but should I mention that we have a nursery school orientation at some Academy of Entitled Offspring, this type of appointment simply doesn’t stick in his brain.

  The problem with trying to construct the Gurkahn Eighteen-Year Plan was that as hard as it was to absorb anything from What to Expect when I was pregnant, it was even harder to concentrate now. I had spent my valuable scant readi
ng time on the subject of pregnancy, when what I really needed to read about was what happens once the baby comes out, and now it was too late. If I actually had the time and mental acuity to read more than one sentence after our kid was born, did I really want to spend it reading books about parenting, which was now my life? I did manage to read a paragraph or two about childhood development before my eyes glazed over. In case you never get the chance to read them, here are my one-sentence summaries: Piaget: Children develop in stages, not all at once. Your kid will never paint like Picasso and play like Bach at the same time. Sears: When baby cries, pick it up. Often. You’ll never sleep alone ever again.* Steiner: If you’re raising children who will have to work for a living, you can’t afford to follow my kooky bohemian theories. Never read this book. So I took what I thought was a reasonable course of action. I enrolled in an infant development course.

  Classes at the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) institute teach a philosophy that emphasizes allowing infants to develop at their own pace. Simple toys that encourage exploration as opposed to providing passive entertainment were recommended. The rules include no TV, no mechanized toys, no bouncers, and no putting babies into positions they couldn’t get into themselves. (This way they’d build confidence in their eventual independent mastery of walking, instead of being dependent on you to “walk” them around.)

  Best of all, the classes were exquisitely quiet—no moms swapping stories—and the policy was strictly to observe without interference. I could see how their nonintervention rule could work to my advantage. The black string that was being used for Ezra’s esophageal dilations attracted a lot of attention. Well-meaning people would not only inquire about it, one day a complete stranger in an elevator reached into his mouth and tried to pull it out. Because that string went through his mouth down into his stomach portal and up his esophagus (an endless loop through his internal organs), this appeared to cause Ezra enormous pain. “I thought your baby had a cherry stem in his mouth!” the lady shrieked as Ezra howled. By the time I started RIE classes, I had attached a notice onto his stroller: “Yes, I know my baby has a string in his mouth.” I knew he’d be left alone at the institute.

  Jeff likes to say the R in RIE stands for “ridiculous.” I know that RIE sounds a little extreme (OK, it was a little intense), but in practice it was basically infants rolling around on blankets in a circle, ringed in by moms. Some of the ideas just made sense. For example, every parent knows that no matter how much money you spend on a toy, your kid will end up spending more time playing with the box it came in. The class I attended had a warm and easygoing teacher, Janet, whose sense of humor made some of the more severe rules more palatable. As luck would have it, Janet got pregnant with twins, and she was replaced by Lucinda. Where Janet had been warm, approachable, and bubbly, Lucinda was sullen, distant, and sported a short choppy haircut that suggested she had styled it herself with a dull blade. Both her personality and voice had the affect of a recent lobotomy patient. Her placidness was tempered only by her strict adherence to the rules of RIE. But how much damage could she do? We were basically sitting on our asses observing our children, who were barely more than soybeans, right?

