“Is I dog, or is I a charming hat?”
Nikki’s stupendous adoption series at Catapult wrapped up with this lovely, lovely installment:
Mika
i.
When can a fetus feel pain? Utah Governor Gary Herbert valued an accountant’s answer to that question over the current medical consensus when he signed a law Monday requiring abortion providers to give fetuses anesthesia when performing an abortion after 20 weeks. It is the first law of its kind nationwide.
As The Salt Lake Tribune reports, Republican State Senator and Certified Public Accountant Curt Bramble sponsored SB 234 based on his belief that fetuses can feel pain beyond that point.
it is totally reasonable that she needs to pay back this money, especially if he’s letting her do so over a twelve-month period:
Q. Co-worker stealing money, I’m conflicted: I work for a small theater company. My boss recently discovered that my co-worker, over the past couple of years, has put more than $2,000 of personal charges on her company credit card. He’s furious, and wants to fire her and give her 12 months to pay it back, or else he will press charges. While I agree with the decision to let her go, I feel that asking for her to pay the money back is excessively punitive, considering she’s 25, completely broke, and lives with her parents, who are equally broke. My boss said if it were him, he’d be mortified and want to pay everything back because it’s the “right thing to do.” But he comes from a wealthy family, has never had to struggle for money, and doesn’t seem to care (or realize) that paying back this money will likely upend her whole life. For example, he suggested, “She might have to take out a loan,” seemingly unaware that there’s probably no way she could get a loan. Who’s right?
This is an excellent rant, also, listening to Rick Mercer is always a joy to me, because he sounds SO CANADIAN.
Can an outsider really become Amish?:
Reverent, giddy, almost lustful: it’s the way you’d expect a teenage girl to talk about her favorite pop star, and yet it’s a tone I’ve come to expect among a certain group of people when you invoke the name of the Amish. Before the internet, these “wishful Amish” wrote emotional missives to newspaper editors in areas with large Plain populations; one man I spoke to, who publishes a series of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania guidebooks, composed a form letter so as to minimize the time he spent replying to such requests. Now, the wishful Amish have dedicated internet forums (ironically) on which they write with the feverishness of the unrequited lover about their long-held desire to get close to the aloof objects of their spiritual desire.
Many say they’ve wanted to become Amish for “as long as [they] could remember,” though most of them say they have only seen Amish people on a few occasions, and don’t know much, if anything at all, about Amish theology. Some talk about wanting to find an Amish partner, others, about the fear they won’t be accepted into the community because they are single parents, or divorced, or have tattoos or once dabbled in drugs. Many are hesitant that they won’t be able to fully adjust, and so wonder if it might be possible to stay with an Amish family for a week or two, just to try out the lifestyle. Although a few commenters say they’ve taken the initiative to make their own lives more Plain–given up television, say, or started to dress more modestly–most of them appear to be banking on integration into the community to transform them, like alcoholics who decide to wait until detox before examining the deeper motivations behind their drinking.
ICYMI, we ran this just fan-tastic interview with Steve Silberman yesterday, helmed by the fabulous Emily Brooks:
The idea that NeuroTribes is a comprehensive history of autism seems to trip some readers up. My feeling from reading your book was not that it’s all there is to know about autism and autistic people; your intention was to provide a detailed and important background. IfNeuroTribes is a starting point, what do you recommend readers explore next?
My book is not at all meant to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of autism, and it’s not presented that way. It’s not a good book for parents who are interested in researching treatments, and it’s not a substitute for reading about autistic experience written by the people who live it.
My hope for NeuroTribes is that it fills in huge gaps in historical information so that crucial aspects of the present situation are made comprehensible instead of opaque. To put it in very blunt language, one of my goals for the book was to answer the question, “How did things get so fucked up in autismland? Why is everyone so angry?” It turns out there are very good reasons for everyone to be angry. Parents were lied to for decades about their alleged role in causing their children’s autism, and two generations of autistic people lived and died in institutions that were worse than prisons, being subjected to “treatments” that would be considered war crimes if POWs were the victims. The legacy of how society has treated autistic people is very, very dark — and the only way we’ll be able to move past it as a society is by having an honest accounting of what happened. A reckoning. That’s what I intended NeuroTribes to be.
Charlotte Shane on Paula Cole:
I was 15 years old when braless, emphatic Paula Cole performed on Saturday Night Live in 1998 with her nipples blazing and pit hair in full effect. SNL was a show I always and only watched with my father, who had custody of my brother and I on the weekends and who had let me stay up late for episodes since I was a child. He was the type of man who regularly commented on women’s appearances whether those women were on the screen, on the sidewalk he drove past, or acquaintances in his personal and professional life. My impression of her hippie chick aesthetic couldn’t admit my own reaction; I was too busy anticipating his evaluation, which he would make known at any moment. To whatever extent my ancient memory of the moment can be trusted, I think he said something like, “she sure likes showing it off” when she threw her mic-free hand over her head during “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”, flashing fur yet again. Though I was not a performer and barely a woman, I recognized even then that her movements, and her body, had less to do with provoking dour sexists than how she naturally existed.
This is so fascinating to me:
Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. She had read Corman’s novel and found Joanna to be “an ogre, a princess, an ass,” as she put it soon after to American Film. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. When she gives up Billy in the final scene, it should be for the boy’s sake, not hers. Joanna isn’t a villain; she’s a reflection of a real struggle that women are going through across the country, and the audience should feel some sympathy for her. If they wanted Meryl, they’d need to do re-writes, she later told Ms. magazine.
The trio was taken aback, mostly because they hadn’t called her in for Joanna in the first place. They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one-night stand. Somehow she’d gotten the wrong message. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all?
That Amish essay was fantastic.
I love this long, amazing, intersectional essay on the relatively recent history of sabotage. Hits on its socio-cultural and economic significance in both capitalist industry and warfare, making me feel like a graduate student again in all the best ways. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/
Wow! It’s too dense for me to take in all at once, but I’m really taken with the bit about sabotage being stretched to accommodate not just the destruction of material goods, but also any act that lessens productivity, or results in an outcome that is less than it “should” have been. When applied to people (self-sabotage) it really brings the bizarreness of that idea into sharp relief. When you accuse a person, or an entire group of people, of self-sabotage, you’re accusing them of not living up to what you imagine was their ultimate potential, or of failing to meet what you imagine was their ultimate goal.
Thank you for linking this! I’ll have to let it roll around in my brain some more.
I read it very slowly over a whole week!
Stealing $2000 from a small theater company doesn’t strike me as one of those fun, no-harm-done crimes that should just get a pass?
“If you’re a small company, my guess is that $2,000 has been sorely missed.”
THIS. Most small theater companies work on a fraying shoestring budget. It sounds to me like her boss is being extremely merciful. If nothing else, she definitely at least needs to pay that money back.
Not to mention, assuming the company has done all its non-profit paperwork correctly, it’s not the artistic director’s money to make that call! It belongs to the non-profit entity, and only the board, representing that entity and acting in its best interests and the best interests of its donors etc, could decide not to go after it. Leaving it alone and letting it slide would be a dereliction of duty that could get the artistic director in trouble, I am pretty sure.
Sansa is clearly playing “Do you like my hat?” You’ve taught her well.
(This immediately came to mind because I use this on toddlers all. The. Time. Pretty much my go-to now. Thank you, 2013 Nicole, for helping me look marginally baby-competent at family gatherings!)
Holy shit bookmarking that link, which I’d never seen before. Thank you!!!!
Dave Barry had a column where he mentioned using the baby as the hat – I think he called it “Oklahoma Chicken Hat,” where you put the baby on your head and strut around like a chicken while singing “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
Early Dave Barry is still able to make me laugh so hard my nose runs.
Exactly. His early stuff makes my sides hurt from laughing. Had to quit reading his recent stuff a few years ago.
I quit when it became clear he’d outsourced his work to his readers sending him humorous news stories. But I have a real soft spot in my heart for Earnest and Zippy the Emergency Back-up Dog. And I’ve loaned “Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys” to friends when they’re going through heartbreak. It’s a touch gender essentialist but there are times when it’s come in handy.
The phrase ‘Oklahoma Chicken Hat’ is just so funny to me, even without the context.
“This thing is in a spot where it isn’t supposed to be” delights children so much. I wish I could be that easily delighted in life. Although perhaps my love of sitting on top of desks is related.
Ugh I love Paula Cole so much. “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” is one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s so foreboding.
It is my go-to karaoke jam.
I have been listening to This Fire on youtube all morning and remembering the late 90s. It’s been great. Thanks!
I just put a bunch of Paula Cole on hold at my library because of that article! I was such a young snob when it came out and she was “too mainstream” for me
“My coworker charged personal expenses to our company but it would be punitive to have her pay them back!” What? What? No no no. Just no. No no. That’s not punitive, that’s 110% normal. No no.
That’s better than normal. Most jobs you would just be fired and sued.
And a full year to pay it back, at that!
Giving her a year to pay it back seems generous!
Seriously. It’s extremely generous, and the LW’s insistence that it’s punitive or going to ruin this person’s life and is wrong wrong wrong is really, REALLY weird.
little known fact, in the US if you’re poor you get two free crimes
…little known fact, in the US if you’re {poor} [white] you get two free crimes…
if you’re rich and white you get an unlimited supply of free crimes tho
True story
I think the LW is the woman who stole the money. It sounds too much like those “a friend of mine” stories.
Ooooooh this makes so much sense!
I read the Meryl article last night and I CANNOT stop thinking about it.
Dustin Hoffman whispered THE NAME OF HER DEAD BOYFRIEND IN HER EAR so she would cry more! Who does he think he is????
I’ve been off Dustin Hoffman since that viral video a few years ago where he wanted a medal for saying that dressing as a woman for “Tootsie” had proved to him that ugly women can be interesting people with feelings.
Haha!! I watched that too, and I was like, “Well, good for him for finally understanding reality,” for about four seconds before the primal scream welled up.
We set standards so low…and so many people can’t meet them anyway.
The kicker was a few months later when the video had finally got around to a man who was a theater friend, who enthusiastically and at length explained to me what the video was saying and how moving it was.
to be fair I have now learned from Dustin Hoffman that goodlooking men can be garbage morons
Whaaaat the fuck I had no idea he was such a psychopath! I can’t imagine working with that level of bizarre hostility. Kudos to Meryl.
Her reaction of ‘oh he’s just being like one of my little brothers’ is so perfect.
I am only 1/4th through this article and my takeaway so far is 1) Dustin Hoffman is an awful person and 2) he’s so awful idk if I can keep reading this at work because it’s making me too angry.
I realize that she was not yet the legend she is today, but the SHEER GALL of assuming that MERYL STREEP needs YOUR help to act.
Oh, oh, I just got to the part where the child actor doesn’t win Best Supporting at the Oscars: “Justin Henry lost to Melvyn Douglas (Being There), 71 years his senior, becoming so distraught that Christopher Reeve, one of the only movie stars he recognized, had to be called over to console him.”
haha, I just read that and copied it to paste in a comment, because. Christopher Reeve <3
Also making the kid actor cry by saying he’ll never see all his friends on the crew ever again! Why would you DO that?
