So, winter came to New York. For, like, one day. Which caused Emilia to ask whether it only snowed in certain parts of New York City, because it’s so big, and couldn’t it be possible that there’d be different weather systems north and south of Central Park? It’s plausible.

She also asked me if I missed the snow in Canada, which, frankly, I don’t, and I told her as much. “It’s because you don’t have a snowsuit, Mommy,” she said. “If you had a snowsuit and could play in the snow you would like it.” Which, maybe. Or maybe not.

Probably not.

(I have no reason for giving this post this title. I’ve just always wanted to use it as a title, and ‘Now Is The Winter Of Our Discount Snowsuits,’ while perhaps marginally more appropriate. just does not have the same evocative force.)

(UPDATE BELOW) Tomorrow, Tanner will undergo a surgery that will, hopefully, prolong his life. But it’s a dangerous surgery, and he and his mom, my sister, have had to travel far from home and family for this surgery, and she’s scared, we’re all scared, and it’s hard. The struggle around the bullying before the holidays seems – for better or for worse – far away and insignificant; what matters now is that he get through this, that my sister gets through this, and that getting through this serves its purpose, that it yields more time with him, and good time with him.

Chrissie is scared, as I said, but she’s also resigned. In a good way, I think, which is to say, in a healthy way. It feels wrong to speak of resignation in the face of one’s child’s death as a good or healthy thing, but there it is. The better word, I guess, is acceptance. And acceptance is necessary, because Tanner’s fate will not change.

Still, still. It is so hard.

From Chrissie:

This is a test, a test of my strength and my family’s. Not of Tanner’s strength, he is the most courageuos person I know. He has not run marathons, nor done five Bikram classes in one day, and he can barely eat on his own now… but he is my HERO. I have done all of that in his name because I know the courage it takes for him and other children, who may not have DMD but who nonetheless face challenges, every day. Even on my worst day, I look at this gorgeous happy little man and I am in awe. Of the courage and strength and grace with which he faces each day. Mr Magoo, I love you.

Family is so important. I posted a picture today of mine, and out of the blue someone reminded me of how amazing my family was and is, the memories, of what molded me to be who I am… My parents, my sister, and all the of times we shared and laughed. My Mom and Dad gave my sister and I the world. They made us who we are. Thank you. Dad, you are always with us, with me. Mom, I can’t imagine a day where I cant talk to you… I strive to be that for my children. And to the friends in my life and the people I have met, I am blessed to have a list too long to name without making this note a few pages, but you know who you are.

And to Tanner, Booger, I love you. I know how hard it is every day for you. I know the courage it takes for you. To have lost your independance, slowly each day, to watch other children run and be free… I would lay my life down for you. So many people know you and love you..and others, well they will never understand the beauty and power of love. You have touched me and so many people… thank you, my baby. You were a cherub when you were born and you have blessed my life. xo

There are no words to add to that.

Please wish her love and strength.

UPDATE (from my mom):

Hi Cath

just talked to your sister – Tanner is out of surgery – he is in ICU but he appears to be okay.  He still has the breathing tube, but surgeon thinks it won’t be in too long. Tanner freaked out just before he went under – so his first words to Chrissi, after surgery, were “did I ask you if I was dead”.  In retrospect his freakout was probably good, because now the relief he feels about waking up is a big happy.

Love Mom

I don’t know how to import the code that would make this site go dark today, as so many other sites are going dark, in a communal effort to express opposition to SOPA, so I’m fudging it. I could ask that you close your eyes, or throw a napkin over the screen, but that wouldn’t have the effect of communicating ‘censorship’ so much as it would ‘naps’ and ‘mess’, so. This is the best that I can do.

Check out this flowchart for the clearest picture of what SOPA is and why it’s a problem and what you can do. If you’re Canadian, and are wondering why the hell you should care, you should read this CBC post. And then go back to imagining what it would be like to hang out on the Internet if most of it went dark.

