eh_notsomuch

But after writing a lot about the abortion debate in the last couple of weeks, I'm struck by the similarities between the vitriol Vernon reports and typical anti-choice rhetoric. She receives "terrifying" letters and e-mails calling her "selfish ... unnatural, evil." She is "now routinely referred to as 'baby-hating journalist Polly Vernon.'" Ring any bells? How about this -- men more than women, Vernon says, often respond by becoming "aggressive, sneering ... Perhaps the idea that there are women at large who are not actively pursuing their sperm is an out-and-out affront to a certain kind of man. The same men who have spent years believing that all women secretly want to trap them into commitment and fatherhood, probably."

I am no great defender of Rachael Ray, 30-minute peddler of EVOO and perpetual pep, but I was pretty aghast this weekend, when I finally sat down to watch a (week-old) clip of last Monday's "Nightline," in which ABC journalist Cynthia McFadden sat down with the talk-show host and convenient cook to talk about her life and empire...

...It was the interview's turn toward the domestic, in which McFadden shows the television star playing with her pit bull, described as "the light of her life," and planning dinner with her husband. "You have said famously that you're too busy for children," said McFadden.

"I'm not too busy for children in general," replied Ray. "I love working with them, I love hanging out with them, I love cooking with them. I think that I'm 40 years old, and I have an enormous amount of hours that have to be dedicated to work. For me personally, I would need more time to feel like I'd be a good mom to my own child. I feel like a borderline good mom to my dog. So I can't imagine if it was a human baby. Plus I also literally don't think ... I can't imagine anybody giving me three or six months off to go physically have a child and take even a baby break. There is too much momentum and I feel like it would be unfair, not only to the child but to the people I work with."

This sounded to me like an extremely full answer to McFadden's question -- one that probably wouldn't be asked of a man, but which is certainly fair to ask of a television host who specializes in the domestic arts. But McFadden's follow up was kind of beyond the pale: "Do you think you're missing something?"

What? Didn't you hear the lady say she has so much work and so many commitments that she doesn't have time or inclination to add motherhood to her list of responsibilities? Didn't you catch the part where she said that she likes kids but doesn't want them enough to clear space for them? What about her priorities to her colleagues, and her open and unapologetic evaluation of the limited energy she could spend on motherhood? If she felt like something was missing that she needed to add, does Rachael Ray strike you as the kind of retiring violet who would sit silently and suffer in her muted desire for babies? And also, what of this "Are you missing something?" question. Why is that only asked about children, or sometimes to single people about whether or not they long for romantic partners? Why doesn't anyone ever ask the married mothers who don't run media empires if they feel like they're missing something? Isn't everyone always "missing" "something" -- a friend or a partner or a parent or a child or a job or a hobby or a savings account or a sense of security or an extra hour in the day or a soul?

In any case, Ray dismissed the question with a quick sentence, telling McFadden, "I don't feel like I am. I really don't."

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It's such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not."

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research ("Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids," read one), which isn't surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we've been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents' happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. "If you admit that kids and parenthood aren't making you happy, it's basically blasphemy," says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. "From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you're supposed to feel like a kid because you're there with your kids, we've made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it's disappointing when you find out it's not."

• Last month, one couple had their first child.


• Friday night, we were out to dinner with another couple, who are due next month. Their baby shower is this Saturday.


• Our other friends finally got the word that they can go to Vietnam and pick up their baby boy.


• And of course, we're on baby watch with SIL. Her due date is this week!

chicklet73

The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.

Even winter -- the hardest season, the most implacable -- dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

So August gave way to September, and there were few complaints.

They aren’t really the worst persons in the world, of course.

Somewhere somebody’s ending freedom, or sticking a shiv into a witness, or defrauding an orphan, or bombing a home. And there’s almost nobody in this book who—in any kind of empirical analysis of the worst person in the world at a given moment—could truly hold a candle to any of them.

But my guys and gals have all, in their own ways, tried.

Orphans may have nothing to fear, and freedom is more likely to hurt itself laughing at them than to be hurt by their Rube Goldbergian machinations. But these Worsts (if you’ll permit the term) are the mortal enemies of honesty and dignity, of selflessness and class.

From today's "Ask Amy" column, which I read in the Philly Inquirer, but is carried in plenty of other papers:

Dear Amy: I am the nanny of two 10-year-old girls this summer, and I am concerned with comments they have made about their looks.

