Blessings, Darlings!
I just had an interesting little interaction on Twitter. One of the folks I follow tweeted that she wanted parents to not let their children call stores to ask questions (about their hours, if they carry certain items, etc). She, as an employee, didn't like to take such calls. Rather than saying "fuck you, they are your CUSTOMERS, take their calls and do it with respect", I asked how she expected anyone to learn how to make such calls without, well, making them? She told me she expects parents to handle all that until the kids are teens.
Just ...wow. Now we're going to have totally screwed up teens, who don't even know how to make a simple phone call to a store to ask about products/hours. Just because an employee doesn't want to do their job and help customers.
By the time my spawn was a teen I expected him to have PERFECTED the skill of using a telephone. And mowing the lawn. And doing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, etc. But now someone expects me to parent HER and protect HER as an adult from doing HER job, and thinks I should RETARD my own children.
Nope. Not gonna happen. I expect MY children to grow up. And I expect all people interacting with customers to grow up, too.
Frondly, Fern
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Different Worlds
Blessings, Darlings!
As I pack, and we rent a truck (and I stop my husband from hitting the 'submit' key until I look for AND FIND a coupon for 20% off of the truck rental), my mother calls.
In every call, she tells me not to work too hard. Now, I'm not a type A person, folks. I'm laid back. I like playing online, I like reading, I love cooking and gardening and all sorts of leisure activities. And I totally ignore housework as much as I can. I TOTALLY do NOT 'work too hard'.
But in her eyes, I work way too hard. I don't hire folks to clean my house (at one time when I was young we had two women who helped clean our house) (and I was an only child, it wasn't like she had 8 kids like her Mother did) (and her mother didn't hire anyone to help with the house) (but I'm sure her older daughters were given PLENTY of chores).
Mom, altho' a Cancer and .... uh .... rather family obsessed and co-dependent, was the baby girl of the family. She and her twin brother were the youngest of the 8 kids. She didn't get taught to cook everything her older sisters learned to cook - by the time she was growing up my Grandmother wasn't making her own challah for Shabbos. She wasn't helping raise younger children (at least until her sister Anne was widowed and came home to live, and needed childcare while she worked).
But Mom did work outside the family for a while, for the Corps of Engineers. She even made it to supervisory level there. And I'm SURE she never told anyone she supervised to 'not work too hard'. In fact, she and a friend of hers from that time, who worked under her, tell a story about how Mom told the woman to get back to work (using some 'strong' Yiddish as part of her order).
Mom can't understand that we, like most of humanity, are doing the bulk of our moving ourselves. We'll hire folks to help us one day, to move the heaviest furniture, and that's it. The boxes, all 400 or more, we'll pack and handle. She can't understand that we have more than 20 books. I've not even tried to explain prepping to her, and the amount of stuff that involves having and moving. She'd lose it at 'grind your own grain', let alone STORE your own grain.
I often wonder how she ended up with me as a daughter. We are alike in some things - a few from nature (whole family with anxiety disorders!) and some nurture (some of the manifestations of the anxiety disorders!), but so often so totally different. She loves that I put my life on hold to homeschool. She loves that I dropped everything when my Mother In Law had a heart attack and made sure she got the right drugs, followed thru', changed doctors, etc. Co-dependence gets her full approval, possibly because I manifest that so VERY rarely!
My son and I have a far more natural relationship, at least in my view. We're quite alike, I understand his grunts, jokes, etc. Helps that we're both Sagittarian, I suppose.
Well, I must get back to packing.
Frondly, Fern
As I pack, and we rent a truck (and I stop my husband from hitting the 'submit' key until I look for AND FIND a coupon for 20% off of the truck rental), my mother calls.
In every call, she tells me not to work too hard. Now, I'm not a type A person, folks. I'm laid back. I like playing online, I like reading, I love cooking and gardening and all sorts of leisure activities. And I totally ignore housework as much as I can. I TOTALLY do NOT 'work too hard'.
But in her eyes, I work way too hard. I don't hire folks to clean my house (at one time when I was young we had two women who helped clean our house) (and I was an only child, it wasn't like she had 8 kids like her Mother did) (and her mother didn't hire anyone to help with the house) (but I'm sure her older daughters were given PLENTY of chores).
Mom, altho' a Cancer and .... uh .... rather family obsessed and co-dependent, was the baby girl of the family. She and her twin brother were the youngest of the 8 kids. She didn't get taught to cook everything her older sisters learned to cook - by the time she was growing up my Grandmother wasn't making her own challah for Shabbos. She wasn't helping raise younger children (at least until her sister Anne was widowed and came home to live, and needed childcare while she worked).
But Mom did work outside the family for a while, for the Corps of Engineers. She even made it to supervisory level there. And I'm SURE she never told anyone she supervised to 'not work too hard'. In fact, she and a friend of hers from that time, who worked under her, tell a story about how Mom told the woman to get back to work (using some 'strong' Yiddish as part of her order).
Mom can't understand that we, like most of humanity, are doing the bulk of our moving ourselves. We'll hire folks to help us one day, to move the heaviest furniture, and that's it. The boxes, all 400 or more, we'll pack and handle. She can't understand that we have more than 20 books. I've not even tried to explain prepping to her, and the amount of stuff that involves having and moving. She'd lose it at 'grind your own grain', let alone STORE your own grain.