Oh, hey! Remember when I posted about being unfriended on Facebook for being a stay at home?

I received the following message via Facebook today. I think that it’s pretty awesome. And by awesome, I mean, so profoundly insulting and ignorant that I actually yelled out “REALLY???”

Catherine –

I know I probably shouldn’t say this, but I have to ask you, how did you end up a “stay at home mom” with no job after all the university you took? … I have to take you off my Facebook as it is such a disappointment that you never did anything with your life and you do this all day… it was not what I would have imagined for you Catherine… so sad.

So there you have it, people. I am a disappointment. I have no job. I am doing the worthless and pathetic work – wait! no! unwork – of raising two beautiful children, when instead I should be, I don’t know, out there in the world using my years of education to teach other peoples’ children about Plato or sell cola or design widgets or something really meaningful. Because raising children isn’t actually work, right? It doesn’t actually contribute to society. And, of course, the fact that I write about parenthood and children and family and the condition of love in post-modernity is just, you know, pffft, whatever. Who reads that stuff? What does it actually contribute? What good am I really, people? What good are you? You should go have a good think about that.

TRANSLATION: what a great big steaming pile of utter bullshit. Didn’t we bury Linda Hirshman’s nonsense under there a long time ago? Which is to say this: no woman is less of a woman for choosing to stay home with her kids. Nor is any woman any less of a woman for choosing to work at home with her kids or to work at home without her kids. Nor is any woman any less of a woman for choosing to work outside the home and parent as a working mother. Nor is any woman any less of a woman for choosing to not have kids at all. No woman is any less of a woman, or a feminist, or a human being for making any one of those choices. None of these choices is any less valid or meaningful or worthy than any of the others, because these choices can only be measured according to the fulfillment of the individual, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just straining to justify their own choices as a defense against their own insecurities over those choices.

In related news, I think that we’ve found someone worthy of the given name that corresponds to Emilia’s new favorite word.

 

UPDATE: Although this person was determined to unfriend me for being such a disappointment, she waited to do so until after I had responded to her message, at which point she said, among other things, this:

As for my opinion on “stay at home mothers”, I do have a thing about stay at home mothers as I do not think a man should make all the money and the wife stay home and not have to work (just to raise the children)… that is just my believe (sic). I think both people should work and everyone I know work (sic) and take care (sic) of their children.

So there you have it! It’s a sexism thing! Women staying home and not working – you know, just raising children, which as we all know means sitting your ass and eating bon bons all day and contributing to the public good in no way whatsoever – is sexist and backward because it means that the man does all the work and makes all the money and the woman is just – what’s the word? – kept. Silly whores, all of us.

FEMINISM: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

 

I kind of thought that that might be the end of it. I mean, there were a couple of hundred supportive comments, expressing outrage and disappointment, and everyone that I spoke to about the incident agreed that the kind of person who would say this kind of thing, in this way, was batshit crazy, and also sort of illiterate. Most sensible people agreed, it seemed, that this was an offensive, retrograde opinion. Most people agreed, it seemed, that judging mothers at all for whether they work in or out of the home was offensive and retrograde.

But then Anderson Cooper decided that it would awesome to have moms go all batshit judgypants on each other on his show, the better to cause skirmishes and catfights! And Dr. Laura thought that this would be awesome, too, and dedicated twenty minutes of one of her programs to ripping working moms new perineal tears. Which, my god. Seriously? WHY DOES THIS ISSUE JUST NOT GO AWAY?

So we decided to do a salon discussion about it over at Babble – about the question of why the Mommy Wars keep coming back, like great lumbering armies of the undead, groaning and lurching and pissing everybody off – just so that we could maybe, maybe, start to make some sense out of this. Or not. At the very least, we hope to leach some of the judgment out of there. Go check it out, and do weigh in. Why do YOU think this issue keeps coming back? Why CAN’T we all get along?