Both are normal-size, healthy girls with regular bodies, but I have heard them say how fat they think they are at least five or six times. One time one girl complained about her "big belly," and the other said, "I need to work out soooo bad. I'm so fat."

Amy, these girls are 10!

After they say these things, I always tell them that they aren't fat, that they are a healthy size and beautiful girls.

I am wondering if this is the proper way to handle this, or what I could possibly do to make these girls believe that they are healthy and not fat.

I do not want them to suffer the same self-esteem issues so many women (including myself) face.

- Wondering in Illinois

Dear Wondering: You are right to be concerned, and you are responding just as you should. You can help further by exposing them to positive girl role models, rather than the stick-insect pop tarts and cultural "icons" in vogue.

If your summer charges haven't yet started the Harry Potter books, now would be a good time to read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998, Scholastic) with them. The Hermione character is one that any 10-year-old girl should emulate. On TV lately, I'm enjoying Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide on Nickelodeon. The character Moze is a girl who is tough, savvy and funny.

Girls should be encouraged to be smart and creative problem-solvers, not miniature workout queens.

Obviously, let a parent know what you're observing. Unfortunately, the girls might be re-creating talk they hear at home. You would be doing these young girls a service to let them know that the content of their character is always going to be the most important thing to you. They're watching and learning from you.

From UPI:

Emphasis on children decreasing

OAKLAND, Calif., July 10 (UPI) -- As people live longer, Americans' child-free years are expanding and more young adults are delaying, or skipping, having children.

In 1960, nearly 50 percent of all households had children under 18, The Christian Science Monitor reported Tuesday. By 2000, that had fallen to less than 30 percent and in a few years is predicted to drop to 25 percent, said a report from the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In addition, the percentage of people who said children were very important to a good marriage has fallen from 65 percent to 41 percent since 1990, said findings released last week in a Pew Research report.

"We are getting much more of an adult-oriented culture than has ever existed arguably, and that could prove problematic," David Popenoe, codirector of the Marriage Project, told the Monitor. "You can envision a society in which children are kind of an afterthought and not in the interests of society as a whole."

PUEBLO, Colo., Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Police in Pueblo, Colo., arrested a woman and charged her with using her 5-month-old son as a down payment for a car.

Sgt. Brett Wilson of the Pueblo Police Department's special victims unit told the Denver Post the alleged sale took place on Feb 21.

"We received information from a third party about the sale of the baby," Wilson said. "Within hours, we were able to locate the baby."

The child was healthy and was placed in foster care, the report said.

Nicole Uribe, 23, was taken into custody for investigation of trafficking in children, which is a Class III felony, and the couple who allegedly bought the child could also be charged, Wilson said.

Oscar winner DAME HELEN MIRREN is glad she doesn't have any children of her own - because she has no motherly instincts at all. The British star has never had the desire to start a family with her husband of 10 years, American director TAYLOR HACKFORD, and she warns that others should not do so if they feel the same way. She says,"I'm just not interested. I've no maternal instinct whatsoever. And I don't think I'm so unusual. I think an awful lot of women don't really want children but feel they ought to. They think there's something wrong with them if they don't want to, but it's not true." And while Mirren, 61, admits kids aren't for her, she is willing to play the occasional role of step-mother to Hackford's two children from a previous marriage. She adds, "I'm so happy I don't have children. But I do love children and I've got family, and Taylor has children that I'm involved with - and with great pleasure - but it's just not for me."

At first I attributed my dates' decade-plus age gap to male swagger and the desire for a midlife ego boost. But after asking a 42-year-old man directly why he listed only women up to age 35 as within his "desired age range," I got the forthright reply I had begun to suspect. "Because I don't want to throw away the condoms on the second date," he said. "I want to be with someone who still has a few years left on her clock" was his unapologetic response. "So you're looking for the next available womb," I countered, "someone you think is still fertile enough to incubate your offspring, rather than a partner." "No, no, no, of course not!" he insisted. He wasn't that utilitarian; he only wanted someone who was still within a certain window.

