cat named pig

[Here is something resembling a conclusion, or at least the winding down of my ranting, on the subject of Princesses and How We Feel About Them. What about you? What do you think? Leave a comment, even if it’s just to request that I go back to writing stories about cat barf. Because I’ve got more to say about that, too.]

Where I left off: the Princess Obsession has a life of its own.

In keeping with our “theories” about parenting, we did not encourage Siena to be super-girly. Yeah, we bought her pink clothes, because sometimes those were the cutest ones, and we gave her baby dolls when A) we were starting to think we might want to become a family of four, and more importantly B) she was rocking and swaddling and cuddling everything she found that was even remotely small and baby-like, from stuffed ladybugs to a stuffed Peep (yes, like the gooey, disgusting Easter treat, but in stuffed animal form. A gift from the same friend who gave Elliot the E.T. doll, as a matter of fact.).

For the most part, her own interest level has always dictated the “girly” stuff we’ve bought for her, and for a while, we made a conscious effort not to introduce Barbies or Disney Princess Brand merchandise. (Those things made it into our home anyway; once Siena’s friend Avery acquired a significant Barbie collection, we realized it was futile to pretend like they weren’t cool – Siena knew they were if Avery liked them. Then a co-worker gave Siena three Barbies – Disney Princess Barbies, no less – and Matt’s head exploded. He has since recovered, and now tolerates “The Princesses” [he refuses to call them Barbies] with much gritting of his teeth and rolling of his eyes, but with less overt hostility.)

So at some point, we lost the war. I’m not even sure we realized we were fighting a war, until we lost the Battle of the Halloween Costume. Which wasn’t so much a battle as a complete annihilation of our defenses by the juggernaut of Disney Princessdom. Last August, Siena starting asking me daily if she could be Belle from Beauty and the Beast for Halloween, and after a few months of this, I reluctantly paid actual cash money for a large, highly-flammable tulle-and-polyester Belle costume that dragged on the ground and fulfilled her every princess fantasy. At first, its gaudiness made me a little nauseated. Couldn’t she be a cute little animal for one more Halloween? But it grew on me as I saw how much she loved it – you could see how she felt transformed when she put it on. And, let’s be honest here, I could get her to do anything I needed if I let her wear it.

[Full disclosure: the months since Halloween have actually seen me standing in the Princess Aisle at Target (they have a whole aisle exclusively devoted to this stuff) and contemplating flammable Snow White and Cinderella costumes. Because I know what her face would look like if I brought one home: pure crazy joy.] 

Fine. So we have princess stuff. But then there’s the whole issue of how to “play” princesses. I get all twitchy when this play revolves around lying down waiting for someone to kiss you, because HELLO, passive female stereotypes. And I don’t think putting on makeup counts as “playing,” no matter who is on the package. But from what I’ve observed at school, playing Princess also seems to involve lots of sprinting around, yelling for your Princess-Sister-Cat-Ballet-Friends to keep up with you, or hide with you, or something. Action Princesses. That’s cool, I guess. 

Maybe it’s time for me to stop rolling my eyes or suggesting plot lines that sound slightly more feminist to my ears (“OK, now Elliot’s the prince and he ate the poison apple, so you have to come rescue him”) and just let her play princess. Or princess-ballerina-cat. It’s not like this is a child who is afraid to assert herself, or to tell everyone around her exactly what she wants. And if she wants to surround herself with things she finds beautiful, and to use her imagination to both enact scenes from movies and invent stories and characters of her own, why not? 

She watches me put on makeup (OK, not so often these days, but every once in a while, for special occasions like going shopping by myself) – so why get all bent out of shape about some Princess Lip Gloss?  She watches me buy things to make our home look nice, and we talk about colors, and notice sunsets, and point out other things that are beautiful. I take her to art museums and we do art projects and we read books with gorgeous illustrations. So why would I not want her to have a beautiful (to her) Barbie Island Princess doll, complete with bizarre peacock-tail attachment that fans out at the push of a button? (So what if beauty, to her eye, is gaudy and ridiculous to mine? And rather baffling – like the peacock thing? What is that?) Do I really have so little faith in her that I think her character or self-esteem will be warped by playing with these things? Do I really have so little faith in myself, and my parenting?