Method acting is all well and good if that is a tool you choose to use for yourself. It does not mean you get to impose it on your fellow cast members, who a) might not find it effective, b) might have other acting techniques that work better for them, and c) oh yeah, might not want you bringing up deeply personal traumatic experiences without warning.
The TV Tropes page Enforced Method Acting is completely horrifying. Some directors are apparently very keen on imposing it on cast members.
Ohhhh yeah, I am looking at YOU, Stanley Kubrick.
Y’all know that the actor character Hoffman played in Tootsie, the guy who got fired all the time because he would argue with the directors and the other actors about his character’s motivations, was based on Hoffman himself, right?
It’s a lot like kink that way, really.
Method acting, whee!
I will always remember that story from Marathon Man, where Hoffman stayed up all night to be haggard and gross for a scene, and Laurence freaking Olivier suggested he could just, you know, act.
I’ve always been off Hoffman since reading an Olivier biography. Olivier at the time of Marathon Man had a degenerative neuromuscular disease and so was extremely frail healthwise. Hoffman wanted to prove that he had the real power in the set and Olivier was the has-been. When they were rehearsing a scene where Hoffman had a gun on Olivier and forces his character to walk from place to place; Hoffman wanted them to try some improvisation on the scene, knowing that Olivier hated improv. They ended up doing the scene for over an hour, walking the whole time, the director letting it happen because he didn’t want to make Hoffman unhappy. At the end, Olivier’s ankles were massively swollen and he could barely move he was in so much pain, but he hadn’t wanted to let Hoffman see he couldn’t do it, so he kept quiet.
Charles P. Hashbrowns, dangerous felon, learned a new trick yesterday: prison break!
I had to move his potato containment unit to the bathroom because we were moving a whole lot of furniture upstairs and the only path went right through the kitchen, his usual domain. He took exception (look at that grumpy expression) and used his crate to hop over the fence after I left for work.
He does not get his crate in his PCU anymore, but he has a nice soft bed to make up for it.
He was actually pretty good, except for a few stray poops- I couldn’t find anything he chewed or tore up too badly! So, I’m not upset but I don’t think I’m going to test my luck on letting him out permanently all day yet.
Great photo. He seems to be looking at you like, “Me? Oh nothing. I’m just standing on my crate for the unobstructed view. Nothing to worry about, certainly.”
POTATO CONTAINMENT UNIT
Potato Cinematic Universe
I would pay so much money for this to be real
So much better than the DCU
Marvel’s Agents of P.O.T.A.T.O.
SUCH an innocent look, of course aided by his total absence of eyes.
Came here to say HE HAS NO EYES.
poor eye contact = guilty
It’s all the floof!
HOW IS THIS EVEN A REAL DOG THOUGH
IT LOOKS LIKE A DOG A CHILD DREW AND I MEAN THAT IN THE BEST WAY
Not so much grumpy as “looky how clever potato is!” (I say this, obviously, as someone who has not met the offending hashbrowns and cannot judge his moods, and yet — if this is grumpy, I’ll take it!)
This might be my favorite one yet!
You know he’s in trouble when you use his full first name. Oooooh, Charlie’s in trouble.
Ok I don’t want to start trouble here but are you SURE that Charlie isn’t actually a muppet?
But what does George think about the NeuroTribes/Steve Silberman interview?
Toasts, this is more of an OT problem, but it’s ruining my sleep schedule so here we are.
I was recently not given a promotion at work and was instead given a newly created position that I was assured was not me being passed over. However, my office has a very strict promotion hierarchy, and this is totally outside of it. No one has given me a straight answer on what next steps might be. I also wasn’t given a title change.
The condundrum is that the work I get to do is objectively cool for now, but there’s a good chance I’ll hit a wall in the next six months. Leaving means doing less interesting work, with the potential for a payoff in a year.
I’m trying to set up a meeting with my bosses to talk about this, but I’m really worried about coming off as ungrateful and wrecking my relationship with them (it is a very small office with no actual HR. The director of the office is also basically the HR department, in theory). Is it fair to directly ask for a title change and some outline of where they see this going, or is that forcing them into a corner and making me look too demanding?
“I’m excited about the work I’m doing in this new role. So we can be on the same page, and so I can work more efficiently and plan better, I’d really like to get an idea of your vision for this position moving forward. Oh, and it seems like it would be helpful to have my title match the position, just for clarity’s sake. Thanks!” — does not sound even remotely unreasonable to me.
If my boss doesn’t want to hear what I need to say in order to stay (reasonably) happy and fulfilled at my job, then I don’t want to work for them. If you are afraid to tell them what you need and you think you can find something more rewarding elsewhere, then what have you got to lose by talking to them? I wouldn’t ask directly for a title change, but an explanation of why things were done the way they were and an outline of how they see the job progressing–those seem to be entirely reasonable things to ask of your employer.
I think the meeting with the bosses is a good idea, and I don’t think it’s ungrateful to be curious about next steps. Try to make the tone of the meeting “this is a new thing, and I’m genuinely wondering what happens next since this is outside of the norm” rather than “whyyyy is something different happening to meee?” (Hard, I know.) I also think asking for a title change is fine, especially if you’re doing work/changing roles. “I know that here in the office we know what my role is, but since my work is changing it seems fitting that my title should as well.” Also, I’d submit this question to Ask a Manager – this seems like a pretty unique situation and I’m sure she’d have good advice.
Does your new position, objectively cool work aside, come with an overall increase in work responsibilities and in time that you will have to spend doing the job? That was how i had to evaluate something very similar recently. Since the answer was yes, I had a number of conversations with my superiors about “career development”. Even something as basic as a title change (not accompanied by increased $) would have been helpful as a line on a resume to show that my career was advancing and that I wasn’t just treading water.
If they won’t have those conversations with you, or those conversations are “we really do need to set up a plan for your professional development in the near future” then in my experience you should start looking for a new job. You don’t have to be noisy about it, but start casting out feelers. See if you can get an external promotion in the time it takes them to actually reward the work you’ve already done internally. Be clear with any new prospective employers you talk to that you aren’t looking for a lateral move, you are looking for advancement. In my experience companies tend to severely undervalue the talent they already have and rely heavily on inertia when it comes to keeping that talent in-house.
Basically: you have to take firm control of your own professional advancement because (almost) no employer will do it for you. Make yourself your top priority. If they don’t recognize your value, someone else out there is likely to.
That’s fair! Don’t doubt yourself. Ask yourself if a man would be asking the same question vs just waltzing in and demanding what he wants. Everything about the tone of your comment shows you’re being respectful and tactful, if you can keep that up while squashing some of the self-doubt (or at least keeping it from creeping into the way you talk to them), then you’ll be going in with just the right balance.
Oof, I am related to a George. He is always telling far-fetched tales of how he touched someone’s life just by existing. He’s a classic narcissist. It’s fun. (And by fun I mean really sad and lonely.)
I’m pretty sure I’ve dated a George unfortunately
IS THERE NO NAME MEN HAVEN’T RUINED JUST BY EXISTING AND HAVING ONE? My list is getting too long, so I am just going to start calling all men Carl. Or Jason. Or Octavian, idk.
give it time. the octavians of today are the georges of 20 years from now.
All through high school, my mother could not be bothered to remember the names of my friends’ tedious and irrelevant boyfriends, and thus referred to them interchangeably as Fido, Bingo, Rover, Spot, Skip, etc. The older I get, the sounder this strategy seems.
YASSS! Oh, my darling dear departed Bingo, and then that Spot that broke my heart. I wonder, will Fido be the one??
A friend and I decided once (in a desperate attempt to maintain our sanity in a duplicitous world) that everyone has an evil twin named Sparky, on whom all disappointing behaviors can be blamed. In the ensuing 25 years or so, it does seem that the world has now been completely overtaken by Sparkys, so that it is perfectly acceptable to refer to everyone, permanently, as Sparky.
My evil twin would need a much more sinister name than that, I’m afraid. I believe I shall call her Duessa. (TBH that name is probably my favorite thing about The Fairie Queene but don’t tell my former DGS.)
Ah, but Sparky isn’t your own evil twin, he’s everyone else’s (slightly ridiculous and therefore rather belittling) evil twin. One’s own evil twin is, naturally, magnificent in his or her evil.
Such truth! Of course!
I’ve known one horrendous Jason and one terrific Jason, not to make things harder for you. I do know an incredibly nice, intelligent, and handsome bartender named Carl though.
i’ve known 3 horrible Carl’s. i now refer to all Carl’s as “fucking Carl” so… Carl is out.
I can only visualize a Carl as the homicidal llama from Llamas with Hats, which was amusing (to me & the rest of the grunts at least) when an inoffensive, not homicidal dude named Carl was picked as EIC of the Law Review in law school.
I worked with a guy named Carl, and “Karl, why would you doooooooo that?” was a pretty reasonable thing to say. Not that he was homicidal, just deeply strange.
We didn’t so much quote it at him, but you call out for the EIC a remarkable amount if you’re on the Ed Board during certain stuff, plus he often had to be the bearer of bad news, so teasingly agonized cries of “CAAaaaAaaaRRlll” were not unheard of.
I haven’t even finished that Meryl Streep article, but man Dustin Hoffman is a terrible person.
But this is adorable: “Justin Henry lost to Melvyn Douglas (Being There), 71 years his senior, becoming so distraught that Christopher Reeve, one of the only movie stars he recognized, had to be called over to console him.”
That was by far my favorite part of the article (which was incredible). Can you imagine? “Mr. Reeve! Mr. Reeve. We have an inconsolable 7 year old child. Can you come here and give him a hug?”
That makes me want to cry a little! Christopher Reeve! Superman! I’m still sad he’s gone. 🙁
This reminds me of wee Jacob Tremblay getting to meet all the Star Wars peeps and being so cute and adorable at the Oscars this year.
Christopher Reeve WAS superman to me.
On a tangentially-related note, one of the things that I love about Supergirl is that they seem to be trying to conjure that old vibe.
“Paging Mr. Reeve. Mr. Reeve, this child needs a hug, stat. You’re our only hope.”
Remember that interview where he was talking about doing Tootsie, and how it really shook him to finally get that women were people? Small victories, I guess.
And how there were so many awesome women he could have been friends with, if only he hadn’t been focused on their being sevens, at the very most?
I dunno. I know it was a different time and everything, but it seems to me that if Meryl Streep wants a role, Meryl Streep should get that blasted role. She’s pretty much the acting muse in human form. And this is not just me hoping she gets cast as Darkseid in the inevitable Justice League movie. (OK, maybe it is, but I feel that I have a valid point)
Meryl for Darkseid!!! Yes!!!!