Last week, someone in our community lost her home in a fire. She tweeted about it, and the community rallied (not least because of this dear woman), and although there’s no real happy ending when someone loses so much, it seemed, at least, that one could keep faith with humanity as caring and good. But then – almost immediately – and inevitably – the criticisms came. Why was she was tweeting? Why should someone so irresponsible be supported by the community? Why should the community support anyone they don’t know? What is this ‘community’ thing that everyone is talking about, anyway, because, seriously, how could anyone think that the Internet has communities? There is, after all, no there there.

I’m not going to speak to the question of community support – I have about eleventeen thousand words to say about that, that I’ll save for another time – but I can speak – have spoken to – the question of why we tweet in those moments that seem to defy tweeting – why, indeed, tweeting during those moments tells us something about the very nature of tweeting, and of social sharing generally. Those words, repurposed, are below.

When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.

My father is dead. My father has died. My father is gone.

There is much that can be said – dissected, debated, argued, asserted – about the impulse to tweet a tragedy. Some have said that tweeting during a tragedy is akin to fiddling while Rome burns, that it is evidence of a narcissistic soul. Others have said that it’s simply the virtual equivalent of calling out to friends  – by phone or by letter or over the garden fence – for help and support. I think that it’s a little bit of both.

The impulse to narrate any event, or one’s feelings in response to some event, is to some degree a narcissistic one, if we understand narcissism loosely (and perhaps literally) as focused self-regard, as a concentration of one’s attention upon oneself. It is to position oneself as author of the story that is unfolding, it is to take the first-person narrative role, it is to make the story about oneself. It is – contra Barthes – to become the source of meaning of the text. This needn’t be a bad thing. I asserted myself as narrator of the story of my father’s death because I needed to narrate that story, because I needed to assert my place within that story – grief-stricken daughter, confused grief-stricken daughter – in order to tell it to myself, and to the world. And telling the story was crucial to me surviving the first overwhelming waves of pain and sadness: I grabbed on to the story like a buoy and hung onto it for dear life. It was wet and slick and cold and I kept losing my grip, but it was there, and I kept myself afloat by reaching for it, grabbing for it, clinging to it when I could. There I was adrift, there I was battling the waves, there I was out and alone in a dark, turbulent sea with only the buoyant mass of my words to hold onto, to mark my place in that sea, to alert others – anybody, anybody – that there I was. I harbored no illusions that anyone could pluck me from the dark and save me. But I needed the world to know that I was there. I needed to know that I was there.

So: it was narcissistic of me, in some wise, to tweet my father’s death. Tweeting my father’s death made that death all about me. But, for me, it was all about me. It was my story, the story of my grief, and my tweets were the first painful lines in that story. I needed to say them out loud so that I could keep going. I also needed my community, my friends, and tweeting was my way of crying out to that community that I was hurt, that I was hurting, that I was in pain. But that, too, was part of the storytelling impulse: I needed someone to tell my story to. I needed my cries in the dark to be heard. I needed to know, I needed to prove, that the story was real, that this wasn’t just me talking in my sleep, singing myself a nightmare, narrating some terror from which I could not rouse. Is a story really a story if there is no reader, no audience? Even if I’d written the words down in a journal to read to myself, or whispered them into someone’s ear, the purpose would have been the same: to put the story out there, to get it heard. By one person, by thousands – the intent is the same. To get it heard. To make it real. To tell the story. To tell the story so that the pain and ache and gut-tearing grief become something other. So that they take on a life of their own, outside of one’s ravaged heart, as story.

The love, the hugs, the prayers, the good wishes, all of the things that come from the community when we cry out to it: these are precious, these are invaluable, these are necessary. But they are not what we are looking for – or, not the only things that we are looking for, not the only things that I was looking for – when we proclaim our tragedies, our hurts. We proclaim because we are storytellers, because storytelling has a saving power, because telling stories – telling our stories, telling our most difficult stories – saves us, or, at least, keeps us afloat. Twitter is a storytelling medium, and so it is understandable that some of us turn to it to tell our saving stories, in whole or in part.