They say that when you have kids of your own, you earn a new respect for your parents and what you put them through. If I look back on some of the major battles of my own childhood and teenage years, a lot of them arose from me wanting to look a certain way. Ear piercing, and later eyebrow piercing debates figured prominently, but there were also the urgency of needing the right brand of jeans and the tragedy of having to wear glasses, and countless bizarre outfits I put together when I needed to look like Laura Ingalls Wilder (second grade) or a character from The Babysitters’ Club (fifth grade).

If my own experience tells me anything, it is that my children are likely to have equally specific ideas about how they want to present themselves to the world – these ideas may be all their own when they are younger and largely influenced by their peers when they are older – but I am pretty sure these smart, stubborn kids will have very little interest in what their parents think they should like. And that goes for everything from what they wear to how they play – as long as it’s relatively safe, legal, age-appropriate and not too messy, we’ll probably all be happier if Matt and I just let them be themselves (or whoever their imaginations decide they are at any given moment).

[Brace yourselves for the world’s longest blog post. I wrote this as a Word document, and it kind of got away from me. (Perhaps I thought I was back in college, writing a paper for Intro. to Women’s Studies, only with more sentence fragments and less structure.) So here is What I Think About Princesses, Part the First, because I couldn’t handle looking at it when I had it all as one post. Part Two will be up this afternoon, so check back if you are riveted by this subject. Also, Matt and I welcome your comments on the whole phenomenon, so please weigh in or share your insights — if you have time after reading all this.]  

I’ve written a lot about Siena’s Nutcracker Ballet Obsession, but not as much about its wicked stepsister, the Disney Princess Obsession. I actually prefer the Nutcracker Obsession, telling myself it suggests an underlying passion for the arts, and also because it provides the benefit of regular exercise (for all of us) as we reenact the entire ballet on a daily basis. The Disney Princesses, on the other hand, don’t actually do much. I mean, in their own individual movies they do plenty of things, but as a collective (the way they are marketed by Disney to three-year-old girls) they just kind of sit around looking fancy.

We own countless coloring books, stickers, lip-gloss sets, and other such junk featuring three or four Disney Princesses grouped together, often wearing matching dresses. You might expect to see them with other characters from their movies, but I guess the animal sidekicks and whatnot aren’t as fancy and therefore deemed less interesting to little girls. My problem with this trend is the way it shifts the focus away from the actual stories and onto the fanciness (and homogeneity) of the beautiful princesses.

I’m not convinced these ladies and their Princess-branded products are sending messages we want to send about women, or girls, and what’s important to them.

…..

The whole girly princess thing started gradually for us. Before Siena was born, I thought (isn’t it cute how new parents, or parents-to-be, always have these theories?) that maybe this Princess Obsession was sort of created by parents. I didn’t believe in innate differences in the interests of boys and girls; I thought those differences were something they picked up from the adults around them. Like when the parents are all, “Oh, I’m having a boy – better decorate the nursery with cars and trucks!” and then the little boy grows up surrounded by trucks and, naturally, loves them. And then the parents laugh and say, “He’s just such a boy!” as he plays with his trucks.

[Side note: Elliot’s nursery contains an E.T. doll, a gift from friends, that just happens to be Elliot’s favorite item in the whole entire world. He would pass up legions of BALLS! for five minutes of putting E.T.’s feet in his mouth and laughing about it – so, yeah. Maybe a happy kid will love anything you give him or her — instead of a truck theme, we just happened to go with extraterrestrial. Which means I’d really prefer not to believe in a link between gender roles/expectations and nursery décor, frankly, as I’m not sure how the E.T. thing fits into that theory.]

Anyway. I thought maybe the Princess Obsession developed like this: parents have a baby girl. Because she is a girl, they surround her with every girly pink thing in the world, they give her dolls and princess-themed toys to play with, they call her their little princess, and lo, she’s obsessed with princesses. Ah, how naive I was. How overly optimistic, too, thinking my kids would care that much about what their parents thought would be interesting to them.

Since having an actual daughter, instead of just a theory, I have revised my position: the Princess Obsession has a life of its own.

[Here I pause, to allow you to get back to your jobs for a while, and because people in my house are crying. Stay tuned for the next installment of Everything I Think About Princesses, to be posted later today.]  

