[Parenting] is a job in which you need to put forth your very best effort.

admonishes one parent to another (who apparently isn’t meeting the author’s standards).

This? Is such bullshit.

Yes, our parenting choices matter. No, [...]]]> I’ve run across this a thousand times before, but here’s the most recent example which inspired the following (no, I’m not linking):

[Parenting] is a job in which you need to put forth your very best effort.

admonishes one parent to another (who apparently isn’t meeting the author’s standards).

This? Is such bullshit.

Yes, our parenting choices matter. No, not “anything goes”. Yes, kids deserve so much, and no, a lot of kids aren’t getting what they need. But who can possibly sustain a Very Best Effort at every moment for at least 18 years? I’d say no one can. I surely can’t. And the pressure this puts on women — for it is indubitably mothers who receive the brunt of this admonishment — is untenable.

Much like in the attachment discussion, kids have needs, and often we ignore those needs, or try to fill them with things that aren’t quite right. There’s nothing wrong with trying to do better, especially if one is trying to go against the standards of a society that marginalizes children and alternately exalts and belittles them. There’s nothing wrong with putting effort into parenting, or spending a lot of time researching decisions, or thinking of parenting as the most important job of your life.

But there’s nothing necessarily wrong with not, either. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with just doing what you do and not putting extraordinary effort into parenting, either.

What does it even mean that we “need” to use our “very best effort”? So what, if we don’t, we’ll fail at parenting? We’ll ruin our kids? But if they’re not ruined (and how do we measure??), then I guess it was enough? But if we ruin them, is that proof we didn’t try hard enough? Or that failure is OK as long as we tried hard enough?

How messed up is that is that philosophy? According to that thinking, if we spend 23 hours a day with our children, does that mean if we “fail” we should have spent 24? If we sleep only seven hours a night, does that mean if we “fail” we should have slept only six? How much is one’s very best? Do we have to collapse, push ourselves to exhaustion and past it (to death?), before we can rest safely knowing that no one will say of us that we should have done more? But no — someone will say we should have rested more. That wasn’t our best. We could have tried harder for balance.

Kids do not need perfection — which is wonderful, because none of us can achieve it. They need good enough. They need their basic needs met: for interdependence and attachment, for freedom and responsibilities, for a stable base to jump from and a safe place to land. But they don’t need every need met perfectly every time. They don’t need a mistake-free upbringing. And they certainly don’t need us to break trying to meet impossible standards — or impossible standards of effort.

I’m not a particularly laissez faire parent (though I might call my parenting free-range inspired), nor a laissez-faire-in-parenting advocate. I think some decisions are better than others. I think some decisions are worse than others. And I don’t think “but I was ____ and I’m Just Fine(TM)!” is a particularly good justification for continuing practices we know are harmful and for which we have accessible alternatives. But at some point, we need to say that it’s enough. Our effort is enough. We are enough. Even if we don’t do everything the ideal way, even if we perform the blasphemy of not even trying to. Our good enough effort is good enough.

You are a good enough parent. And even if you’re not, your good enough effort at doing better is good enough. Maybe you could try harder, research more, up the pressure, increase the guilt when you (inevitably) fall short — but why? If there’s something you think you could be doing better, and want to be doing, and have the ability to do, then do it. Not because you’re not good enough right now (you are), but simply because you want to. Or because it would make you life easier. Or your parenting more joyful. Or your child happier or healthier. Not, please, because you’d be failing if you didn’t, because unless what you’re doing now is likely to kill your child in the near future, better is probably not a requirement. It’s probably just better.

And good enough? Is enough.

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Family-avoidance interlude

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As I’ve alluded to before, there are things I haven’t been mentioning on the blog, in part because my [...]]]> Dear family: please stop reading. Auntie (!!!), and SIL, and brother, and mom, and dad, this means you. Really. Please. Stop. If you want me to keep blogging, ever, stop reading, right now.

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Family-avoidance interlude

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As I’ve alluded to before, there are things I haven’t been mentioning on the blog, in part because my family reads here.

When I’m not saying anything about those things, I find it hard to say much of anything at all. Which can, without exaggeration, drive me crazy.

So here they are:

I’m trying to make a book. And we’re trying to make a baby.

I have, in fact, conceived the book (the one I alluded to recently, Martyrdom Not Required: Attachment Parenting in the Real World). And I did, in fact, conceive a pregnancy.