OH MY GOD YES
Guys, there is a new Courtney Milan novella out and I cried and it is so good and CAN WE TALK ABOUT IT PLEASE
Here for this! I haven’t ordered the new novella yet because I did not love Once Upon a Marquess (which feels like treason to write, but the decapitated baby elephant/cockney geese dialogue made me feel actual fremdschämen) so I would love to know 1, what you thought of OUAM, and 2, how you feel the new novella compares to for ex. the Brothers Sinisters series.
I enjoyed OUAM, though it’s not on the top of my all time favorite Milan books. The novella is probably closest in tone to Suffragette Scandal, in that it’s overtly feminist in tone, and it deals with issues of perception of POC (because Crash is dark-skinned, but no one really knows what his background actually is). I loved it, and I highly recommend it.
I think OUAM, as the first in the series, was more of a set-up book, and I think those are often Courtney’s weakest. My favorite books she’s written always come later in the series.
The new novella is about not internalizing the limits other people try to put on you. It made me cry a lot. (I also didn’t love _Once Upon_ because it had too many things in it. If you liked Daisy, though, her shopping buddy, this one is about her.)
I ordered it last night but I had to finish The Winner’s Kiss first!
Eeeeeeeeeeeee please without spoilers tell me how TWK was because I loved the first two so much and I’m on hold for it at the library but O.O and somehow I’ve forgotten how to use punctuation.
IT’S JUST SO GOOD. She’s SUCH a great writer and it’s like a master class in elegant language in YA.
Oh squee somehow this was not on my radar so thanks for the heads up! I have to finish the new Julia Quinn before I get to this, though. My favorite Courtney Milan is The Heiress Effect.
I want your opinion on the new JQ!
WHAT OMG
I will joyfully come back and talk about it when I ahve finished it thank you
Buying it NOW
“I have been in the presence of autistic children on two occasions.”
George, can you not hear how you sound?
I saw this article on the BBC today about the experience of being trafficked for sex; it is horrifying, obviously, but the woman behind it sounds amazing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35846207
One occasion is anecdata, two is a trend. George knows.
I read that this morning and was also horrified. What a woman!
Twice! In 20 years of work in special education!
The hero we all deserve.
She does sound amazingly badass, and I am horrified by our police and the consulate that just turned away a naked, traumatized woman who told them she had been sex trafficked.
I think it’s generous, but perhaps naive, to even consider keeping an employee who’s stolen unless they have a compelling reason why they did it. I mean, how is he going to trust her going forward? Assuming they work that out, garnishing her wages for as long as it takes to pay back the theft without making cost of living untenable seems reasonable.
I was so excited that Oscar Isaac and Gina Rodriguez are starring in the same movie, but then I saw that it was an adaptation of the Southern Reach Trilogy which means that they whitewashed the Asian female lead with fucking Natalie Portman. UGH UGH UGHHHHHHHHH.
Wait wait wait they’re making the Southern Reach Trilogy into a movie?
Yep. With Alex Garland directing, and Oscar Isaac and Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson
and…Natalie Portman. Playing a role that was written as Asian.
I had somehow missed that the biologist was Asian. Whoops. The whitewashing really sucks.
Though I’m now trying to figure out what parts of the books the movies are covering. I’d expect Oscar Isaac to play Control, but he doesn’t show up till the second book. (I say I expect him to play Control because the only male characters I can remember from the series are Control, the biologist’s husband, and Whitby.)
Oops, I just tracked down more information and it looks like he’s playing the biologist’s husband.
Oh I hadn’t looked into it further and assumed he was playing Control and I was very excited about that. Womp womp.
RIGHT? I can totally see him as Control.
Her race is mentioned starting in the second book. But, I mean. They’ve signed on to do the entire trilogy if the first one does well, so I’m pretty sure Garland read the entire trilogy.
gratuitous gif of myself reading your comment
Turns out you’re adorable.
fuck I forgot the main character was Asian and not white and now I am much less excited about this movie than I was just 5 minutes ago.
It deeply bums me out. When was the last time you saw an East Asian female lead in an American production? Playing a role without an immigrant accent, or w.o martial arts involved.
Yeah. I love Tessa Thompson and like Gina Rodriguez, so I still want to see this movie.
Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh
Wow. I had no idea they were making a movie adaptation of those books and I just became very excited for it all to come crashing down about 3 seconds later.
OT but can we talk about how much Gina Rodriguez and Tatiana Maslany look alike?
And how happy that makes me because there are TWO of the most beautiful woman in the world?
More like 30 if you count all of Maslany’s characters 🙂
Also, the psychologist is Native American in the novels. IMDB is saying they’ve cast Jennifer Jason Leigh for her character. 😐
I really enjoyed reading the Southern Reach trilogy, but the movie adaptation is not off to a great start.
Ah…Diversity. But not too much Diversity!
Paula Cole! I love “This Fire” and “Harbinger” so very much. “Me” and “Saturn Girl” were my songs in high school (other than all the Tori Amos I loved then and still love now).
The second song from the case/lang/veirs album is out.
I don’t like it as much as Atomic Number but it’s better than whatever whiny male rockers are singing about!
Ooh thanks for the heads up and also the reminder that I need to go listen to Atomic Number on repeat all afternoon, again.
GEORGE it is really weird that your response this “girl” who I am sure 100% exists who invited you to interact with her was to PUT YOUR HANDS ON HER WAIST. Unless you are slow dancing that is just a really fucking weird way to physically interact with a five year old.
Your totally made up scenario is airing out some weird shit about you, bro.
I couldn’t read it all the way through b/c of the ick. George, look at your life.
YES that made me actually shiver a little. GROSS, GEORGE. GROSS.
and then specifically “bouncing [the other girl] on his knee” uggggggh that’s so creepy in the context of “hands around her waist” and 2 very life-changing interactions with little autistic girls.
Also this was in a classroom where he was substitute teaching, which doesn’t seem like the right context for that sort of interaction, even if we for some reason ignored the other incident.
Also also, he was “substitute teaching in an autistic class room,” but only one of the kids from that class rates mention in the list of times he’s met autistic kids?
Let’s go arrest George now.
what?! nooooo no no i didn’t want to know that. i really hope he’s just oblivious and not actually a creep
She knocked over the noodle structure with her hand. “Hey. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Not for being alive.”
This line.
OT: Has anyone ever successfully trained for a marathon and also been in rehearsal process for a show simultaneously, preferably without getting a divorce
Not sure about the divorce part, but this sounds really impressive.
Invite your SO to help you with your long runs on the weekends! My husband would ride his bike with me and carry water on my weekend long runs. It was a great opportunity to spend time together, talk, get support from him, etc. Also justification for long weekend naps together.
Source: I trained for 6 marathons through undergrad, grad school, and the first year of marriage, AMA.
He did that last time and it was great. 🙂
That sounds hardcore, girlfriend.
Yeah. I can’t even really figure out when I’d eat.
Yes, but I would be extremely hesitant to try it with children.
If no children – proceed! Treat your partner nicely.
If children, um.
No kids, buuuuuuuut the time commitment with either one shoves our chore division right out the window. Combining the two seems risky.
Maybe consider hiring a housecleaner, if you can afford it?
We decidedly cannot. I’ve already committed to the marathon, so. Sigh.
No, sorry. I tried once and that’s why I had to limit myself to 10 milers max and do most of my training in the off season. But I am going for a 1/2 Marathon in Feb so my Christmas season (marathon gigs) is going to be interesting this year.
Time-Turner?
That’s the most realistic idea so far.
I trained for a marathon during my last semester of undergrad, while I was trying to find a job and was also in the process of reporting a sexual assault…however, I had no significant other and did basically lose touch with everyone I knew who couldn’t run with me, so I have no advice there.
The consistency and commitment of Alex and Rebecca, the couple who became Amish, amazes me, and is so foreign to me. They began to dress plainly and eschew modern technology before actually deciding to convert; they started doing these things as children! I can’t think of anything that has that kind of through-line in my life. I’m a little jealous, when it comes down to it, that they have something so foundational to who they are that they can build their lives around.
Yeah but you have The Toast.
This! We are all eternally blessed.
The end of Susan Kiyo Ito’s piece reminded me of my grandmother. She was adopted at a time when all adoptions were closed, period. The only reason she knew she was adopted was that she remembered travelling from the orphanage to her new home. My cousin is really into genealogy and hit a brick wall trying to find out anything about my grandmother’s birth family. So she did the dna test thing at ancestry and boom! Apparently Grandma’s birth family has a big fat genealogy gene because a whole bunch of them popped up immediately and my cousin went out to lunch with them a week later (they all lived two counties over). All the people involved have passed away, so it was pleasant and drama-free, according to my cousin, and she’s still in contact with them. I wish my Grandma had been alive to meet them all.
dang, that Amish article is fascinating, and I feel a little bad for thinking of Those Victorians at certain points.
I absolutely thought of them as well.
I have a lot more sympathy for and faith in Alex, but if he had a blog and I read it, that might change.
Why, why, why do people idolize the Amish? The perceived safety and convenience of not having to put on makeup and being guaranteed a spouse comes at a high price. Like:
1. For women, no makeup and no hair removal, anywhere, at all. Look, I understand the complaints about modern women being pressured to shave their pits and put on mascara, but some women like it. It should be a choice, no?
2. A rejection of modern “conveniences” also entails a rejection of modern MEDICINE. Even when it’s a matter of life and death. Those Amish who break the rule by taking their eclamptic wives to the hospital end up getting shunned.
3. The shunning. It’s arbitrary, it’s excessive and it’s cruel as hell. Also, at least some communities have employed dentistry (!) for punitive purposes.
4. The complete dominance of community elders and the loss of practically all control and choice in one’s life — not just what to wear or what to watch, but what to think, what to say, and whether to voice one’s opinion on ANYTHING.
5. The strong hostility to and rejection of education and all intellectual inquiry. There is a hostility towards art, too (it’s “vain”).
6. A culture of coverup with regard to domestic violence, child abuse and — especially, because of course — sexual assault.
For the same reasons people idealize the Victorians, and any previous era: because they haven’t had to deal with that kind of oppression, and/or because they’d be the ones meting out the oppression, rather than dealing with its fallout. The Louis CK bit about white people using a time machine vs. black people using a time machine hits this pretty succinctly.
right, it strikes folks as a better way of religion and/or life when they’ve grown up with the secular education and social skills they need to re-enter the outside world if they need to. I sympathize with the folks in this article, looking for a church that gets them, but isolation and simplicity just ring a million alarm bells. I appreciate how this article emphasizes “the Amish are flawed humans like the rest of us” but you need a few stories about people leaving these communities to get a complete picture of that.
6. A culture of coverup with regard to domestic violence, child abuse and — especially, because of course — sexual assault.
YES YES YES THIS. I just CANNOT deal with people who think the Amish are some kooky benign group of loners. They are an insular cult that repeatedly and consistently refuse to deal with the problem of sexual assault and incest that’s rampant in the community.
