A Piu Tardo

My friends,

As you can see, the Crabmom just hasn't been able to crab at you properly the past months, and when I have it's been a little too serious and a lot unfunny. No doubt I have worn out the patience of my regulars who can see I'm just not the old Crabmommy they know and love (or love to hate). So I am taking myself on sabbatical. I will return; I don't know when exactly or for how long, but I will be back...This isn't goodbye forever, just a gathering of self away from blog, an attempt to attend fully to pressing matters in the so-called real world. I do have more to say (absurdly enough) on the subject of motherhood, but it will have to wait.

If you're feeling unspeakably blue about my imminent absence from the web, vivify yourselves by turning to other lifestyle gurus: may I recommend reading the latest installment of GOOP, whereby Gwyneth P. conscripts her money people—including a "wealth management" adviser, whatever that is—to offer financial advice to the "layman" (her word, not mine)... [No, I'm not sick of reading GOOP yet.]

Hoping you are all finding yourselves full of the bounty of fall's goodness...or at least, hanging in and on, by a thread, a rope, a satin ribbon. I don't either know what any of that means but it comes with all my

Very best wishes
Crabmom
p.s. I do hope to see you here again. Check back in a month...or two.

Hot Dang It, It Dang Hot!

I thought it high time I used a palindrome in my post title.

And hot dang it, we've been sweltering here. Hence my inability to type. Heat, coupled with extreme laziness, has a profound effect on my blogging finger (I never learned to type properly so my pointer digit figures prominently in the formation of words from my keyboard). Poor blogging finger. It does not like 107 degrees in Oregon. I had to bathe it in ice and set in on the A/C for days at a time. As one of few people I know in Portland whose apartment blessedly possesses aircon—central aircon no less—the Crabhome became of late the locus of much neighborly cocktail activity, all and sundry from our street crowding into our pad to cool down. It was quite fun.

In other similarly earthshaking Crabby news, Crabgrandma has been here for two weeks attending to the small one, who at almost 5 is going through one of those stages of insisting on wearing winter clothes in summer, in a heat wave, no less. She digs them out from the basement, saying, "I think these [corduroy] pants are right for today" and "Please can you button this [thick wool sweater]." And Crabgrandma deals with the tedium of challenging and changing and generally engaging the tot in all her contrariness.

Me, I lie on the floor plotting future vacations to Sicily, or sit beneath our one shady tree with a gin and tonic, pondering the plural of gin and tonic. That's gins and tonic.

I'm having a dang good summer. You?

Barack Obama: Looks Matter

Barack Obama is a great man, but frankly I voted for him because he's hot.

Perfect face, perfect bod, great hands.

Whenever it comes to serious matters—such as choosing a president—my advice is to go shallow. And, people, Crabmommy knows what she's talking about. Just look at my voting record: every time I have voted for a president, said president has become a hero of international proportion. Witness the presidential elections that—through fate's strange hand—are the only two elections I have voted in:

1. 1994, South Africa: for Nelson Mandela
2. 2008, USA: for Barack Obama

Not to overly estimate the power that is Crabmommy, but I think the results above prove that I am onto something: whenever Crabmommy votes, great things happen. Because evidently I am able to see what makes a great leader.

Here, for the first time ever, I'm happy to lift the veil on the voting booth and share with you the oh-so-simple secret behind my spot-on picks! Friends, my one and only criterion for predicting great presidents: appearance. True, both of the above men exhibited impressive track records of service, humanitarianism, idealism, intellectual heft, and so forth, but when it comes to the actual voting process I set everything aside for simplicity's sake and go on looks alone. Physical-merits-based voting: it works every time.

Nelson Mandela: He may have been old when I voted him in as South Africa's first democratically elected president, but he was still hot. In South Africa this is a pretty widely accepted fact even for white people (except perhaps by those who still long for apartheid, and there are a few of those left). Mr. Mandela has a great physique: he is tall and well-built (as a young man he was a boxer). He has high cheekbones, and is basically all-around h-o-t. See, even here as an old chap, he remains beautiful:Not so P.W. Botha, another famous former president of my native country:Aside from the fact that the man above is a ghastly racist, he's plum not sexy—a superb, picture-perfect example of how NOT to vote in presidential elections.

Moving on to the USA, no one could fairly say that Bush is ugly. He has nice cheekbones and a decent nose. But the famously tiny too-close-together eyes seal the deal. And the mouth is loose (see left). I do understand that sometimes politicians are captured on film while talking, but one can still make hard aesthetic choices by analyzing motion shots. After all, here's Barack (at right) doing much the same as G.W. is doing, only he looks hot while the other does not. Who's going to go down in history as the better president? I don't think we need time to tell us: we have the photos, and the answer is clear.

I hope you've learned something today, dear reader. And that going forward, like me, you will continue to vote with your eyes. Imagine a world where we all picked leaders based on looks alone! A world where this guy— —and this guy—
...and similarly atrocious leaders would be vanquished from the pages of history! Let us dream of that beautiful possibility, my friends, even as we give thanks for the exquisite reality we are currently enjoying in the USA. p.s. New posts this week at the bloglet, as always. Please to visit the corporate sponsor of your Crabmommy?!

Atheist Moms Unite!

Are you out there, fellow atheist mommies?

I know there are lots of Christian moms in the blogosphere and in particular, Mo-moms (Mormon moms) who seem to run the media these days, dispensing domestic and decorating advice amid a sea of children to those of us who can barely manage one.

But where are the atheists among you? I ask. Not for any particular reason, really. This title isn't really a call to arms for atheist moms. Just wondering if you're out there, pondering those inevitable God-driven questions from the tots. Me, I was born to a Christian-born mother and Jewish-born father but both were non-believers. My father didn't possess a yarmulke and when called upon to wear one at some family event, he supposedly had to make do with a handkerchief. My mother wasn't very devoted to God either. She's become a bit Deepak Chopra-ish of late but when I was growing up there really wasn't much of a spiritual vibe in the fam. In fact, the only religious person in the family was me. For a time.

See, I went to a Christian school (a private school that happened to have a Christian affiliation). I first heard the call of God in the second grade when singing the song "Jesus wants Me for a Sunbeam" during music class. That song stirred something deep within. A love of the Lord!

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam
To brighten up his day
In every way try to please Him
With the things I say.

When I sang the words I believed that Jesus really did want me to be his personal ray of sunshine in heaven! I can still remember being amazed at this new feeling. I really loved God! As it turned out it wasn't God I loved so much as singing.

Either way my joyful pious warbling landed me a place in choir and I spent all my school career heaping blessings upon His name in both English and Latin, in both pop-Christian melodies ("If I was a teddy bear, I'd thank you, God, for my fuzzy-wuzzy hair") and in somber classical performances (Benjamin Brittens Requiem in D Minor).

For a while I also attended Sunday school at a local church. I went with another family who gazed sorrowfully at my heathen mother as she waved goodbye to me in her robe. I attended Sunday school because the girl I accompanied had shown me these awesome stickers they gave you for going. Stickers you could stick into your very own cute little Bible! The stickers were tiny and had cute weentsy little bees on them and inspirational messages: Bee kind. Bee nice. Bee good. I went to church so I could get the loot. Bee mine! But once I got them for myself I lost interest in Jesus. And once I realized you could be in the choir without praying, I no longer felt duty-bound to be anyone's sunbeam.

