H is for Helpers

Every child should have at least two mothers. The second mother can be a neighbor, aunt, gramma, friend, spouse or well trained labradoodle. Having an extra set of eyes or hands is crucial to parental sanity.  One thing you can't have enough of is help.

 

Even Lady Granthum agrees, "Parenting is hard enough, even when you like the child."

cousins in Seattle
pic by Auntie Kirsten

When there's an age gap between siblings or cousins, it's like home-bred childcare.  Older siblings and cousins can be vital second mothers, filling in on playground and carpool duty or handing you a clean diaper, depending on the age.  Even if they complain, they enjoy the responsibility.  

My eldest has stepped in to help my sister with her kids while simultaneously she is helping me with him.  My cousin's daughter has done the same. When I was little I often stayed with my aunt's family in Texas for the summer. I was mothered by her and my five older cousins. When my parents divorced one of those older cousins came to stay with us for a few weeks to help my mom with the move, and she learned to drive a stick shift out of necessity. And I learned what skinny dipping was.  Win-win.

cousins in Switzerland
pic by Auntie Kirsten

Lady Grantham:  "One forgets about parenthood. The on-and-on-ness of it."

Isobel Crawley:  "Were you a very involved mother?.....I'd imagined them surrounded by nannies and governesses, being starched and ironed to spend an hour with you after tea."

Lady Grantham:  "Yes, but it was an hour every day."

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop. 

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Jungle Plant

there's one in every litter

Remember looking at National Geographic magazine's pictures of jungle tribes?  Lying on the living room floor, your head bracing hand falling asleep, the scratchy carpet irritating the skin of your belly where your Hang Ten hand-me-down shirt had lifted up,  turning the slick pages with your functioning hand.  The smooth skinned naked natives with their blackened nub smiles both fascinated and repulsed.  The body manipulations: ritual tattooing, scaring, piercing and stretching of the dark jungle moist skin was so other, alien.  I thought about this as I seated myself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, forcibly softening my squint of disapproval and holding my tongue in order to enjoy a rare visit from my eldest son.

to find some books on xeriparenting

Modestly pierced ears were pretty much unanimous at the table.  My scientist brother-in-law has tiny hoops in each ear, but my eldest son has surgical steel in various gages looping in and out in three different directions, plus rosewood bottle cap sized plugs in stretched lobes, but most festive is the thick shiny silver bull ring ending in double ball bearings dangling from his upturned nose, jewelry that would be more suited on a 350 pound Samoan, not my delicate featured, freckled, blue eyed Scot-Irish Neo Primitive. Plus I think we can all agree that white boy dreadlocks are unfortunate. Two ambitious rope heads are seated at our dinner table. Brothers, one dark, one red. Seeing them seated next to each other, eating only the quinoa salad, I recall rinsing playground sand and sweat from their toddler scalps as they battled with multiple Batman action figures – and me -  in the tub.  I would pour water from a Toy Story popcorn bucket as they covered their eyes with a washcloth, the stream pulling their ringlets down their backs as the suds were rinsed away. Now those curls are matted and hidden in rough ropes that smell worse than they look and include remnants of camp outs on Mount Tam, beads and feathers.  The elder, the redhead, ‘the Gingerdread Man’, has crafted his signature look into a dread mullet, cutting the front short, growing a pompadour, bleaching it, then shaving it down to a burr cut again, and with the red ropes pulled back, he passes as employable. 

The Gingerdread Man, as he sits here before me, is six months into what we are collectively agreeing to agree is a gap year. He left college after his freshman year and he is the only person at the table who is happy about this. His freshman year of college was a busy one.  While he did well academically, he also hopped freight trains, took up with a nefarious crew in Portland, can use the term ‘squat house’ with confidence, has earned an arrest record and he has three four DIY tattoos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he hasn’t been wearing his retainer.

I’m enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with my family and baffled by my poseur Hobo. When he left school he and his tribe went on food stamps because they didn’t want to be tied down to summer jobs. He wanted to roam and since we, the evil fun oppressors wouldn’t be sponsoring his plan, well he showed us. He and I had a chat about integrity and I might have used the words ‘lacking a moral compass’ when I forgot to use my inside voice.

Willing to sleep in a squat house in Oakland or the joint custody tribal van rather than his bed in our home.  Opportunities rejected, intentionally festooned to appear unemployable, throwing himself headlong with gusto into risk laden situations, all the while knowing he has options.  His reality is his choice.

HoboCam Pic

My choice is to detach, and enjoy my dinner, sip my wine and breathe. I look at my kids and realize it was never my intention to raise house plants, children who fear the world and I cannot control his 20 year old choices. I am fascinated and repulsed. I say nothing. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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Training Day

My first bra was a hand-me-down.  I have three older female cousins and I’ll never know with whom this one originated, but I do know that it didn’t fit.  My Auntie Jo told me that it was inappropriate for a girl my age to not wear a bra and since I was under her care deep in the heart of Texas for the summer of 1977,  my time had come.  My mother didn’t wear one, so what did I know?

The bra was white cotton, originally. Now grayish with lumpy cups from too many washings.  It felt like cardboard under my t-shirt and the straps pulled on my sunburn. And it itched.

Riding a bicycle barefoot on the country roads in Texas in the summer had been a liberating feeling.  But with this new-to-me recycled bra I felt constricted.  I couldn’t lift my arms without it riding up and then I had to stop the bike and tug it down.  I was always tugging and adjusting and now I was completely self-conscious.  Did it show through my shirt?  The easy freedom of summer had hit a lumpy cotton wall.

Once I was back home, my bra went missing the morning after a birthday sleepover.  The birthday girl was a pain in the ass and had taken it out of my overnight bag.  She told me she was going to hang it on the door of our classroom at school on Monday morning. Never underestimate the psychological torture of being a seventh grade girl. I got to school early to stake out the door.  She didn’t make good on the threat, but she never returned the bra.

I had done some research by this point and I had found that Danskin made a bra that I wanted. Sold in dance stores, this was the precursor to today’s jog-bra. No hooks. No lumpy cups or pinchy straps - I could move!  

With the exception of a brief tawdry fling with Victoria’s Secret in the 1980’s, (I was living in LA, and thus, defenseless.  I even got a membership to Trashy Lingerie with a friend who I will not name, but she knows who she is),  I stayed loyal to the same pullover style until the Mom years.  After breastfeeding three ravenous babies, I self promoted to underwire with strategic padding, and was professionally fitted by one of the blessed Nordstrom bra wizards.  These women are amazing.  They tricked me out with bras that actually fit and were pretty.  And expensive. 

2008

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