CAN YOU TELL I GREW UP NEAR LANCASTER PA????
yes yes I was not going to have too many feelings about this article but after reading all these comments I just want to hang out on here all morning yelling about how cults are terrible and these communities hit a LOT of the salient points on the Is This A Cult? checklist but get away with it because they are nice simple loving Christians, not wacky fringey types ranting about aliens.
I’ve heard they are mean to animals, too. As in puppy mill, shipping 40 dogs in a cargo van kind of mean.
They are TERRIBLE to animals. I have a friend who runs an animal rescue, part of her work is buying the worn-out mother dogs from Amish puppy mills by pretending to work for an animal testing company. So many of the dogs she rescues have never walked on grass or known any kind of kindness and I cry just thinking about it :(.
Lord have mercy, she has to pose as an animal tester!? That is so horrible and literally the only thing worse than being in a puppy mill. (Maybe a dogfighting ring. But still.) Poor babies.
by pretending to work for an animal testing company
This is legit the worst thing I’ve read today. Your friend is doing amazing work, and I hope she has some amazing self-care going on, because that sounds soul-crushing.
40 dogs per truck is an awfully low number if we’re talking puppy mill dogs.
No stop I picked a random too-high number already. (I literally just applied to a job at a shelter…)
My only experience with Amish has been very positive to animals – my parents are friends with a family who used to raise golden retriever puppies; we got our dog from them, and they then asked us to adopt the dog’s mother, who they had bought with her last litter, because they though she needed to “retire” rather than have more puppies. They also arranged to sell the litter of pups from their other dog through my parents, because they didn’t want to send them to a puppy mill style pet shop and trusted my folks to thoroughly vet prospective owners.
I know its just one family, but its not fair to say “They’re all like this!” when most of the people I know who are terrible to animals are “normal” members of society.
Re: shunning, this will break your heart, but it’s really good. I’d assign it immediately to all the “wishful Amish.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/…
That one is really good. The woman who left because she was an “old maid” at 25 only to realize that she didn’t have the English language skills or social connections to survive on the outside? Sheesh, I still wonder about her.
Number 4 is what appeals to these people. They want relief from the pressure of decisions and choices. It is human nature to seek a leader, someone to guarantee our safety if we only follow. It’s how we survived as a species.
What these wishful Amish don’t realize is that they can gain relief from decisions and choices if they just front load a little more effort. Give hard thought to their priorities and how they can streamline their lives to fit a limited number of goals. No cult leadership required.
Whoa whoa whoa. As someone who has wishfully thought that life would be easier if I could only muster up the fanaticism to believe in a leader, I would like to know more about this!
Be your own leader, is what I’m saying, in case you’re not just having fun here.
Many traits that allowed our survival are no longer necessary. Blind obedience to a leader is one of them. But cults worldwide can still take advantage of this vestigial bit of human nature.
Any anthropologist can expand on this subject. Or any book covering intro to anthropology.
I mean, I’m mostly joking about wanting to follow a leader, but what I really meant was that I’m interested in how people manage to (1) decide on their priorities and goals, and then (2) not second-guess them. (I’m reasonably well informed on anthropology, for a layperson.)
For example, I regularly flip-flop between wanting to keep my low-key job so I can focus on my family and home, and wanting to go back to pursuing the more high-pressure career that I was working on before having kids, even though that would mean changes to our lifestyle that I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy. Sometimes I wish someone–a charismatic leader, a patriarch–would just tell me what to do so I could stop agonizing over it.
For my spouse and I, finding a therapist who works in both couples’ counseling AND vocational counseling has been a godsend. If you’re in the upstate NY area I’d be happy to provide a recommendation!
I actually AM in the upstate NY area and I would be interested in this!
Ok! Shoot me an email at shakerethyl@gmail and I’ll forward you her contact info and website. I can also add you to our email list if you’re not on it yet — we’re planning to try to get together in Ithaca when Mallory and Nicole come to Cornell.
This service should be free to everyone who has a SO and a job. I wish I lived up there!
This has been the greatest discovery of my year so far (admittedly on a relatively small scale), so I am happy to babble about it!
So it turns out that the most exhausting part of life is making decisions about things, and the best way I have found to feel better about my life is to dedicate some time to making decisions. I started small, with meal planning. The only thing I hate more than making dinner after work is trying to figure out what to make for dinner after work. So I do it once a week, on Sundays, buy my groceries, and I don’t have to think about food again until next Sunday. It takes half an hour to start with, which is sometimes tough to do, but it makes the whole rest of the week easier.
To help me do the same thing with larger-scale things, I bought a Passion Planner, which is kind of like a more motivational version of GTD in paper form. (And an excuse to use sixteen different colors of pens.) It has pages for you to set your goals at the beginning of the year and at the beginning of each month, and even the daily planner pages have little sections to push you to think about long-term goals. After my freak-out about potentially moving cross-country to take a new job in December, I sat down and thought about my career goals for a while, and realizing that I actually currently have the job I would most like to have, that all my ambition is in non-job-related areas, was a huge relief. (For one thing, I’m not wasting my time applying for new jobs any more.)
But you know, getting to that point was…several years worth of work. I’ve read Barbara Sher’s Wishcraft three or four times now, and it helps every time – she’s talking very much about how to figure out what you want when you’ve been socialized to make other people happy and have no real idea what you want. (I’m also currently reading T. Thorn Coyle’s Make Magic of Your Life, which is similar.) And then she lists strategies for figuring out how to get the thing you want, even if it seems like a silly thing to want.
That’s the appeal of all of these simple-lifestyle, back-to-the-past traditions: to not have to do the hard work of figuring out what you want, to have someone else tell you what you want and how to do it. (I mean, I get it – I’m studying neopagan druidry, talk about back-to-the-past.) And it is work. It took me years to figure out what I really wanted to put my effort into doing, and I wouldn’t have been able to decide that I wanted to focus my energy on my art before last year when I finally had a full-time job that paid me enough to live on without worrying. One of my friends went the other way, deciding to spend more time on her art and work part-time. And that’s where the simple-lifestyle community falls apart for me – it doesn’t work the same for everyone, and you’re going to get squished into some corner that doesn’t fit you, somehow. The joy of the modern era is that you can pick the disciplines that work for you and still have the freedoms you need, but you have to pick, and that part is always going to be hard.
…And now I’ve written way too much and I’m going to just hit post before I decide to delete it all. Sorry, I think I’ve got some new-convert energy around this topic right now.
Oh gosh, this is a great comment. I just requested Wishcraft from the library. Thanks for sharing your experience! Sometimes I can’t tell whether I really don’t want something or whether I’m just being lazy, you know?
Oh my god do I know. I really think one of the things that has helped is getting things I thought I wanted that turned out to not be all that great. I’ve been lucky enough that those were always situations I’ve been able to get out of again (and that I’ve always known I don’t want kids, which I think would be the worst “Let’s Just Try It And Oops, I Was Wrong” situation), so trying again and again until I get something that works, and even then it took me six months before I realized that the thing that was working was actually working.
Part of the problem is that so much of this is experiential. Every time I have one of these breakthroughs I sit down and try to write it out, to explain what it was I figured out, and I realize there are fifty cliches that say the exact same thing, but none of them really worked for me until I figured it out for myself. Which is the part that sucks, of course.
(Another author helpful on the same theme is Gretchen Rubin. Her tone is a little syrupy for me sometimes, but she writes very frankly about trying things, finding out they’re not for her, and trying something else, which is reassuring in a sea of “just follow my rules and you’ll be fine” self-help books and gurus.)
I so glad you wrote about making yourself practice making small choices, and which writers/resources you’ve found helpful.
I’ve used Susannah Conway’s year in review a few times; and also appreciated Rubin’s books (I’m working through her podcast backlog – not loving it quite as much, but enough to keep going)
I’ve heard Susannah Conway mentioned a couple of times – I’ll have to check her stuff out too. Thanks!
And how do you know if getting what you want will be worth the agony of getting there?
For example. I HAVE always known I want kids, and I have two lovely ones. Yay! But do I want more? When I think of myself nearing the end of my life, then it seems clear: yes, I can readily imagine that I’ll wish I’d had more than two. But will having a satisfying number of children and hopefully–but not necessarily!–grandchildren as an elderly woman be enough recompense for the extreme hassle and expense of raising young children for twenty years? What if being constantly stressed out by having a large family permanently ruins my personality?
Or what if I decide that I do want to, say, double my salary by pursuing a higher profile career. Assuming that I even could, I’d then have to cut back on things that might seem frivolous but are important to me, like cooking dinner every night, and volunteering at my kids’ schools, and helping out friends in need, and getting a decent night’s sleep once in a while. So we’ll be a little (or even a lot) less financially stressed and I’ll have more prestige. Will it have been worth it, at the end of my life? I mean, possibly–money matters. But will it be enough?
What if I prioritize the wrong goals? What if I’m wrong about what my passion is? What if I change my mind, and it’s too late?
I know that these are unanswerable questions, which is why they’re so paralyzing.
No goals are wrong if they were carefully chosen. But some goals have a shelf life. When you feel something isn’t working, be prepared to jettison a goal as no longer useful. It wasn’t wrong at the time it was adopted. it would be wrong to keep it on life support when it’s time to let it go.
Yes! Just because a goal becomes something that no longer fits into your life, doesn’t mean you were wrong or you chose the wrong path or you failed. You followed a decision, you evaluated that decision, you absorbed whatever you needed to, and now you are looking towards new goals. No goal needs to ever be permanent. Like a rock climber friend says, “There is no cheating in climbing; as long as you get up the wall you’re doing it right.”
The unanswerable questions are the worst. The more things I try the more okay I am with “what if,” but that’s just acquiring more data to make better guesses, I think. And – I hesitate to say it, because it can be so easily misinterpreted – I think this is one of the areas where having depression has helped me? Because I’ve had to learn not to trust my own brain and its expectations about how I’ll feel about something. Depressed Brain is convinced that everything is awful all the time, but sometimes I’ve done a thing and it turns out not to be awful, so clearly my prediction that it would be awful was wrong, so assuming I know how I’ll feel about something tomorrow, never mind years from now, is pointless. (That said depression is The Actual Worst, if I thought about the years I’ve lost to bad brain chemistry I would burn everything down in a white-hot rage, 0/10 do not recommend.)
But a lot of neuroscience and psychology says the same thing – our brains just aren’t good at predicting how happy or unhappy we’ll be about a thing, because emotions blah blah blah neurochemicals frankly I don’t understand it but I do find it reassuring anyway. Humans are very adaptable, is the thing, and we’ll adapt to find pretty much any situation normal after a short period of time. Which can be both heartening, in that it’s easier to tackle hard things when you know you’ll get used to how hard it is, and depressing, in that it’s easier to settle because the disappointment will go away.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t know that looking at things from the perspective of “at the end of my life what will I wish I’d done” is very useful, because I know I’m so different at 32 than I was at 22 that I could not have predicted what would make me happy, so why should I assume I know what would make me happy at 102? All I can do is figure out what would make me happy now, and know that my brain’s natural equilibrium will iron out any of the downsides. As long as I keep taking my meds.