Thus began and ended my conversation with God unless you count the many, many Halleluias I have proffered in churches, standing in my choir girl's robe. I spent a fair bit of my schooling learning about other religions and I think they're all equally sensible in theory and dreadful in practice. So I don't plan to raise Crabkid with any of it. But I know I must also be careful not to be too contemptuous of religion, which is hard for me; yet we all know if we look down upon something, our kids—if they have any spine at all—are likely to revere it.

I'm all for the study of religion from a historical/literary/philosophical perspective. But I'm also with those people who think that atheism's message should be equally voiced in a tolerant society. Gotta love the Brits for coming up with the cash and gumption to run this plug for atheism on municipal buses!

As for Crabkid...God-moms, don't get your knickers in a knot: I'll do my best not to push my atheism onto her and I certainly plan to discuss anything she's interested in and expose her to sources other than her mom. But I can't help hoping she'll nix the God business and be a Buddhist type like her dad...I just think Buddhists are so much more civilized.

p.s. Hot off the presses: come read about my run-in with a Bragdaddy.

Shortest Post in Crabmom History

I know it's wrong.
But I feel sorry for O.J.

There. I said it. I can't help it. I just do. I don't know why.

I know he's a murderer. But I always feel sorry for the wrong people.
Anybody else? Or am I a MONSTER?

Crabmommy Interview! Check it, yo!

CityMommy has just posted a lengthy interview with the Crabmommy, complete with a real and actual and recent shot of me with my chin perched atop my hand.

Here's a sample of this convo:

CityMommy: You blog, you raise Crabkid, you engage in tampon wiener craft activities, you run a household...how do you do it, Crabmommy?

Crabmommy: Let me tell you a little secret, mom to mom: I never recycle. All those hours that the rest of you moms put into wiping and folding tin foil, scrubbing out plastic trays of takeout vindaloo, and rinsing anchovy jars? I just stuff it ALL into the garbage. Every last bit! What a time-saver!

JK, people. JK. I live in the world capital of recycling. If I didn't recycle the eco-fascists (whom I totally dig and am grateful for) would come and yank me out of my blogging chair and put me into the garbage themselves.

The real and honest and not-ironic interview is here, for those of you who just can't get enough of who, why, what, and how much when it comes to Crabmommy. Real and sincere tips on blogging. Completely candid chat about momhood and writing from the crab POV. It's a rare thing.

You could also skip all that and instead sample this utterly hilarious video, brought to me courtesy of my pen-pal, Libba. Watch it again. And again. Even if you got laid off today I guarantee you will laugh. It's that good.

Dear Mormons

What do Mormons and gays have in common with exploding burmese pythons? Why, for that you must read on!

There were two noteworthy headlines in the paper this past week: "Mormons Tipped the Scales in Ban on Proposition 8". According to the New York Times, Mormons raised $5 million in a matter of days, right before the measure to outlaw gay marriage in California, thereby tipping the scales and defeating those sexual deviants by a hair!

In an equally explosive national moment, a Burmese python in Florida recently ingested an alligator, and then blew up. Biologists suspect the alligator may have chewed the python's stomach from the inside, causing it to burst.

So I don't want to rehash tired explanations for why gay people should have the same legal right as the rest of us. I don't want to remind the Mormons that church and state are meant to be separate in our country and that it serves them well that this is so. I don't want to remind the Mormons that not so long ago (and currently, in certain Fundamentalist polygamist quarters) they had a pretty funky take on marriage themselves, so it seems a bit rich to be getting so peppery over a union involving two people who just want a decent tax break and a committed monogamous partnership. I don't want to irk my Mormon readers by once again making fun of Mountain Dew, invoking the name of John Krakauer, and otherwise being saucy. I mean, I wouldn't want to seem intolerant. Because, you know, we all have our rights—as everyone reminds me whenever I get cheeky about theirs.

Except that some of us still don't have those rights. And the thing of it is, Mormons and everyone else against gay marriage, you are not going to win this war for long. Sooner or later when you try to swallow the alligator it will be too big and too aggressive and you will damage yourselves instead.

So, why not be smart and skip to the punch line? Let gay people get married. Letting them get married doesn't have to reflect on your own marriages, Mormons, just as Warren Jeffs and his child bride unions don't represent mainstream Mormon marriage—a point you are understandably eager to reiterate whenever the subject comes up. Saying yes to gay marriage doesn't make you deviant and queer and gay and stuff. Unless you're already gay and are just hiding it in your heterosexual church-ordained union. As one gay protester said, "We can't all marry Liza Minelli." The point is, you don't have to believe in gay marriage any more than I as an atheist believe in the angel of Moroni. Nor do you have to like it. But as Americans in search of tolerance yourselves, you have more in common with these other Americans than you think. "Momo" and "homo": see? You even rhyme with each other!

The bottom line, Mormon church, is that you're fighting a losing battle because California will eventually sanction gay marriage, and one day your children and/or their children will see nothing wrong with giving legal rights to all members of our society because my children and their children will be at school with yours. So, why not be pragmatic? Be the Christians who don't have to blow up over this issue. Be nice to the alligator, for he shall rise from the swamp again. And as we all know, it's never smart to bite off more than you can chew. p.s. On a chirpier note, go to the bloglet today for incredibly swanky and festive and cheap-ass Thanksgiving delights. It's recession-fabulous! (Gwyneth Paltrow, take note: if GOOP sourced me a set of letter-pressed funkalicious Thanksgiving place cards for $3, I'd be digging you too.)

What's a Gender Blender?

That was the question Crabkid asked me that this morning en route to school, as a winsome gender-neutral radio voice announced "Gender Blender!" a new show focused on helping gay and bisexual and polysexual and transsexual kids bump up their self-esteem. I thought I was on NPR until I realized I'd switched away from talk radio yesterday during a squabble with Crabkid, and had instead dialed into a local station whose African drumming music had drowned out the back seat back chat wonderfully well.

Returning to the gender blender question: I like to think I'm supremely tolerant and broad-minded but if anything is a yardstick for your truest values, it's parenthood. And while I tell myself I will be quite fine with any gender blending my child might one day be drawn to here in the epicenter of liberalism, the fact is I think I'm really only just capable of surviving lesbianism or bisexuality (the Lindsay Lohan sort please, with lipstick involved) and even then the concept of a lesbian/bisexual daughter gives me a slight vasovagal feeling, which is a cardiological term for feeling faint. If Crabkid starts walking around in a breast-binding shirt, shaves her head and listens to whatever future equivalent there is to Ani di Franco, I'll have to join a support group. And if Crabkid one day wants to be a full-on gender-blended Thomas Beattie, it may be too much for my socialized Victorian ways, ways inculcated in me by growing up South African during the 1980s, which in American years is like being a child in the 1930s. Seriously, in the land where races couldn't even blend, gender blending wasn't even a faint notion on the horizon. There were no gay people ever in South Africa when I lived there, not a single one. And the ones declaring themselves queer now? As far as I'm concerned it's just a phase they'll grow out of. (Cousin Paul, are you listening? SNAP OUT OF IT!)