At breakfast, I ask Elliot if he wants a banana. (I hate feeding him bananas, because of the smell and because of the petrified banana goo that I will end up having to chisel off every surface in the dining room, but this kid loves his bananas. I am helpless in the face of so much cuteness.) As soon as I say the word banana, his face lights up and he starts pointing frantically to the kitchen.

“Buh!”

 “Da-na!”

“NananananaMAMA!”

“Buh-mama!”

“Da-na?”

“Num-nam-na-na. Mum mum.”

“MAH!”

He just keeps throwing syllables at it until he gets what he wants.

Which come to think of it, is not all that different from the way I ask Matt to do projects around the house. At least, I’m guessing that’s how Matt would describe it. 

That guy you saw at Target at 9:30 p.m. tonight? The one dressed in a suit and tie, having just left some kind of fancy board meeting? The one standing in the bottle and sippy cup aisle for more than ten minutes, on his cell phone, discussing which sippy cups were made of BPA-free plastic, had the right kind of spout that would not contribute to speech delays or difficulty, and had the least irritating graphics or characters on them? 

That was my husband.

And no, you cannot have him. 

Last night I ate a pint of ice cream for dinner. Seriously. I mean, Matt and Siena each had a little bit for their dessert, but I had already eaten a double-scoop cone of two different flavors when I bought the pint, which means I probably ended eating more than a pint yesterday, myself.

By contrast, Siena had organic spinach, a Boca vegetarian sausage, and whole wheat organic pasta for her dinner. Elliot had the same, with organic peas and corn instead of the spinach. And they watched me eat ice cream straight from the carton for my meal. Sometimes it’s awesome being the grown-up. (Not that I do this all the time; if I did, I guarantee Siena would start to protest and then I would be at a crossroads: give up the ice-cream-as-substitute-for-dinner, or let the whole family start eating nothing but ice cream. While that might make for a good reality show, I don’t think it would make for good bedtimes.)  

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, you should know that my mom’s nickname (given to her by my brother and me when we were little) was “Ms. Nutrition.” We would say this in a teasing, sing-song voice whenever she quashed our hopes of purchasing a product containing corn syrup, or anything as decadently unhealthy as white bread instead of whole wheat. A Fig Newton was the closest we ever came to having cookies in our snack drawer; I tasted my first soda at the age of twelve, at a  friend’s house. Saltine crackers and Kraft single slices of American cheese were my snack of choice at my best friend Heather’s house — not what I would want in the way of cheese and crackers today, but they were exotic and irresistible at the time.

The weird thing is, I appreciate all that. Thanks to my mom, I would say I grew up with a good understanding of nutrition, and I really do feel better when I eat well. I buy organic, whole-grain, low-sugar everything (including snack foods — I think they have better options now than when I was little) and I would say we all enjoy our healthy meals. 

With the occasional exception.  

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who responded to yesterday’s post. In addition to the comments posted, I received multiple e-mails and some of you probably just sent some good energy our way, because we had a lovely, and violence-free, day today. As a stay-at-home mom, I have a lot of time to hang out with my own thoughts, especially regarding parenting decisions, and that one was weighing on me. So it was really nice to get some outside (of my head) perspectives, and some encouragement. 

It was also interesting to hear anecdotes from other people’s childhoods about consequences and lessons; several people shared very specific memories of times when their parents carried out a threat and got their point across. And no one seemed particularly upset or resentful of their parents as they retold these stories, which is very encouraging!

I know now to only make threats I am actually willing to carry out (duh), and I should know by now never to be surprised when my kids bust out a new negative behavior in a public setting, just to keep me on my toes. I mean, Elliot’s just getting started. . . . 

I think Siena knew she had crossed a line yesterday, and I think she learned something from the experience, even though I didn’t go through with making her miss the class. She might not remember this incident in thirty years, but with any luck, I won’t either. This wasn’t the biggest event in the whole world, but it’s a good example of the way these little guys keep constantly changing the terms of the deal on you. I thought we had worked through hitting/biting/physical violence when she was one and two; the amount of time we spend embroiled in complicated verbal negotiations these days had led me to assume we were past the physical issues, when WHAM. Literally. 

But then this is the same child who will spontaneously drop what she’s doing and run across the room to give me a surprise hug. And sometimes out of nowhere she will say, “Mama? I love you,” and it almost sounds like a question. Like she’s just saying it to hear me respond, “I love you, too, Sweetie.” (I guess not all testing is bad.) 

