Body image and the preschooler

Yesterday, my daughter and I were snacking on grapes when she said to me, "Don't eat all those or you'll get fat."

Whaaaaaaattttt?

She's four and not a cruel child, but the remark brought me up short. I have...curves, putting it mildly, but I'm sure I've never said such a thing to her. I've tried not to discuss food issues in terms of being thinner or trying to lose weight, but only in terms of eating more healthy foods, especially since she herself is at a perfectly normal weight for her height and age. So where did she get the idea?

When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I told her, as calmly as I could, that it wasn't nice to say such things, that it was mean and could really hurt someone's feelings. I think she understood, but again, she's four and of the age when the world is entirely black and white and it's okay to say what you're thinking when you think it. (Which I usually admire in her but um...yeah. Sometimes, not so much.)

The remark, though, made me think---about all the things we tell little girls about how they should look and what they should be. Abercrombie and Fitch just got into trouble (again) for marketing push-up bikini tops to seven year olds. I've seen platform shoes and ultra-short skirts marketed to kids Roisin's age and younger. We've done our level best to innoculate her from the worst of things, but I don't fool myself--the pressure from her peers, from society itself, is never-ending. I don't want her to look in the mirror and feel fat or ugly, not ever, but especially not at four. And I also don't want her to think it's okay to be rude to other people, even if she is speaking a literal truth. Sometimes, people are overweight for reasons other than eating too much food and even if they are, it's not her place to say so.

Sigh. There isn't anything like parenthood to make you worry. :)

"Do you love me?" :)

Today is Valentine's Day, and I confess that our family is pretty much ignoring it this year.

My husband and I will have been married eight years at the end of April. In that eight years, we've had four moves, one miscarriage, one premature birth, one cardiac bypass surgery, one NICU stint and all the other various and sundry things that happen in a marriage. I'm reminded of the line from "Fiddler on the Roof" where Tevya asks his wife, after twenty five years, if she loves him. She gives him a laundry list of all the things she's done and at the end of it, says, "If that's not love, what is?"

After eight years, I agree with Tevya's wife. My husband is an excellent father and husband---if he has kitchen sink blindness occasionally, he's also the same guy who can make a good meal out of seemingly nothing in the pantry, the same guy who also remembered a remark I made in passing, and bought me my favorite lip gloss.

In eight years, we've struggled, grieved, loved, lost, laughed and learned...together. I don't need a card to remind me to tell him I love him. I already do. And I know he loves me and loves our daughter. We don't need the day....it's nice, but not necessary.

If that's not love, what is? :)

You are my sunshine...

To my daughter, on her birthday....

I found your sonogram pictures the other day---five or six of them, stored in an envelope with your birth certificate and the name chart and growth chart from your stint in the NICU. The sonogram pictures were our first pictures of you---the earliest of them was when you were a whopping 4mm long. I was five or six weeks pregnant and terrified that I was having another miscarriage; my OB took pity on me and my fears and squeezed me in, somehow, for an ultrasound.

And that was when I saw you for the first time. I realize, if you read this later, that you might think that you looked like a really small baby, but you didn't, not then. You did look like the seed that gave you your first nickname (Sprout) before we knew if you were a boy or girl...but then, that early, you were just this tiny life who'd arrived in our lives against tall odds. I fell in love with you then---which you probably won't truly understand until you have a child of your own, but it's true. I saw you on that screen and I knew I'd fight for you, struggle with you, love you, no matter what.

It's four years later, four years since your birth and I don't quite have the words to describe how you've changed both of our lives---the terror and joy and hope and awe that we've felt as we watched you be born and grow. We're seeing more and more of you now, parts of me, parts of your dad, and parts that are most definitely just you, the unique presence that I first saw on that ultrasound all those years ago.

Happy 4th birthday, Róisín. :-) We love you, so very, very much.

Nope, definitely what we didn't need, thanks.

Well, yesterday it was time for auto maintenance---oil change, brake check, tire rotation, that sort of thing. We took it to our local mechanic---two guys who run a hole in the wall place about a mile away. I've been going to them for my repair needs since I drove my VW bug regularly (which was, if memory serves, before I met my husband.) They don't take appointments, so you have to get there roughly at the crack o'dawn, but they're reasonably priced and honest.

Anyway, our Honda is not even three years old yet (it'll be three in February) but we're going to have to replace the tires on it soon. Not real soon (else they'd have told us yesterday...they're that honest) but soon. And with Rob hoping to start school in January, we'll have to have it done before then. I'm just glad that we don't have long commuting trips planned or snow and ice to deal with.

It's just...gah, annoying. I had a suspicion we'd need to buy them soon; the tires on our last new car, a Toyota, needed to be replaced when it was roughly three years old. I don't get it, though...when you buy a new car, I think you should more or less be able to expect that the tires wouldn't need to be replaced before the 36K mile mark (we don't even have 30K on our Honda.) We're not lead-foots or dangerous drivers...but it seems that junk tires are the rule, these days.

*Facepalm*

This day, we give thanks....

Today is Thanksgiving. It's not our first as a married couple, but our seventh. It's not our first with our daughter, but our fourth. It is, however, the first time we cooked The Bird by ourselves---with a series of completely random events, we not only ended up cooking a full dinner, but cooking one for less people than we planned. (I fully expect to be heartily sick of turkey by next weekend :-P)

This was the first Thanksgiving that my daughter was old enough to begin to understand how the holiday originated (and, frankly, this is the one occasion where being a history geek really isn't a good thing.) I told her a simplified version, how those first colonists---all alone and starving---needed the help of others to survive. The larger moral, I've thought as I've gotten older, is that we're all interconnected to each other by our actions and our choices, that none of us should be too high or too mighty to realize we might need help come morning.

Which brings me to the grocery store. We ended up shopping at the last minute, not today, but yesterday...and because of the job which occasionally drives me insane, we had the money to buy the ingredients for the meal. Our local store has a food donation drive---basically, you buy a grocery bag with the dry ingredients for three meals inside (the prices vary,) and the grocery store donates it to a local food pantry. I didn't even blink when I picked up ours---it wasn't even a choice for me not to help, even a little bit---and there was a time when I would have, when I would have ignored the display and been too focused on what I was doing or where I needed to be.

But I have been in need---not that desperate kind of need where I couldn't feed my family (thank deities,) but need nonetheless, when I received help from people who could have chosen not to help...but didn't.

So today I give thanks, not only for my friends and my family, but for those experiences...because they taught me and bent me and shaped me.

No, No, and No. I don't think that's unclear.

Tonight after work, I made my weekly pilgrimage to Chez Target for, well, everything. (Yeah. This was one of those weeks where we ran out of everything all on the same day. Sigh.) So anyway, I saw a little old lady who'd borrowed a Target shopping cart and was handing out religious leaflets with the headline "Does God Love You?" She tried to hand one to me and I said, "No, thank you."

When I came out, she tried to give me the same pamphlet twice within about five minutes. The third time, I'm afraid I wasn't as polite as I maybe should have been. I said, "This is the third time you've tried to give me this and the third time I've said no." She said, "Well, I forgot." Um, okay. Silly me for thinking once should have been enough.

I don't know if that was the proper response---certainly it didn't work either of the three times I tried it. I don't like being preached at, or being on the receiving end of someone's conversion attempt---and make no mistake, she wasn't trying to, say, convince me that Zeus or Buddha or Shiva loved me. ;-) (I wouldn't have liked it if she had, but at least it would have had the virtue of newness---we don't get a lot of proselytizing Hellenists, Buddhists, or Hindus in our area of San Diego :-P) And I don't think I should have taken her pamphlet and then tossed it away (which seemed to be the majority choice, to judge by the trash in the parking lot.)

I don't come from a tradition that does a lot of witnessing, or whatever the term for it is nowadays. I wasn't raised Wiccan, but my mom and dad never went in for that type of religious practice. But I also couldn't have said to the old woman what I wanted to say, which was---to paraphrase another blogger---I believe in my gods the way you believe in your god.

Or put simply...I just want to shop and go home to my family. I don't want to be rude, but no means...no.

Le sigh.

From the mom of a preemie

Today, November 17th, is Fight for Preemies Day. Sponsored by the March of Dimes, it's a collaborative blog effort to promote and bring attention to the worldwide issue of premature birth.

In 2006, my daughter was one of nearly half a million babies born too soon in the US. I had excellent prenatal care, I didn't smoke or drink or use drugs. What I did have, though, (unknown to me) was a condition called incontinent cervix (IC) in which the cervix, for some reason, does not stay fully closed during pregnancy. Tragically, in many cases this condition is diagnosed only after late term pregnancy loss. I was one of the lucky ones; my cervix was seen dilating on an ultrasound when I was 22 weeks pregnant, and I had surgery just a few hours later to sew my cervix shut. I then went on bedrest for the next nine weeks.

When I was a little over 30 weeks pregnant, my water broke and I delivered my daughter at one day shy of 31 weeks' gestation. She was 3 1/2 pounds at birth and 16. 5 inches long. She went immediately into the NICU, where she stayed for the next five weeks.

In some ways, looking back, I think my husband and I were lucky. Róisín was our first child; we didn't have another child to compare this to, so this became our version of normal. And she--and I--had the best medical care we could have asked for. But all of this is not to understate the real risks my daughter---and others born too early---faced. Cerebral palsy, brain bleeding, intestinal and heart problems, blindness, developmental delays...these are all risks of premature birth. These babies are not just "smaller than normal"; they face a whole host of medical issues that full-term babies almost never deal with.

Today, my daughter is healthy and thriving and for all intents and purposes, perfectly normal. We were lucky, but many other babies born at her gestation or even earlier, are not. If you are reading this, if you are pregnant, are thinking about being pregnant, or know someone who is, please go to the March of Dimes website and educate yourself about the warning signs of premature birth.