So...what is it that makes me cool with the concept of a gay male child but uncomfortable with the idea of a lesbian/gender-blending daughter? I understand and relate to homosexuality and bisexuality on a conceptual level and as an atheist have zero religious or otherwise ideological issues with any of it. I can even see how I am just an unevolved human who has not allowed herself to branch out on the great sexual continuum because of my background and upbringing and a certain prudishness that is nothing to be valued.

Still, I'm not digging the possibility of a lezbo daughter even if some of my best friends are lesbians! Yup, we're all tolerant until we're proven hypocrites.

Crabkid, if you're older and you're reading this and you are by some chance gender blending, just remember that Mom loves you no matter what, but she's just a bit hysterical over that macho key chain thing hanging off the back of your flubby man-jeans. She'll get over it, but you have to give the dinosaur time.

Back to this morning, when my 4-year-old asked me "What's a gender blender?" my mind raced ahead to the many uncomfortable questions parents have to face whether they're ready for them or not. But obviously a 4-year-old doesn't need to know that Mom finds the question tricky. What she needed was a simple answer, so I told her the truth, which is to say I told her the first thing that came out of my mouth and that I thought sounded convincing:

"A gender blender is a very special type of coffee machine."

p.s. If you missed it, big competition happening this month with major cashmere involved!

What's On My Mind

On a more serious note than usual, I just can't stop thinking about the news today, of what I have just tried to digest on the front page of the NYT.

The cruise ship the QE 2 is about to be retired and turned into a floating hotel in Dubai.

Yup, after 40-odd years of transatlantic travel, the Queen Elizabeth 2 just made its 701st, and also its last, appearance in New York City's harbor. And I feel cheated. I always wanted to go on the QE2. It seemed only a matter of time. My grandparents were always going on the QE2! (Okay, maybe just once or something but you know, it's family tradition!) Going on the QE2: I just assumed it would happen, you know? When I retired! On my non-existent 401k.

Now I have to be content with sitting on a stationary QE2 in Dubai and frankly that's not the same thing. For one, where's the British hospitality? It just won't be the same to take my Earl Grey and crumpets from a stewardess in burka.

Bloody bad times indeed.

Dear Levi Johnston

Dear Levi,

I know the whole world has been telling you this, but it never hurts to hear it again: you really are very cute, which is a good thing for the baby of Bristol Palin since she is herself very cute as is her mother, and all that cuteness will help your kid out when you guys can't deliver in the more cerebral departments.

You also do very cute things. Like when you lost the "promise ring" that, in a twist on tradition, your budding feminist Bristol gave to you, and you decided instead of a ring you'd just tattoo Bristol's name on your ring finger. I know a lot of people who will think that is cute. People like Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and a bunch of others who dig that whole tattoo-instead-of-ring thing. I myself don't find that very cute, personally, but I can understand how it might be deemed as cute by others and how it will definitely seem refreshingly cute if your mother-in-law makes it to the White House. The tattoo, paired with your dropping out of school to become a rigger or a jigger or whatever it is they call oil people, can be cast in quite a cute light: it's that whole down-home Wasilla in Washington thing.

I really did enjoy reading more about you today over at ABC News. Like, this part:

The soft-spoken teenager discussed his relationship with Palin and how life has changed with fatherhood fast approaching. He agreed to talk despite the presidential campaign's advice in the days following Gov. Sarah Palin's nomination to avoid the media.[...] "They're not telling me anything right now," Johnston said as he checked his Blackberry. "It's pretty chill."

I just love how you check your Blackberry! Levi Johnston is a busy man! Seriously cute. And I love this part too:

Johnston hinted he's expecting a boy, but he declined to discuss baby names.

"I'm looking forward to having him," he said. "I'm going to take him hunting and fishing. He'll be everywhere with me."

I love how you didn't give the gender away. Very artful of you, my cute young friend!

Another reason I probably find you cute is that you remind me of an ex-boyfriend of mine who was terribly cute. I mean, really devastatingly handsome. You can't maybe tell in this mug shot I'm about to show you but trust me, handsome as all get-out, like you, Levi.

Unlike you he actually came from a top-notch blue-bloody family but he went a bit bananas. I remember it as the big tragedy of my early 20s, where I met this lovely cute person whom I thought I could have babies with and then one day he just stopped coming out of his bedroom. His roommate called me and told me he had locked himself into his room with pounds of pot, and was maniacally drawing pictures of horses, which he would slide under the door. The horses were sort of a bad sign I guess, but I was in my 20s so I ignored the sudden equine obsession and continued to throw myself at him in a fog of adoration. Then he went more nutso and druggy. Luckily he was very rich and managed to purchase his own crack den down south. Sadly it all came to an end when he was had up on rape charges. And I know it's bad and all to say but, in spite of the bad lighting in that mug shot (which I Googled) and the drugs that have ravaged him since we were young, I still think my ex looks a little bit cute so...you know, maybe the alleged victim sort of got lucky? I'm sure your mom-in-law would agree with that one!

Anyhoo, I suppose I'm getting a bit off-topic here, Levi, not that you would know about that since you probably didn't get to the whole 5-paragraph essay bit in school. I guess I just wanted you to know that, like a lot of people, I think you are dang cute! And I sincerely wish for your baby that you and Bristol will really resist tradition when it comes to that baby name and just go with something like Jane or William. So that's my advice. And, you know, stay away from the drugs! Because when you're a rigger or a jigger or whatever, there can be temptations! Of the meth-y sort! So just, you know, just say no! If you can't keep your pants on, at least keep your nose clean.

I guess that about sums it up for Crabmommy advice, Levi. All best to you, your bride, and the fruit of your loins...How cute will that baby be? Forget it! I almost can't stand to imagine the level of super-cuteness about to debut. The future for all of us in America may be uncertain, but experts are predicting a landslide of cuteness in that scrumpulicious new Wasillian you've been working on. So, high five on that!

All best,
Crabmommy
p.s. Readers: acorns. Do you love acorns? I bloody love acorns.

Because Other Moms are Funnier

I think we're all a little tired of me and my Sarah Palin satires. I'm finding myself a smidge dull and obvious at present, so I'm going to send you elsewhere instead. Here are 3 nice linkies to amuse:

1. Blogger Sugar and Snails talks of how she found a velvet Jesus painting at a thrift store...and through the miracle of bribery, managed to wrest the artwork from another shopper. Read it here.

2. See this most excellent entry from blogger Suzanne Broughton's 6th-grade yearbook.

3. If you aren't already watching Season 2 of Motherhoodlum over at Offsprung then shweesh, get on with it already! Readers may remember Emily and Marty from when I first wrote about them here...they "J-vibed" on Jdate, got together, had a baby and now Ems is navigating mommylife...getting kicked out of eco-mommy groups ("Oh my God, she's only two and her carbon footprint is huge!"), inveigling herself into a single-moms group in a desperate bid for sisterhood, almost making out with her sleazy ex-boyfriend in an alley while out taking the baby for a walk, and trying to figure out how to keep the flame between her and Marts. If you haven't seen the show, start here.

Palinoscopy: Exclusive Crabmom-Sarah Palin Interview!

