Freedom isn't synonymous with fairness

new addition to the playground, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

Jed and I disagree.

Often.

About a lot of things.

For instance: He likes chocolate-based ice cream flavors while I prefer fruit or coffee-flavored confections;

He hates fish. I love fish.

He prefers peaches in his yogurt. I like berries.

He thinks children who make hideous experiments out of food items in the pantry should be made to eat their creations. I think a little "Time Out" and a lot more supervision is a more humane and appropriate consequence.

He also thinks a woman in Missouri, who was indicted on charges in connection with a "cyber bullying" event that ended after a teenage girl committed suicide, should go to jail.

I don't.

Not that I think Lori Drew doesn't deserve to be vilified in the press, or spurned by her neighbors, or considered to be America's Most Immature Mother for the next fifteen minutes or fifteen years for that matter. She definitely earns that disrespect.

But to make Cyber Bullying (or any bullying for that matter) a crime, I think, endangers our freedom of speech.

Jed puts himself in the place of the parents. He sees a woman who victimized a teenage girl, who set her up to take a fall. Even if she didn't know the girl would hang herself in the aftermath, she is culpable and should be punished by the law. He sees an event that is deeply disturbing, and that, from all media accounts, seems to be burgeoning as more and more people avail themselves of the thin blanket of annonymity the internet provides.

I see the many of the same things, and yet I also see that such a visceral reaction has caused a rush toward making outright and low-down meanness a crime. I see the disparity of having laws that apply justice arbitrarily. Why have different laws for cyberspace? In the real world, if they had passed fake notes in the classroom would they be in the courtroom? It's not really a different world. Harrassment is harrassment wherever it is found, whether on the schoolyard or in the boardroom or on a web page.

We all need a lesson in dealing with jerks that doesn't end up with a phonecall to the local precinct. We need our children to be strong enough to ignore; to rise above their petty peers. Not only because bullies will always exist.

But because if this keeps up, one day free speech may not.

Say your criticsm of treatment by a doctor, or shoddy service at a store, or any number of things you have a right to say becomes something criminal because someone else says you made it up intentionally?

Really, this type of legislation could go anywhere and apply to anything.

What about that boy to whom you gave your virginity IN REAL LIFE? He's the one who told you he'd love you forever and who broke up with you the next day. What about him? Some of you are probably wishing he could get his comeuppance, too. Maybe if he broke your heart in an e-mail, you'd get your shot.

To Jed, and many others I imagine, it may seem as if I am defending this monstrous woman who antagonized a child in her skewed understanding of fairness and lack of any semblance of parenting skills. Everyone, it seems, wants an eye for an eye.

I want to teach my kids that jerks are jerks; and nobody -- not even a Real Boy who tells you lies or says mean things -- is worth your tears. You are better than that. We should all be better than that. We can unplug. We can move on. And we should.

Let the bullies of morning news magazines take care of the public shaming. They're already on it.

Food for thought

snack, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

Food has never been my favorite topic. As the old saw goes: Some people eat to live and other people live to eat.

I don't really fit into either of those little niches.

I'm the person who seriously considers (and sometimes actually manages to) pack a healthy lunch but usually just eats whatever my pocket change buys from the bank of vending machines in the cafeteria.

Sadly, I approach the kids' lunches with the same wistful enthusiasm and failure to follow through.

I search flickr for lunch ideas; I buy resuable lunchboxes and have adopted some of the tricks used by bento box afficianados. I think about all the pretty things I can send for the babysitter to feed my kids while I'm at work.

I bask in the glow of the multi-colored foods Annabel has eaten since she was a tot, and wonder exactly when her palate will pale. I soldier through the fact that Silas eats hardly anything besides breastmilk and graham crackers. I know eventually he will eat the beige menu of a normal childhood.

I even dream of the loving little notes I will put in the lunch boxes once the kids can read.

On Monday mornings the sitter laughs at me as I show up with the kids and a grocery bag full of that day's lunch offerings carefully placed in containers or bagged with colorful ribbons.

Apple slices, berries, three colors of peppers, chicken nuggets, corn, snap peas, carrots, bagels, yogurt, cheerios, oatmeal, soup, corn chips and cookies.

But my ability to continue the planning and procuring of such pretty packages is shortlived.

The downhill slide starts on Tuesday as I'm lucky to have remembered to bring the kids. By Friday, if it weren't for the sitter, my kids would be eating lint from the floor and drinking water from the toilet.