(If I am being preachy or unhelpful please tell me to stop and I will go away. I really, really feel for that sense of paralysis you’re describing, but I don’t want to make it worse.)
You are on a roll today. Very good stuff here.
::solidarity fist bump of chronic depression::
Thank you for posting, that’s fascinating!
This is such a great, helpful comment, thank you!
Thank you for such a detailed comment! I have been caught in the loop of “what do I actually want to prioritize, and how do I make any decisions about what to pursue when every decision means ruling out other possibilities” for a while, so I will be checking out Wishcraft immediately.
Lots of wisdom in this comment.
I just want you to know that this has made my day because you were one of the first people to give me fantastic advice when I started commenting on The Toast Dot Net. <3
You made me feel good! And you made me blush. Ahem, except I am too old to blush. That’s my official stance.
I’m going to just chime in here with another expression of “rosecamelia gives good and helpful advice.” Because yes.
I just use a collection of beans.
Wait, hold up, go back to the punitive dentistry because WHAT?
For women, no makeup and no hair removal, anywhere, at all.
The makeup prohibition is not a rule applied only to women. Amish culture is sexist and oppressive enough that the places where it’s not, like here, ought to be recognized.
(but re: double standards I am curious to know whether women for whom it is an issue are forbidden to shave their mustaches, because of vanity, or required to shave them just like men are, because of mustaches.)
Now I REALLY BADLY need to know whether there is church policy on this.
On the other hand, odds are the women shave their mustaches in secret because the men in power can’t imagine women growing facial hair. You know, like everywhere else.
At least they have an excellent defense if found out?
There might be different rules in different places! Religious authority for Amish tops out with bishops at a fairly local level, so there’s lots of regional variation in rules.
Not that I’m not also v curious!
I agree with the vast majority of that, although #2 isn’t always true– a lot of Amish (and Mennonite) communities do seek out modern medical care, vaccinate their kids, etc. It varies by community. It’s not like (say) the Christian Scientists, where refusing medical care is a central tenet of the religion across the country.
We have a local hospital that takes in a lot of Amish patients from surrounding rural counties. My mother used to arrange those patient transfers, and they sometimes had to send in medical helicopters so that they wouldn’t take a buggy to the hospital…
(The Amish don’t have health insurance as such, but they often have a sort of central fund where people pool savings for medical expenses).
I went to college in Lancaster, PA. I am here for ALL of your points. Also, 7. Puppy mills.
I wanted so badly to be Amish growing up. I had really romanticized notions of the past and becoming Amish seemed like the only way to achieve that. 10 year old me wasn’t even allowed to watch much TV, my only real hobby was reading, and I loved wearing dresses- it didn’t seem like that big of a leap! 27 year old me cries every night because I don’t have a dishwasher and thinks that 10 yr old me, who was also actively trying to sell her soul to any and every group that didn’t allow girls to go to school, was a big idiot.
Anyway, I still love reading about the Amish and that essay was so fascinating and well-done. But really, I want to know more about Alex’s fishkeeping.
In non-link news, I feel like the Toast has taken a very pro-dental health stance in the past few months, which has reminded me of my own shortcomings, but I still haven’t made an appointment. Well, something is wrong with my lingual bar. I’m in 0 pain but when I eat I just know it’s not right. I guess this is my official “come to dentist” moment. Of course it happens when I have two back-to-back long travel weekends and no schedule flexibility.
I finally went to the dentist last week; and she was totally non-judgemental about how long I’ve been between appointments, and it was really great and I’m way less anxious about going back tomorrow.
I went to the dentist last month, for the first time in YEARS. I gave the very lovely hygienist this little speech I had prepared about my Tooth Shame and how scared I get about Being Shamed At The Dentist, and she was very nice to me. Then she looked in my chart and said “ummmm… you are a midwife? You realize people feel like this before they come to see you for a Pap smear, right?” (I have told this story to everyone whose Pap test I have done in the past four weeks. EVERYONE.)
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was just going to post about my deep frustration with the romanticization of Amish and Mennonite communities. And conflation of all the different sects into one lump. What you’ve described above applies to most Amish and Old Order Mennonite groups. The “Beachy Amish” which this couple joined are quite different in some aspects.
So my mother was raised conservative Mennonite and her entire family, aside from her, still is. They embrace cars and most modern technology, including modern medicine, while rejecting pop culture/movies/tv and having a kind of pro- but wary relationship with the Internet, smartphones, etc. (Basically if it’s something you need/can use to run a business, they’re gonna find a way to use it and make it acceptable.) There’s more I could get into, but they still live in their own little subculture and of course women’s dress and hair is highly regulated, while the men (in these communities) can look like everyone else (aside from t-shirts with logos/writing and shorts). They look down on, and feel sorry for, Old Order and Amish types. Beachy Amish are more in the direction of this group, with a few more rules, I think.
Anyway, it only makes me sad, and I really fail to understand the adoration side of the equation. No one understands how back-breaking and hard and difficult a life without technology is (going back to the Amish for a second), and how constricting it is to have your life governed by a host of (arbitrary to our eyes) rules and minutiae. I mean, a slightly different hair covering has to be approved by the (male) leaders of the conference before the women can wear it.
Divorce is not allowed for ANY reason. For instance, the more “open-minded” folks might allow a woman to live separately from her husband IF he is getting drunk, beating her, etc. (alcohol is strictly forbidden), but she can NEVER divorce and remarriage is only permitted if one spouse dies. That’s it.
I could go on, there’s so much. But I honestly think it is sad and not enviable to choose to live in either system. If there are specific things you appreciate about someone’s “simpler” (it really isn’t) way of life, you can certainly adopt an aspect into your own life, without adopting extremism or an entire religious rule-based system.
I meant to reply to Amused, but looks like it posted separately. Anyway…
OH HEY this is my family story too, more or less, the details are different but the story is the same. Just a really crummy situation all around, and the people in the article reminded me so much of family friends who we know because they joined, looking for that simpler life, and ended up in a really bad place after.
If there are specific things you appreciate about someone’s “simpler” (it really isn’t) way of life, you can certainly adopt an aspect into your own life, without adopting extremism or an entire religious rule-based system.
This is a very big part of why I’m uncomfortable with religion in general – yes, there are appealing aspects of any religion, but so many religions have so much other stuff that goes along with that, a lot of which is not something I want to align myself with. I would rather just try to adopt the things that appeal to me without actually joining the religion itself, as I don’t want to sign up to the less pleasant stuff.
The Amish article is giving me the excuse to talk about one of my favorite things the internet has brought to my attention: Amish romance novels -https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/bonnet-rippers-the-rise-of-the-amish-romance-novel
Or, more precisely, Evangelical romance novels about the Amish that (according to Amish people) pretty significantly misrepresent Amish culture and how the Amish understand salvation and their relationship to God.
Yes! And that’s a big distinction between the various conservative sects. Their view of salvation/theology can be very different. Just because there are head coverings involved doesn’t mean the beliefs are the same.
Yesss! I read one of these a while ago out of curiosity, and although it was not particularly well written, it was oddly compelling and I still find myself thinking about it more often than I would like.
During my painfully earnest Christian kid phase, I read these. It’s like Laura Ingalls Wilder with more evangelical christianity and less Pa being a douche.
However, these novels avoid the trope of “Woman brings man to God by being super good. They have children (Average of 4 kids) and/or adopt children from a disadvantaged country where the kids would never know a loving god” which was refreshing.
Whoa whoa whoa your comment “like Laura Ingalls Wilder with more evangelical christianity” just reminded me of a series that I read during *my* painfully earnest Christian adolescence. The series takes place in Canada, probably during a slightly later (but not much) timeframe to the Little House series. The protagonist is a young woman who is posted to a rural community as a teacher and falls in love with a local Mounty. They get married and he is posted to increasingly more rural locations, like in the Yukon Territories and areas with a large Native population. The whole thing was super Christian (and probably pretty gross about Natives too, though that would have gone over my head at the time) and I adored them.
Does anyone else remember these books or am I crazy?
Janette Oke, right? Thinking it’s this: http://www.amazon.com/When-Calls-Heart-Canadian-W…
And yeah, her books were wildly popular in my Christian teenage years.
That’s totally it! Thank you!
Is this what the When Calls the Heart series that’s on the Hallmark Channel is based on? (I don’t watch it, but they advertise for it all the time.)
(No, I don’t watch the Hallmark Channel ever and I definitely do not find comfort in their made-for-tv movie cookie cutter cliches and bland characters.)
I would guess so? Looks like it from the IMDB.
Netflix has been trying to get me to watch this show and now I’m really not sure what to think about that.
Netflix has been recommending that to me based on North & South and the Murdoch Mysteries.
Janet Oke was a evangelical fiction machine.
Omg yes she was.
Wow, I didn’t even know that was a trope.
When I’m trawling Kindle Unlimited for books, I see these ALL the time. I try not to be judgmental, because lord knows that I, the pot who compulsively and secretly reads romance novels where hot men turn into an assortment of animals, cannot call the Amish novel reader kettles black.
I did try to read one once, just to see what it was like, but they seemed, like you say, oddly Evangelical in tone and religious content.
May I draw your attention to the work of Keira Andrews, writer of gay Amish romance novels? I bought the first one in the series, A Forbidden Rumspringa, because I thought it would be hilarious but the trilogy is actually really good! I mean, it’s good if you like romance novels.
Anyway, I’m sure they’re not perfect, but Andrews did a lot of research with people both in the Amish community and people who have left and the books do a really good job of showing a) distinctions between Amish communities, b) problems with being Amish (they don’t go into some of the really dark stuff like abuse, but the arbitrariness of a lot of it, shunning etc. comes across), c) what keeps people part of that community even if they have issues with it and d) problems people have on leaving. They’re v. melodramatic and soap-opera-y but honestly it’s one of my fave romance series and certainly doesn’t romanticise being Amish.
While reading the LA Times article, I couldn’t help thinking of the similar problematic-ness of straight women writing M/M romance. The authors may go in with good intentions, but all too often the work says more about the writer than about the people they are writing about.
This is exactly my problem with the Amish romances: they tells stories of allegedly Amish people, but they aren’t really about the Amish. They use the restrictions associated with the Amish to tell some kind of idealized story that’s actually about Evangelical Christians, often without getting the details right and without treating the culture with respect – even the respect of accurate criticism.
“A Forbidden Rumspringa”
I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop laughing when I read that title. It’s like something that Liz Lemon would be reading in high school.
This is so chilling (from the Daily Beast link) “Now, the state overrides her consent unless she can prove that she would be physically harmed by anesthesia or that she has a lethal fetal anomaly.” THE STATE OVERRIDES HER CONSENT.
At this point, I thought I was beyond horror at the state of abortion rights in this country. Wrong again!