I am goshdarn excited to tell you that while Sarah Palin hasn't granted many media interviews she agreed to let me interview her candidly for my motherhood blog, so long as we avoided the topic of motherhood altogether and did not mention baby names even once. Here follows a transcript of that session:

Crabmommy: Ms. Palin, you only got your passport last year. But you have spoken of being able to see Russia from Alaska.

Sarah Palin: It's just right over the border.

C: Does seeing Russia sort of count as having traveled to another country? You know like "I've seen other parts of the world"?

SP: Absolutely, yup, yup.

C: So how do you see Russia—

SP: Well, Crabmommy, you just don't blink!

C: Because if you blink then you can't see it anymore?

SP: Absolutely!

C: If you make it to the White House...you've got your Blackberry, your breast pump, and your nuclear button. How do you know which button to push at 3am?

SP: "All of 'em, any of 'em. You just don't—

C: —blink?

SP: Absolutely.

C: Do you feel qualified to make decisions about your own hairstyles as a VP?

SP: I still can't answer that question until somebody answers for me: what is it exactly that the VP does every day?

C: What do you think of the race thus far? How confident are you?

SP: It is a very long race. Iron Dog is the longest race of its kind in the world. But Todd has won four times and as a family we are committed.

C: Seriously, things aren't looking so hot for you guys at the moment. How exactly is your team going to win?

SP: On a snowmobile. Iron Dog is like Iditarod, without the dogs.

C: With regard to dogs, if you had a pit bulls would you put lipstick on them, and if so what color?

SP: I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you.

C: So you think raped women should pay for their own rape exams?

SP: Absolutely, yup, yup.

C: Do you think raped women sort of brought it on themselves then?

SP: Absolutely, yup, yup.

C: So what do you do if a rapist is coming at you?

SP: I just say "thanks, but no thanks."

Milking It: Manipulating Motherhood on Planet Palin

Seems quite a few women are incensed to see the "sexism" abounding on the net (and here at Crabmommy) when it comes to questioning Sarah Palin's ability to run the White House, should she be so required if McCain kicks the bucket or spontaneously combusts in a fit of his trademark ire.

Many of you agreed with me when I said--saucily, people, as is my wont--that anyone breastfeeding her babe shouldn't have a finger near the nuclear button; others found my post anti-feminist and offensive. I find it hilarious and stupid in equal measure that we are even having a conversation about empowered mothers, women's rights, and shattered glass ceilings when the person in question is totally against women's rights and reveals herself to be quite a questionable mother at best, not to mention a believer that the road to smart women begins with teaching Adam and Eve in school.

Some thoughts:

• If Sarah Palin were a great VP candidate we would not be talking about motherhood.
  
• If Sarah Palin were a great mother we would not be talking about motherhood in the White House because she would not be politicizing her children for her own ambitious ends.
  
• If Sarah Palin's camp thinks it's unfair for her attackers to talk about her children and pontificate on her ability to simultaneously be a mother and a VP, then Sarah Palin's camp ought not talk about her newborn, nor parade her knocked-up child on stage for all the world to see in a grand fallacious gesture of "walking the talk" of family values.

The irony, the hypocrisy. It's so funny, it's turned me serious.

In spite of the Palin freak show we continue to engage in absurd conversations in which people say such things as "If Obama had a baby no one would ask him how he planned to juggle it" etc. etc. Similarly, several comments here and elsewhere suggest that if Obama had a young baby then we too should question him on how he would cope. Puh-lease.

Me, I don't ask the same questions of Obama or McCain because neither man has a babe attached to his bosom, nor does he traffic in talk about juggling breastpumps and Blackberrys and "soccer mom" hoo-ha. If either man were the primary caregiver of an infant I might idly question how that kid would get shafted (though it wouldn't play a role in my vote), but that's not the case here, is it?

This convo is so ridiculous in its bending-over-backwards attempts at political correctness. For one, Obama isn't grandstanding about family values while parading his pregnant teen onstage like a circus animal and speaking proudly about stepping up to grandparenthood. Nor would Obama in power ever do anything to reverse a woman's right to choose whether she wants a family at all. Obama is not a mom and he's not running as a Supermom while also attempting to stop moms from making their own decisions about family and career, so I'm not asking him to show me if he can handle being a mom and running the country at the same time.

As for Palin "walking the talk" let's hear some of the talk and then see if she's really "walking" it. On abortion: we all know Palin is pro-life, even if her own daughter were raped, (and on the subject of rape, as we now know Palin thinks raped women should pay for their own rape kits). As for the pro-life/pro-choice question, I believe we are meant to see Palin's Down's baby, the unfortunately named Trig, as the living example of Palin's truly "walking" her own talk. I dare say that's a major insult to anyone with a Down's child: comparing Palin's circumstance with Trig to one in which a person is raped and falls pregnant is offensive beyond all measure, yet that's what's actually between the lines if anyone considers Trig proof of Palin's "walking" her pro-life talk; i.e., that the decision to have her child proves her to be a woman willing to go all the way when it comes to her beliefs on life vs. choice.

I believe that everyone has the right to abort or keep any baby, healthy or not, but I don't believe that Ms. Palin's decision to have her Down's baby is something for which anyone should be congratulating her, much less a signifier of the beautiful courage of the pro-life position; Palin's decision to have her son is her personal choice in a personal and individual case, a case with far more opportunity for a mother's optimism than, say, the case in which a fetus has a disease or a congenital defect that would cause it unbearable suffering and/or certain death were it to be born. A Down's kid may have health complications, but there are, quite obviously, way worse diagnoses than that. And then there's rape, Ms. Palin.

To reiterate, babies are a matter of personal choice in my book--the mother's choice. That Ms. Palin *may* exhibit courage in the matter of choosing to have Trig is irrelevant to me and should be irrelevant in any political campaign. But it's not, for Palin and her team and supporters have mined and distorted this narrative of so-called personal courage in quite the twisted way, when you look at it closely. As for poor naughty knocked up and unfortunately named Bristol, again Palin is not walking her talk because it's not hers to walk: it's Bristol's, whether Mom wields the influence or not. And, to be blunt, this daughter cannot either be touted as an extension of Palin's particular pro-life position because this daughter has not been raped, though apparently if she had been, Mom would still push her to have that baby. Nice!

Whatever happens, America will get what America asks for. And so many Americans right now think Palin is, at the very least, is a woman we should all take great pains to view as capable of both motherhood and governance, because any other stance is sexist and backward and redolent of double standards! Slap on the wrist, Crabmommy, and anyone else who dares to suggest that her particular circumstances as a mother might cloud her ability to run the country.

To the various self-proclaimed feminists who have come over to this blog and declared me and my supporters to be sad disenfranchised victims of patriarchy: keep talking your PC talk and we may all soon become sad disenfranchised victims of GOP patriarchy, only this time disguised in a skirt.

Yet the tedious argument grinds along: whether we dig Palin's issues or not, we ought to respect her right to go for the VP role untainted by pesky sexist questions. After all, party affiliation aside, she's still a role model, right? She's still punching at that glass ceiling while pumping her boob with the other hand! She's still a woman with career and yet devoted to family, juggling furiously and getting it all done! And even if she does have some kinks as a mom, who are we to judge...right? I mean, it's not our business.