The book might yet, if I am very, very lucky (and very, very diligent), make it to fruition.

The pregnancy did not.

It was not, you might be surprised to hear, the most recent cycle, nor the cycle that I missed blogging about. Nor was it the cycle where my back went out. No, it was the one before that, and it was so very, very short that I hardly feel justified in calling it a miscarriage. We never had a chance to fully confirm, much less celebrate, even privately, before there was nothing to celebrate, and the confirmation was a resounding “not this time”.

This was not the first miscarriage I’d ever had — not even the only I’d ever known about.

I was seventeen, The Man was nineteen, and I was known for having long, heavy, irregularly timed periods. But one was later still than my unusual-usual. I didn’t suspect anything — I had no particular reason to, and I was as bad about tracking my periods as my body was at regulating them. But when I bled, finally, it was harder than anything before. And there was… something. Something very, very small. Maybe the size of my pinky fingernail, in memory. Probably even smaller than that, if we try to factor out memory’s magnifying focus. But there was something unusual, something unexpected, something I hadn’t seen before nor since, resting atop the plastic pad, when all the rest of the blood and serum and fluid had soaked in.

I didn’t tell anyone, not for years. I still answer “one” when filling in number of pregnancies on medical forms. After all, I don’t “know”. There was no stick with multiple lines, no disturbing, distorted black and white films from an ultrasound, no diagnoses scribbled near illegibly in an official medical chart somewhere. I don’t “know”. Just as I don’t “know” this time, this so much earlier time, with even less physical evidence for support.

But I know.

Three times now, my body has been home, temporarily, to DNA that was of me but was not mine. One became a baby, now a bubbly, blond, aggravating, adorable child. Two… didn’t. Once, over a decade ago, it was a strange, spikey knowledge — something unasked for and unwanted disappearing, without my having to do anything about it. This time, it was pain I didn’t let myself feel for a month, when finally, bleeding again, I sobbed on the floor in part from pain in my back and in part because I was surrounded by fecundity, by women with proven fertility, and I should have been one, I should have been like them, I so wanted to be and almost was like them and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, and it hurt so much. And so I cried, and sobbed, and gulped for air and breath, and keened with anger and grief and fear and envy and so many kinds of pain.

But everywhere else, with all but a very small few, I was silent.

I don’t know if I can explain my silence, because I’m not sure I understand it. About everything else, I am vested in full disclosure. I’ll write about craziness, self-injury, pelvic organ prolapse, the -isms I am infected with. I’ll write about mundanities and profanities and even, if you ask nicely, the time I talked to Jesus. But this? This desire for baby-baby-now? This trying and trying and waiting and trying and the interminable months of failure? This I have a hard time disclosing.

I think I want to present a fait accompli — I don’t want the kibitzing and second-hand second-guessing along the way. I want the congratulations — I don’t want the commiserations that it takes us so damn long. I want, in one area of my life, to not be made to feel that I am damaged, deficient, that nothing will come easily to me, or for me.

Neither do I want to publicly perform pious self-pity. I don’t want to be anyone’s maybe-baby show. I don’t want to declare woe-is-me when so many have it so much worse, require hard-to-access technological intervention in order to reproduce, or are not able to at all. What right have I do bemoan my circumstance when odds are decent that, eventually, a pregnancy will stick, virtually free, and societally approved?

I think also that I don’t want to have to explain or defend or justify my desire or my timing or any other part of this. I don’t want to try to explain to the childfree what this compulsion feels like, nor defend from the childless my grief over the loss when I’ve already had a baby, nor justify to the environmentalists or the anti-child feminists the decision to try to bring yet another person into the world.

With both the baby and the book, I think I want to be able to quit quietly. I want to be able to fail, without failing anyone. I want to be able to give up, without being seen to. I want perfection — mission accomplished, see what I made! — or to pretend I never wanted it in the first place. (I admit: as coping mechanisms go, I could perhaps find healthier.)

And I really, really don’t want my family to say one damn thing to me about it, good or bad or anything. (If you’ve ignored my previous warnings, family dearest, you’ve only yourself to blame.)