Tangentially related.. There was a great long-form article on Slate about the impact of Planned Parenthood v. Casey a few days ago: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/cover_stor…
It’s horrifying. The state is going to now insist on the administration of risky drugs against medical advice? Can this stand up in court? Can doctors even ethically do that? If a doctor did administer anesthesia without consent and something happened to the patient, could he/she be sued for malpractice even though it was state law? I know I’ve talked to an abortion provider in Texas who says when he has to “counsel” his patients with incorrect information he made a point of saying something like, “The state of Texas says I have to tell you this, but it is not medically correct.” There’s not really that kind of workaround with anesthesia.
I nearly puked when I read that. My Googling was quick, so my numbers might be off, but for a typical abortion in the first 8 weeks, it looks like the mortality rate is 1:1,000,000; 1:29,000 at 16-20 weeks; and 1:11,00 after 21 weeks (not sure about weeks 8-16). The mortality rate of general anesthesia is 1:100,000. So basically, by restricting access to abortion, they’re making it more likely that a woman will not get one in the first trimester when a) 89% of abortions take place and there is <.05% risk of major complications and b) they are increasing the risk of the woman dying during the riskier procedure. How the fuck is this not “undue burden”? “Sure, you can have control of your life, as long as you are literally willing to put your actual life on the table.”
OT, but: Toasties, my grandmother died yesterday and I’m having a really difficult time figuring out how to cope with being A Mourner. On the one hand, she was 90, going senile, couldn’t get out of bed, and HATED being in a nursing home, so I honestly feel like she was so unhappy that this is for the best, but no one wants to hear that. On the other hand, she was viciously emotionally and verbally abusive to my mother, and left me painfully insecure about my appearance and clothes. I accepted years ago that I’ll never get closure, I never cut her out but I didn’t seek her out, I know my primary role right now is support for my mother…but I feel really uncomfortable with the dual role of “mourner” and “support for chief mourner” and hiding my feelings that boil down to, “I’m so relieved that she died before she could say anything insulting that my infant daughter will remember.”
When my mom died, and I was having problems balancing mourning her and supporting my dad as he mourned (they had one of those marriages in which they were each other’s best friend), someone pointed me to the Silk Circle concept.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/l…
My advice would be, be terribly honest with someone well outside the mourning circle, and mouth platitudes to those for whom the truth would be too much right now.
I’m so sorry, stirringsofconsciousness. I’m sorry you and your mother suffered from your grandmother’s abuse. All of your feelings are important, including the ones in conflict with each other.
It’s more than OK to be relieved that your grandmother’s abuse is at an end, that her unhappiness has ended. Is there someone with whom you can share your relief? You are correct in keeping your mother out of that conversation.
Ring theory. Your mother gets your support, others less invested than you get to hear about your feelings.
::Toasthugs::
I second following the Ring Theory on this one. When my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer it was a MASSIVE help for me in dealing with people. Also, grief is weird and everyone does it differently. Yours doesn’t have to match anyone else’s, and if someone doesn’t like the way you’re grieving that’s their problem.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/l…
Yeah, I have my husband and some close friends, and ring theory is definitely a part of my thinking. <3
oh, I do understand your ambivalent feelings, and you’re not alone; many people have ambivalent feelings when someone difficult dies. As you know, this isn’t the time to express your ambivalence, especially to your mother. That said, there will be a time in the future when you might — maybe as soon as in a few weeks or months. It’s not that you can’t ever express those feelings, it’s just that the timing isn’t right right now. Does that help?
It’s not that you’ll never express those feelings — it’s just that you aren’t expressing them right now, because it isn’t helpful for your mother, and that’s one of your forms of support for her. Also, you can still have those feelings even if you aren’t expressing them; that’s okay too. One doesn’t have to tell one’s mother everything. I know it sounds obvious, but sometimes it helps to remember. All best wishes.
My husbands Grandmother was like that. She had dementia when she passed and so was the nicest I’d ever seen her. He said he didn’t grieve, he just felt relief.
All of the things you are feeling are okay. Don’t let anyone tell you how you are supposed to feel about this.
Did you and your mother ever talk about what your grandmother did and said? Maybe your mom is feeling similarly to you but doesn’t know how to say it.
*hugs* I’m sorry you’re going through this difficult time.
Oh, we’ve talked about it and she’s preferring denial. Part of what’s driving my dissonance is that I’ve been secret-keeping some of the terrible things my grandmother said to me about my mother _from_ my mother, because she can’t handle it. She explicitly chose her relationship being surface-salvageable with her mom over me trying to curb some of the more unpleasant behavior (like making a face whenever my dad spoke — she hated my dad and refused to even pretend to be polite) before my wedding. So right now is very much not the time for real talk, if there ever is a time. And I’m not close enough with any of my cousins to know if they can talk about her unpleasantness, either — I’ve just got my husband, who only knew her for a few years.
My grandfather had a very difficult relationship with his mother most of his life– she was an alcoholic for many decades, and did a lot of arguing and criticizing.
She had a big personality change towards the very end of her life (after she lost her short-term memory, stopped drinking, and was put on anti-anxiety medication), and became a lot happier and more pleasant. Fortunately, my grandfather was able to make peace with her and spend some good time together before she died.
My great-grandma had a very hard life in many ways (losing her mother at age 5, being raised in an orphanage, losing her husband at a young age, etc.) I think she had lifelong issues with anxiety and depression (and severe post-partum depression), which they didn’t really understand or know how to treat years ago. It makes me sad to think about how much different her life might have been, if she’d had effective treatment earlier.
I’m sorry that you’re having a tough time.
I have experienced a similar situation to yours in two ways, when my Nana passed away and when my Grandma passed away.
My Grandma was 93, had Alzheimer’s, hated living in a home, etc. She caught pneumonia and died and it was both sudden and unexpected. She was a very loving woman, in her own quiet introverted way, and I have many fond memories of her. But I was able to see her passing in a sort of, not happy? but relieving way? I thanked people for their kind thoughts and words, comforted my mom, and was able to do my own grieving quietly and relatively quickly.
My Nana was 87, and she died of a final bout of cancer after beating it twice before in her life. And I hadn’t spoken to her for two years before then, with one exception two weeks before she died, because of her own behaviour. She treated my mom and my brothers horribly, in her own ‘prim and proper’ way, and she finally did something that caused me to unofficially cut off contact with her and let my dad do the visiting etc. So when she died, and my dad was distraught, I focused my attention on him. I thanked people for their kind thoughts and words, but I didn’t go into the details except with people I felt I wanted to share with. I’m sad she died, but I recognize that she wasn’t a kind person to people who didn’t fit into her world view, and while I’ll think happily on the childhood memories I have of her, they will always have a mental asterisk.
You can choose how to remember her, you can choose how to grieve. Nothing you choose is wrong because it is for you and not for others. If your way of dealing with this is just to support your mom and be publicly polite and stoic, then that is what is right for you. If you want to tell people you have complicated feelings about her, then that’s up to you too.
Sorry if this isn’t super coherent, or helpful. I hope you and your family have peace and love in this tough time.
(Also, if you don’t read Captain Awkward, here’s a great one that is a little similar to your situation as well? http://captainawkward.com/2016/01/21/817-death-st… )
Thanks, this really helps, and I was hoping someone would have a CA link handy!
Your feelings sound completely reasonable (I am surprised that nobody is likely to be receptive to “she was so unhappy that this is for the best”!). No advice, but much sympathy.
I’m so sorry you’re going through this. It’s okay to feel how you feel and deal with it in your own way. When my grandmother died, I didn’t share or relate to a lot of the ways my mom and sister were grieving, and I also didn’t feel comfortable being open with them about what I was feeling. I felt the need to be very private about my own grief (which included some ambivalence of the relieved “at least she didn’t suffer” variety). I tried to be a supportive (if stoic) presence as my family went through their feelings and pretty much turned outward to my now-husband and my therapist, who I could be much more candid with, to get support for me.
I’m so sorry. I’ve been there – my grandmother was also abusive to my mother and awful to me and my siblings, and it was really hard to balance supporting my mother (who was clearheaded about how bad her mother was and tried to shield us from the worst of it) with feeling not that bad about it myself. Others have given good advice about how to handle it, so i will offer a supportive fistbump.
It’s okay to feel however you feel, and it’s also very normal for people to feel conflicting (or just plain negative) emotions when someone they had a difficult relationship with dies.
Many people (even when they had a good relationship with the deceased) feel relief when someone dies after a prolonged or painful end– that’s perfectly normal and okay, too. I was very close to both of my grandmothers, but they both had long and difficult declines, and I was also very relieved when it was over.
And it’s okay to not to endorse any revisionist history (“what a great person she was!”) or force emotions you don’t really feel while supporting your mother.
I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this! Death is…weird, but your feelings are all valid. In the immediate aftermath of a traumatic/difficult event, I find it helpful to simplify priorities as that will ultimately make the process easier for me.
“Getting through this” is always the top priority, and dredging up the past (especially with grieving family) can create a lot of turmoil that can be difficult to manage on top of supporting your mom and dealing with your own feelings.
I read your comments downthread and it sounds like you feel comfortable talking openly about this with your husband and friends which I would totally recommend. I would wait to bring it up with family or your mom. It may be something that can be discussed more casually in the future, but not right now.
Having something to fall back on in conversations is really helpful for larger family gatherings, and for someone who was in your grandma’s situation, relief is a good feeling to reference with family members in a tactful way. I.E., she’s not suffering/in pain, etc. It’s also a good distraction from the underlying urge to say “yeah but she was a total jerk.”
I hope the process is as smooth as possible for you. Please don’t forget to be kind to yourself and make time to take care of yourself. 🙂
We really didn’t hear much from Rebecca in the Amish convert essay, did we? I’d be interested in hearing her take on everything.
Yeah, we know she exists and then she vanishes in the wind.
OT, but relevant to everyone’s interest: The Library of Congress has a subject heading for “Misandry in Art”
Don’t believe me? READ IT AND WEEP. https://lccn.loc.gov/sh97002513
😀 My fav is one my law librarian ex once pointed out: International booty. I always thought it would be a great name for a disco song.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85015785…
Once again sad that I didn’t take Admiralty Law in law school… 🙁
I did.
Piracy only came up once and I still insisted on referring to it as pirate law, even though it was really “how worker’s comp works totally differently on boats.”
For one thing, rum, sodomy, and the lash are treated much differently in land-based office environments.
The class lacked in all those things, but I got an A and only had to take night classes that semester, so.
Library of Congress Subject Headings can provide hours of entertainment. So bizarrely specific!
Welp, there’s a book I need to read.
I love LC subject headings for little kid books. Something about things like “Colors–fiction” really tickles me.
“an ogre, a princess, an ass,”
Isn’t that the cast of Shrek?
It’s just Shreks all the way down
Shreks within Shreks, man!
I love this place. I love all you weird Toastpeople. Here, I’m not unusual. No one stares.
Layers even…
Like an onion!
I’m dying here. Tears. So much laughter.