From a moral or political perspective I don't care if Palin is a bad mother, which I think she is. Being a bad or good mother or father is a non-issue for me among the issues I do care about when it comes to this vote because I don't particularly care about the candidates' children: I happen to believe the personal lives of politicians have nothing to do with me or my interests. (I also don't give a royal fig who the candidates sleep with; nor do I give a rat's bum whether they're cross-dressers or porno-watchers or wear purple drawstring pants in their spare time.)

I don't care if Palin's a bad mother, or a good mother. But I do care that a woman running as a mother and using her specific family circumstances to further her campaign is not allowed to be criticized as a mother. That's where the double standards come in. If you raise the subject of motherhood in your campaign, Palin, then so can we all. And for my money, you can be any sort of mother you like, just not in my White House (where all that late-night feeding might distract you).

The Right To Choose?

Big weekend. Gov. Sarah Palin, caribou hunter, major reproducer, bearer of a prom hairstyle, has been on my mind:

I believe every woman has a right to choose, but this weekend my belief has been seriously tested.

Crabmommy tries to steer clear of politics in this blog because who wants to hear anything serious from me? However, I'm making an exception today to question Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's ability to use good judgment and make sound choices. With regard to baby names.

Go here for more on that.

What I wasn't prepare to say at the Cookie blog: I don't get why women are supposed to get excited when they hear stories of potential leaders of the nation juggling "breast pump and Blackberry" and being "a soccer mom just like you." Why are Americans so into identifying with their leaders? I'm all for the inspired story that starts in the common mire, and I think it's great that Barack Obama can connect to ordinary people's struggles, having once been an ordinary person, but I'm glad Obama is no longer an ordinary person and is now an extraordinary person and that's why he's getting my vote.

Palin on the other hand: Is she an achiever and also a mother? Def. Is that cool? Yep, sure, duh. Extraordinary, as in, worthy of the extraordinary position of running a country? Not sure about that. Especially since she's still very much engaged in the very ordinary business of producing new babies, which speaks to a desire to expand her own family in favor of taking care of the nation's at large. And sorry, but I don't want someone second-in-command in the White House juggling breast pump and Blackberry. Make that, nuclear button and breast pump. With all those hormones flowing? I'd wager "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il of North Korea's got more global sensitivity than a brand-new mom attached to her Medela and worrying about a week of greenish diaps.

Or are we supposed to be heartened by the fact that Palin really *isn't* going to be in charge of her new baby at all and is in fact going to put the country first and aside from brisk lactation duties will toss baby number five at her clearly overwhelmed and emasculated hubby, who didn't do too well wrangling the knocked-up teen daughter?

Yes, I know *I'm not supposed to say this and all* but I don't think a new mom should be running the country. Mom in the White House? Sure, duh. New mom? God, no! Call me a traitor to my sex, but I think Palin's new babe might be a tad dangerous to the free world. And if somehow I'm wrong? Well, then, Palin's just a common hypocrite, preaching anti-choice family values and the right to choose a career over motherhood—rather tautological, if you ask me.

Back to breastfeeding...seriously, if she had her fitness once-over in prep for White House running, don't you think they should check her hormones to see if boobing it to the new babe could jeopardize our nation? Dunno about you, but I could barely remember my own name during that first year of Crabtot, let alone give a rat's bum about the world beyond my own chest.

But sheesh, that's just me! We're all different! Each to her own! May we tolerate the differences between us! And agree to disagree.

Blech. Puke.

A Crock of Utter

Ladies and gents,

Crabhubby and I have something to tell you. We wrestled over this decision for a while (or rather, I did, whereas he was basically okay with it from the get-go) but after thinking about this for a long, long time and worrying about the details (do we have the space?) I decided to just go for it. And so we have some really big and exciting news for you, and I feel like you guys are like my family, you know? So I know you will be thrilled for us even if you're a little wary and wondering rightly whether the Crabmom can handle such a big new responsibility on top of her regular commitments as wife, mother, blogger, and complainer.

SO. I've been holding out on you, but now that our new addition is officially here and all, I thought it best to just make it...official.

Crabhubby and I are pleased to announce a delightful new addition to our family. She arrived pale but robust in size, and we couldn't be more thrilled to have her in our home at last. Truly does she bring joy to us all!

No, not a new baby, dumb-dumbs. I mean, seriously, HAVE YOU BEEN READING THIS BLOG, OR SNOOZING INTO YOUR GREEN TEA? Crabmommy and two children: bwa-ha ha! Too comically hideous to imagine her pulling that one out of her hat, eh! No, we have something a little more docile and a lot more helpful than a new baby: a crock pot.

Seriously, I have just bought a crock pot and have become totally obsessed with it. It is not unlike maternal love: you are amazed at how lovely this new addition to the household is, and amazed that you ever lived without it. And amazed by how dang heavy the thing is when you cradle it in your arms a whole bunch. Having a crock pot also elicits less positive but equally familiar thoughts from me, just as having a new baby had its significant downside for the Crabmommy: I can't believe how much I think about and talk about this crock pot and it's depressing to me that I am doing so.

But I can't help it.

Yesterday we attended a Crabhubby company barbecue, where my good friend Jege overheard me discussing the crock pot with several other women. She could not believe the banality of the discussion. I think it was so banal as to be almost interesting and as such, she informed us that we were basically a bunch of losers for talking about our crock pots.

And she's right.

But. Crock pot. I like it. You can throw stuff into it, and make eating all fancy-like with minimal effort. You get to feel all Nigella when the spouse returns daily to the fold from the cruel toil of office work, and is greeted by the warmly delectatious and sassy aroma of the crock pot repast, wafting splendidly across the threshold of your home and making you feel hugely kickass and capable-like, for multi-tasking like a mother.

On a depressing note, it's true that in some way I feel I've officially crossed over the other side of the domestic abyss, now that I have a crock pot. It's not so much the crock pot itself but my love for it that formally marks me as a woman lost to my former life, a life spent doing...what, exactly? Can't remember, but anyhoo, I think you know what I'm saying. This crock pot business, it is both disturbing in its capacity to render me pleased with my otherwise gad-dull day and also it is very much cool. So, you know, get one. Let's be in a club together! Why the heck not, I say!

I hereby call for your easiest, most retardedly basic (can you say the r-word about a recipe and get away with it?) crock pot recipes. Or if you don't have a recipe, feel free to heap upon me your scorn before you go out for your apple-sake-mocha-tini or whatever it is you undomesticated unharnessed urchins of youth libate when you go on your wild forays out into the world beyond your front doors...

New posts chez bloglet. Please to go there, yes?

Nothing But Tears

Still stealing from other more humorous venues than I; namely, The Onion. I found the following very à propos my recent broken-record musings on wimpy parents:

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—After decades of coddling young children, Johnson & Johnson unveiled its new "Nothing But Tears" shampoo this week, an aggressive bath-time product the company says will help to prepare meek and fragile newborns for the real world...

Go here for the rest. Thanks, Jege, for the link.

At the Crabmommy bloglet: placenta prints—the must-have original artwork for your newborn's nursery! Très soignée! (Why am I using so many French expressions today? Could it be that I am bitter about all those wasted years learning French only to marry an American and live among the cowboys and recycled hippies [I will write more on this] of my past and present homes, respectively?)

I leave you with—for no good reason—an image of David Lee Roth:And here's another! Why not?Davy, it's been a while since you were this hot:YEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW! PANAMA-HA!