And last night at bedtime, Siena asked if she could put Elliot to bed. I wasn’t sure she could manage the logistics on her own, given that he’s almost as big as she is, but I let her sit in the rocking chair and give him his bottle before I put him in the crib. She rocked him and stroked his hair, and gave him soft kisses on the top of his head. He beamed up at her, even pausing his milk-chugging a few times when it got in the way of his smiling. (He never pauses when drinking milk. He never pauses when drinking or eating anything.) 

I know these two are going to challenge me in every way possible for years to come, individually and as a unified force. They will team up to unravel my mental stability, and then they will turn on each other and make my ears bleed with the sound of their fighting. I know this. But, man, are we all crazy about each other. 

I can’t bring the funny right now. I’m too tired. And a little bit sad. (How often do you really admit that to yourself, in response to the day’s events? Not that often, probably, unless you have a blog. Easier to just shrug it off and move on, or at least that’s how I was until I started scrutinizing every experience to see if it could be turned into a blog post.)

So here’s what happened today: Siena hit me. Hard, with a closed fist to show she meant business, three separate times.

If we had been at home when this happened, I would’ve just gotten all SuperNanny and given her a warning after the first one, followed by a three-minute time-out after she did it again. Then we would have talked about it, hugged, and gotten on with our lives. And I’d be writing a post about cat barf or something. (Don’t worry, that happened today too. Pig still can’t break the binge-purge cycle.)  

But we weren’t at home. We were at the park rec center, getting ready for Siena’s ballet class. Surrounded by parents getting their children ready for the same class, and watching us in that pitying/judging way that says, “I have a kid; I know how they can be. But still, my child would never hit me like that. I can’t believe you allow that sort of behavior. I’m glad my child and my parenting skills are so vastly superior to yours.”

So here’s what I did: I tried to ignore the first one (she almost missed, anyway, and there was a lot going on in the room. I just chalked it up to over-stimulation and was willing to let it go in favor of putting on the ballet shoes and finishing her snack before class started). When she hit me the second time, I hissed, “NO hitting” and then placed her on a couch and informed her (SuperNanny-style) that this was her warning. She was to sit there and finish her snack or we were going home.  

But when she got up, came over to me and very deliberately hit me a third time, I didn’t know what to do. I had given a warning, with a grave enough consequence that I thought she would never test it, and she had. Should I follow through (as I assume SuperNanny would) and actually leave? Or was that cruel, considering how she practically lives for dance classes? Or is that appropriate, to take away something really important to her, so she learns an important lesson? I mean, you can’t just hit someone every time you get a little bit frustrated; that’s reasonable, right? Have to learn that sometime. But then again, she’s three. She’s not even going to understand it as a Life Lesson — she’s only going to be crushed that she missed her dance class. And hate me. And need years of therapy to move past this incident. 

With all that racing through my mind, I decided to buy myself a minute to think by packing up our stuff as though we were leaving. This got the point across that I was serious and that she had crossed the line. It also allowed me to cool down enough to talk to her calmly. (It also gave the other parents in the vicinity an opportunity to really give their pitying/judging faces a workout. I mean, the things people can convey with just their eyebrows — it’s impressive.)

I asked Sara to watch Elliot for a second and took Siena outside. We talked about how it is never OK to hit someone, no matter how angry you are, and I told her I would still let her go to class, but I expected that this would never happen again. She apologized, we hugged, and we went back in.

So now I’m interested in opinions, because I still haven’t made up my mind about the whole situation: did I do the right thing? Did I overreact? Under-react? Fail to follow through on the punishment, thus setting myself up for a lifetime of having my warnings ignored? Or lay the groundwork for future therapy sessions by threatening too harsh a punishment, and making her doubt my love for her by pretending I was actually going to go through with it? Gah.

I’m serious: I’m interested in hearing what people think. Many of you reading this are parents, and it’s not like that even matters — I had plenty of opinions about how to raise kids before I ever got pregnant. I know you do, too. So leave a comment or send me an e-mail. All (constructive) feedback and suggestions welcome. (Suggestions along the lines of “You should never have had kids” would be an example of non-constructive. Besides, I already know that. Kidding.)