I often wonder how she ended up with me as a daughter. We are alike in some things - a few from nature (whole family with anxiety disorders!) and some nurture (some of the manifestations of the anxiety disorders!), but so often so totally different. She loves that I put my life on hold to homeschool. She loves that I dropped everything when my Mother In Law had a heart attack and made sure she got the right drugs, followed thru', changed doctors, etc. Co-dependence gets her full approval, possibly because I manifest that so VERY rarely!
My son and I have a far more natural relationship, at least in my view. We're quite alike, I understand his grunts, jokes, etc. Helps that we're both Sagittarian, I suppose.
Well, I must get back to packing.
Frondly, Fern
Monday, October 25, 2010
CPT #5 - Breed!
Blessings, Darlings!
This is a tip that applies to ciswomen only: being pregnant or nursing your entire post-puberty life greatly reduces your risk of breast cancer. At least if you are a female rat.
There is an INCREDIBLY HIGH rate of breast cancer in female pet rats. Why? Because evolution's programming is for them to be pregnant or nursing - or both at once - all the time. Pet owners, however, not wanting to find homes for all those ratlings, don't tend to let that happen. So they get breast cancer a lot.
For human women, it's a bit different. There is a slightly lower risk of having breast cancer if you have at least one child, especially one before you turn 30. There is an additional slightly lower risk if you have many children - the main theory is because you have fewer menstrual periods. I'm not sure about the details on how that helps, the scientists might not know yet.
Of course, having one (or more) child(ren) just to reduce your risk of cancer is not doing justice to the child(ren). Gods know, parenting is rarely about the parent, when done right.
Frondly, Fern
This is a tip that applies to ciswomen only: being pregnant or nursing your entire post-puberty life greatly reduces your risk of breast cancer. At least if you are a female rat.
There is an INCREDIBLY HIGH rate of breast cancer in female pet rats. Why? Because evolution's programming is for them to be pregnant or nursing - or both at once - all the time. Pet owners, however, not wanting to find homes for all those ratlings, don't tend to let that happen. So they get breast cancer a lot.
For human women, it's a bit different. There is a slightly lower risk of having breast cancer if you have at least one child, especially one before you turn 30. There is an additional slightly lower risk if you have many children - the main theory is because you have fewer menstrual periods. I'm not sure about the details on how that helps, the scientists might not know yet.
Of course, having one (or more) child(ren) just to reduce your risk of cancer is not doing justice to the child(ren). Gods know, parenting is rarely about the parent, when done right.
Frondly, Fern
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Raising A Foodie
Blessings, Darlings!
The Spawn, now a 23 year old man-like thing, is well on his way towards being a foodie. I'm not saying that he loves the work involved in, say, grating real parmigiao-reggiano when he makes an al fredo sauce, but he does it and knows WHY he is doing it.
Obviously, just having parents who are foodies helped make him this way. But I think that our approach to his eating when he was young helped, too.
Like many young American children, he had times of being a picky eater. ("Picky Eaters" are kind of the definition of "First World Problems", wouldn't you say?) We let him pick a few foods he didn't have to eat at all, one fruit (he always picked grapefruit) and two other foods (usually cooked dried beans and Brussels sprouts, sometimes spaghetti squash, or winter squash, or whatever). He got to change his selections every 6 months. But for all other foods, he had to eat a serving at any meal it was served at. A serving was defined as 'as many bites of it as you are years old". Also, when we ate out, he had a sample of whatever we adults ordered, to help expose him to new tastes/textures/foods.
Now, the spawn has always been a pretty easy child outside of his speech delay, fine motor skill issues, and sensory integration issues, and this level of respect plus explicit expectations worked for us. There were no meal time negotiations, no excessive whining, no tantrums over food.
For us, this worked. The Spawn is now into darn near all foods (even those dried beans, on occasion). He also does a good job as a food critic, and is experimental in the kitchen and when out to eat. He makes his own sushi. Yeah, he's still an American male and eats his share of fast food, too. I'm proud of him!
Frondly, Fern
The Spawn, now a 23 year old man-like thing, is well on his way towards being a foodie. I'm not saying that he loves the work involved in, say, grating real parmigiao-reggiano when he makes an al fredo sauce, but he does it and knows WHY he is doing it.
Obviously, just having parents who are foodies helped make him this way. But I think that our approach to his eating when he was young helped, too.
Like many young American children, he had times of being a picky eater. ("Picky Eaters" are kind of the definition of "First World Problems", wouldn't you say?) We let him pick a few foods he didn't have to eat at all, one fruit (he always picked grapefruit) and two other foods (usually cooked dried beans and Brussels sprouts, sometimes spaghetti squash, or winter squash, or whatever). He got to change his selections every 6 months. But for all other foods, he had to eat a serving at any meal it was served at. A serving was defined as 'as many bites of it as you are years old". Also, when we ate out, he had a sample of whatever we adults ordered, to help expose him to new tastes/textures/foods.
Now, the spawn has always been a pretty easy child outside of his speech delay, fine motor skill issues, and sensory integration issues, and this level of respect plus explicit expectations worked for us. There were no meal time negotiations, no excessive whining, no tantrums over food.
For us, this worked. The Spawn is now into darn near all foods (even those dried beans, on occasion). He also does a good job as a food critic, and is experimental in the kitchen and when out to eat. He makes his own sushi. Yeah, he's still an American male and eats his share of fast food, too. I'm proud of him!
Frondly, Fern
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