Next in show: Rod Stewart, then and now, each era perhaps as scary as the other...

Summer Camp for Parents!

Gang,
On vacation and cracking up, so no original posts this week. I do, however, have to keep up with my bloglet, even if I am cracking up and/or on vacay, so please go there for Crabmusings, should you wish to hear them. I promise soon enough to stop talking about wimpy parents and wimpy kids and to go back to talking about such things as hemp seed brownie mix and shower caps for food storage; until then here's yet another a variation on my latest theme, to be found in full at the bloglet:

In lieu of the usual Million Dollar Mommy inventions that I test-drive on this blog, I've got a slightly different idea this month. Inspired by two recent articles, here, and here, I foresee great wads of cash to be made by someone in the summer camp business. Apparently so many parents, coast to coast, are going ballisto with grief when their kiddos go to camp, to the point where camps need to contend with parental separation anxiety as an occupational hazard. But it doesn't have to be a hazard; it can be a cash-cow! Seriously, someone crafty surely stands to profit this new trend of parents experiencing seasonal "kid-sickness." For example, here's a letter I'm working on to welcome parents to my imaginary summer camp...a camp for parents of soon-to-be summer campers.

Dear Campers,

We are super-excited to be welcoming you to Kamp Kickapoo Lake. Congratulations on making the decision to take on a camp adventure! We are certain you will leave with new friends, fond memories, and most important, the skill set for which you came to us in the first place.

Camp Kickapoo is a smart choice for those moms and dads who need a little extra emotional preparation before their children go to summer camp. We realize that saying goodbye to your campers can be deeply challenging, but we are confident we can help you build the strength you need to face your child's camp experience with courage.

To read on, please go here.

Wimp Nation, again (final instalment)

The following contains the last part of my interview with Hara E. Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps. If you are coming from Cookie or Yahoo, you might want to go here first for the second part of the interview. I hadn't planned on running such a long convo today, but I think this additional piece will clarify some of the ideas discussed previously as well as reader questions. As always, feel free to dig or diss, as you see fit.

I will return next week with lighter fare—three words: David Lee Roth.

Crabmommy: You speculate on the origins of why so many of us are taking parenting so seriously, and you talk about later-stage motherhood: so many of us moms are having kids later in life, and so, having been professional, we're approaching child-rearing as a profession. You criticize that, although one might say that treating motherhood as a profession dignifies it. It sort of does to me, since mothers have the toughest job in the world.

Hara Estroff Marano: And I agree with that!

C: But you're saying, too, that because we approach it as a job, we're very goal-oriented, and that can be counterproductive.

HEM: It is. And truly, the best way to dignify motherhood is to take the values of parenting and apply them at the office. Nurturing talent, for example, is something that comes with the territory of mothering—but it is also a great leadership skill.

C: But you don't think professional goal-driven values belong in motherhood. Because there's no such thing as being the perfect mother and making your child's life perfect...?

HEM: Yes. And because childhood doesn't proceed—development doesn't proceed—on a schedule. It doesn't have the same values; it doesn't respond to the same things that professionals take meaning from. Efficiency, for example, has absolutely no meaning in childhood, and yet efficiency is one of the values of professional life. So what you have are all these very highly trained women with professional values. This group is dropping out of the workforce in high numbers and partly that has to do with affluence, and they're applying the values of the workplace to childrearing, in part because they've been rewarded for them so well.

C: And also because of good intentions! Just wanting to do a great job.

HEM: But the road to hell is paved with good intentions! You have to stop and say that childhood is a completely different enterprise that works according to a different scheme, has different values, and has a completely different goal. Efficiency and goal-direction have nothing to do with child development. The goal of child development is to produce an independent, autonomous human being who is capable of functioning on his or her own.

C: This connects to another point you make and many others have made: a lot of us over-schedule our children, which you would say is another form of interfering in their childhood.

HEM: By itself—and I only know one set of studies done on this—over-scheduling does not appear to be the culprit. But there are things that go on in over-scheduling that have a negative effect. Part of the problem is that kids are not in charge of their own time. They're not gaining the experience of creating their own activities...and then—particularly you see this in the suburbs—kids go from one activity to the next and they're ferried by the adults. And the point is that for the kids there's no way of opting out. You can't opt out. You don't even know you can opt out.

C: You don't know what you want to do.

HEM: One end result of kids not being able to opt off this track they are placed on is they have no clue what they really want; there is no way to build a sense of self because there is no way to make choices. Putting kids on a track from an early age produces kids that are overly compliant. You don't want compliant kids in a democracy. You want people who can speak up for themselves. In addition, when you have compliant people, you don't get innovation.

C: You have a piece in your book about the value of boredom, and I think a lot of us moms who line up activities for our kids are trying to keep them from being bored. We see boredom as bad.

HEM: I regard boredom as an important event. It's an aversive, uncomfortable state. People don't like to be in it. The value of aversive states is that the unpleasantness forces people to experiment and/or explore to find things on their own that they do like to do.

C: When you're bored you have to learn to get yourself out of it.

HEM: Exactly. And so if you're bored you discover something you like and you also gain the mastery of yourself and know you have the ability to handle all kinds of unpleasant situations. So a lot goes on when you're given the opportunity to be bored sometimes.

C: But we are used to giving into our children's desires, or our perception of what will make them engaged and therefore happy.

HEM: The supreme irony is that parents who want only the best for their kids can wind up bringing out the worst in them. Partly it's because they have a complete misperception about how you make kids happy. People really want to make their kids happy, and so they really want to smooth the path for their kids, but many parents don't understand that the way the brain grows is through challenge. Challenge is absolutely critical. It's the way the brain grows and it's the way you create happiness. You can't be happy unless you're mastering challenges and you gain a sense of self. To provide what you think will make your kids happy all the time actually undermines their ability to be happy.

C: So we mustn't sell our child's girl scout cookies for them! We must try to avoid refereeing in play dates. These are things you'd suggest. What are other suggestions?

HEM: There are a number of them in the book. Teach your kids to tolerate discomfort and uncertainty. Help your kids fail. As you go through life, share your own mistakes, judiciously. Share your hard-won coping strategies, which may or may not work for them, but it would be nice to put them on the buffet for sampling. Another suggestion of course is just to let kids play. One parent can't do it by him or herself. Because your kid needs other kids to play with.

C: I wanted to bring up something that relates to that: I think hothouse parenting is contagious, infectious. You can have ideas about what kind of mother you're going to be before you have a child. But then you have your child and then you have things like play dates starting with very little kids, and you see you're meant to referee in play dates—your child is not sharing and so you get in there and tell them to share—and maybe you're doing it out of obligation; you don't want to be seen to be rude or seeming to flout the conventions...I guess what I'm saying is that it's hard to break away from this over-involved parenting style because other parents are out there doing it too and very often they'll do it for you.