Yet… I’m tired of silence. I’m tired of Not Talking about something that matters to me. I’m tired of not being able to write because I’m not writing what’s most pressing to me. I’m tired of my desire for privacy from my sometimes-draining family blocking off the soul-sustaining support of my friends (whether I’ve been blessed to meet you in person yet or not). I don’t want this to become a baby-making or book-hocking blog, but I don’t want to have to censor every impulse I have to mention a major undertaking — which informs almost every area of my life — either.

So that’s it. Baby, book: gimme. I don’t know how I’ll manage, I don’t know whence the time and energy and space in my life will come, but I don’t care, because I’m doing it anyway. And I’m not going to keep it a secret any longer.

Except from my family.

Oh, I do not think so.

What infants and toddlers and preschoolers need is attachment — loving, responsive care from people they know and trust, preferably have known for most or all of their lives but at least with whom they have [...]]]> “A mother shouldn’t leave her child until about the age of three”, declares a father.

Oh, I do not think so.

What infants and toddlers and preschoolers need is attachment — loving, responsive care from people they know and trust, preferably have known for most or all of their lives but at least with whom they have built a relationship. They need to have older people — adults, yes, but also teens, older children — who know them and love them and who they know and love, accessible to them when needed. The placement of that responsibility exclusively on the mother makes it not a joy, a task of life easily fulfilled, but a burden, under which so many of us are breaking.

Something is wrong with a culture that expects a six week old to sleep through the night, that tells a four month old her hunger is inconvenient and needs to be scheduled, that is surprised when a one year old doesn’t want to be left with a stranger. Some of us recognize this, and some have decided the problem must be because women are employed outside the home, have chosen to have lives that do not revolve around our children.

Not that we have moved away from our families of origin.

Not that we have built fences real and psychological between us and our neighbours.

Not that we have tiny families and a dearth of siblings and cousins.

Not that we have segregated adults and children, and alternately marginalize people with fewer years as second class citizens and exalt them as angels on earth (but never simply honor them as perfectly imperfect persons).

Not that we hold ideal a single family home, and define family as up to two parents and 2.5 children.

Not that we have taught half the population to deny and repress any nurturing potential, for fear of being “unmanly”.

No, it is, as always, entirely the fault of women. Of mothers, for daring to stand up for our humanity and our autonomy, for daring to do the work that earns power and prestige and some amount of protection, for daring to say we have needs and wants and goals too, for daring to take even an hour away to nurture ourselves so we have something to give to our children.

How dare we?

What some misguided whistleblowers (on the problem that is our parenting culture) have deemed is the solution — a mother, subsuming her own desires entirely to her offspring for a full three years each, minimum, accessible at all times of day, all days of the week, all weeks of the year — is just as unnatural and damaging as the model it rebels against.

We are not supposed to do this gig — which risks becoming labor and work and mind-breaking, body-destroying toil the less it is shared with loved ones — all by ourselves. We are not. That some can do it and survive, even enjoy it and would pick it first over any other idealized options, speaks far more to the diversity and flexibility of humanity than it does to the failure or unnaturalness of any woman who doesn’t choose or wouldn’t enjoy (possibly wouldn’t survive) 24/7/365 sole caregiving.

Kids don’t need one person, if that person is going to break if she has to clean up one more fecal-smeared surface.

Kids don’t need one person, if that person is snapping and yelling and cannot catch her breath alone.

Kids don’t need one person, if that person’s back is breaking from twelve hour shifts of bending and lifting and carrying and holding.

Kids don’t need one person, if that person has lost herself and her center and has no core around which her child can revolve, no life from which her child can learn.

Kids need people, people they know and love and trust, people who are with them and responsive to them day after day, who know their rhythms and their personalities and their needs and their wants, who have done the work of endless toiletings and feedings, who have assisted nap times and play times, who have tickled and carried, who have been there through laugh fests and crying jags. Kids need as many of those people as possible. Blood relation entirely optional.

One? Is a bare minimum. The kid might survive, even thrive (because humans are fantastically adaptable); and the parent might as well (ditto): but it comes at a high risk of burning out the carer, torching the relationship, scorching the child. And if that happens, there is no one for the child to turn to.

Two is better.

Three or four are better still.

Half a dozen is getting closer to ideal.

Half a dozen? Sure: a parent or two, a grandparent or two, a parent’s sibling or two, a couple teens or older kids: it’s not a big family, as primate evolution (or human tribal history) goes. But good luck growing it in this society.

(My infant only wants me. She’ll have nothing to do with her dad!

