#7, meatballs, and motherhood

I love Oragel. And Tylenol. And, for the really bad nights, I love Children's Advil. I am not a woman who usually praises brand names. But this stuff helps us all to not go mad from sleep deprivation and lets our little trooper sleep at all.

For the last two days Jupiter has been working on his seventh (seventh!) tooth. He has been quite the little grump. He didn't even want to eat his dinner tonight. On a typical night he fusses if I don't feed him fast enough. Tonight he sat in his chair and cried. Poor sweet boy. Poor neglected homemade sweet potatoes with leeks and cauliflower and cheese. Hopefully the tooth will break through tomorrow.

Dinner for us parents, however, was divine. Oh yes. Spaghetti and meatballs from scratch. Or, as the author of the recipe more properly names it, Meatballs and Spaghetti. I made 25 meatballs with this recipe, for 1.5 pounds of pasta. Way more meat than your standard recipe, and so very comfy and hearty and delicious. This is an obscene amount of food for two people and really should have been prepared for a dinner party, but it sounded so good I had to try it. So most of it is living in the freezer, most likely to be enjoyed by future family (free! and deserving of dinner) babysitters in the coming weeks. You know who you are. And if you're not family and you want to sit for us for free and eat meatballs, just let me know.

On another note, there's been some thought provoking discussion going on amongst friends, initiated this time by my friend and fellow blogger on Facebook. We were discussing what some writers have deemed "the cult of total motherhood," a riff on the late 19th-century "cult of True Womanhood" phenomenon, and how it has made us all feel guilt for some thing or another (or several things) during our time as parents. In a nutshell, the total motherhood ideology promotes what comes across as "wholesome, attachment parenting": baby-wearing, making your own organic baby food, co-sleeping, breastfeeding for at least a year, etc. It's a parenting style that assumes parental control of how kids will turn out, and that mothers (yes, more than fathers) should gladly shoulder the responsibility of making every conceivable effort to give their babies the best start imaginable. First-time parents are especially vulnerable to the guilt that comes from not playing along, because we haven't yet grasped the near-futility of all the constant exhausting effort we put into trying to produce the best children possible. It's a difficult discussion that often pits science (with all of its faults and biases), against women's intuitive knowledge (which is at least partly defined by the discourse of motherhood, for good and for bad), against the practicalities that emerge from our modern way of life, especially if we work.

So I've started to read Maternal Desire, by Daphne de Marneffe, which takes the two poles of the conventional, even feminist, discourse about motherhood and strives for a third way. Rather than seeing child care as selfless sacrifice and or as something to be delegated in favor of career goals, de Marneffe asks if there is another way to think about motherhood that acknowledges and respects as valuable the desire to parent (the maternal desire) that many women feel, rather than assuming that parenting is something to be worked around or resented. She's not saying we can "have it all," but rather asking (in a sort of radical, meta-feminist way) why we would want "it all" at all. I have not read very far into the book yet, but I think it will help me think about some of the more anxiety-inducing elements of the culture of total motherhood that I find myself often hewing to.

That is, if I can make the time to read it.