Random acts of Cynicism

Cynicism (Greek: Kυνισμός) was originally the philosophy of a group of ancient Greeks called the Cynics, founded by Antisthenes. The Cynics rejected all conventions, whether of religion, manners, housing, dress, or decency, advocating the pursuit of virtue in a simple and unmaterialistic lifestyle.

Currently, the word 'cynicism' generally describes the opinions of those who maintain that self-interest is the primary motive of human behaviour, and are disinclined to rely upon sincerity, human virtue, or altruism as motivations.

Honestly, I just looked it up so that I would know the correct way to spell it.

I first thought that I would name this post as "random acts of kindness", but I decided to talk more about my mind-frame than to gush over a recent event, but I need to also do this in order to explain my mind-frame. Here is my story:

I was in Trader Joe's today. This is simple enough... go grocery shopping. I needed to pick up "snack" for 40 kids for 2 days (for my oldest's school)-composed of 4 lbs of cheese, 8 lbs of fruit, 4 boxes of crackers, and 2 gallons of juice. Plus there's the dog food. Grocery shopping is an ordeal. When my husband goes with me, we divide and conquer. We are now a "two cart family" and the thought sickens me to a certain extent. He is not with me now though, he has a shrink appointment.

The trick is not so much the parking, but carrying my 4 year old, and the 6 month old (in carrier), and the tote bags across the parking lot. The 4 year old is "out". I try to wake her. I open her eyelids one at a time and peer into her eyes. No effect. There's no turning back. I need to go. I need to get this done. There is no other time.

So I carry 50 lbs of human beings, 5 lbs of carrier, and 6 shopping bags 200 yards to the door. A man helps me by holding the shopping cart so I can slip the 4 year old into the seat. Why these things don't have breaks is beyond me. All they need are simple breaks like the ones on strollers. I've had one of my kids "take a ride" through the parking lot before, and it's not pretty the looks that you get when you leave your child unattended in this manner.

I put the carrier with the baby in the back. This leaves me the bottom of the shopping cart to put food in, so we can't buy anything that is smaller than 4 inches in diameter or it will slip through. I put what I can down there, and decide that it's "okay" to put 4 lbs on bananas on top of the baby. She seems alright with it. Then I put another lb. of oranges on top of her. Still okay, they are off to the side. I pile on a can of tunafish. She's chewing on it. I guess this is okay. Is the label made in China, is it printed with lead ink? No turning back now. The dog food is on the bottom, so that doesn't leave much room for anything else.

It's not very apparent that there is a baby in there. I am hoping to avoid "I would never" looks from people who don't have children. We know that all the "I would nevers (take my kid to Disneyland, buy Cinderella shoes, pile groceries on top of the baby)" go out the window once you actually do have kids.

No, it's not apparent I have a baby in there, until I am in line and she starts to cry. The oldest is still zonked out. The baby is strapped into the car seat with 6 lbs of groceries on her. There is no getting her out. I will have to let her cry. The line is long. I can't leave. I am responsible for "snack". A woman gets behind me in line. I guess I have a line in my forehead that looks like someone has taken a chainsaw to it, and my mandible muscles are bulging like a bulls, so she can see that I am a bit tense.

She begins to talk to the baby. Her voice is the quintessential mothers. She's soft and soothing, and it doesn't really matter what she's saying to the baby, but she knows that I am listening too. The baby stops crying and I look at her. She tells me to do what I have to do (which is basically check out, but it feels like I am climbing Everest). She is telling the baby that "mommy" is going to take her home soon and snuggle with her and cook dinner. She says "unless mommy has something else that she needs to do (this part is specifically for me)... and if she does she's not going to do it. She's just going to take you home".

Funny, in reading back that last sentence, it sounds so presumptuous. But it wasn't. She was honestly saying it to the baby to keep her calm. And she was, as if she could understand every word the woman was saying. Her words were so carefully placed.

I manage to swipe my debit card which has almost broken in two. I keep meaning to get another, but it's way down on the list. It will become priority when I can no longer get it out of the ATM machine. I can put the bags on top of the dog food now. I am one solid package. My baby is no longer crying (until the drive home). I run to the woman and hug her. We introduce ourselves, and I know I will remember her face forever.