These were Type A types, bursting with accomplishment and professional swagger. They had climbed the ladder and were now at its top, stunned to realize the narrow platform they ascended so doggedly held room for only one. "Meet wife, have children" was something they'd thought would just happen along the way -- but it hadn't. Now that they'd set the goal of getting married, they seemed more than a little surprised (bewildered, in fact) that this was one goal they couldn't make happen by simply applying their will. Often their opening monologues included the recent loss of a parent, or the revelation that they were staring down 50, which seemed to have galvanized their efforts to spawn. And with their eyes now on their rearview mirrors, many seemed to regret their noncommittal 20s and 30s, when driving to the top of their fields seemed to be the only thing on their minds.

"But you're 48," I would say. "How old will you be when your kids are in high school?" "Do you think you'll live to see your grandchildren?" I asked one man, who maintained it was just the next generation that mattered to him. "Did you ever consider," I said to a 47-year-old who disavowed adoption, "that if you're with a partner who is too old to have kids, then that means you can't have children either? That your partner's limitations are your limitations, because you love her?" Apparently not was the answer; his biology meant endless possibility, but hers was an obstacle. In my barrage of 10-years-plus suitors, I finally recognized a mix of both male hubris and underlying pathos. How could so many men have woken up to a desire for a family at an astonishingly and woundingly late point?

ORLANDO, Fla. - AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff.

AirTran officials said they followed Federal Aviation Administration rules that children age 2 and above must have their own seat and be wearing a seat belt upon takeoff.

"The flight was already delayed 15 minutes and in fairness to the other 112 passengers on the plane, the crew made an operational decision to remove the family," AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.

Julie and Gerry Kulesza, who were headed home to Boston on Jan. 14 from Fort Myers, said they just needed a little more time to calm their daughter, Elly.

"We weren't given an opportunity to hold her, console her or anything," Julie Kulesza said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

The Kuleszas said they told a flight attendant they had paid for their daughter's seat, but asked whether she could sit in her mother's lap. The request was denied.

She was removed because "she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat" during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

krustukles

In preparation for her all-but-announced 2008 White House run, Hillary Clinton has re-released It Takes a Village, her 1996 tome on child-friendly public policies. The new cover depicts the senator from New York dressed in hot pink, bathed in sunlight, and surrounded by six smiling, multiracial children. Talking about the book last month on the gabfest "The View," Clinton responded to a question on whether a woman would be better suited to the presidency than a man with the affirmative, "Well, we've never had a mother who ever ran for or held that position."

It was a new articulation of the mommy mantra -- the idea that what qualifies women for politics isn't their intelligence, their experience, their policy proposals, or even their character, but rather their inherent identities as feminine caretakers....

...Pelosi and Clinton's pandering to outmoded gender stereotypes doesn't assuage doubts about women ascending to the highest reaches of power. It reinforces them. When Clinton and Pelosi claim political capital due to their experience as mothers and homemakers, they are selling their ambitious selves -- and, indeed, all women -- far short. Women don't deserve to be in politics because we're more compassionate or nurturing than men. We deserve to be there because we are human beings, and especially because we are human beings who, regardless of our choices about if and how to become mothers, continue to live under a social and political system that denies us many of the same options men have enjoyed for generations.

...In some ways, it's simply part of a kid's natural journey toward independence. But child development experts say that physical and behavioral changes that would have been typical of teenagers decades ago are now common among "tweens" — kids ages 8 to 12.

Some of them are going on "dates" and talking on their own cell phones. They listen to sexually charged pop music, play mature-rated video games and spend time gossiping on MySpace. And more girls are wearing makeup and clothing that some consider beyond their years....

DEAR ABBY: I'm in a relationship with a man I'll call "Dominick," who was arrested a few years back, but he refuses to tell me what he was arrested for. I have two children, and I don't want to continue this relationship if Dominick is a child molester.

Do you know where I can find out what he did? -- UNEASY IN SANFORD, FLA.

Abby then proceeds to give her some info about looking up public records and stuff. She does not say, "You silly sow, break up with this guy and get your children away from him. Remember your children? The people you're supposed to care for more than anything else, including your stupid-ass boyfriend?"

If you really need an advice columnist to tell you to get your kids away from some guy who's been in jail who's been arrested and can't/won't tell you why, you are too stupid to procreate.

ETA: A commenter pointed out that the letter didn't state he'd been in jail. (Of course, that's as far as the letter writer knows, right?) Also, commenter stated that Abby said not to invest any more time in the guy. But I reiterate: if you really need Dear Abby to tell you this, see my earlier point. (It's not like you write a letter to Abby on Monday and get it posted on Tuesday. I'm sure this has been sitting in her mailbag for weeks.)