Or a parfait. Everybody loves a parfait afterall…
I was reading that Amish article this morning, thinking “oh I bet Nicole would enjoy this” and then here it is!
Off-topic: I got hit by a car yesterday and knocked out my front teeth. Suggestions for soft foods? I’m sure I can survive on peanut butter and ramen for two weeks, but I’d rather not. (I’m fine otherwise, just busted my face real good)
Ouch! I hope you feel better soon. 🙁
I’m pretty sure I could live on mashed potatoes for a week. Mashed potatoes with melted cheese….
Taking ramen as the minimum level of softness: Non-ramen pasta; rice; pudding cups; scrambled eggs; any pureed soup, like broccoli cheese soup or potato chowder or that black bean soup that someone shared in the comments here once.
Ugh that sucks. My bestie broke her jaw a few years ago and really relied on pureed veggie soups and smoothies with almond butter or peanut butter for added protein. She lost a scary amount of weight, and ended up drinking Ensure basically round the clock. Gross, but helps.
Oh, maybe Soylent would be a good idea. It’s supposedly better balanced than Ensure. Soylent 1.5 (the powder) is not bad. It’s not great, but it’s drinkable, and you can flavour it fairly easily. Soylent 2.0 (premixed in bottles) is apparently much better tasting, though I haven’t tried it and can’t confirm this. If I had a face injury I’d probably get some 2.0, so as to have something that requires absolutely zero effort, because healing and painkillers can be pretty tiring. Shipping in the US is apparently pretty fast.
I wish Soylent had been around when I had jaw surgery. Strongly flavored things were a pain and I wasn’t up to making food, so I lost terrifying amounts of weight despite literally drinking heavy cream.
Smoothies and soups and several different kinds of creamy desserts. Congee and scrambles and those vegetable medallions from IKEA. Layered concoctions that are usually served as dips (beans and avocado and cheese etc) but which your condition gives you latitude to eat with a spoon like we all secretly want. Find one of those lists of “exciting ways to top oatmeal!” (if you like oatmeal) and try them, keeping track of results for science*.
I hope your healing process is speedy and relatively stress-free! I am glad you’re okay, but oh man it sounds terrifying.
*I am interested to read your scientific treatise on oatmeal toppings if you choose to go that route.
Science! Yes, instant oatmeal adventures are in the cards for me.
I hope you feel better soon.
As for the food, it seems like as good an excuse as any to mostly eat just mashed potatoes and ice cream.
Unfortunately I have an exposed root, so cold things are too painful. However, I am going to eat raw Pilsbury cookie dough and nobody can stop me
Daal. Either homemade or from a reputable purveyor of Indian food.
Yasssss omg
OH MY GOD, I am so sorry you got hit by a car but relieved the damage wasn’t worse! How terrifying.
(Eggs? Hard-boiled eggs?)
Mayyyybe… I’m going to see if I can convince my partner to make me tofu “cheeze”cake filling and let me eat it all
I don’t know how your partner can refuse any request you make after you got HIT BY A CAR yesterday.
Hahah true, tofu cheezecake is very labour and dishes intensive though!
Oh my goodness, I am so sorry for your injury, that sounds awful. I hope you are ok!!! No suggestions for food other than the ones offered already. Get well soon friend!!
I’m glad you weren’t hurt worse, but as someone who is *still* dealing with childhood front tooth trauma 30 years later, you have ALL my sympathy. Fortunately, modern dentistry, though expensive, is amazing.
[Now I’m going to be in this corner, holding the front of my mouth and whimpering in solidarity. Yes, solidarity]
Yeah, the emergency dentist said I probably will need a double root canal. And then cosmetic if I don’t want to look really punk for the rest of my life.
Holy crap! Glad to hear that you are going to be ok! Sounds like a solid reason to have ice cream for all meals.
I’m glad you’re okay (apart from the busted-up face) – that sounds so scary! On top of the suggestions you’ve already gotten, I would add steamed dumplings, if you like dim sum.
Oh my goodness! That’s just awful. I REALLY REALLY hope the car’s insurance will be able to help with your teeth situation (I read about the exposed root- that sounds kind of scary.) Prayers for you if you want them! (sadly I have no food suggestions because I’m bad at these kinds of things.)
I hope so, it was 100% their fault. I’m going to see if they will pay for new glasses too, I have my spare pair but I could use some new frames. Thank you for the prayers, I’m not religious myself but I appreciate the sentiment
I’m glad you’re mostly okay.
I’ve been hit by a car, too. The most interesting bruises and the deepest aches didn’t show up for a couple of days, so be prepared. I would have liked to know that accidents may cause more hair loss than usual in the weeks or months afterward, so I suggest smoothies with leafy greens or a good multivitamin so you get lots of folic acid, niacin, and biotin.
I hope you heal beautifully.
OT (and a bit late) but I wanted to tell you guys that my mom is a BBC Global Philospher!! It’s a new thing they’re doing where they’ve gathered 50 or so people from all around the world to discuss relevant topics/current events & it is really interesting; this very first episode is about borders, immigration, and refugees. The radio program aired in the UK yesterday, but there’s a video as well (& my mom’s bit wasn’t edited out!! go her!!): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075ft6f
It’s late and probably no one will see this but I’m upset and so I’m telling the internet. We forgot to give my 5 month old baby her medicine this morning, so I ran over to the day care (small, in-home), which is just a few blocks away, to give it to her. When I got there she was lying on her back crying her eyes out. The provider said she’d been crying for about 15 minutes.
(Background: the provider told me Friday that that she cries way more than normal whenever she’s not being held, to the point it’s disruptive to the other kids. We’re trying to work on it at home, but it’s slow going.)
When I checked I saw she had a wet diaper, and told the teacher that might be why she was crying. She said, “yes, I change them all at 9:15 before their nap.” So she was just going to sit in a wet diaper for 45 minutes?
I had to leave to go to work, but as soon as I walked out the door I started crying thinking about my baby crying for 15 minutes with no one comforting her. Now I’m thinking we might need to find another child care situation, which stresses me the fuck out because I’m working full time and trying to find a new job (this one ends soon) and I just don’t have the bandwidth.
So, if any parents read this: is it normal for a baby to be left in a wet diaper for half an hour or more at day care? Is it normal to have to let a baby just cry for more than 10 minutes, because there are other kids who need attention too? Am I overreacting? Or underreacting? I feel like a horrible mother right now.
I am not a parent, but that does not sound normal at all to me 🙁
I ran a small daycare center a long time ago. “My” children were between 6 months old and 5 years old. We were never understaffed, but never overstaffed. No one was ever less than very busy. No child ever, ever experienced a wet diaper for more than 3 minutes after alerting us (crying, fussing, misbehaving). Every negative expression from a diaper-wearer elicited a diaper check. There is no excuse. Good child care is hard to find. If your instinct is to look for something better, do so.
Thanks so much, RoseCamelia. It’s SO helpful hearing from a former provider. And whew, yes, it is so hard to find! I know it’s also extremely hard work, which is why I wanted to check whether my expectations about things like diaper changes were unreasonable. I really appreciate it.
1) Please do not feel like a horrible mother. You are doing the absolute best you can, with the tools and information available to you. Aside from this, you are neither over- nor under-reacting. Your reaction is yours and it is just fine.
2) It is totally, totally reasonable to want to employ a child care provider who shares your parenting/discipline/child-rearing philosophies.
3) Today you received new information which you understandably want to combine with your prior knowledge and consider whether changes need to be made.
4) You are only one person, who is also holding down a full-time job and job-hunting.
5) You mentioned “we” a couple of times. Is the other part of “we” an adult partner who has more time and emotional energy available to start the legwork of finding a new provider?
6) IMO, cry-it-out and diaper changes only on a schedule (rather than on demand, as it were) are not ideal but will probably not damage your child in the short term. If they’re not acceptable to you and your partner, go ahead and search and make a change, but don’t freak/stress over it or put your ownself in a bad situation in order to get it done. I know it can be hard to find the right fit with childcare, and I wish you all the good luck in your search!
Thank you so much for this kind and thoughtful response. I do have a partner. I tend to be better/more comfortable at this sort of chore than he is (I have more of a network I can tap for advice, and much less anxiety about things like cold calls) so I tend to assume it will fall to me. But I can/should reconsider that default.
You are so welcome. Being a new mom is hard, hard work. I will just say, as someone whose babies are now in high school, that now is the time you are building foundations and starting habits of who will do the unpaid emotional work required in raising a child – finding and interviewing and managing the relationship with the childcare provider, with the pediatrician, with the neighborhood playgroup, with the preschool, with the elementary school/teachers, with the middle school/teachers, with the high school/teachers, with the extra-curricular sports/club/scout leaders.
IME, if you just cruise on into this thing based on your defaults, you’ll be defaulted in for the lion’s share of this type of work. If you want to take it on, that’s great! But don’t do it by default. Look this sucker in the face, talk with your partner about tradeoffs, and make decisions that are smart for all three of you, in the work that you as parents are doing individually, and what you are modeling for your child(ren).
Ouch. That is really upsetting. My gym comes and gets you if your child is inconsolable for 15 minutes, and that is with care-giver attention. I think your daycare provider is wrong not to console a crying baby, and you are going to have to find another situation. I’m really sorry.
If it helps at all, though, my guess is that the diaper was not the issue. As the mother of a now-toddler, the wicking action of a disposable diaper makes it basically unnoticeable to the kid. Unless your child has diaper rash or another skin condition, changing/checking for wet diapers every 2 hours is standard.
Again, I am really sorry. You are not a horrible mother! You are doing your best for your baby and your family. Maybe put your partner in charge of finding alternate care options, since you are also job hunting, and then interview together? It shouldn’t all be falling on you.
“My gym comes and gets you if your child is inconsolable for 15 minutes” Yes! My daycare calls me if my kid is in this state.
I’m a parent…we had some similar moments with our caregiver. We were able to work it out most of the time but eventually realized it was time to move on.
1. You are not a bad mom. You care about your baby!
2. You need to have a conversation with the provider about your expectations, but only after your emotions have cooled down to embers. You might want to make a list of the most important elements of childcare for you (and partner, if you have one). That way you might be able to go into the conversation with some perspective like, “This provider meets 9/10 of my top priorities, so if they can work with me on #10 I will keep the baby here.” or “They are only meeting 6/10 of my priorities; I probably should have moved on before now.”
3. IMHO, there is no way the baby should be crying for more than 10 min because she has a wet diaper. That is like childcare 101. Our daycare changes diapers on a schedule, but ALSO if the child complains (obviously?) That being said, every daycare has its group meltdown moments, and you might have just walked in during the exceptional one.
4. Talking to friends and colleagues seems to be the best way to find a new provider. I’m not very good at it, but every time I do I learn about options I never knew existed. As chiaroscuromom says, if you have a partner (or even a supportive friend or sister), they might be able to start the conversations with people they know, and then send you info, to take some of the pressure off of you.
