16 May 1999: Alternative Parenting

CBS News has this ongoing series about real people's stories. The reporter finds the people by dartboard. So anyway this week's person lives in Iowa somewhere and apparently the most interesting thing about this person's life, what the reporter chose as his story, is that she doesn't want to have children. She's 40, works in Wal-Mart or some such place, and has three cats and a dog. The reporter also spoke to a coworker who spent $50,000 on fertility treatments and who said that one, how can this woman know she doesn't want children unless she tries it, and two, anyone who doesn't want to have children is selfish.

You can call me defensive here if you wish. Get it out of your system. Feel better? Now then.

One, you can't "try" having children then opt out when you discover it doesn't suit you in practice as much as it didn't suit you in theory. Two, selfish people probably make the worst parents because they resent the time, emotion, and material resources they have to expend upon their offspring. Except of course those selfless people who spend fifty thousand dollars to satisfy their parental craving. Three, fifty thousand dollars on your own personal satisfaction? For that much money, you could adopt probably ten children--if you didn't insist on healthy white newborns but wanted children who wanted a home, or even two such children plus investments for their educations, if you didn't selfishly insist on two of your own genetic offspring.

My mother called last weekend and said that my grandfather was going into residential care on Monday. On Monday she told me he refused to leave the house without his wife. My mother did not point out to him that DEW is in fact his ex-wife, so I figure she thought herself pretty generous there. So away DEW went, supposedly not permanently but I doubt any doctor would allow her to live alone anymore. I found the place with MapQuest and know where it is but it vexes me in my nostalgia not to be able to pinpoint the building in my head. I've sent her one letter already with another to go in the mail tomorrow, along with an issue of Birds and Blooms which strikes me as the ideal grandmother's letter--birdwatching and gardening--and a box of Childe Hassam stationery.

Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painting around the turn of the century and painted in Old Lyme at one point. Possibly he painted Old Lyme in Old Lyme as well, but I don't recall. The Florence Griswold Museum features two of his paintings, Late Afternoon Sunset and another not properly linked. Sunset looks pretty damn depressing to me, but the paintings on the notecards are bright sunny ones full of flowers: Dexter's Garden, The Island Garden, Isle of Shoals Garden, and In the Garden, all from the National Gallery of Art. The NGA offers no images but says "His favorite settings, however, were Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Appledore, on the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire, where he produced some of his best known images." I knew that the Isle of Shoals was a favorite but not Old Lyme too. Good.

We began today planning to do a juice fast. We lasted until 2:00, but--may I whine?--I'm sick.

This morning "CBS Sunday Morning" focused on Cuba and Ernest Hemingway, and I set the VCR just in case. I woke first at 5:54 then not again at 8:30, so it was a good thing I did program it. Once up, we watched the balance of CBS, RDC made chai, I started laundry and walked to Safeway for oj and bananas and switched the laundry, we drank smoothies made with the oj and bananas, I fetched the dry laundry, and then we went for a walk.

After all that extremely draining labor, after we came home and the rain began, we began to gripe about being hungry, and by 2:00 we each had had a bowl of cereal. Then I took a shower, and kissing RDC afterward I smelled that he had taken advantage of my watery absence to slip further down his slippery slope of solid food. I yelled "I want one too!" and scurried dripping into the kitchen for my own brownie.

So we don't get any prizes for discipline and self-restraint.

Yesterday as we debated the possibilities of supper, RDC pointed out that we were ignoring a leafy green vegetable. "We don't have to eat vegetables if we don't want to," I pointed out to him in one of our couple-jokes, "and d'you know why?" "Because we don't have kids!" he replied happily. When we first lived together and ate cake for supper, we said we could do this because we didn't have parents. We were in our mid-20s then. After we married and reached our late 20s, we changed the excuse.

I love those Andrew Weil french fries (which we made again for supper last night). The trouble is that the crushed garlic slips off the oiled slope of potato wedge and therefore the potatoes aren't as garlicky as they could be. I shall leave the tweaking of the recipe up to RDC.

CKC graduates from school today. Last month I sent an inane birthday card to her youngest sister that probably indicated once and for all that Mrs. McTwitter is a little bit crazy. Birthdays, though, and three a year--I can't take that much pressure to be original and funny, ack! I tried to be more coherent for CKC's college graduation and I hope I was. It just took a slight pause to gather my thoughts, and I hope I was able to convery my esteem and fervent best wishes.

Mrs. McTwitter the babysitter
We think she's a little bit crazy
She thinks the babysitter
Is supposed to sit upon the baby!

Or something like that. It's not in Falling Up, which is the only Shel Silverstein I own. Uncle Shelby. How we'll miss you.

Anyway, that was my name. Lisa McTwitter. So I'm allowed to be a little bit crazy, and I hope also extremely fond of these women their whole lives. I do think the nine years that separate me from the eldest divide us irrevocably into different generations, plus that I used to babysit them, but I don't think either fact means we can't be friends. Except that I shall always feel protective of them, even if I realize they're wiser or more mature than I.

A satisfying Sunday night of television. Sean Connery on "60 Minutes," Mothra on "The Simpsons," Brian the talking dog on "Family Guy," and cool! One Who Waits is in the season finalŽ of "X-Files." I have loved Floyd Red Crow Westerman since "Northern Exposure."

I've been thinking about those puffins in Far Afield that I mentioned the other day. I am too credulous of anything I read in print, just as Charlotte said all people are. After reading and loving Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then all of Annie Dillard, I read something somewhere debunking her naturalism as invented. That big toad-melting bug in Pilgrim, for instance. Doesn't exist. So anyway I realized after writing about the Faroese scooping up floating puffin chicks that that book is listed under fiction and should be treated as such. Silly tigger.