Hot and Sour Soup for The HomeSchooling Mother’s Soul
or
the three books I read on New Year’s Day.........

Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child
by Frank Furedi

This one is a fun read. I don’t agree with everything the author says. (he wasn’t real keen on homeschooling and co-sleeping, for example) But I certainly do by his basic premise that for every theory in modern child raising, you will most certainly find a contradictory theory. And finding out about the plethora of parenting advice that has mushroomed since I stopped reading the early parenting books (about twenty years ago, with the exception of the stuff that I would see in the course of my La Leche League experience) was amusing. Amusing because I am not a new parent looking for advice. If I were embarking on parenthood today, it would scare me to death. I was paranoid enough without a whole genre of books to spur me on. Embot was the baby who had her nursery washed down with a Lysol solution before she was born so she would be in a ‘clean environment.’ Fifteen years later, Edward came up just a little bit short of sleeping in a drawer. Guess which child contracted staph and spent a week in isolation on IV antibiotics......

A typical American child will never experience the horror of polio or spend time in an iron lung. She will not get tuberculosis from milk or rickets from vitamin D deficiency. She can go about her everyday life without worrying about smallpox or scurvy from vitamin C deficiency. On average, children can expect to live almost thirty years longer than their counterparts a century ago.says Furedi. But that hasn’t stopped a journalistic genre to bloom around the prospect of management of risks that no one anticipates....The periodical Parents publishes a regular feature titled “It Happened to Us.” Every issue contains a story about an unusual accident that happened to a family - the moral of the story is that it can happen to you, too. “Our Child Got Burned by a Cellar Door,” My Baby Fell Down the Basement Stairs,” “My Baby Was Nearly Strangled by My Hair,” or “A Bouncy Seat Hurt My Baby’ are some of the stories recounted. While it is not evident that what these articles aim to accomplish, their only possible effect is to scare parents about one more trivial aspect of their children’s lives. Scare stories about cellar doors, basement stairs, bouncy seats, and the length of a mother’s hair are not important in and of themselves. But they feed into and reinforce a climate that continually forces parents onto the defensive.

Perhaps I shall write, “I Dropped My Baby in Parking Lot on the Way to Mass and Even Though the Hospital Checked Him Out and Pronounced Him Fine, He Has Neurological Problems, Social Anxiety and I May Have Ruined His Prospects of a Religious Vocation.” Or “My 8 Month Old Ate All the Cooked Carrots While I Wasn’t Looking - Now She’s a Nicotine Addict with a Dubious Boyfriend.” And I wish I were still in touch with the ‘friend,’ who gave me the article about maternal emotional stress during pregnancy having an influence on the baby’s eventual homosexuality. I happened to be going through a rather difficult time - and that was just not what I needed to cheer me up. So, when there is a time when I have nothing to worry about, I can dredge that thought up........years after the fact. And hope it isn’t true.

Of course, there were stresses in all the pregnancies (if having a baby isn’t enough of a stressor in itself.)


Raising Blaze: Bringing Up an Extraordinary Son in an Ordinary World
by Debra Ginsberg

Not exactly the story of our lives, but close enough to give some comfort.
I find encounters with these other mothers extremely uncomfortable. They always know who I am before I can introduce myself.

“Oh, hey, you’re Blaze’s mother, aren’t you?”

That’s how it always starts and then I sense the inevitable unspoken subtext: I know who Blaze is. He’s that strange kid in special ed. You’re his mother so you must be strange too. It must be dificult for you, having a kid like that. Of course, I wouldn’t know, my kid is normal.

The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
“That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.” Mrs. Scheer added, “She wanted out of that decorating scheme.” (p. 19) This is the point when Rick walked out of the movie.........I had wanted to watch it after one or two snarky comments were made to me about my overprotectiveness of Martha and my reticence about her going to the local high school. I thought there was something I wasn’t quite ‘getting’ about the movie, so I read the book. The book was intriguing, but not much more than the movie. And I didn’t see that many parallels to our life. Decor notwithstanding.

I was happy for Sofia Coppola. I felt badly about the way people trashed her performance in Godfather III. In my Pollyanna-ish way, I defended her, saying that Mary Corrleone was a wooden and two-dimensional girl and Miss Coppola played her perfectly. Few people buy that. Her directorial debut was better received and that makes me feel better for her.

”According to Mr. Lisbon, he had long harbored doubts about his wife’s strictness, knowing in his heart that girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.”