Has her dad been there? Does he know her? Does she know him? Did she hear his voice in the womb? Did she breathe in his smell within hours of birth? Did he carry or wear her her first day out of the womb? And the second? And the third? Does she sleep with his breath on her face, his heat keeping her warm, his body keeping her safe? Does he respond to her attempts at communication about her hunger and elimination? Does he help keep her clean? Does she know him?)

Kids — the younger they are the truer this is — need to be with people they know, and trust, and love (who among us doesn’t, really?). They need attachment; this is immutable biological fact. They’ll make do with almost whatever we give them, but the more the better. It is only our messed up society — or the very rare, very exacting child — that says that this means all-mom all-the-time.

(Oh, the breasts. The sweet, sweet breasts. Yes, infants need near-immediate access to milk at basically all times; known and trusted lactating breasts are biologically expected to be on call 24/7. Only humans — and only some humans — would translate this as mother’s-breasts-only, and even fewer as mother-as-primary-minder-at-every-moment. But a ten, a twenty, a thirty month old gets ever less in need of such omnipresent access, even as their need for it sometimes, and their need for constant nearby presence of trusted caregiver(s), might remain unabated.)

Do you, caring mother, have to leave your less-than-three? Of course not. (If there’s no one around we trust our children to trust, why would we want to? If we have enough people to share the load with that it is still a joy and not a toil — however many that is for us, zero or a dozen — why would we want to?) But you could. If you wanted. If your child wanted. If there are other people your child knows will care for them.

And I promise — it wouldn’t destroy them.

The Man is in his fourth week of mandatory overtime, and I’m very very tired of him being very very tired and us having no time together, but that wasn’t why I was grumpy.

The kid has entered the most aggravating contrarian phase, where he automatically disagrees with whatever we say, even [...]]]> I was really grumpy today.

The Man is in his fourth week of mandatory overtime, and I’m very very tired of him being very very tired and us having no time together, but that wasn’t why I was grumpy.

The kid has entered the most aggravating contrarian phase, where he automatically disagrees with whatever we say, even if it’s “Hey, let’s go get some ice cream now!” But that wasn’t why I was grumpy.

The house is a wreck (in large part because of the two above points), and I can’t cook simple fried eggs without having to stop and clean a pan, but that wasn’t why I was grumpy.

I’m menstruating and cramping and exhausted and brain drained, but that wasn’t why I was grumpy.

I was grumpy simply because I was grumpy.

The things I listed above don’t exactly lend themselves to an effortlessly joyful mood, and they might be enough to challenge even the most calm, zen-like person, but they didn’t make me grumpy, because they can’t make me anything.

I just went with it. I was grumpy, nothing was going to make me less grumpy (because nothing was making me grumpy to begin with), and that was that.

No, this is not the story where I submitted to the suckitude and suddenly everything became rainbows and kisses — but it is the story of a day I survived, and it didn’t even feel like a big deal. I took the kid to the park, and didn’t yell at him once. We went grocery shopping, and I didn’t abandon him in the cart. He punched me, and I didn’t punch him back. I didn’t even really consider it. Because I was grumpy, and that’s just how it was, and it wasn’t his fault, and that was OK.

And that? That I simply didn’t care, and wasn’t attached to any particular outcome (such as happiness, or lack of grumpiness)? That meant that today was a pretty good day. Challenging, sure. Not the most fun I’ve ever had — but there was fun. There were kisses. I didn’t see any rainbows, but we baked sweet potato fries together, and that was pretty darn cool.

We have this belief in the culture I live in that our moods are always to blame on something. Either something external (we need x and y and z to be happy — so why are people with x and y and z still not happy?) or internal (we just have to think our way to happiness, and have only ourselves to blame if we “fail” — how can anyone be happy with all that pressure?). While I am all for choosing joy, as much as we are able, I also think that we are setting ourselves up for misery if we think it is possible, much less if we expect, to be 100% happy 100% of the time.

It’s just not gonna happen. Take it from someone with a mood disorder¹: moods, sometimes, just happen.  Yeah, if your lifemate dies, you’re going to grieve, and it might look a lot like depression (or it might trigger full-on depression), but being depressed doesn’t “require” some catastrophic event. Sometimes it just happens.