5. My husband and I agreed before we had kids that everyone in the family was sometimes going to have to make sacrifices for the others, including the kids. If you decide your caregiver is not perfect but is okay, then maybe it is best for your family as a whole to leave the baby there until you get a new job. Then you can turn your focus to finding a better caregiving situation.
The best of luck to you and your sweet baby!
I am so sorry. My best friend’s son was a “cries more than normal” for a LONG time – basically any time he wasn’t being held, from the time he first started going until he started walking – and it was terribly difficult for her to know that he was receiving different, worse treatment from the daycare providers because he was a “problem child.”
As someone who used to work in a daycare, I will say that it was ABSOLUTELY not our policy or my experience to know that a baby was wet and just leave them there. We were always running around like crazy, but if we discovered a wet diaper, we changed it as soon as we possibly could. Speak to the daycare director. This is not normal nor is it best practices.
Yeah, that is my deep fear right now – that she will not be treated as warmly or affectionately because she’s difficult, and that this will be true in whatever day care she’s in. We’re trying to practice getting her more comfortable playing independently: putting her down and verbally reassuring her that we’re there, picking her up when she cries but then putting her down again as soon as she’s calmed down, etc. But I don’t know how much success we’ll have.
Thank you for sharing your experience; that’s very helpful. There’s no director to talk to – it’s a one woman operation.
I think you should listen to your gut on this. My best friend’s son had two daycare teachers, one of whom was understanding about the whole thing and one who was N.O.T. NOT understanding. She had to have a couple meetings with the director and the teachers and it still wasn’t great, but at least that period is over now that he is walking. (We called him “needy baby greedy baby” because he could just not be put down.) If there’s no one else you can appeal to, and she is the only care provider, it might be worth considering a switch. I know that’s immensely hard to do, but if you have a conversation with her and you feel like it goes nowhere… that would be where my mama bear side would come out.
It sucks because it’s understandable – of course a fussy baby is frustrating! – but if you’re trying to work on it at home, yet the daycare provider is NOT working on it with her during the day, your kid has less of a chance of learning. She’s getting mixed messages from her different caregivers, so maybe framing it as a “we’re trying to teach her to be less fussy, but she needs a consistent message and for all of us to be on the same page about this” conversation might help? Best of luck, seriously.
NOPE NOPE NOPE. I have both worked in licensed childcare and been a parent to a baby/toddler in childcare, and the standards in the states I have worked in are CRYSTAL CLEAR: children are changed every two-three hours unless they demonstrate need, in which case they are changed promptly. Children are not left unattended while crying for more than five minutes.
THE FIRST THING that should have happened when your baby started crying was a diaper check. In-home care is, of course, subject to different sorts of regulations than licensed center-based care, but the licensing rules exist for a reason: babies are incredibly fragile. I personally would prefer in-home caregivers to adhere to something similar, at least.
In your position, I would have, at minimum, a stern conversation about the circumstances under which my child was left alone to cry. Why can’t she carry your baby and complete her other duties? I have never met an infant childcare worker who couldn’t carry one child, feed another, and clean up a room basically simultaneously. Would it be possible for her to wear your daughter in a sling you provide when she is upset? And diaper-changing on (the baby’s) demand should be a given, and I’m baffled that it’s not.
I am SO SORRY this is happening to you. It is scary enough to leave your child with someone, and to find out things are happening that you aren’t comfortable with and wouldn’t have otherwise known is deeply upsetting. And it is really hard and expensive to wrangle full-time care. YOU ARE NOT a horrible mother, this stuff is just really hard and sucky.
Yup, this: “children are changed every two-three hours unless they demonstrate need, in which case they are changed promptly.”
“I have never met an infant childcare worker who couldn’t carry one child, feed another, and clean up a room basically simultaneously.”
This whole thread is giving me MAD respect for any and all childcare workers.
I’m not a parent, but I was the baby in a daycare drama. When I was one, I went to a daycare where (my parents discovered after several months) the provider would literally sit on me/hold me down when she thought I was being naughty or disruptive (and apparently she had a low bar for naughtiness, so I must have spent a good deal of time in that position). I have absolutely no memory of this, and at this point I think it’s kind of hilarious. Years from now, your daughter too can think, “Yeah, I was the disruptive kid in daycare who would not stand for the injustice of a wet diaper. I was basically the Norma Rae of nursery school.” She is fortunate to have such a wonderful, attentive mama!
You are not overreacting; don’t hesitate to trust your instincts. But also, being stressed out at the idea of finding other arrangements is totally understandable. You’re human! Balancing obligations is terrible!
If this helps, my eight-month-old just had a phase where she would cry if I wasn’t holding her, and I couldn’t set her down even to pee without her bursting into tears. It’s taking a while but she’s growing out of it, and I can now leave the room while she plays independently!
That is not normal. No wonder baby cries. Best of luck finding a better provider.
I really like Gretchen Rubin's podcast, Happier, that she does with her sister (they're a nice balance of each other)—haven't read her books yet, though.
Oh Paula Cole! “This Fire” is still on frequent rotation in my car. I think I got it second hand a few years after it came out. It was the first time I remember hearing real emotion come through music like that. So Angry. So powerful.
I have been listening to Paula Cole on YouTube this morning, and remembering the late 90s, and it’s been great.
I remember that at some point I got totally sick of Rick Mercer, but I can’t recall what it is he did that turned me off him.
Was it getting Clermont St renamed for him?
[i keed]
Oh, thanks for explaining why that bit was in my head unexpectedly; I hadn’t connected it
…All he had to do was die…
Totally OT but I had my yearly checkup this morning and finally got the tetanus and MMR vaccine booster shots! (I’m sure I had the MMR booster as a child, but I have no idea where my immunization records are and my doctor figured I may as well get it done just in case.) I am Very Bad with needles so it’s a big deal to me that I finally did it after years of putting the clinic staff off whenever they reminded me I was due for the tetanus shot. I also had blood drawn for tests so there were a lot of needles this morning. But it’s over and my needle-phobic ass didn’t even shed a tear!
Way to go!
I remain completely confused as to whether I need an MMR booster or not. I know I got it at least once in childhood, but am not sure if I got the second round? When I had a physical for college the doctor recommended it, but my mother turned it down. (She turned down all the shots he recommended except tetanus booster, though I did have childhood vaccinations. Long story…) Most of what I’ve read has been “you probably don’t need it,” but I still wonder?
Immunity from childhood can occasionally wear off. It can’t hurt to get a booster, or, if your insurance will cover it, your doctor can run a test (titer I think it’s called?) to check whether you are currently immune. I found my gyn to be very helpful to guide me on this, because if you have any interest in getting pregnant they really want you to be protected, but it is not safe to get a booster while you are pregnant.
Yay for vaccinations and for everyone who is brave about needle issues to protect the immune-compromised!!
Thanks!
They can do a blood test to check if you have immunity- my ob did mine when I was planning to get pregnant since you can’t get the MMR vaccine during pregnancy, but presumably they can do it whenever. If there were an outbreak of one of the diseases it protects against near me or if I were doing some major traveling I’d probably have it checked, but if your risk of exposure is low it’s probably not a big deal.
Oh, that’s good to know! Thanks!
One consideration, though: depending on your location, insurance, etc, the titer test to see if you are still immune could turn out to be a lot more expensive than just getting the vaccine. (With my insurance, for example, vaccines are very nearly free and exempt from deductible while lab testing is not.)
So unless there’s a specific medical reason you should not have the shot, you could just get it and it won’t hurt you even if you’ve still got the original immunity. Even if you’re super needle averse, I assume getting blood out of you for a test is going to require something sharp and pointy and then you might still have to get the shot later.
Rick Mercer. ♥
I had the same reaction when I heard that story about refusing to allow people with Down’ss syndrome to immigrate.
Is there such a thing as grandparents’ rights? That doesn’t sound like a thing. I was reading Dear Abby ( http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20160330_Upse… ) about someone who was upset her son was donating sperm to lesbians (to make a biracial baby! she mentions it twice but she’s not upset about that because she’s totally not racist and has a biracial kid of her own!) thinking she has some sort of rights to the children produced by her son’s sperm.
This is just a controlling mother, right? Your parents can’t actually force you to do anything with your kids?
WOW, oh my god, no. That woman is awful and “grandparents’ rights” are often something that narcissistic/controlling parents will invoke as an attempt to manipulate their adult children. (As far as I know, some states have laws that allow grandparents to formally petition for visitation rights, but it varies from place to place and the ruling is made according to the best interests of the child. I don’t think it’s ever a thing in adoption cases, though.)
Yeah, the narcissist/controlling manipulation makes sense here. Also “I don’t think it’s ever a thing in adoption cases, though” was one of the reasons my bullshit meter pinged during the lady’s letter- good luck getting sperm donors if they need to get their parents to sign rights away for it.
They do exist, but not in the way grandparents that shriek about them think they do. I haven’t researched in depth, but my understanding is a grandparent would have to prove they had a significant role in a child’s life and by not seeing them any more the child would be harmed.
It does not mean “MY CHILD HAS PROCREATED, I MUST HAVE ACCESS TO THE CHILD BECAUSE THEY ARE MY BAAABBYYY and so I will take you to court!” Grandparents’ pretty much have no rights when it comes to grandchildren. Which I’m sure this LW was very thankful for.
Thaaaaaaaaaank goodness.
As I recall from taking family law classes 10+ years ago, US case law is pretty consistent that grandparents have no legal rights in regard to grandchild visitation, their children’s sperm/ egg donation, etc.
The only situation where grandparents could conceivably take legal action is where the parents are unfit (due to abuse/ neglect) and the grandparents are seeking legal guardianship of the grandkids. And that has to be approved by a court.
Some states allow limited grandparents’ “rights,” related only to visitation. In my state grandparents can petition if they can show a preexisting relationship with the child and harm to the child after the parent (s) ceased allowing visitation, with the final determination based on best interests. This can either be a very good thing or a very nasty thing and more times than not it’s the latter because the grandparent gets visitation because the parent lacks funds to contest it and then starts acting as if they have custody or decision making capability.
That last part is scary.
I have seen those ugly cases. I’ve also seen parents hurt their children immeasurably by using them as pawns in struggles with their grandparents who love them. There aren’t good answers. 🙁
IIRC, this got mentioned in The Toast some time back.
This one, I think: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/
Yes and thanks!
oh, man, down the rabbit hole I go
Haha, right? It’s like 10 pages of “best of DWIL”, but with seemingly qualified psychological analysis.
Are we aware of this? http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/28/th…
It is, in fact, better than it has any right to be.
The Episcopal Church welcomes you!
Which now has me thinking about how Amish women probably aren't even allowed to use THOSE, because they're too modern, and not that that's the only reason I wouldn't want to go back in time, but Improved Period Technology is definitely one of the bonuses of the modern age.
I just put a bunch of Paula Cole on hold at my library because of that article! I was such a young snob when it came out and she was "too mainstream" for me