Not all of Twitter’s stories are saving stories, sure. Some of Twitter’s stories are banal. Most of Twitter’s stories, maybe, are banal. But, too, some are great and some are beautiful and some are terrible and the great stories and the beautiful stories and the terrible stories – all the saving stories – live alongside the banal stories and all of them, all of them draw us ’round the fire to hear and to share and – sometimes – to survive.

And that’s all that we need to know.

(Title from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elegy 1)

For New Year’s this year, I made the usual kinds of resolutions that everybody makes. Eat healthier. Find more time for myself. Get more exercise. Buy fewer shoes. I don’t know whether I’ll follow through on them, but that’s not really the point, is it? New Year’s resolutions are aspirational. They’re not really meant to form the basis of a life plan for the upcoming year, regardless of what O Magazine tells you.

That said, I did make some resolutions that intend to keep. These were mostly tech-related resolutions, which I suppose tells you something about my priorities. Still, they are resolutions, and, I think, meaningful ones. Sort of:

1.) Take more photographs. This is a giveaway, in a way, because I already take a gajillion photos, weekly. So I should clarify: I resolve to take more photos, more intentionally, and in a more diverse range of formats. This year, I’ve been using my iPhone camera, and taking candid shots with it, almost exclusively. I intend to continue doing this – I love my iPhoneography – but I also want to get back to using my DSLR more frequently, and to being more intentional about setting up certain kinds of shots, like portraits and still life. I get awesome pictures of my kids with the iPhone, and do cool things with those photos in camera+, but when I looked back, recently, at some of the portrait-style photos I’ve done of them in the past, with my Nikon, I realized that I was missing some great images. So. MORE NIKON IN 2012!

2.) Encourage my husband to further his relationship with his Canon, and stand back and let him be the Official Family Photographer more often. He’s good with that camera, and he has a different eye than I do, and the resulting pictures are great. And sometimes those pictures even include me, which is kind of radical, and also disconcerting (is my hair really that pale? Why do I keep that white t-shirt that gapes at the arms? WHERE IS MY STYLIST?)

3.) Print more photos, and put them into photo albums. Or maybe even scrapbooks, if I feel super daring this year. Because here’s the thing that I realized late last year: regardless of how organized I think that I am in maintaining my digital albums, and regardless of how secure and permanent the so-called ‘cloud’ is, it remains, for now, that a) I am terrible at keeping track of my hundreds of thousands of digital images, and b) if anything happened to them – a toddler smashes a laptop, say (which has already happened, and rendered irretrievable some hundred of photos that I took in Lesotho), or the cloud implodes because our cyborg overlords deem it a threat – I would lose a treasure trove of memories. Yes, I know that the most important memories are those that I hold in my heart, but my heart sometimes loses its power of recall, and in any case I want solid evidence of my daughter’s attachment to a phallic lovey to produce at her wedding.

Don’t ask.

4.) Take more video, and get better at taking video. I keep missing moments where Jasper punches the bejeezus out of a balloon, or where Emilia stages a interpretive dance performance to Lady Gaga’s Alejandro – or, if I don’t miss the moment, I only capture it inexpertly, or fail to edit it properly. I need to do better with video, because, seriously, now that we have YouTube TV accessible on our flatscreen, I want to relive those moments in all of their hi-def glory.

5.) Get onboard with Pinterest. I love the idea of Pinterest. I just haven’t had the time to figure out how to use it, or, you know, just use it. I want to make time, because, seriously, it looks like fun.

6.) Continue not getting onboard with Google+. Unless someone can convince me otherwise. Seriously, I just don’t get Google+. Aren’t Facebook and Twitter enough? I have social networking limits, you know.

