Day 8 of NaBloPoMo

Its already 8 days into November and I have yet to figure out if I should be writing these posts the night before and schedule them to post the next day. If I should get up early and write them in the morning (this is a virtual impossibility as mornings and I are like oil and water, we do not mix well!) or if I just keep doing what I'm doing at sit down to write them after the LO is down for the night. The problem with writing them at night is I'm tired and have no motivation to write something original..

That being said I'm going to write about something that has come up today..
Veronica at CrunchyVTMommy and over at Raising My Boychick everyone was talking about Erica Jongs article Mothering Madness in the Saturday issue of the Wall Street Journal.  Both blogs had great takes on Attachment Parenting and how motherhood isn't a prison.

I'd like to talk about her third paragraph which starts out like this:

We also assume that "mother" and "father" are exclusive terms, though in other cultures, these terms are applied to a variety of aunts, uncles and other adults. Kinship is not exclusively biological, after all, and you need a brood to raise a brood.

She is correct, it doesn't take blood to raise a family.  Look at all the people who become foster parents and adoptive parents.  We take on children that are not biologically ours and try to raise them to the best of our ability.  But adoptive/foster parents sometimes face an uphill battle because the children they choose to raise can already have issues making proper attachments, making it more important that these mothers focus on attachment and not "handing" them off to others to help raise. 

Her next few sentences are this..

Cooperative child-rearing is obviously convenient, but some anthropologists believe that it also serves another more important function: Multiple caregivers enhance the cognitive skills of babies and young children. Any family in which there are parents, grandparents, nannies and other concerned adults understands how readily children adapt to different caregivers. Surely this prepares them better for life than stressed-out biological parents alone.

This statement perplexes me "how readily children adapt to different caregivers." Yes, children do well with multiple care givers but studies show that home care is preferable to day care.  A child being in daycare lends to an parent to being more of an attachment parent at night and on weekends.  How else do you reconnected with them?  My LO is taken from me twice a week for three hours with people that she doesn't really know to see a mentally ill mother that doesn't know how to attach to her child.  It takes hours sometimes to get my disorganized LO back to her secure self.  Why would I damage her "self" by handing her off to anyone if I didn't have too?  

When I was a babe back in the early 70's my mother was encouraged to bottle feed, to let me cry myself to sleep, and to not pick me up all the time.  And even now as an adult, I can tell my mom that is not how I want to raise my child she will argue with me.  She'll tell me how it didn't do me any harm..So how do I know that when I leave my child with her that she is following my wishes?  That I want her picked up him instant he cries, that I want her to lay down with him until he falls asleep, that I want her to wear him as much as possible.  I don't and neither do other parents who choose to follow the Attachment Parenting path.  Please note..I'm not dissing my mom, I love my mom tremendously and without her I wouldn't be who I am today, but I recognize her limits

And her final sentence of the paragraph

Some of these stressed-out parents have come to loathe Dr. Sears and his wife and consider them condescending colonialists in love with noble savagery.

I have found that the parents who are "stressed-out" tend to be the ones that can't see the long term results of the two to three years of stress..Yes it was hard to breast feed my son until he was 2, but now at 16, I smile everyday because I know that my attachment parenting made him the fine young man he is today!

The Needs Dance

Over the last eight weeks my LO and I have been doing this intricate dance.  A dance I like to call The Dance of Needs.  It’s a dance that all mothers learn to do with their babies.  We rehearse this dance in our heads before our babies arrive…we imagine how great it’s going to be when the baby is born, nursing will be a breeze, they will sleep through the night, they won’t ever scream blood hell, they won’t impede that much on our lives.  Our perception is that our dance will be perfect and full of bliss.  Unfortunately, once the baby arrives reality hits and we realize that we have learned the wrong dance.  Some babies are high needs dancers, some babies are easy dancers some babies are always changing up the steps.  Our babies have a dance all of their own!

I didn’t really get a chance to learn my own dance before my LO arrived, so I have been dancing the steps my previous partner taught me.  It was a long time ago and though I remember some of the steps I have forgotten plenty.  In true baby fashion, my LO is teaching me to dance her steps.  Sometimes our dance is slow, sometimes it fast, sometimes we hit all the right steps and its magnificent.

 

Tonight, as I was trying to finish up this post my LO and I had to do the dance of cranky baby since it was visitation day.  I finally got her calmed down after doing about 15 minutes of the Mommy sway..I must have gotten the steps right because she drifted off to slumberland!