Conversely, sometimes happiness just happens. Happiness is a lot easier when we’re not lacking basic rights — societal recognition of our humanity and freedom from marginalization and oppression; enough food and shelter and health care and free time to not worry about surviving the day, or the week, or the year; a network of family and friends, people who care for us and who we can care for in turn; a vocation that gives us satisfaction and a feeling of contributing to something greater (such as our family, our cause, or our culture) — but happiness is possible even without great good things happening to us, and even, sometimes, without those basics. Sometimes it just happens.

If we spend all our time trying to hold on to our happiness, or resenting our unhappiness, we never get to simply experience the good possible in each moment. Even when we’re grumpy. Even when things aren’t going “right”. Even when we have a child who disagrees with simply everything.

We don’t have an obligation to be happy in each moment — we don’t have any obligations or shoulds around our moods at all. Today, I was not particularly happy, ever. But because I was ok with being grumpy, I didn’t suffer my grumpiness.

So now I can look back and say: it was a good grumpy day.

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But most of the rest of me? Was so, so relieved.

I loved nursing him. I loved [...]]]> The Boychick weaned sometime between Christmas and his birthday. I’m pretty sure he was still nursing at Christmas, and I know he was done by his birthday, because part of me was sad we didn’t make it to three years.

But most of the rest of me? Was so, so relieved.

I loved nursing him. I loved being able to look at him for the first seven and a half months of his life and know that, aside from a few thyroid molecules, every atom of his being had come from me. He made himself, but he made himself from my body, and my milk. I loved snuggling him close, and I loved calming him, and I loved never having to worry about hydration or nutrition when he was sick, and I loved that I could help him sleep, and I loved the symbiosis of full breast, empty baby leading to happy me and happy him. I loved nursing him.

I also hated it.

Not all the time, but more and more as he got older, as my period returned, as my milk dwindled. I felt sexual sensations, which would have been fine, except I loathed it. There were times when nothing but my breast would do, and I was crying while nursing him, chanting “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop”. There were times when nothing but my breast would do, and I couldn’t do it, and he and I both cried. And in the end, that was what lead to his weaning. It was at his pace, but accelerated by my need for ever shorter, ever more infrequent nursing sessions.

So when Twitter and the lactivist blogosphere exploded over an op-ed from the UK that, among other things, said breastfeeding felt “creepy”, I cringed.¹

Breastfeeding isn’t creepy — except for me, it is, a bit.

Breastfeeding isn’t sexual — except it is, for me and people like me, and for many people for whom those feelings aren’t a bad thing, and they’re not perverted or child molesters, they’re just normal women with a functioning sexual system.

Breasts are sexualized in our culture, exaggerated into caricatures of themselves, used to sell cars and movies and everything else, and that’s a problem. But, breasts are also sexual. Not just because our society says so, though that “helps”, and not just because all the body is sexual, though it is, but specifically, actually sexual; nipple stimulation releases the hormones of love, of sexuality, of life-giving. It contracts the uterus, floods the brain with prolactin and oxytocin, sends blood to the genitals. It can start or augment labor, it can stop postpartum bleeding, it can, all by itself in some women (not me, alas), bring about orgasm. Breasts. Are. Sexual.

Some breasts. Some of the time.

When I say breastfeeding is creepy, I’m not insulting those (including myself) who breastfeed. There is nothing wrong with breastfeeding, and I wish more women would do it, and for longer — we would all be a lot better off, as individuals, as a society. Even more, I wish that all women who wanted to (which is most women) had the support and the lack of “booby traps” to nurse for as long as she and her child(ren) wanted. I smile when I see women nursing in public, when I see pictures of a child in a lap, held close, both parties obviously content.

But when I see a beautiful, naked, close-up picture, when I think too hard about it, when I am reminded of the feelings in my body of the last months of nursing when I had little milk, of the early months of nursing when he suckled for hours, when I think about having a child suck on my breast — I get the creepy crawlies.

And I hate that. I wish I did not feel this way. But I do.

So when I hear someone say that they didn’t breastfeed because it “feels creepy”, I get angry. I get angry at a culture that says breastfeeding is perverted. I get angry at a culture that says my breasts are not my own but my lover’s, exclusively. I get angry that breasts are so sexualized and breastfeeding is so controversial that the only way one can admit in a major publication that the thought of suckling a child feels creepy is by saying that, therefore, she wouldn’t dream of doing it.