She knows how to push buttons

damn hell bathroom, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

It never fails. As soon as you get to where you are going the preschool set needs to use the facilities. Doesn't matter if you've gone ten miles or ten feet, nature's call has a strong desire to see the decor and smell the handsoaps.

If the place has anything interesting at all -- an automatic hand dryer for instance -- you are destined to make multiple trips to the lav during the course of your shopping experience.

Potty training does have it's price after all. You might as well put the savings you gain from skipping the diapers aisle directly into the unnecessary things you will buy so as not to look like a schnorrer whenever your kid needs to use the washroom at a store that doesn't legally have to provide them to patrons.

"Oh, mama. Can you pick me up? I can't reach the sink. Look! The walls are purple. And they have that blowdryer thing on the wall. I want to push it again ... and again ... and again. Just one more time? Pleeeeeeeeeeeese oh Plaaaaaaaahhhhhhzzzzzz."

You can't stop progress

I would like you to move, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

But that doesn't stop me from trying.

I watch him struggle to his feet in the tub. It is with confidence and authority that I tell him to "sit down." Standing in the tub is not advisable for the less ambulatory among us. So many unnecessary accidents happen in the bathroom.

He struggles to his feet in the livingroom, gripping the sofa with both hands. I don't want him to walk. Not yet. He's still a baby; my baby.

But I can't really tell him to sit down.

Not with Jed sitting nearby with his one eyebrow raised anyway.

So I laugh, and tell him in unskilled French: "asseyez-toi, si vous plait."

It doesn't hurt any if he doesn't know what I'm saying, right?

How was your Mother's Day?

breakfast in bed, served family style, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

From our room at the Mirror Lake Inn I schlepped down four floors to the restaurant and (charging $9 to our tab) got two tiny boxes of cereal, a banana, a juice box and coffee so we could have breakfast in bed.

It was a good morning.

I would have said ... 'see you tomorrow' ... but I didn't want to jinx it

Did you miss me?

It's ok if you didn't. It's only one day. I know you all have busy lives that include crazy, mind-numbing deeply gratifying and wonderful things such as household chores and ignoring your spouse playing with your own kids.

I had an opthamology appointment: The kind in which they dilate my pupils to see the inside of my eyes.

For me it's an annual thing.

You see, I have a "freckle" located somewhere on my left eyeball, (how's that for sharing?) and the doctors like to keep a watch on it to make sure it doesn't change into something that begins with the Latin form of BAD.

I learned of the mole about five or six years ago, probably two decades after my previous opthamologic appointment.

"Has anyone ever told you that you have a mole on your eye," the doctor asked.

"Uh. no."

"It's really not that uncommon. You are a freckled person. And you can get freckles and moles anywhere on your body."

During that visit I also found out I had "convergence," a condition in which the muscles of one eye aren't as strong as the muscles of the other eye."

"Did you have a lazy eye as a child?"

"Um. No. ..."

"Well. It's really no big deal. But it will get worse if you let it go. The good news is there are simple exercises you can do that will strengthen the muscles."

"Well could it be related to the massive amount of computer work I do?"

"Um. No."

Anyway, It was quite a shock that first appointment years ago. I had scheduled it first thing in the morning and had gone to work afterward, not realizing I wouldn't be able to SEE anything like WORDS on this here COMPUTER SCREEN for nearly three hours. Even with reversal drops to counteract the dilating ones, it was a long stretch of close-up blindness.

But all of that is really beside the point.

The point being: I am neurotic.

And this mole -- this TINY, TINY FRECKLE, as the doctor describes it -- is on my EYE.

MY EYE, PEOPLE!!!

And, as a consumate worrier, that just nerves me up.

So I go in there are hold my breath until they tell me it's all beautiful and stable and see you next year.

Which they did, luckily, before I turned blue.

You know where this is going, right?

you know where this is going, originally uploaded by toyfoto.

This little pea stone is going right in the boy's mouth.

No hesitation. No awkward fumbling over fingers and thumbs.

Right in.

He doesn't eat more than a thimbleful of genuine food items in any given day.

A bit of banana here, a taste of yogurt there.

He'll gum graham crackers until they are a taupe-colored paste and he'll share most of his Oatio's with the dog. Then he squirms to get down and prowl the kitchen for leftover cracker crumbs and pieces of dog kibble.

So why am I surprised that out on the playground these little rock morsels wouldn't seem like a delicacy?

Ice, Ice, Baby

ice maam , originally uploaded by toyfoto.

I had to leave work early today.