Before I had two children I figured "to each his own". I was the last person that needed help, ever. I would bull my way through my day with my kid, dragging her here and there. People would offer, and I would look at them as if they were nuts. It was my choice to have a child, and I can deal with this, just get out of my way. I am independent to a fault, my mother will tell you this. She admits to making me this way. She didn't want me to cry when I went to kindergarten.

I remember being 8 months pregnant. I had my oldest in tow, five bags of groceries on the curb. I started to get her into her car seat when a guy started towards my bags. "Um, excuse me, those are my groceries!" I yelled to him. What did I think he was doing with them? Stealing them? sure. He was HELPING me. He saw that I had a kid and was pregnant, and he decided to help.

That was the beginning of the end. Little did I know that having a second child would require me to accept help sometimes. The fact was cemented when the baby was 6 weeks old. My car got stuck in across both lanes of a very busy street. I jumped out frantically trying to push it, and then decided that maybe this was not the best thing to do with the two kids in the car. Two super-women and a UPS man stopped traffic, carried the kids, and pushed my car to the side of the road.I sent out a mass email trying to reach them to thank them (managing to reach the UPS driver) and had my letter published in two newspapers.

Through these few events my mind-frame changed. It went from a "to each his own" cynical view of the human race, to a much kinder, gentler space. I am malleable now, I can accept help.
As for the ancient Greeks and their view of cynicism (The Cynics rejected all conventions, whether of religion, manners, housing, dress, or decency, advocating the pursuit of virtue in a simple and unmaterialistic lifestyle). This virtue would be simple to embrace, if only one never had to be responsible for "snack".

Baby Hates Power Tools

I'm not sure there are too many moms that can say that their baby hates the sound of a jigsaw in action. I honestly hope that I am wrong about that... or am I?

Today I found out that it is impossible to multi-task while using power tools. What I mean is that it is far easier to wash the dishes and hold the baby, fold laundry and hold the baby, build a web site and hold the baby. It is quite physically impossible to hold the baby while you are using a jigsaw (that is unless you want to risk... well we won't even go there).

I was in charge of installing a new dog door. Well, I guess technically not "in charge" but if I didn't do it, then it wouldn't get done, and it really needed to get done before the dog sitter took over for the week.

There are quite a few things like this that fall onto my plate in our household: installing a new garbage disposal, fixing a leaking faucet, mounting a new toilet. It's not that I know how to do any of these things. With the toilet, I had forgotten to put one of the gaskets in place so it looked quite perfect, that is, until I flushed. A full tank of water expelled itself all over the floor and by the end I was dripping wet and topless with wrenches in both hands, screaming, and laughing (thank god that part) with a two year old looking at me wide-eyed as if mommy had lost her mind.

The one thing that I've learned while acting as handyman for our house is that I should NOT read feminist lit while doing so (The Beauty Myth comes to mind). The two in combination are deadly. The division of labor in our household is stated verbatim in stats sited in those kinds of books, but having to play handyman pushes it into tilt, and I am generally not laughing but stewing over the figures, wrench in hand.

As I said, I don't know how to do most of the things that a handyman does, but they are quite necessary, so I just do them. My husband doesn't understand the "just do it" part. Holding a wrench must cause some kind of disconnect in his brain, that makes him utterly useless in these situations. What is so frustrating is that I have to hear over and over what a brilliant man he is (being a mathematician and all). Maybe mathematicians are not required to care for themselves in our world. Maybe I am a math slave.

Maybe there is just a difference in how we were brought up. I am an overly stoic New Englander (I say this as a fault). I grew up in the woods. He is a non-practicing Jew from LA. City boy. I only bring up the Jewish part because of the utterly tasteless joke about "How many Jews does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" (there are several punchlines to this, most along the lines of "One to call the cleaning lady and two to feel guilty about it"---the sick ones about Auschwitz are completely irrelevant). The joke is age old, so much that there is an environmental movement centered around it involving installing energy-efficient lights in their homes for the celebration of lights.

The joke is stereotypical, and racist, of course. It's an over-generalization, but in our household there are 7 light bulbs that are out, and someone complaining very loudly that it's too dark. So, I have to laugh at the joke.