[Edited to add: Upon re-reading this post, I realized it may sound like I get all my parenting techniques from a TV show, which I actually don’t. But that time-out thing? It really works. And it’s not like the kids came with instruction manuals. You gotta pick up pointers wherever you can.]

Dinner tonight was interrupted when Siena received a text message from Barbie. 

I wish I were joking or making this up.

She literally jumped up from her chair, ran over to her toy cell phone, flipped it open and exclaimed, “Oh, Barbie just texted me!” 

Sigh. And triple-sigh.

Last night was a big night for the catnamedpig household. First, Sara and Avery came over and hung out with Siena and Elliot, while Matt and I went to dinner — by ourselves. This has not happened in quite some time. We went to Chino Latino for some spicy food and Significant Cocktails. (Capitalized to differentiate them from common, insignificant cocktails that do not contain blackberry puree [mine] or three kinds of tequila [Matt’s].) My Blackberry Mojito was so Significant it led me to suggest, more than once, that we order our table neighbor a beverage which requires tying on a Samurai headband and shouting “BANZAI!” or some such nonsense before downing it. He politely declined, much to my disappointment and his date’s relief. I still think it would’ve been great.

When we came home, Siena headed back to Sara and Avery’s with them for her first-ever sleepover at their house. It appears to have been a raging success; I went over there this morning to pick her up and stayed for two more hours while the girls played and Sara made lunch for us. Even though she was clearly exhausted, Siena was reluctant to leave.

I’m pretty sure the Siena-Avery Sleepover will play a key role in our parenting strategy for years to come. It was nice to have an evening where we didn’t spend half our time putting kids to bed (thanks, Sara!) and a relaxing morning where only Elliot and the cat whined for their breakfast. It was also nice to see how much fun Siena had (and how easily she went down for her nap this afternoon).

I look forward to hosting Avery for a sleepover sometime soon. Matt is eager to have kids sleep in tents in our basement. In fact, I would say he is positively giddy with excitement at the prospect of setting up a tent. Inside! For kids to sleep in — OMG! So cool! (Just teasing, Honey. It will be really cool. Go for it.)

My brother hates blogs. It’s true. He raises some good points about them being self-indulgent and narcissistic and boring, because they tend to focus on things that are only interesting to the person experiencing them. But I say one more blog in the universe is a small price to pay for having a mentally stable sister, so I make no apologies for being part of the problem, and we’ve agreed to disagree. And today he is the subject of a blog post he may or may not ever read.

My brother is a lot cooler than I am, although he is five years younger and I have only recently realized that I am no longer the cool older sister taking him shopping for back-to-school clothes in junior high. And haven’t been for quite some time. Sigh.

Here is what he looks like now: 

This was taken in a recording studio, where he and his band are recording. A record. (A CD? An album? Whatever you call it nowadays. I’m so far removed from cool I’m not sure how to even talk about these things.) But yeah, his band plays at clubs in LA and is working on an album and he has waist-length dreads. All of which are probably cooler than blogging about cat barf. (Hey, they say you should write what you know. And I know what it’s like to live with a bulimic cat. Do I ever.)

Just to remind you, here is what I look like these days, right down to the facial expression:

Or possibly this, but with less in the way of bangs (and creepiness):

*

I’m not entirely sure short hair is for me.

Now back to my brother: yesterday was his birthday, so we called him and sang to his voicemail. Siena calls him “Tio Matt,” because one of the first times she spent much time with him, we were in the Dominican Republic and giving our high school Spanish skills a workout. The name stuck, and now we all refer to him as “Tio.” (Sometimes Siena calls him “Uncle Tio,” not quite understanding the redundancy. Then again, sometimes she calls me “Uncle Mama” or “Uncle Baby,” then laughs hysterically, so it could be that I just don’t understand her particular brand of humor yet, and she’s writing blog posts in her head about how I’m just “not quite there yet” and I “just don’t get it.”)

The final story I have to share relating to my brother is the fact that, while he is five years younger, Siena insists on calling him my big brother, because he is bigger than me. She frequently asks when Elliot will grow up to be her big brother, like Tio Matt is mine. I’ve given up trying to explain this one, although you’re free to try. Good luck to you.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Tio Matt. We love you.

Love,

catnamedpig.com

*Photo by Richard Foreman/Miramax Films