  When the babies reached twelve months, Lucinda announced that she was ready to facilitate the first official snack time. She placed wooden cable spools in the play area, but before she could put the orange slices and cups of water on top of these makeshift snack tables, one oversized child clad only in a diaper (sort of a baby Spartacus) started knocking the spools over and rolling them toward the other children, some of whom were still crawling and not terribly swift at that. It seemed about to escalate into a slaughter of the innocents, but no one said a word. “Shouldn’t we do something?” I volunteered. Lucinda wouldn’t budge. “Nobody move. The rules are no intervention of any kind. The children are scheduled to have snack time today and snacks they will have! We need to let them adapt to their environment!” Adapt to their environment? Was this an infant playgroup or a demonstration of survival of the fittest? I hadn’t just spent a quarter of a million dollars and the better part of the last twelve months nursing our child to health to have his head cracked open by a baby gladiator! I picked up my child and dragged the spools out of the play area. Some of the mothers looked aghast while others followed my actions, but the chain of command had been breached. Lucinda excused herself, went into an adjoining office, and softly shut the door. We could hear her phoning someone to come in for “backup.” Backup for an instructional course on human development? We knocked and waited for maybe forty-five minutes. She never came out. That was the last any of us ever saw of Lucinda. She phoned me a few weeks later and left me a long rambling message, at the end of which she demanded that I apologize to her. A replacement was brought in, but I was persona non grata at the RIE center and was never invited back to the class. I still maintain that it was worthwhile. While other toddlers were flinging themselves down stairs and were covered in bruises, Ezra was far less accident-prone, but Jeff maintains that the best thing to come out of RIE is that he gets to tell people that I was kicked out of an infant observation workshop.

  If Jeff deemed RIE ridiculous, he characterized my television-viewing guidelines as patently idiotic. This despite the fact that the American Pediatrics Association has been saying for years that children under the age of two shouldn’t watch TV.* You don’t need a Ph.D. to observe that a kid in front of a television turns into an inert receptacle and you might as well remove his brain and sell it on eBay to the highest bidder, who will no doubt be a parent in Asia, where they recognize that a child’s brain is the key to greater earning power in life.† That’s right, I’m just the kind of hypocritical person who makes a living on TV but doesn’t want people to watch it. At least not shows that I’m not in.

  Sadly, I discovered early on what everyone who can’t afford child care finds out really fast: babies don’t need TV; parents do. Sure, it was all well and good when you’re paying people to watch your child, but once you’re on your own, the minutes stretch into aeons, especially when your kid is sick. One such night Jeff was working late and little Ezra had something as ordinary as a cold and was screaming his head off. I couldn’t listen to my supposedly relaxing Liszt for Light Sleepers or Mendelssohn for Munchkins CDs one more time. So I plopped him in a swing (non—RIE approved; I cheated on that too) and turned on the tube. It was one a.m. and we watched the only thing that held Ezra’s attention long enough to get him to stop crying: Chucky III. That’s right, Child’s Play 3, a movie about a sociopathic doll that kills people. Ezra calmed down and fell asleep just as Chucky decapitated his last victim. The next day Jeff danced a little victory jig when I told him I would rethink the no-TV policy.

  I am still fighting the TV battle to this day because although we’ve found consensus on one area of parenting—our kid’s attendance at a school with rigorous academic standards—when it comes to actually fulfilling these expectations, such as doing the homework they assign, Jeff complains more than Ezra. Despite our numerous discussions about imposing the no-TV-on-weekdays policy, I’ll come home and find them settled in front of the screen on a school night because, according to Jeff, “sports is not TV.” Nor is House. “It’s a medical drama.” Nor is The Simpsons. “It’s the Halloween episode.” Nor is Family Guy. Why? “Because … Because … it’s so funny!”

  There’s a lot of TV on TV. With eight hundred channels there’s always something on that fits Jeff’s exceptions. Put the Internet and YouTube into the mix, and it only makes more sense to me that we need some kind of scheduled media-viewing timetable or at least a reliable reward system. Unfortunately, I’m too disorganized to ever remember and Jeff is too uninterested to recall what kind of plan I come up with during any given week. Did we agree that if the kid does the homework, he gets a half hour of TV? Or was it if he does his homework before we have to ask him five times, he gets that privilege? Does that include thirty minutes of reading, or did we decide we don’t want to make him r
ead because that might turn him off reading? We can’t keep it straight and no matter how many times we’ve imposed a “you’re losing your allowance, TV, Internet, or iPod” punishment, it never holds for more than thirty minutes before one of us caves in. Well, Jeff caves in. That’s why I’ve advocated for the simple, one-stop-shopping, no-TV-during-the-week rule.