I am proud of the fact that I have done all of these things, yes, but given an hour of spare time, I don't think that I would put it into doing them (especially the toilet). I had a daylight fantasy of becoming a handy-woman for a living today. The dream quickly degraded into who my clientele might be. On the plus side, maybe little old ladies would want to hire me, because I would be safer than having a man come into the house. On the downside, I'd get men hiring me to look at my ass while I screwed in a light bulb. Maybe this is just an over-exageration. Maybe not. Why do I even need to think of this?

The real question is, if I did not own a jigsaw, who would install the dog door? Would I have to hire a handyman to do it? How long would it be left undone? So, it is utterly necessary.

So getting back to my feelings about whether or not more women should use jigsaws. Truth is, I don't know too many couples where both partners have a set of power tools (or ones that they share). Maybe I am hanging with the wrong set. Growing up, my father did all of the handyman work. He built our house. He introduced me to sawsalls, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers. I helped. I learned a little... I learned that if you take something apart, you can put it back together again with new parts (you better have damn well been paying attention when you took it apart). I learned that if there is information written about how to do something (such as instructions), eventually you can figure it out.

I watched my oldest daughter help "poppop" take apart her crib when she was about two and a half. She held the screwdriver, and he actually showed her how to use it. He loosened the screws enough, so she could feel a sense of accomplishment when it finally came loose. She was ecstatic to help.

She came home from school today, and looked at the tools scattered all over the floor, and very proudly said "Mommy. You DID it!". When everybody was settled in, I put the tools away, and started to wash the dishes and cook dinner. She went upstairs to put her "jammies" on. When she came down, my little princess was wearing blue pajamas with wrenches, and hammers, and saws on them. She never wears these (think PRINCESS), but tonight, I guess she was inspired. I bought them for her a couple of years back (she's finally grown into them).

Her father was sitting at the table and she looked at him and said "Look Dada, I have tool jammies on"

"Oh yeah, where did you get those?"

"Pop-pop bought them for me"

I think she's on the right track.

Groundhog Day

I was nursing the baby to sleep tonight and I happened to glance over at the clock, which displays the wrong time and the wrong date. We use it as a sound machine to cover up my husband's snoring. It doesn't work. I slept in the hallway the other night (after ripping the comforter off of my husband and grabbing one of the five pillows he was using). I shut the door. peace. no. I turned on the dryer, the laundry room was right next to me head, there was change in it. Cachink, cachink, cachink... ah peace. All until I almost gave myself hypothermia because of sleeping on a cold tile floor. By this time the baby was next to me, kicking... she was probably trying to tell me that she was getting hypothermia too.

Anyhow, the date on the clock said 2-02. Groundhog's day. I never notice the time or date on this clock, but somehow this struck me as ironic. Why exactly, I'm unsure. Maybe it was the fact that I know what rocking a "pack and play" sounds like, whish, whish. I have been doing it for four years now.

I'm not thinking of the holiday necessarily, but the movie. The one where he wakes up over and over to the same day. I guess we all do it to a certain extent. This happened to me while I was pregnant for the second time. Every time I turned around, it was Wednesday. There's no distinct marker to Wednesday necessarily in my life, but it stood out more than the other days. Not sure why. Hump day, huh, that's what got me in my predicament in the first place.

I thought of naming the baby Wednesday, but due to the Adam's family rugrat, I thought it might be a bad idea. "Adam's Family Values" was on the other night. I never watch TV, but it was background noise for some sewing that I was TRYING to do (I don't sew, but thought that I could at the moment).

I caught the part of Morticia in labor. Peaceful, happily grim, not moving an inch. Way different than me on all fours in the shower yelling at my husband to stop asking if I was okay and to tell me that I was doing great. Morticia, the ultimate Macho mom in labor. No epidural. She should have had a home birth.

I just met with one of my "mommy" friends in the park the other day. Her second is about a month old. She had a home birth. And she had a retained placenta. And a nice little trip to the hospital. And 4 units of blood (we only have 5 in our bodies). She had Smurf hallucinations because they shot her up with PCP for the pain.

I am all for "back to nature", I harvest edible wild plants, get my produce from a co-op farm. Why women would give birth at home though is beyond me. Just think of the mess. Who's going to clean that up?