7.) Really, seriously, stay committed to not overburdening myself with social networking applications and groups and circles and all those pretty shiny things that scream JOIN ME. Except Pinterest. I really want to do Pinterest. BUT THAT’S IT.

8.) Curb my app addiction. I have nearly 40 photography apps. I only really use camera+ and a handful of others. And I only read Slate, Cracked, McSweeney’s and the New York Times, and I only play Angry Birds. So, if you factor in a few social networking applications, and the odd random kids’ app, I really should have less that 20 apps on my phone, rather than a few hundred. I’m an app hoarder. I need to deal with this.

9.) Spend more quality time away from my iPhone and all of its sweet, sweet apps. I sleep with it under my pillow. I think that means that I’m too attached to it.

10.) Spend more time off the grid in general. I’ve said before that in some respects, it doesn’t make sense for me to try to delink entirely when my camera and my calculator and my alarm clock and my music and much of my reading material and my to-do lists and ten zillion other daily-use things are all on my iPhone (to say nothing of the fact that our television is fully WiFi-enabled – we watch Netflix and Vudu and YouTube TV instead of cable – and that we stream music through Pandora, etc, etc.). But it does feel good when I determine – and live up to my determination – to not check email or update my social networks or otherwise just tinker with gadgets and apps from time to time. I want to do more of this, this year.

So, yeah. These won’t help me fit into skinnier jeans, or ensure that I get more rest (unless, perhaps, I stop reading Cracked on my iPhone when I wake up in the middle of the night), but if I manage to fulfill even a few of these resolutions, I think that I’ll be a better person. Well, a person with a healthier, more moderate and more productive relationship to tech and gadgetry. Which amounts to the same thing, right?

Do you have any tech-related resolutions? (How could you not? OUR CYBORG OVERLORDS DEMAND IT.)

If I hadn’t been present at Jasper’s birth, and very personally involved in that birth, I’d swear that there was some kind of ‘separated at’ thing going on here:

I’m not even going to remark on the ears. Those ears. THOSE EARS.

We would start calling him Happy, after the Rankin/Bass character that he so resembles, except that he’s not, strictly speaking, always happy, and also we just prefer calling him names like Jibby, Jibbler, Jazzburger, Joey, and, when we’re feeling edgy, Jasser Arafat. So. An opportunity for a new nickname, but one that we, sadly, cannot take.

What I would like to take: that whole part of the story, from ‘Rudolph’s Shiny New Year,’ wherein Father Time explains that it is possible to stop the clock and to freeze time and have it be perpetually now. Because although I am so, so excited for the upcoming year, and although I love watching my children get bigger and older and faster, it all just feels, sometimes, like it’s happening so fast. I wouldn’t mind stopping time for a little while. A day or two or twenty or more, just so that I could stop, and enjoy it all for a little longer.

Of course, if it means banishing an infant to the Archipelago Of Last Years, I can probably live without this. Probably.

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2012/01/rudolphs-shiny-new-year-big-eared-brooklyn-preschooler-edition/feed/ 0 http://herbadmother.com/2011/12/so-this-was-christmas/ http://herbadmother.com/2011/12/so-this-was-christmas/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:40:49 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=4833

… and this – blurry, with shredded gift paper and monsters – pretty much sums it up.

Scan any set of Internet headlines this week and odds are that you’ll see something along these lines: Imagine There’s No Santa, No Virginia, There Is No Santa, and Why I Don’t Tell My Kids About Santa. You’ll also see classics like Should You Tell Your Kids About Santa Claus? and When Should You Tell Your Kids About Santa Claus? And if you were online today, you might have seen this: Justin Beiber Never Believed In Santa Clause.

You’d almost think that there was no Santa Claus.