And I get angry at the lactivists who have declared that breasts are not sexual, that people who think so are the ones who are perverted, that my breasts are not my own but my baby’s, exclusively. I get angry that I hear her feelings, which are so like mine, dismissed as “disgusting”, and I wonder, what would they think if I told them I felt the same? Would I get a gold star for persevering anyway? What if I’d stopped at fourteen months, when my period returned, and it got a lot harder? What if I’d stopped at two weeks, when I handed him to his father to latch on because it was that or self-harm to the point of permanent injury? What if I, long-time breastfeeding supporter, never started at all? Would I be disgusting? Or would I be OK, because I was on “the right side”, even if I was “broken”?

I am not broken. I don’t know why I feel the way I do while breastfeeding, and while I suspect fewer people would feel the way I do if our culture normalized breastfeeding and decentralized breasts in sex, I might still feel the same. Or I might not. Maybe “wires are crossed” in my brain, maybe I trained myself into it with nearly a decade of using my breasts to help me achieve orgasm before having a child (yet was I supposed to be anorgasmic?), maybe I was just born this way. Frankly, I don’t care, and I don’t want to hear anyone who does not feel this way theorize about why, especially not in a way that pathologizes and Others me and ignores what I have to say about my experiences.

What I want is to be allowed to talk about it. I want to not be shoved into a corner, head patted and gold star decorated, and told to shut up because my feelings might make the job of “selling” breastfeeding to the masses harder, might give ammunition to anti-breastfeeders who will use anything to call us perverted, any excuse to avoid nursing. What I want is to never, ever hear someone called disgusting for not being able to — or not wanting to — reconcile a lifetime of having a lover at her breast with the thought of having a baby there. What I want is to be part of a movement that doesn’t debase itself to use any means to achieve its goal, no matter how worthy that goal is; what I want is to be part of a movement that honors women and our multitude of feelings, that works not to control our actions but to give us the freedom to do as we wish.

Until we can talk about all the experiences of breastfeeding, until we can recognize that a woman’s breasts are not for sex nor for feeding babies nor for decoration but for whatever the hell she wants to use them for, people will continue to think that breastfeeding is creepy, and thus won’t do it. Those of us who feel this way — a minority even of people who don’t breastfeed, perhaps, but how large or small we don’t know — will continue to get defensive and toss out any excuse to not try and attack and belittle those who do; to reach in tears for a bottle and for the socially-sanctioned fallacy of “I didn’t have enough milk”; to grit their teeth and not seek help and fall into darkest depression; to soldier through and hurt themselves so as not to hurt their babies; to question whether they really want another child if it means going through all that again, alone. We have to be able to talk about it — we, those few (but not so few as you might think) who feel this way — so we can get past it, and get to peace. Whether we choose to breastfeed for nearly three years, or some, or not at all, if we cannot talk, we will be alone, and we will not find resolution.

So make the space. When someone says she didn’t breastfeed because it was creepy, listen to her. When someone doesn’t want to tell you why she didn’t breastfeed, or gives you a reason you know to be false, realize you don’t know the whole story, and grant her her privacy. When someone says she didn’t love every damn minute of nursing, don’t assume she’s anti-breastfeeding.

Mostly, shut up and listen. There are worlds of nuance that are being missed in the all-or-nothing shouting match as it stands, and I can’t stand it anymore.

Just listen.

Sex ed is every day.

Sex ed is teaching children, of any age, that their bodies are their own; it is making sure they know [...]]]> Sex ed is not something we do once. It’s not something we talk about “when they’re old enough“. It’s really not something to leave exclusively to schools, or chance, or experiential learning.

Sex ed is every day.

Sex ed is teaching children, of any age, that their bodies are their own; it is making sure they know what bodily autonomy is (whether or not they know the word), and that they have it, and everyone else has it too.

Sex ed is answering their questions about pubic hair, and armpit hair, and facial hair, and breasts, and penises, and vulvas. (Sex ed is making sure they know words like breast and penis and vulva because they’re a part of your every day vocabulary.)

Sex ed is telling kids that most women have vulvas but some don’t, that most men have penises but some don’t. (Sex ed is telling them that penises and vulvas and men and women aren’t the only ways to be.)

Sex ed is telling them that pads and sponges and tampons and cups are for catching menstrual fluid; sex ed is telling them what menstrual fluid is.