My oldest asked me today, in view of the hospital, if that's where all babies are born. I listed at least a half-dozen babies that had not been born there, but born at home. Granted, we live in a hoodoo town where naval-gazing is the norm. Healers run amok selling their stuff, whatever that might be. I actually had a neighbor admit to me that he was on hallucinogens and lighting fires at the top of our hill behind our house. He said it proudly. He was having a "very powerful ceremony" up there. a huh...

What I am wondering is, do we do these things to get out of the norm of everyday life? Nine to five is definitely not our nature anymore, and we need to prove it to the world. We are better than that. We can give birth at home, who needs those doctors anyhow? We fill our kids with alternative medicine until their eardrums burst because they have an infection that we thought we could treat ourselves. Everyone is a medicine man.

Are our lives so filled with the mundane that we feel we need to take chances to get closer to nature? I can understand why we don't trust our "medicine men" anymore. I can understand that our insurance/health care system is corrupt. But this is not about the masses, it's about the educated and relatively wealthy. You don't see welfare moms giving birth at home, at least not on purpose.

Well to each his own and I am not making any judgments. I simply think that women have enough burden on them in our society without raising the bar even more. Life choices that bring us back to nature shouldn't happen for just the intense moments, but for the simple ones too. Everyday we do our thing. Over and over we do it. It's this over and over that matters in the long run. It's the small choices that we make that add up and in the long run bring us back to nature.

Nature will take care of us. That is until we need a trip to the hospital.

Daylight Save-me

"Tonight we turn the clocks back! That's an extra hour of sleep!", my husband joyfully proclaimed tonight at the dinner table, while my oldest screamed that she needed to color AND eat, and the baby cried holding both spoons (one intended for me to feed her with, the other to hold).

WHAT? Is he out of his mind?

I calmly rebutted "not, if you have kids" and he looked like I had slapped him. Don't worry honey, I won't ask you to wake up with them tomorrow. After all, you don't have breasts, or at least ones that work.

The ticking time-bomb, uh, I mean time-clock of my kids bodies doesn't relate to the time change in the least. Could it be that they don't know how to tell time yet? Or is it that they just wake up to each day with joyful wonder and excitement? Maybe both.

When exactly does it happen? Is it in High School, where given an extra hour of snooze time, we quickly jump to the opportunity? Is it sooner than that? What switch goes off in our human existence? Maybe it's when we stop believing in Santa Claus.

My rebellion: I put the kids to bed an hour earlier tonight. This could mean one of two things. They will be getting up pre-dawn, or I've tricked them into getting that extra hour anyhow. I think the former will probably preside.

I will find myself using that extra hour, over and over and over tomorrow. Maybe I am using it now. Personally I think that it should come to us by surprise. We should all get phone calls at a particular hour proclaiming that we have just been given another hour, maybe Monday morning when we're getting ready for work. At least then the extra hour wouldn't be absorbed into our day, but would allow us to do the things that we really cared about, like wash dishes, or watch Cinderella III.

I've heard that it came late this year, later than was marked on the Calendars. SOMEONE decided this was a good idea. This all leaves me wondering, "who exactly is in charge of this anyhow?". Obviously the government is, right? Is there a division for this? How much are these people paid? who is on the committee? How do I contact them?

How much time is wasted actually resetting all these clocks? How long will I spend with the wrong time on my car stereo before I remember which button to hold down for three seconds?

Anyway, back to children. I used to work with a woman that had two children (5 now, poor thing). This was back in my 20s, when the word "snooze" was well worn on my alarm clock. She said that she didn't have an alarm clock, she didn't need one. This was so out of reach of my comprehension that I still think about it today. Now, I know what she means... it's unnecessary.
SOMEONE will wake you up, and more than likely it will be sooner than you want to wake up.

Now I am just trying to figure out whether the sound of an alarm (which noise is uncannily like a school bus backing up), or the sounds of children screaming is more pleasant to wake up to.

One thing's for sure, I don't have the excuse anymore of the alarm not going off.

((Here's a good link. I guess I can relate my kids to the cows that need milking no matter what time we all say it is.
http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200504010806.asp))