You can find these headlines on Babble too, of course. We’re currently running a salon discussion about ‘the Santa Myth’ at Babble – Santa: Holiday Hero or Horrible Lie – in which most of the discussants are wringing their hands about lying to children about a fat man in a red suit. I just don’t like doing it, they’re saying. I want my kids to trust that I always tell them the truth. They worry about this, of course, because the story of Santa is not true. And if the story of Santa is not true, then telling that story in a manner that does not disclose the story as fiction is, basically, lying.

Which, sure. Of course.

If you were to ask me, casually, if I thought that the most familiar Santa stories – ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, Rudolph, et. al. – were based on fact, I would say no, of course I don’t. I don’t believe that a fat man in a red suit runs a sweatshop, exploiting cheap elven labour, at the North Pole. I don’t believe that he keeps a list of who’s naughty and nice, nor that he flies around the world in an airborne sleigh on Christmas Eve, dispensing gifts and small bits of coal according to the dictates of that list.

I don’t believe that reindeer really do know how to fly.

But neither do I believe that Santa stories are lies.

Plato wrote, a very long time ago, before there was a Christmas or a Santa or anything of the sort, that there is a very important difference between what he called lies of the soul and verbal lies, or lies in speech. A lie of the soul, he said, is a lie that misguides the soul, misdirects the soul away from truth. It’s a lie that causes the soul to become confused, and so, ultimately, unhappy. A verbal lie, on the other hand, might be as simple as a little white lie, told to avoid hurt, or it might be something more noble. A noble lie is a lie in the sense that it veils the truth, but it veils the truth in such a way as to make it comprehensible to those who are unable to grasp truth in its fullness. It orients the soul to truth, without revealing truth openly (the truth being like the sun – it can be blinding, and so we must, most of us, shield our eyes.)

A long time ago, when I used to teach the story of the noble lie (which appears in Plato’s Republic) to my undergraduate students, they usually responded, initially, with indignation. It’s a lie, they say. It is meant to deceive, and deception is bad. Yes, I would say, deception is bad. But not all fiction is deceptive. And then I would remind them of origin stories and creation myths, of the story of the Garden of Eden and of the Fall (which, forgive me, I do not regard as plainly factual), of cosmogony, of Pangu and Nyx and Romulus and Remus; I’d remind them of fables and myths; I’d remind them of the stories that we tell children, the stories that we use for the purposes of teaching.

Stories like that of Santa, which, I think, teaches something about generosity and goodness and the idea that all children deserve to be (even if they are not in fact) loved. That the best way to celebrate Christmas is to give gifts without the expectation of reciprocation, to quietly slip a little happiness into the stockings of others. (We could, of course, go darker with this story, and expand upon the ‘naughty and nice’ proviso, and say something about cold and coal-dark hearts being undeserving of gifts, but I am skeptical of the quote-unquote truth of this part of the story and so I will likely – because it does not accord with the quote-unquote truth that I wish to communicate to my children – delete it from the version of the story that I tell them. Such is the power of the parent, who as primary storyteller is both poet and philosopher-ruler.)

(I could, of course, say something here about religion and the original story of Christmas and the purposes that these stories serve and what it might mean to refer these stories as noble lies. But that is a much longer and more complicated post – and in any case it is a post that I attempted, once upon a time - and so you must just accept these concerns as subtext.)

But there’s more to this than the question of whether such stories are deceptive. Joel Stein, in the discussion at Babble, stated that Santa is a character of fiction, no more real than the Cat in the Hat. Which is a reasonable position to take, I think – except that when I think of my own childhood relationships to characters of fiction, what I remember most fondly is the wonderful uncertainty of those fictions. Grover might have been real (I cried when I met him. I did not care a whit that a puppeteer’s arm was jammed up his rear-quarters. He was real to me, in that moment; so real that I apologized to him after I asked for his autograph. Oh god your arms don’t work I AM SO SORRY.) So too Peter Pan, and Alice, and the Cheshire Cat, and Charlie who went to the chocolate factory, and the Tooth Fairy. And Santa. Those characters, and so many others, were fascinating to me because they made demands upon my imagination – they lived only through my imagination, it was my imagination that sustained them, that made them walk and talk and breath. Had they solely been one-dimensional figures, had they only been words and pictures on a page, had I been certain that they were not real, they would have remained flat. Lifeless.