Sex ed is knowing that when a kid is cranky and you need a moment’s respite, YouTube has abundant birth videos as well as cartoons.

Sex ed is setting boundaries around your body: “Yes, you may kiss my face, but please don’t lick my mouth; yes, you may pat my breasts but don’t brush my nipple; yes, you may watch me pee, but don’t touch my genitals.”

Sex ed is setting boundaries around behavior: “It’s fine to touch your penis/vulva/clitoris/testicles, but not while nursing/on the plane/in public/in front of your Grandparents.”

Sex ed is exposing children to the multitude ways of building a family: sex, and IVF, and adoption, and blending, and donors. It’s exposing children to the multitude variations of what family means: two parents of different genders or same, one parent, more parents, grandparents, others; families without children, families without blood relation, families without legal protection.

Sex ed is kissing: the way we kiss our kids, the way we kiss our partners, the way we kiss our parents; it’s the kissing they see in movies and the kissing they see on the streets and the kissing the see when we leave the door open, or they hear and wonder about in the dark. Sex ed is what we tell them about all the ways of kissing.

Sex ed is the other things they hear in the dark, and in the day time; sex ed is in where and how much and when we enact our sex lives, or not. Sex ed is the bed-side drawer we keep off limits (or don’t), and it’s the answers we give to what’s in there.

Sex ed is demonstrating that our bodies can give us pleasure; it’s hugs and back rubs and gentle touches. Sex ed is never teaching them to accept unwanted pain.

Sex ed is honoring their nos; sex ed is teaching them how to say yes.

Children are always learning; they are learning from what we say, and from what we don’t. If we say nothing, they are not learning nothing, they are learning that some things are unspeakable. Sex ed is not a one time course (though those can be great); sex ed is not a conversation to schedule, or put off, or plan out: sex ed is every day.

Do it well.

*****

Sex and sexuality education resources. Learn, so you can teach your kids:

Scarleteen (highly recommended)

Go Ask Alice

girl2girl

1a. Any group larger than two, or maybe [...]]]> 1. I am an introvert. No, really. I adore parties, love people, am a great conversationalist, have quite excellent social skills when I choose to¹, but holy fuck: if I don’t get enough downtime between activities or being around a crowd, the results are not pretty.

1a. Any group larger than two, or maybe three — counting myself — is a crowd.

2. The Boychick is quite possibly also an introvert, because his ability to use words and empathize and behave as a social, gentle creature — as he is 95% of the time around his immediate family — decreases in direct proportion to the number of people around him increasing.

2a. Except for his younger cousin, whom he professes love for when away from, but is cruel to in astounding ways when close to, regardless of who else is present. This is slightly made up for by his utter, and mutual, adoration of his older cousin. But it still makes me cringe and weep.

3. The one thing a restaurant really needs in order to be family-friendly is to have a kid-accepting attitude. Crayons help. Clowns are unnecessary. Candles are not incompatible as long as the servers are happy to take them away if asked. I’ve felt more welcome with the Boychick in a restaurant with chandeliers and candles and a wine list longer than my arm² than I have in some places with balloons and picture menus. It’s all about attitude.

4. The more busy I am, the more I need to write. The more busy I am, the less time I have to write. Next time, I’m putting it on the schedule, because as antisocial as it seems, it’s better than the alternative. (See also 1 and 1a.)

5. A seven day visit, no matter how stressful, may it worth it for the one late-night one-on-one two-hour conversation all by itself.

5a. But more of those connection moments would be better.

5b. Staying up late for a two-hour conversation, no matter how wonderful, seems like a Phenomenally Bad Idea the next morning, when the child(ren), who had been sleeping the whole time, wake up and demand that adults also be awake and chipper and ready for More Fun, regardless of how sleep deprived they may be.

6. If no one is making the decisions, no decisions get made. Herding cats might actually be easier, because cats at least know what they want and will tell you (even if it is “to get the hell away from here!”).

6a. Don’t ask me to make any decisions: see 1, 1a, 4, and 5b.

7. Never, ever, ever again will I schedule or agree to a visit during which The Man is in training the entire time, thus leaving me as the sole on-duty parent during days and days of Super Fun Activities, any one of which would challenge me, the combination of which about does me in.³

8. Destination reunions are sounding better all the time. How’s the Caribbean in February?