HEM: Also there's just so much judgmentalism these days and so many places to find it. I'm thinking about websites like urbanbaby. People are often made to feel bad for any deviation from what others are doing. Parents seem exceedingly eager to judge, and criticize other parents and children. So we have the phenomenon in which some parents become overprotective and over-involved as a defense against the judgmentalism of their neighbors; they don't want to be told they are horrible parents. Which they may very well not be if left on their own. But this overprotection is fed by enormous insecurity about child-raising on the part of parents, and the erroneous belief that every little thing they do will matter to their child's development. It's not that parents don't matter; they do, but often not in the way that parents think. All that hovering and over-involvement tends to make kids anxious. Parents need to relax a bit...about their own kids and about others'. Given that children have their own built-in drive for competence, a little benign neglect is really good for kids...if you can keep your neighbor off your back.

C: Talking about judging parents: you are seriously judging motherhood in this book. I'm going to guess you've made a few enemies.

HEM: I haven't had it coming directly to me. I expected it when I talked to parents....I would say that most parents suspect that there's something not quite right about hothouse parenting because they know they weren't raised this way. So while they may be wary of my message and they may feel that it's judgmental, what I'm offering them is data and explanations, and I offer them a better way.

C: You're not asking all of us hyper-vigilant moms to give up our concern for safety, you're just saying balance it out with encouraging independence, risk, letting your kids do their own homework.

HEM: "Balance" is a good word.

C: We should take a chill pill, and send the children to camp, right?

HEM: Yes! Back off! Take a drink! You know, relax a little. Make parenthood fun again, allow it to be fun again. It's just not. It's approached with this hyper-seriousness that endows every action with an importance it doesn't have.

C: You're a grandmother now.

HEM: I have three grandchildren.

C: Do you want them to wear bike helmets?

HEM: We haven't got to that yet.

C: Are you against bike helmets and knee pads?

HEM: Bike helmets make sense for kids on two wheelers. They veer towards the absurd for kids on tricycles going two miles an hour on a dirt path. Okay, then you might make the argument that it's never too early to get kids used to associating bikes and helmets. I would respond by saying that not every action in life carries the same meaning and the same risk, and it's important to be able to distinguish reasonable risks. I see no reason why a child who graduates to a two wheeler can't be told that now is the time for using a helmet because the opportunity for going fast is much greater and so is the opportunity for a spill. And knee pads? Knee pads for what? Bike riding? Absurd idea. They actually interfere with agility. Children don't die from scraped knees.

Wimp Nation: the interview

*Update: there is a final part of this interview. Please see the post above this one, or go here to hear the last piece of my interview with from A Nation of Wimps author Hara Estroff Marano. She concludes our conversation with words on the pitfalls of professional mothering, the value of boredom in childhood, and why tricycles and bike helmets don't go together.

Crabby friends and enemies,

Today I am doing something a little different: I'm running the first piece of this post here at my Cookie magazine bloglet and the second part of it below. Some may see this as a ploy to get you to go to Cookie. (Goodness, what a fallacious idea!) Actually, though your traffic at the bloglet won't hurt, the real reason for splitting this piece into two is that I had big ole' fat convo with my new favorite author, Hara Estroff Marano (Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting), and to put the entire chat up in one spot would be way too dang long for a single blog post.

So, here's how it works: go here to read the first part of the interview, in which Hara E. Marano shares her impressions of—and considerable research on—freaky, hyper-anxious parenting, or skip the first piece if you must, and pick up the thread below. It's a very loose but not unedited version of the interview; I deleted all the bits in which I rambled insanely, and then I reshaped my own words to make myself sound amazingly on the topic. Kidding. I couldn't delete all my rambles, but I tried. Anyhoo, I hope you find this to be of interest and as always feel free to give a thumbs up or down, as you see fit, in the comments.

To set up this bit, Hara and I were yakking about how uber-protective parenting manifests in our culture today. I asked her for some crazy overkill examples...

Hara Estroff Marano: I was visiting my younger son, and friends of theirs told me about this couple and their 2-year-old toddler daughter who visited. They flew into the airport and they jumped into a taxicab and on their way to the hotel the couple asked the driver if he would please stop off at the Home Depot. And they ran out and came back with a roll of bubble wrap. And they literally bubble-wrapped their hotel room to protect their 2-year-old toddler!

Crabmommy: [makes horrified noises about the bubble-wrappers...as though I had never done a single over-protective thing in my sensible career as a mother]

HEM: That's what anxiety does. Whether you bubble-wrap the child or the room, there's no psychic space anymore for trust. Every corner of the psyche has to be filled up with anxiety—

C: What your book does so well is to point out that extra caution doesn't make the world a safer or a better place for your child.

HM: No!

C: Because if you breed that kind of fear-based thing in them from the very beginning—making them believe that everything they do is terribly dangerous—they won't be able to embrace failure and learn from it, or take risks in their life, or do anything that departs from a very safe plan.

HEM: Exactly.

C: As you say, psychologists are now seeing record numbers of kids that can't cope with ordinary college stresses or can't really think for themselves—

HEM: Right.

C: But where I connected to your book, as the mom of a young child, is where you talk about play. When you have little children, you often find yourself negotiating in play dates and getting very involved in what the children are doing. And I think your book is suggesting that moms should back off, let the kids work it out.

HEM: Absolutely. One of the origins for this book was a day when I was out jogging and I passed the playground where my kids had spent many hours and so had I when they were growing up—and I don't like to use my experience as the touchstone, but my experience is a generational one here. When my kids were little we would take our kids to the playground and the parents would sit on the perimeter. We stayed on the park benches and we let the kids play and we actually didn't get involved until the kids came crying to us: "Jason pushed me off the bike," or someone's feelings were hurt. We were too busy talking abut our own lives, and maybe about our kids. But what happened on that particular day when I was jogging: I was passing the playground—it was a Sunday—and all these fathers were out with their kids. And what struck me so was that the parents weren't sitting on the perimeter. They were totally in there with the kids. It was as many parents playing as there were kids playing. And I was struck by that. And I began observing it again and again. And I thought this change had occurred in which the parents were kind of co-playing with the kids, directing the kids...that struck me as a really big change, a tremendous—

C:—a serious trend.

HEM: Yes, a serious trend with very powerful effects, even though on the surface of it people may not understand the psychological ramifications of such a simple act. Play and how kids play is really very important.

C: You're talking about free play, where they can just be in their own world without adults helping them negotiate or figure out—

HEM: Right. The key thing that happens in free play—there are lots of things that happen. But if you just imagine free play...how old is your daughter?

C: Almost four.

HEM: So you've probably seen this with her and her friends. Let's say they decide to play house. They make up the roles and the rules and then here's the really key part: they subordinate their own impulses to the rules that they have just made up. And you don't know this because they don't do this when the adults are around. When the adults are around they turn over the communication to the adults. That's what kids do. This is the great secret of play: kids learn how to control their own impulses. This is the source of emotion regulation; this is the source of attention regulation. In addition, physical play stimulates brain growth, stimulates the growth of the frontal cortex which is the area of the brain that is responsible for executive function, for emotion control, and attention regulation...so play is really vitally important. Plus you learn to be nimble, you learn to read ambiguity. It's kind of a cognitive high-wire act.

C: There's this part of the book where you talk about the phrase "child's play" and you speak about child's play as something we dismiss.

HEM: To adults play looks like a waste of time. And to kids it's extremely important.

C: To the point that there are psychologists theorizing that a lot of teenagers diagnosed with attention deficit disorders might actually just be—

HEM: —play deprived.

C: Play-deprived children. Can you explain that theory?