Their stories had force, for me, precisely because those stories occupied and energized that wonderful space between my heart and my mind where truth and story and fact and fiction are blurred, where the impossible and the not-quite-possible and the possible become deliciously tangled, where disbelief is always suspended. They lived – they live – and became real in the space of my imagination.

So. I will never try to convince my children that the Santa in the mall is the real Santa. I will never insist to them that he does come down every chimney in every house in the world. I will never claim that he is always watching, all the time (I reserve a clause here – no pun intended – for the elf on the shelf, and for certain iPhone applications that allow me to call the North Pole.) I will never try to make them believe. I will, however, tell them stories about Santa (of all varieties), and I will tell these stories in my most assured voice, with my most sparkling eye, with my most animated gestures. And if – when? – Emilia or Jasper asks me whether Santa is real… well, I suppose that I’ll be honest with them. I’ll say that ‘real’ can mean many things; I’ll say that sometimes it’s enough to believe in something with all your heart to make that thing real in many of the ways that count (to love that thing, to derive hope or comfort or inspiration from that thing). I’ll say that while I can’t personally confirm that there is a Santa who lives at the North Pole (never having been there myself), that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible that there is a Santa, somehow, somewhere. I will say that it is, in any case, important to believe, sometimes, in impossible things. I will say, with the Queen of Hearts, that I myself have been known to believe in as many as six impossible things, all before breakfast.

All of which is to say that I will encourage them to reach their own conclusions, and that I will encourage them to be open-minded in pursuing those conclusions, in pursuing understanding of seemingly impossible things. I will give them the opportunity to believe, to embrace the stories and let them live in their imaginations. I will let them have their Santa, whatever that means, if they want him.

(Audience participation! What do you tell your children about Santa? Weigh in here, or over at the Salon.)

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2011/12/the-most-real-things-in-the-world-and-also-santa-claus/feed/ 21 http://herbadmother.com/2011/12/the-week-that-was-pink-earmuff-edition/ http://herbadmother.com/2011/12/the-week-that-was-pink-earmuff-edition/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:26:34 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=4820

So, you know. This week.

This week was hard.

But the whole thing about being a grown-up is, however hard things get, there is still always life to get on with. Work to do, kids to attend to, cats to feed. And, at this time of the year, elves to move from shelf to shelf (which, seriously: is it just me, or is it just a bit much remembering to do that every night? I totally forget that he’s there, and then in the morning I find myself doing some mad, manic distraction maneuver to get Emilia to look away while I shuffle him from one spot into another. This shit is complicated, you guys.), presents to purchase and smuggle into the house, Christmas trees to keep upright, etc, etc.

And so we just push onward. Thank god there’s the Internet, and small children, for our amusement.

1.) There was this whole debate about Santa Claus. (You know, do you do the whole Santa thing with your kids, or do have issues about it being some kind of whack lie?) (Which, the latter, I just don’t get. Santa is REAL, you guys.) Anyway, it’s still going on, and I imagine that it will just keep going until Jenny brings out her shotgun and shoots Joel Stein in the face. Which she isn’t really going to, unless he turns into a zombie. I think.

2.) I revisited that whole ‘Santa is totally a vampire thing.” Because, DUH.

3.) I Skyped my mom. It was complicated.

4.) There was this whole Babble Top 100 Mom Blogs thing. Third year. I’m on it again, which is great, for sure, but also a little weird, because I work there, but then again, I had nothing to do with the list, because, not my department, so. DON’T LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH. Or something.

5.) I tried on shoes.

6.) My bank account got hacked.

7.) Jasper wore pink earmuffs.

So, you know. Grace in small things.