I had a problem with one of my mammary glands. The left one.

Took me by complete surprise. Ten months with the little guy and nary a hint of trouble. (Not like the last time where every four days I was dealing with something that looked like an alien life form inside my nursing top.)

I self diagnosed a caked breast ... basically a bunch of clogged milk ducts that made the whole thing swollen and painful. Nothing was coming out. Not even a trickle.

I checked in with Dr. Google, who recommended the same thing that the folks I fork over increasingly larger co-pays to did four years ago: hot compresses, warm showers, rest and plenty of nursing. The baby, they say, is the most efficient declogging agent.

Baby drain-o.

But guess what?

They are WRONG. WRONG. WRONG-O.

Now I know babies are efficient little suckers. And Silas was getting something alright, but he was jumping around like a chimp trying to get it. And even then it wasn't enough.

The breast still felt like a brick.

Moist heat? Sweartogod, the four times I had this with Annabel (two of which led to the need for antibiotics to get rid of mastitis) heat never did anything.

And then I thought. What about ICE? To stop swelling most SANE people recommend ice.

Guess what?

Six minutes after four cubes of ice in a Zip-Loc back were applied to general area, Silas nursed without any acrobatics and the clog got noticeably better. In an hour it was feeling back to normal.

So please, tell all your lactating friends ... Hell has frozen over and most doctors don't know or just don't believe. ... Ice, Ice, Baby

I wouldn't stand too close to me today

I'm feeling randomy. And not in a good way.

I've been pretay angray latelay.

Like the kind of angry one feels when they feel attacked. Or misunderstood. Or slighted. Or maligned. Even if no one else really thinks those things have happened to you at all. It's the kind of angry that turns into sadness.

I hate not being able to talk about it.

... But I'm not gonna talk about it.

I'm also pretty ticked at Hillary Clinton. Her insistance that a lifting of a gas tax will do anything to help the American people (regardless of who pays for it) is nothing more than pandering in my estimation. And really? I'm over it. We need to pay the piper and get used to big price tags at the pump. We need to use less energy all around and not just make our rampant consumption affordable.

... But I'm not going to bother you with that noise.

Speaking of Hillary. I'm seething a little over this and I really don't know why.

A lot about the piece bothers me, but for some reason what stands out most is this passage:

Old-guard feminists, for their part, seem not yet aware—or prepared to believe—that the younger generation is coming around. “Young women take a lot of things for granted,” Geraldine Ferraro told me. “We sometimes joke, ‘If you don’t get it, give it all back.’ We don’t want to say, ‘Look how bad it was.’ But they don’t know their workplaces are better because of loudmouths like me who said, ‘This is not how society should be run.’ ” Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, said she thinks the feminist movement, even the third wave, may have seen its final days. For another movement to reach critical mass, she said, women in society may need to experience what she calls “an accretion of insult.” But with the inequities highlighted by Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid reminding us of the inequities we experience on a regular basis, the insults may have, well … accreted.

I huge part of me wants Hirshman, and Ferraro for that matter, to take a big giant leap off a steep, rocky cliff. I know it's been two years since I wrote this but I still feel pretty much the same way. We women need to stop beating each other to a bloody pulp and stick together, yet I don't think that means we should just toe the line.

... But I'm done with the big mouths and their causes.

Perhaps I'm also just done with the numbers. I'm done with the idea that feminists are disappointed in me. Done with people telling me what I, as a FILL IN THE BLANK, should do.

I'm done with the talking heads who pose as independent journalists sneaking in their agendas. Hell ... I'm kinda over agendas. I'm over insecurites. I'm over political correctness. I'm over the whole "you are right but you should have done it this way" arm-chair quarterbacking.

I know that lots of us just don't get along, but I'm really beginning to think that moving forward really isn't feasible because NO ONE CARES ABOUT MOVING FORWARD, we only care about moving in a direction that we've picked. We just call it forward. And that, to be quite blunt, sucks.

I suppose therein lies the lesson. My way or the highway is over.

I want to move on.

And I am moving on.

I am moving on.

I'm moving forward.

I'm moving backward.

I don't even care if I bump into to things along the way.

See, we bought some pre-owned cars over the weekend. But my conscience is in the clear. These babies are compact and cost a fraction of their original sticker price. Best of all they use no fossil (or even biofuels) to operate.

They are Plasma Cars ... and they rock the house.

And you know, I don't care if I'm just going to the other side of the house, I'm going to drive from now on. Forget walking.