HEM: There's considerable evidence for it. And I don't think parents are particularly receptive to it. They'd much rather, somehow, give their kid a drug.

C: And just to clarify, the idea is that by over-scheduling children, and watching over them, directing them and so forth, the idea—outlandish or true as it may be—is that their brains rebel against that at some point, because they haven't been able to just do nothing, and just be.

HEM: Right. And it's not so much that their brains rebel against it; they haven't stimulated that portion of the brain that develops in response to play. They haven't had the experience of regulating themselves through free play, so their circuits of attention are not developed. And we know from studies that attention can be trained. And so play is one of the ways that attention gets trained. And it's so counter-intuitive to adults. Many would rather just give a pill when their kids can't pay attention. And I find it unbelievable that people would give a pill to young kids whose brains are still developing. And nobody knows what the long-term impact of these drugs is on brains, and some of the evidence that there is, is really not fantastic. And I find it amazing that adults are more willing to accept the mechanical or mechanistic solution than the behavioral one.

C: There's a wild bit in the book where you cite a well-regarded psychologist who prescribes for these ADD-type boys intense bouts of roughhousing with their fathers, to offer some experimental antidote to medication. I guess with some kids it seems to really work, that just by fooling around in intensive ways their brains resettle and learn how to do those things in free play that you say are restricted by the way we raise kids these days.

HEM: The fooling around contains important ingredients. Fooling around involves social engagement and touching; these are the mechanisms by which the play, shall we say, gets transmitted into the brain...There's this physical contact, this physical activity, and it's highly motivating. But to kids its just fun; they don't know their brains are being built by it. So, concealed under all this fooling around there's some very serious brain growth going on.

Okay, so I have a bit more of the interview, which I will post at a later stage. Needless to say (for the thousandth time), I think Nation of Wimps is an important parenting book for our times. A wake-up call for people like those twits who need grief counseling when their kids go off to camp. And for the rest of us too. But what do you think? Does any of this ring true for you and/or the moms and dads in your orbit? Let's convo seriously this week and then I'll go back to posting pix of George Michael and the like as a reward!

There's a Little Black Dot on the Sun Today

Make that a large-ish gray cloud hovering over the sun. It's the same old thing as yesterday. And I don't dig it. Not even the end of July and already I'm back in cardigans. It's just plain depressing to whip out a cardigan in July in America.

Here I go, beginning what is sure to become a recurring, if slightly less than thrilling, theme of bashing my new climate of the northwest, which, I have hinted, is rainy and gray quite a lot of the time. Some of you may also recall that I longed for rainy and gray quite a lot of the time in my old climate of the mountain west. Which was insanely snowy. And was itself chosen over the ghastly thick damp heat afforded by the east coast and south, where for at least half the year you feel as though you live inside someone's armpit.

That Crabmommy, wherever she goes, there she does not wish to be. Is it a mindset I can change? Some might say so, but the farthest I am prepared to go down that path is to examine it with the Zen approach, simply recognizing the moment and allowing it to be what it is, free of judgment. Meaning (I think) that I can judge the climate and all and generally feel all Crabpissy at things, but I must not judge myself for judging. For I am but a whirlpool in the river of life. And while I might have a bit of debris in my whirlpool, I must not make a big deal out of the debris. I must just see the debris and (if I am understanding my present material reading correctly), when I see that debris I mustn't try to fling it out of the water or shout at it and judge it and be all harsh on it, but instead I should just acknowledge that there is debris in my whirlpool.

You can say that again.

But before I let my babbling brook become a mighty stream of nonsense, let me get back to why I started this post with Police lyrics: Crabhubby and I went to see the Police reunion concert, for which we were given tickets as a present from my m-i-l. Now there is surely not a human being alive who has not mocked Sting, and certainly I have done so in my time. I have always found his wife to be particularly unsavory, with a face somewhat like a stiletto shoe, and then there was all that Tantric sex business that you really didn't want to visualize with a stiletto shoe....and then that phase of his career where he got choirs of Guatemalan children to sing uplifting backup vocals for him...or whatever it was he got up to (okay, so I don't really know what he got up to but). I picture that whole period of "Sting" to be a series of highly expensive tickets to private benefit concerts held in the same places where Yanni might perform: the Colosseum, atop the Acropolis, a Druid cave...all involving, of course, interesting lighting effects and, quite possibly, some powerful chanting and a very dorkish audience.

That said, I went to the Police reunion concert with low expectations and it was fantastic. In large part this had to do with Sting himself, who performed extremely well and remains annoyingly in shape, although he now looks a bit like Hemingway from the neck up, because he is sporting a very silvery exuberant facial hair situation. But he channeled my teen past right back at me and I briefly thought of getting that poster again, the one I used to have in my room, of Sting eating a piece of fruit, which I used to kiss before I went to bed at night (you laugh, but before Sting came along, I was kissing a poster of Ralph Macchio, so it's all relative).

The very best part of the show, for me, was the Stuart Copeland side of things. I have always thought him amazing, and he drummed his pants off, with a permanently shocked expression on his face. He is very handsome, in an elongated sort of way. He looks a bit like he has had electric shock therapy, or that he might need electric shock therapy, not sure which.

The opening act was Elvis Costello, whom I adore, OBVIOUSLY, but he was ill-suited to the large stadium of aging light-bulb salesmen, grim housewives, tarty younger people with husky voices and French manicures and silver flip-flops, and the generally undistinguished people that comprise a Police concert audience. Seriously, how freaky a Police reunion audience is. It's quite remarkable how unremarkable so many of the fans were in appearance! And many were old. So plum old! Meaning, people the same age as Sting himself only balding and paunchy and in bad shirts because they don't do yoga seven hours a day and then have marathon Tantric bouts with a stiletto shoe, in between performing rock concerts. And there is something both sad and heartening about seeing such people attend a concert, people whom you would swear would never attend a concert and yet there they are, with their kids, enjoying some family entertainment.

And right here I would like to say a word about attending music shows with your offspring: I think it's just wrong. Even and especially if you're a hipster mom or dad (or think you are), you ought not attend pop/rock music concerts with your child. Music is fundamentally about dissing your elders, even if your elders are on-stage playing songs that are 35 years old. I still don't get why there are still so many parents out there who don't get this one timeless truth: when you attempt to be cool with your kids the opposite effect is achieved. And if your kids somehow do think you're cool by going to a show with them? Well then, your kids are supremely uncool. Poor buggers. I saw a number of embarrassed teens at the Police concert, edging away from their dads in pleated pants and moms rocking out in Keds.

To close this post, a thought about age and music. Some musicians age in a yummy sort of way, the musical equivalent of a piece of excellent old Brie.
Others refuse to age, but instead tweak their gorgeous selves into something scary and impish by dint of too-young hair and wickedly smooth eyes.
And howzabout those naff criss-crossed arms? What are you doing, David Bowie?

And then there are people who just look, well, sort of not great as they get older, even when they aren't very old, but are simply older. In this category do I find the person whose image is to follow this paragraph. Apparently he is performing again, and I challenge you to find in the following photo, any resemblance to the gayly swarthy crooner whose careless whisper sent far too many people in the 1980s into a tizzy. Seriously, I don't think this could put a boom-boom into my heart, much less leave me hanging on like a yo-yo: