The Critical Mom's Guide to the Bilingual Child

Expect them to talk a lot and to mix up their languages constantly until they are two, four, five . . . depends on how many languages you have them on.  Ignore teachers who insist that they should speak the national language at home or who threaten they won't be able to spell.  Teachers are wrong about this.  From birth to three or four children can absorb as many as five languages.  I've known children raised on three, and mine are on two:  German and English.  Curiosities of their speech include the straight mix--as in "Wo sind meine red shoes?" and the cute translation, as when a package arrives and they want to unpack it, but they don't know the English word for "unpack," so they just translate the German one, "auspacken":  "Mommy, can I pack it out?"  For a long time your American friends will say the kids have a German accent and your German friends will say the kids have an American accent.  Ignore both sets of friends.  The kids actually sound unusually precise and correct to the Americans, and the Germans find that they have a peculiar freedom of intonation that sounds almost inspired, if not sloppy.  Read to the kids constantly in the language that is not spoken outside the house--English--and insist that they speak that language at all times at home.  When they complain, "But Mommy, I don't know the English word for  . .  ." you will have to learn the German words for "goal," "referee," "penalty kick," and "goalie" in order to explain, and then you will have to insist that they talk about soccer in English.   Go back to reading The Cat In the Hat, Goodnight Moon, Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Seven Silly Eaters, The Dutchess Bakes a Cake, Tikki Tikki Tembo, The Gruffalo, and any other book that delights while instructing.  The very first rule is that when you're reading an English-language book to your child you have to enjoy it.  If it bores you you'll read it badly; if it has a moral it's bad for the kid.  Then they'll get older and they'll only know certain words in German because they never hear those particular words . . . the really big cuss words . . . at home.  They only hear them at kindergarten, and then first grade, and they only hear them in German.  And to make matters even more charming, the teacher has the idea that the kids should learn what words are not acceptable to say, everybody write them all down, and by the end of the lesson your child has absorbed the unimaginable phrase "Ass-faced ass fucked," which actually rhymes in German, and even sounds good, provided, of course, that you don't understand it.  Which is the thing I was always counting on when we visited New York and all three kids used to scream obscene insults at the top of their lungs.  "Oh," I'd think.  "Thank God nobody around here understands a word of that."  Except that then they get their own computers, find the horrible stuff on You-Tube before you get there, and learn all those awful phrases, and more, in English--and doubtless in other languages.   Keep reading to them, even if you're hanging on by your fingernails; they are probably ready for everything from the Madeleine L'Engle books to The Wizard of Oz to Rick Riordan to the ever-present Diary of a Wimpy Kid, (complete with endless sequels and movies) with which they impress their friends by having it in English.  Enjoy it when they speak English, too, even when the two of you aren't quite speaking the same language, as when I told my daughter, then three, that she and I would be flying to New York, and she asked, "Mommy, do we have wings?"

The Critical Mom's Random Recipe

Here's the leftover spaghetti-or-noodles-or-rice-enough-for-two recipe.  Get out the chopping board and dice, in four separate piles, the following:

one red onion

one piece of fresh ginger half the size of your thumb

A few cloves of garlic

A carrot (you can grate it)

Put a few tablespoons of corn or plant oil in a deep frying pan, and let it get hot.  Dice the fresh ginger and put it in the pan.  When it smells good, add a bit of diced, cured ham or bacon.  Continue to sauté both and add the onion until it gets transparent, then the garlic, then the carrot.    Don't dump in everything at once--this comes out better if you wait til you can really smell the onion or the ginger cooking before you add the next ingredient.  When all four are in and sizzling, add the rice, spaghetti or noodles and stir.  Then add an egg or two and mix well until the egg is coating everything and holding together the ingredients.  Turn down heat; add a dash or two of sesame oil--the very brown aromatic kind--and stir.  Turn off heat and add a few dashes of light soy sauce.  Also a dash or two of Tabasco, unless you're serving this to children.  Voila

The Critical Mom's Guide to the Fifth Grade Boy

He's not a little kid.  You're reminded of the day he turned three: when you picked him up from day care, he categorically refused to sit in the stroller.  It took half an hour to do a two-minute walk, since every neighbor's yard had to be invaded, flowers sniffed and occasionally beheaded, dogs provoked, sticks swung at hedges, glittering objects, some of them broken glass, examined and even bitten into before Mommy managed to get there (running and panting since she was carrying the baby sister in a snugli).  You began to appreciate the effort that would go into protecting him as he got older. 

And now it's not drugs, sex, alcohol that you're worried about, although the occasional flasher appears on the tram, it's impatient girls and dumb teachers.  The population of both is dramatically on the increase.  One of the good things about elementary school was that you could always point to Gymnasium (the academic high school here) as So Much Better or tell them Things Would Seem Different Later.   But now he comes home from school saying "This girl keeps poking me in the shoulder with a pencil when I'm trying to read during recess.  Why does she do that?"  And I advise him that she likes him.  Irked, he replies, "Why can't she keep it to herself?  I liked a girl in third grade, and I KEPT IT TO MYSELF!"  I suggest that he will feel differently in a few years.  And now his brother has the same problem:  "The girls.  Pointing and giggling.  Hee hee hee!  He looked at me!  He looked at me!"  A terrific mimic, he wriggles and tosses his head like Hannah Montana and I get the picture.  They'll be all over my kids, those girls, in just a few years.   The dumb teachers are way ahead of me trying to get them ready.  They do sex ed in third grade here.  We did it in sixth, and back then it was the Disney black-and-white Story of Menstruation and you could hardly tell what was going on, except that the voice-over lady thought it was bad, and wouldn't ever stop until you were in your fifties.  As I recall she took "Mother Nature" to task for pulling a fast one.  Our biology teacher, the stereotype of the schoolmarm, came upon a chalked image of a condom, labeled "condom" that the young, cool teacher had drawn on the board, and said, "What's that?" But my younger son got, in third grade, "a horrible book, Mommy, ugh, tickling breasts and hairy penises! I don't want to read it!  I've got a stomach ache."  I took a look at the book, clearly geared toward adolescent girls and not pre-pubescent boys, called his teacher, and told her nine-year-old boys don't like to read about foreplay.   She took on that voice you use with the impossible child, the "now, now," voice.  She was the kind who thought eight and nine year olds like to hear about "the baby growing within me!"  Which is of course the last thing they want to hear.  What they want to hear is:  "I'm your Mom away from Mom!  And if you happen to notice that I'm getting ah, this slightly overgrown belly, well--let me take the whole class out for ice cream!"  But now it's worse:  his brother had the teacher the kids started to call the "Old Aryan."  The Old Aryan, a dandruffy guy in his fifties,  was talking about Hitler's notions of Aryanism, and pointed to a blond haired blue-eyed boy as a German and a good example of "Aryanism."  But then the old Aryan singled out a boy of Russian and Turkish descent who has brown eyes and brown hair and said, "Now, he's not an Aryan German."  My legally-minded kid is taking notes, and has warned his fifth-grade brother, who has yet to meet the Old Aryan and has gleefully announced that his teacher had told his class that it was THE WORST CLASS IN THE SCHOOL and that IN NINE YEARS OF TEACHING she had never seen such a bad class.  And if there was one more peep out of them they'd each write 1,000 words on Why They Should Keep Quiet When The Teacher Is Talking.  "And Mommy," he added, "she was almost up to threatening 3,000 words by the time the class was quiet."  I advised him that my class had also had the distinction of being THE WORST CLASS IN THE SCHOOL--we'd actually taken over the assembly hall on the last day of classes to sing "Teach Your Children" to the whole school.  What?  Oh, that old song, he says when I sing it, and turns on Bravo Hits.

The Critical Mom's Guide to Onions

I did post something on onions, the wonder drug, but oh, they are such a staple!  Cooking and colds, in that order:

(1) Dice them and throw them in boiling olive oil.  Turn the heat down, cook until transluscent, and then add the food of your choice:  bulgar, ground meat, vegetables.

(2) But they make your eyes all teary?  Now you have the best excuse in the world to sip a glass of red wine.  The cure for onion-induced tears is a glass of red wine.

(3) The kid has an earache?  I assume that you, like me, have a shopping bag of mismatched socks.  These are of course good for lots of things--art projects, especially making patchwork dolls, but they are essential in an earache situation.  Take a room-temperature onion and chop it into eight or ten pieces.  Divide between the two socks; tie a knot to keep them in there.  The kid should hold them against his ears and you should provide him with a ski headband or hat--cotton if you have it--to put over his head and hold those onion-filled socks against his ears.   The idea is that he should sleep on his back that way, keeping the onions against his ears; the onions act as a decongestant. Meanwhile, he should take a natural (plant-based) decongestant--Sinupret is a good one and can be found in Western Europe and the U.S. and contains:

• European elder 36
• Common sorrel 36 mg
• Cowslip 36 mg
• European vervain 36 mg
• Gentian 12 mg.
   Besides the Sinupret--and a dose of Umckaloabo would help too--he should use a sea-salt nose spray.  Unless an infection has really taken hold, the kid should feel better in the morning.

The Critical Mom and The Relative Who Won't Take No For An Answer, Part Two

The first glimmer of understanding dawns when you have a child yourself--or when you are pregnant.  When I was pregnant, the relative sent a package:  "by accident I ordered maternity clothes for myself."  At seventy-eight?  I pulled a few tents, apparently designed for an obese pregnant giantess, out of the package--then stuffed them them back in the bag.  At the relative's second marriage, she'd somehow known my size and taste exactly and presented me with a gorgeous Anne Klein cocktail dress and scarf to match.  At her wedding I naturally had to look good.  Then came the visit:  in the changing room of a swimming pool the relative observed my belly, seven months along:

"My, what a big tummy you have!"  The look on her face reminded me of a story a friend had told about preparing her two-year-old for the birth of his brother.  Once her pregnancy was visible, she informed him that a baby was growing inside her and got the predictable response:  "We don't need one!  Send it back!"  My friend explained that she could not do so, and tried all the usual tricks:  "you'll get to take care of him, he will look up to you, you can teach him things because you're so much bigger and stronger . . . " and got the usual responses:  "We don't need it!  Take it back!"  Finally, when the mother to be was about to go to the hospital, she explained that she'd be coming home with his baby brother and he burst out: "Well, if you bring it, I'll take it to the market and trade it for an elephant!"  The sadness on the relative's face, which quickly reverted to a somewhat malicious glee as she discoursed on my "fat tummy" developed along with my pregnancy.  Allowed to hold the baby, she seemed about to burst with the thrill:  "Are you SURE?" Eyes very wide open.  "I don't want to drop him!"  We hovered as she held him.  Things improved when he was old enough to be her playmate, but she never got the hang of asking what size he was or buying appropriate clothes.   But one day she did ask if we needed anything.  "Oh, no," I said.  But she really wanted to get something.  "Surely there's something you need!!"  Well, indeed, but did I dare ask her?  Back in the days before internet shopping you couldn't get heavy waterproof snowsuits where I lived, in a village in Bavaria, and when she inquired about Christmas I suggested one of those.  Along came a package and my heart soared:  she'd really gotten the snowsuit!  I opened it.  Inside I found a thin felt garment in the shape of a star:  as the package said, "for your little star."  Just as I was feeling the material and realizing he'd never be able to wear it outside in winter, my normally calm husband took one look and yelled, "He can never wear that!"  And then I saw what I hadn't noticed before:  a prominent gold star, remarkably similar to those that during the Third Reich, Jews were forced to wear in Germany--which is where we were living.  As my best friend said:  "she just thought hmmmmm--stars, Germany--they have something to do with each other.  I'll get that!"

The Critical Mom and The Relative Who Won't Take No for An Answer

"Only the worst for you, dear," she might as well say, and she says it with such a smile that you could, if you did not know her, think that she means well.  She knows that she means well.  But she's so excited when something goes wrong.   She's jumping up and down and there are words approximately connected to the scene coming out of her mouth:  "I'll call a taxi!  I'll call a doctor!"  but you know that if you don't want a taxi or you don't want a doctor or you don't want her to call either of them she will pout and sigh and tantrum unless she is smiled at and reassured.  She seems less excited when things go right:  at your wedding she complained to other guests that you were off bouncing around the dance floor with the groom instead of talking to her.   She loves to ask if you need help, and she positively glows while inquiring whether anything is wrong.  "Don' t you need something for the baby?  Anything?  I could go to Duane Reed right now: it's on the corner.  Can't you think of anything you need for the baby?"  But she doesn't really mean the one in your arms.  You really do need talcum powder.  Off to Duane Reed she whirls, all 90 pounds of her, and then you and the baby go home.  An hour and a half go by.  It's getting late.   The baby is in her bed and you're sitting up wondering if you should call the hospitals or the cops.  In she comes with a wild-eyed look.  No talcum powder.

"You know, I didn't really think you needed it.  But if you do, it's in aisle seven!"

You flick on the news.  Christiane Amanpour is talking.  She is saying something about Iraq.  What she says is something you want to hear.   The relative who won't take no for an answer begins to rustle around in her chair.  She takes out a lipstick, drops it on the floor, mutters an annoyed sound, and finds it.  She sits up again and points:

"That's Christiane Amanpour!!"

You know that if you say anything at all, from yes it is to I know that, she will keep talking.  But sometimes she keeps talking anyway.  "She's the anchorwoman!  She's the first woman to . . ."  You try to hear what Amanpour is saying about Iraq, but even when the relative stops talking you can't listen anymore.  The baby wakes up.

"Oh, does she need something?  Is she all right?"  You try to explain that the baby just needs some quiet, so the volume of the relative's voice increases: "Don't you want to check on her?  You're her mother!"  I have been a bad mother is written all over her face.  A mother who does not pay attention to her child, the child who is bouncing up and down in front of Christiane Amanpour, the lady on the TV who is also taking attention away from her.  I turn off the TV.

Recipe of the Week: MEATLOAF

Here's another What to Do With The Leftovers special:

Preheat oven to 180º C or 375º F Get a pound (or one and a half kilos) of ground MEAT OF YOUR CHOICE.  Add two eggs.  Shake in garlic powder or garlic salt.  Dried soup greens (Shoprite quality is fine) are a good addition, as is any "Mrs. Dash" seasoning that you happen to have in front of you.  Mix all and set aside.

Look in the fridge.  Remove from the cooler the slightly old, limp celery and the equally limp carrots.  Cut off the non-usable parts, peel the carrots.   Throw the peels and celery ends into the guinea pig cage and experience an ecstatic gratitude that you never get from children (Squeak, squeak!  Wow, this is great!  Food!  You are our goddess, our savior!  We love you!) Wash the parts of the celery and carrot that you plan to use and set aside.

Put a pan on a hot burner, add a tablespoon or two of olive oil, keep on middling heat while you dice an onion.  Add onion to pan and stir occasionally while you chop carrots and celery.  When onion is translucent, add diced celery and carrots and about a cup of water.  Add a teaspoon of dry chicken broth or salt.  Let celery and carrots simmer until water is absorbed (long enough to check an e-mail or two, but if your mix burns slightly, pour all into strainer, rinse, and dump into meat mixture)

Stir all well together.  Add about a cup of dried rolled oats (oatmeal) or, if you prefer, grated bread crumbs.  But the oatmeal gives the whole mix a nice flavor.  Mix in a can of crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce.  Grate a block of Parmesan over the top--enough to cover the meatloaf.  Put in pre-heated oven and cook for one hour. 

If you don't happen to have a pile of leftover celery, you can use frozen peas.  Or open and drain a can of corn.  Or make it without vegetables--it will still taste good.

Home Alone: The Critical Mom's Guide

You never leave them home alone, right?  Not when they're babies, unless they're sound asleep or zoned out watching Baby Mozart while you rush out with an armful of laundry, wait what seems like ten hours (but is really 79 seconds) for the elevator, and spend every moment you're putting the stuff in the machine wondering if they are staring around the room wondering where Mommy is, panicking, and screaming.

It never happened that they were.  You always came back to a sleeping or smiling child, who hadn't registered your absence.

Then they get older, and while the ten-year-old's sister is at ballet class, the ten-year-old goes to soccer, and that's good since that's the one day the babysitter can't come and you can't be in two places at once.  But now the soccer schedule is changed, so that he--and I tell myself after all he is now a  fifth grader--is home alone for two and a half hours, about seven minutes of which will be consumed by his "it's incredibly easy, Mommy" homework.

So you call to see if he is okay but also to ask him to put the meatloaf casserole in the oven and turn it on, so that when his father and sister come home in an hour, they can all enjoy dinner together. You rehearse with him before you leave the opening of the oven door, the removal of the casserole from the fridge, the removal of the plastic wrap from the casserole, the insertion of the casserole into the oven, the closing of the door, and the turning of one dial to 180º and the other dial to "bake," represented not with a word, as would be convenient, but by two parallel lines.   "Yes, Mommy, I heard you, now lea'meaahhhhlohhhhne!"

So this is how it goes when you call him from the ballet school,

Me: "Hi, sweetie!  Can I ask you to put that thing in the oven now?"

He: "You know, Mommy, the other day when I said that stuff about being a housewife was easy?  I was wrong."

Me: "Is everything okay?"  It couldn't be--that much I had figured out just from his voice.  He had complained about the food not appearing in front of him fast enough at lunch the day before, and advised me that Daddy did all the work but I did none.  I had muttered something about the tips in this restaurant being lousy and maybe I'd work elsewhere, and I'd told him that the food just cooked itself and jumped on his plate, the way his dirty clothes marched themselves into the washing machine, cleaned themselves, and jumped back out completely folded.  None of my speech had impressed him at the time.

Now he offers a giggle and asks if I remember the time he was two years old and he wanted to pour chocolate sauce on some ice and I wouldn't let him?  I don't remember the time and I do not want him eating chocolate sauce in the middle of the afternoon, and I let him know that.  Giggles.  "Don't worry Mommy, I kind of made a mess but it's okay.  Just kidding!"

"Could we get that casserole in the oven now?"

"Okay.  Mommy, I was thinking about what kind of apartment I should have when I'm eighteen.  Do you think I should have three rooms, four rooms, or five rooms?"

"How many rooms would you like to have?"

"I think I would need a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom, so four rooms."

"That sounds good.  Could we get your dinner in the oven now?"

"Yes.  Mommy, when I'm eighteen and I have my own apartment, can I come back and visit you and Daddy at Christmas?"

"Yes, of course you can!  We would expect you to!"  And I want to reassure him that we love him, but I'm distracted by the thought that if that meatloaf doesn't get in the oven there won't be any dinner.   "Could you open the oven door first?"

"Yeah, okay, Mommy.  I'm doing it now."  Feet slap across the kitchen floor. 

"And now put in the casserole with the plastic wrap off?"

"Yeah!  I did!"

"And now turn the first dial to bake, the one with the parallel lines."

"Okay, is that the second one down?"  He's sounding a bit irritated.  We talk about the dial.  Now the casserole is in and the oven is on.  The other dial is set, I think.

"And you did take the plastic wrap off?"  I'm afraid he's going to explode and tell me he already told me he did that.

"Oh, yeah!  The plastic wrap!  Okay, now I'll take it off."

I thank him and hang up.  Five minutes later I call him back and ask him about the apartment he wants to have when he is eighteen, and he tells me more about the layout, and I tell him I love him and Daddy loves him and we really want him to be with us for every single Christmas for the rest of our lives.

When my husband gets home there's chocolate sauce all over the floor and the inside of the microwave.  Our ten-year-old couldn't get the lid off the chocolate sauce, and thought it would be a good idea to put it in the microwave and melt the chocolate that was gumming up the lid so he could get the chocolate out of the bottle.  I panic and tell him please not to put a glass bottle straight out of the fridge into the microwave again and realize he has figured that one out.

But the casserole was delicious.  Perfectly baked.   Plus, he'd like it if I taught him to cook a few things, so that when he's eighteen he can make himself dinner sometimes. 

The Critical Mom's Guide to "My BFF Says I Have to Choose!"

"Mommy," says my eight-year-old daughter, lower lip trembling, "Susy says that Mary* is taking me away from her.  She says tomorrow I have to choose whether I'm going to be her friend or I'm going to be Mary's friend."  Before I even say anything, my daughter adds, "I know Susy's just jealous."

"Right," I say.  "Exactly."

"But what should I do?"

"Would you want to have the two of them over together?"

Astonished look.  Arched eyebrows.  "Mommy, they don't like each other!"

"Don't take Susy seriously.  Susy's just being childish."

"I already said to her why should I have to choose?  But she says I have to choose."

"You don't have to choose."

"So I just ignore her?  I know!"  She cheers up for a second.  "I won't bring it up unless she brings it up."  But at this point a tear slides down the nose that has been buried in American Girl's Smart Girl's Guide to Friendship Troubles, where she's hoping to find something under "friendship hot spots" but that lower lip is still trembling. 

"But Mommy, what should I do?"

"How 'bout you smile at Susy and say, 'Susy, you've got friends I don't know, right?  So you have some friends I don't know and I also have other friends, and you and I are still very good friends."

"But she's not going to like that.  She's going to get angry."  This particular friend is not the favorite one of me and my husband.  When he walks our daughter to a meeting point on the corner where either he or Susy's father walks the girls the rest of the way, he gauges Susy's mood by how far ahead of her Dad she is walking, and he asks our daughter, "So how would you rate Susy's crabbiness level today?"
I remind her that Susy is crabby sometimes and she smiles, but then looks worried.
"But she'll get mad."

"So she'll have a little tantrum.  Let her have a tantrum.  She's acting like a two-year-old."  We talk about how two-year-olds act when they don't get their own way, and about Susy's cute little sister.

"But Mommy, what should I do?"  The thumb starts flicking through the pages of Smart Girl's Guide again. 

"I think she'll just get over it.  She's not always that happy anyway, right?  It doesn't have anything to do with you."

"But what if she gets mad?"

"Do you need a friend who's always getting mad?"

"But what should I do?"

"Honey, you don't have to do anything.  Just smile and say you choose your own friends."

This is not comforting.  We have been reading the Betsy-Tacy books, and have gotten to the part where Betsy's friend Tilda doesn't like her other friend, the baroness Helena; the impoverished baroness doesn't like Tilda because Tilda's family is "in trade."  We have talked about snobs and how silly they are.  We have talked about how friendships between girls are often like this.  We have talked about how Mommy has had the same problem, and solved it the way Betsy did and the way my daughter has, by seeing the friends who don't like each other on different days, and by not talking about either one of them with the other.  Her brothers have weighed in with tough guy advice, both of them suggesting she insult Susy with a few choice unprintable words or tell Susy, "Fine!  I'm choosing Mary!  Bye-Bye!" This makes our daughter laugh, but she is still distressed.  So this morning, "Mommy, would you walk me up the hill today?"  And I did.  And Susy, we could see from across the street, was walking way ahead of her daddy.  And when Susy saw my daughter standing right next to me, she had a grim look.  Oh, did she want to get in her two cents worth. 

"Mommy," I'll just nudge you if I want you to say something," for by this point I've told my daughter that if she can't work it out on her own, but I think she can and should, I can talk to Susy's mommy.

By the time we have crossed the street, my daughter looks better and says I can go home.  Stay tuned for an update.
Update:  Susy cornered my daughter the nanosecond I headed home.  "You have to tell me today, by recess, whether you're going to be my friend or Mary's friend."
My daughter met her at recess with the teacher and said, "I would like to be both of your friends.  But if you force me to choose, I'll be Mary's friend."  The teacher wanted to know if the two of them wanted to talk about it for two minutes.  Neither did.
Standoff at high noon! 

*Not their real names

The Critical Mom's Guide to How To Be An Older Mom

I am old enough to be the mother, occasionally the grandma, of the other mommies who congregate daily in the schoolyard.  I am often the only happily married one, at least judging by the way they like to complain about their husbands, and that is my biggest secret from them.  They are mostly in their twenties, these mommies who might as well be aliens from my point of view, although a few of the older ones are in their thirties, and one or two are in their forties.  Not one of them regularly inspires a schoolchild to cry, "Hey, your grandma's here to pick you up!" when I go to get my third-grader. So here are some basics:

 (1) Expect to feel out of it. While the other mommies are discussing how many windows they washed that morning, or wondering why you have cucumbers and radishes poking out of your shopping bag, because those things take too long to peel, you smile and say you enjoy your vegetables, then stick your nose back in Operation Shylock and forget all about them.

 (2) Don't look for soul mates among them. Throughout kindergarten and first grade, my younger son's best friend--an incredibly smart and sweet little boy--was the son of an ancient out-of-work drunk and a mail-order bride of some twenty summers (perhaps younger) from a third-world country.  She had incredible pluck and I admired her, but oh, were we different.  She did hang out for coffee, and I relied for conversation on the one topic that unifies all women: fashion.

(3) Enjoy your marriage.  Very often, you will be the only mommy still married among your children's friends, or the only happily married one.  Tune out when the other mommies on the playground complain, and don't let on that you're still having a good time.  They'd forgive you about as much as they'd forgive their mothers.

(4) Once in a while, shock them.   When the twentysomething year olds were sitting around wondering about a certain kindergarten teacher whom we had all dubbed "Fraulein Rottenmeier," after the governess in Heidi, who was at best exactingly strict and at worst menacing, I said, "My generation would have said she needs to get laid."  To my amazement, they had never thought of this, and laughed until they choked.

(5) Stay young:  go get some exercise--lots of it!  Eat right and spend all the time you want with your husband.  What the tabloids call "quality time," a pretty euphemism for the best time in the world.  And that means romance, too.  A couple we know told us they didn't celebrate Valentine's Day, and I didn't believe it until we happened to visit them one Valentine's Day.  We witnessed the husband come home from work, present his wife with a rose, and--just as she was oohing and ahhing and saying what a wonderful surprise, and looking delighted--inform her that there'd been two roses in the trash at work, and he didn't want them to go to waste, so he handed one to a colleague and brought one home to her.  She cast a wry look in our direction and managed not to burst into tears in front of us.  My husband and I held hands all the way home, and thanked our lucky stars that we were not in that state. 

The Critical Mom's Guide to "My Son Has A Scar!"

Back when Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were running around, nobody made a big deal about two ten-year-old boys punching each other in the nose.  Fast forward to the year 2011 and the film Carnage, Roman Polanski's screen adaptation of Yazmin Reza's play, and you get the current lay of the land:  two sets of parents, one ultra politically correct and the other Yuppies, marked by the prominent string of pearls and the never-silent cell phone, meet to discuss an "unfortunate incident" between their two eleven-year-old boys, in which one clonked the other with a stick, knocking out a tooth.  We never see the boys, and the parents run the gamut from clenched-teeth grins as they compose an e-mail to the insurance company to vomiting, drinking, yelling, slamming a pocketbook at the ceiling, throwing a bouquet of tulips to the floor, and all-around bad playground behavior.

One day when he was in first grade, my highly energetic younger son was playing with a friend, and got carried away, gleefully slamming some article of furniture in such a way that the other boy fell, was cut badly, and needed two stitches.  Our son came home in such a well-behaved state that I knew something must be up and I didn't have to wait long to find out: "Now, Mommy, I didn't do anything," he began, "and it wasn't my fault."  What wasn't?  I didn't get a clue until the next day in school, when his teacher was talking to the other boy's mother and both told me that my son had not apologized.  My husband and I spoke to him and he phoned the other boy and apologized, and apologized to the parents too.  It had been an accident, after all.  Then the other boy's father telephoned.  He thought our son didn't really take the incident seriously enough; he thought he had heard him giggling about it at school.  I had heard a nervous giggle myself, and our son apologized again.  He and the other little boy are good friends, and at this point only the parents remembered the incident.  They phoned us again. 

"You know, we had to pay for a taxi to the hospital!"

"We'll pay it!"  my husband said.  Then they didn't want us to pay.

"You know, that's not the point," the boy's father said.  "My son WILL HAVE A SCAR!"

"I'm very sorry that your son will have a scar," I said.  "I know that's very unpleasant."

"My son will have a scar!" he wailed again and again, until I felt like I'd been buttonholed by the ancient mariner.  Should I tell him to try Vitamin E oil, I wondered?  And I wanted to ask:  "Weren't you ever a seven-year-old boy?  Did you never get into trouble yourself?"  It wasn't as though our kid went around giving other children scars daily.  No one else in his class ever had a scar courtesy of him.

That was the last we heard of that one, but three years later, when he was nearly ten, I went to pick up his younger sister at school.  She looked worried, and told us that a certain Mrs. X, known as the bitchiest teacher in the school, the one who told a nine year old that his painting wasn't on the wall because it was "shit," had told her, "Do you know what kind of trouble your brother is in?"  My daughter went on to tell me this meanie had said there was blood all over the stairs because of her brother and I had better go to the teacher room.   I did go to the teacher room, where the headmaster rolled his eyes and said there had been an incident.  Our son had punched somebody in the nose.  Teachers were talking about who did what first to whom.  A younger teacher walked in and told us the other boy had shoved our son several times, been told by him to "leave me alone," had shoved him yet again and called him "Hitler."  Since we're living in Germany, this particular insult tends to pack, so to speak, more of a punch than elsewhere. And so our kid punched him right in the nose and "There was"--allegedly--"blood all over the stairs!"  Our kid at this point walked into the teacher's room, or had been sent there, and said, "Aw, Mommy, it was only a few drops."  And I made it clear to the headmaster that he was sorry, and he said he was sorry, and I also made it clear, and you should too, that the matter should remain between the other boy's parents, the school, and us.

On the other hand . . . would that scenario get us right back to Carnage?

How To Google What You Have and What You Need: The Critical Mom's Guide

If you're thinking--what?  Isn't that like writing "How to Snore" or "How to Sneeze?" And you can do all that?  Yes, I know.  It's just that yesterday the 13-year-old read my blog and said, "You know, Mommy, you could get into trouble telling people how to read The New York Times for free."

But I learned how to do that by learning to Google.  I was counting my shekels wondering how I'd afford $15 a month or whatever it is now and then it struck me that I could just write phrases for whatever I wanted into Google like this:

HOW TO READ THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR FREE

Reader, you can Google that phrase too.

Of course, then you, like me, will have to read pages of technospeak.  Often basic definitions of necessary phrases eluded me.  That's why I boiled down everything I learned into four and a half easy steps for all my readers out there celebrating The World's Most Un-Read Blog, possibly soon to be the sub-sub title of this one.

Meanwhile, today a minor crisis erupted when the Tooth Fairy forgot all about the tooth under my daughter's pillow, and if I'd only known the night before that I was going to forget, I could have Googled: WHAT TO DO WHEN THE TOOTH FAIRY FORGETS TO COME, an amusing website offering such useful phrases as "she had a molar emergency" and suggesting that I might sleight-of-hand a dollar into the bed and say "Oh, it must have shifted around while you were sleeping." 

You should Google exactly what you have and what you need.  When I want to cook something interesting and haven't managed to go shopping, I Google the ingredients I happen to have plus the word "recipe", for instance:

GARLIC GINGER ONIONS FISH RECIPE

You will get more recipes than you know what to do with.  You might Google

TEN YEAR OLD TALKS BACK  or

MY MOTHER HAS NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER  or

GUINEA PIGS EAT WHAT?

Let your imagination run wild.  And leave a comment by double clicking on the little blue phrase that says "no comments" below and then writing in the little box.  Love, THE CRITICAL MOM

The Critical Mom's Guide to Breastfeeding

Now that I'm way past it, I remember it fondly and wish I'd known, before I ever started, everything that nursing three children has taught me.  Seasoned moms are your best bet, and check out the internationally known breastfeeding organization: La Leche League, a bonanza of information in the language of your choice: http://www.llli.org/

In my experience, nurses in hospitals are too busy to help out, doctors not much better.   The one I called when my firstborn was shrieking for six straight hours cocked an eyebrow, swung her stethoscope nonchalantly and said, "Yeah--little babies cry.  Whaddya want?"  What I wanted was for someone to help me figure out that the kid needed to be put over my shoulder and burped so that his tummy would stop hurting so that he would stop screaming so that he and I could both get some sleep.  Which I eventually, after a couple of sleepless weeks, did figure out, and if you pay a bundle to a midwife or a doula, or if you have a friendly relationship with your mother, you'll figure that out sooner.  And even if you had just read all about burping in the weeks before the birth, I guarantee you that you may forget all about it in the excitement of having just given birth.  You do tend to become quite brainless while you are pregnant and breastfeeding.  Hormones, physical discomfort and exhaustion all militate against the ability to think and retain readings on motherhood.  In the last month of pregnancy and for the first weeks of motherhood I could only bring myself to read pulp lit:  all of Dan Brown plus Valley of the Dolls.  Beware with baby boys, because while you're sitting around in a trance nursing the kid, some doctor will walk in and tell you to circumcise your son, and unless you've put in writing that you want nothing of the sort done, you'll say, "Whaaa?  Uh, okay," and not even remember what you were asked.  A friend remembers that  her doctor walked in and suggested circumcision and when she tiredly demurred, he said, "You don't want him to look different from his father, do you?"  and she felt too tired to continue to defy him. 

Before I even start, I'll return to my mantra:  trust your own hunches.  If you don't want to breastfeed, don't let me or any doctor tell you to do so.  The late lamented Wendy Wasserstein complained about "the nipple Nazis," that is, hyper-efficient American nurses who surrounded her with breast pumps when she was lying in her hospital bed after the premature birth of her daughter.  If you do want to breastfeed, you need not listen--as I unfortunately did--to nurses who insisted that I sit up in bed in order to nurse.  Lie down if you want!  You can nap while the kid nurses!  Those nurses.  They insisted that I had to switch the kid to the other breast every fifteen minutes (and they hung my watch, just so I would have to check the time, on the support triangle that I, after a cesarean, had to pull myself up on in order to sit.)  I was told to insert a finger in his mouth to break the suction--I guarantee you, no baby likes this.  Otherwise--they looked grim--consequences would be bad.  As in cracked nipples.  Well, I never had them until his brother, the second kid, glommed on like a football player chugging a six pack as fast as possible after a winning game.  And then there were all kinds of homeopathic salves that did the trick, and then, since I had had some practice with the first, I figured out how to make the kid stop chewing and start sucking.

 Rule #1: Find comfortable positions.  Sit if you like, but you don't have to do so.  Pillows under the elbow help.  You can buy a body-length cylindrical pillow that in the last few months of pregnancy can be placed between your knees and under your elbow at night, rendering sleep, the ever-elusive third-trimester sleep, a possibility.   I found the same thing great for nursing, wrapped around my waist with the kid resting on one side.  Experiment with getting comfortable and nursing.

Rule #2: Drink, drink, drink.  Water and herbal teas are probably your best bet, unless you do not like either, in which case cranberry juice is also good for you.  After my first cesarean I came to with a Nurse Ratched type hovering over me, and croaked, "May I please have some ice chips?"  A reasonable and expected request for one giving birth in an American hospital to make.  Only I happened to be in a German hospital, and Nurse Ratched's face flinched.  She turned on her heel and stalked out, returning with a huge cannister of fennel tea, which she thumped down on my bedside table.

"In Deutschland, wir machen so!!" ("In German, we do things this way!") she informed me.  Fennel tea tasted great, and the Germans believe that when a nursing mother drinks it, along with carraway-seed tea, she helps prevent her baby from having gas.

Rule #3: Eat, eat, eat.  Whatever you want!  Chocolate!  Pesto!  As much as you want!  Now you can eat sushi, which you should not eat during pregnancy, and now you can drink wine, but don't get drunk.  Now you can drink coffee, but some babies do get awfully hyperactive when you do.  But some sleep right through it.  You observe your kid, and forget what anybody else says.

Rule #4: Amuse yourself reading websites from different countries that tell you what nursing mothers should and should not eat.  In Germany I found a lot on the VERBOTEN list:  no orange juice, no onions, no peas, garlic was frowned upon, no strawberries . . . . I was craving fresh-squeezed orange juice, and when I begged the nurse for some she looked scandalized.  No proper Germany mommy would dream of such a thing.  Then I read the American websites, which at that time were all about preventing lactose intolerance in your baby, and which assured moms they could eat whatever they wanted, but watch out for the cheese on the top of the pizza.  By the time Baby #3 arrived, I had the confidence to ignore the nurses, and when my Korean roommate's husband brought in highly aromatic kimchee and other delights, the nurses huffed around saying "Well, we don't think you should eat it but we can't stop you!"  So we said, "Nyahh, nyaaah--what about all the mommies in Korea?  What about the Middle Eastern moms who eat garlic and onion and cardamom?"  The poor nurses.  We gave them a hard time.  And our babies slept  . . .like a dream.

Rule #5: The obvious: breastfeed on demand.  I knew a woman who followed doctor's orders, breastfeeding only every four hours on the dot, no matter how much the baby screamed.  Nerve-wracking all around:  another example of when NOT to listen to doctors (see previous posts).  Take the kid everywhere you go, wrap up in a shawl or a breastfeeding mom's t-shirt, the kind with the slit on the side for easy baby access to the breast, available from motherwear.com or motherhood.com in the U.S.  The most comfortable and easy to use nursing bras were the ones with a single snap in the middle.  Remember: you're undoing it one-handed, because the other hand is holding the baby.   Same goes for nursing tops:  stick to the ones with the side slit and forget the ones with the buttons.

Rule #6: Ignore naysayers, and even in our enlightened day and age, you'll find them.  Some fifteen years ago a friend was nursing her infant daughter in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. and the waiter came up and asked, "Wouldn't you rather do that in the bathroom?"  If the waiter asks you this, smile sweetly and answer: "Do you like to eat among toilets?  Neither does my baby."  An elderly relative who invited me out to dinner disapproved of my daughter nursing at age two.  "You won't want to do that in the restaurant," she chirped.  "You can use the ladies room there."  I pulled my big shawl around me and told her we'd be just fine at the table.  "When in Rome," she growled, and I said, "The Romans'll have to get used to me."  And they did, those Romans.  And you know what?  No one will bother you unless you're making a point of flapping your breast all over the place.  Do be discreet, and it is easy to be discreet with a shawl or a blanket or a nursing top.  Even so, you may get the tiresome Barbara Walters type sitting next to you on a plane hummphing that she feels "uncomfortable" when you nurse.  Smile sweetly and tell her you respect her discomfort and keep right on nursing.

Recipe of the Week: Banana Bread

It's a sunny day . . .  here's what the critical mom does with three or four old bananas that are turning black, the kind the kids refuse to have sliced over their Cheerios: 

(1) Peel them and put them in a big bowl with two eggs.  Meanwhile,  pre-heat your oven to 350ºF if you are American or 180ºC if you are European.  Grease a loaf pan and set it aside.

With a fork or hand blender, mash up the bananas, blending them well with the eggs.  You may, if you wish, add a handful of raisins, wolfberries, chopped walnuts, or chocolate chips. 

I order wolfberries (which are particularly good for aging women's eyesight and good for everyone's immune system) from www.youngliving.org, which has European as well as American offices.  The ones I got from my local Asian store were far cheaper, but also much darker, and since I know Chinese rivers remain profoundly polluted, I prefer a supplier who makes sure that only pure water touches the berries.

(2) In a separate bowl, stir in 2 cups (or 280 g) flour.  You can use white flour or half whole wheat flour.  100% whole wheat flour tends not to hold together as well and is a bit heavy.  Add 3/4 cup (145g) sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and mix well.

(3) Pour the flour mixture into the bananas mixture and blend well with fork or hand blender.  Pour mixture into loaf pan.  It helps to have a flexible rubber scraper to get every bit of the mixture out of the bowl and into the pan. 

(4) Put in oven and bake for one hour.  Voila!

The Critical Mom's Guide to Reading the New York Times for Free

 I'm writing for Luddites at heart like myself, who use computers to word-process, felt challenged by the term "blog" until they started one, just learned how to open a new tab on their browser . . . after the thirteen-year-old defined 'blog' and 'tab.'  No, it was the ten-year-old:  "Hee hee!  Mommy doesn't know how to open a tab!"  (Knee slap). 

 Since I have no money and am far from home, the apparent sudden need to pay for the Times online shocked me.  I Googled "How to Read The New York Times for Free" and am boiling down what several websites told me into four easy steps: 

(1)  Go to The New York Times online.

(2) Today, at 3:08 a.m. you will see a headline:

RYAN FAULTS 'MISSING' LEADERSHIP

(3) In your browser, the thing at the top of the page where you now see The Critical Mom, you will see the following:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/us/politics/paul-ryan-accepts-republican-vice-presidential-nomination.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=CD9B187A7582F602F4F2122EBE650BD1

(4) Place your cursor at the end of this long thing and backspace--disappearing the numbers--until you get to the ? after the html, both of which you will need.  Hit the return key (step four-and-a-half)

You are now able to read the article.  For free.

The best things in life are free.

P.S.  Post a comment, and I'll tell ya 'nother way to do it.

The Scream: A Critical Mom's Guide

I often think of Edvard Munch and his many screamers:  they speak to me, as does the William Tell Mom, who like me tries to cram "Goodbye I love you have a great day at school" into "Don't forget to feed the guinea pigs and remember your orthodontist appointment at 3:00 p.m. and DON'T GET ON THAT DAMN COMPUTER BEFORE YOU'VE DONE YOUR CLARINET PRACTICE AND YOUR HOMEWORK!"

Maybe I should call it the "The Shriek: A Mom's Guide."

As in, when to shriek at your child and how he or she may best reap the benefits of shrieking.  Once upon a time, my son was having his eleventh birthday party and one guest--I'll call him Alvin--began to scream.  I ran outside where the guests had been playing football to witness two of them carrying a sobbing Alvin, who sounded as though he might need stitches, toward the house.  They deposited him on the stairs, offered that he'd been kicked accidentally, and went back out to play.  Alvin sat woebegonely sniffling and groaning in apparent agony.  I ran up with several ice packs and some antiseptic spray only to find the faintest of scratches and no swelling whatsoever.  In fact I couldn't get the kid to tell me where it hurt, but did surround the scratch with ice packs and offer to call his mother.  

"Yes, yes, call Mommy!"  he said.  He wanted to go home.  I phoned her, got his bag, wrapped a blanket around him, and kept his leg in ice packs, all the while worrying that her child had been injured at my child's party and I hoped it wasn't too bad.  His mother arrived--they lived at some distance and it took her a good forty minutes--and spoke with him cheerfully.  It turned out he wasn't going home.

"He just needed Mommy to come and kiss him," she said, glowing with the desire to be needed and to hop in the car for a long drive in order to kiss his knee and make it all better.

A year later, my son and Alvin were working on a school project together.  Each boy was responsible for four entries on an historic calendar, and my son complained that Alvin hadn't done any of his entries and now my son had to write them all because the teacher graded the group, not the individual in it.  In the mean time I'd heard a lot of Alvin stories:  "Mommy, Alvin has asthma and he's supposed to bring his inhaler to school, but anytime he hasn't done his homework or just doesn't feel like school, he wanders over to the secretary and says he's having an attack and they send him home."  Now my son was telling me that he'd sent an e-mail to Alvin and what did I think?  I read it:  

"Dear Alvin, I am very disappointed in you for not contributing to the calendar and now I have to do all the work and I don't want for you to be in my group anymore."  I told my son that the part about not being in his group was a bit too much like the "and you're not coming to my birthday party!" taunt of elementary school, and he should be beyond that by now, but neither of us felt prepared for the phone call that immediately followed his e-mail.

Alvin's mother sobbed into the phone:  "Alvin is totally exhausted!  What an unfriendly e-mail!"  In the background, Alvin was moaning and muttering that my son was "mean."

"Just a moment," I interrupted, "and I'll let Alvin speak to my son."  I heard my son on the phone, still apparently with Alvin's mother, saying, "I'm very sorry that I sent such an unfriendly e-mail, and in block letters, too.  Yes, Alvin and I can work together and I'm sorry I hurt his feelings."  Alvin could meanwhile still be heard whining for his Mommy and complaining about injustice.  When my son hung up, giggling, he said, "You know, Mommy, I used to think you were tough, but that kid is--"

"Now I can scream?" I said, and he nodded.

The Critical Mom's Guide to Choosing A Ballet Teacher for Your Child

 

Rule #1:  Look at her students, not at her.  She can look like Bozo.  She can weigh four hundred pounds.  She can have a hunchback bigger than Quasimodo's-- but if her students can move like Suzanne Farrell, then go to her.

It's always nice when the teacher is gorgeous to look at--several of my teachers made me sigh with delight when they demonstrated a step:  "when that woman lifts her leg," I thought to myself, "it's like a song."  But:

Rule #2: A good dancer is not the same thing as a good teacher.  A good dancer is an artist, and an artist is propelled by her visions of, say, an effect she'd like to create in a dance.   An artist may not feel interested in the nitty-gritty of necessary repetition, in correcting placement (the way a dancer must stand in order to move correctly) in a way that a young student can understand, in making sure basic exercises done at the barre are repeated in a new and more challenging way in the center.  Therefore:

Rule #3: Good dancing and good teaching are two completely separate skills.  They sometimes appear in the same personality, but my own experience has been that terrible dancers often make good teachers.  Now, I was a dance student with a far from ideal body.  Technique was not easy for me.  A student who is a natural may feel differently.

Rule #4: "Those who can't do teach."  In other words, See Rule #1.  The best teachers I ever had looked like they'd never graced a stage.  Although I knew that Maggie Black (who taught everybody who was anybody in the dance world) had danced with Anthony Tudor, she never pointed her foot.  She didn't stand up straight.  But she had eyes in the back of her head, communicated corrections to the more than eighty people in her classes, and was known as "Black Magic," by George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet, who envied her.  David Howard danced with the Royal Ballet, but it's his sharp eyes and sharp perceptions that you notice in his classes--not his body, which--frankly--is not beautiful.  I loved his wry comments: "Not so spastic with the arms," he would smirk, making us laugh and remember to correct our arms. 

When I was a student, Maggie taught me to stand and David taught me to move.  These unique teachers evolved their own highly different methods, although both were grounded in the Royal Academy of Dance method.  

Rule #5: The best teachers are often those who are highly aware of physical problems encountered by dancers--among them, scoliosis, lack of natural turn-out, lack of natural flexibility, flat feet, toe lengths rendering pointe work challenging . . . the list goes on.  Their knowledge derives from the difficulties they suffered as students, and they develop methods for dealing with physical problems as well as for compensating for them onstage.

Rule #6: It is always good to have more than one teacher.  No teacher can offer everything a dance student needs to know.  I have had teachers whose beauty of movement inspired students.  These same teachers may not be able to explain how to cope with a movement problem if they have not themselves experienced it.  I had a teacher who used one correction for every single student:  "push your hips forward," and eventually I realized that this worked on his body--not on mine!  He was an extraordinarily gifted dancer who had never had to be patient with himself, who picked up steps very quickly, and who did not understand why anyone else wouldn't. 

Rule #7:  The teacher should like children, but don't pass up a brilliant curmudgeon.   I have seen highly effective teachers who barely spoke English--usually they spoke Russian--scream "Make better!" without of course indicating what exactly should be better. Or they yelled: "Terrible! Go to the back of the class!" and many of their students looked well-trained.  For some children, such teaching is traumatizing but for others it becomes an exhilarating challenge.

Rule #8: Look at the websites of nationally known dance schools and organizations:  The Royal Academy of Dance USA, The School of American Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet, The Alvin Ailey American Dance Foundation, among others, and then go on You-Tube and watch performances.  Then you have some idea what a student dancer should look like and also an idea of different methods of ballet teaching in the United States. 

Rule #9: The teacher does not necessarily need a teaching degree, but it helps.  A certificate from the Royal Academy of Dance or another internationally known dance organization is a good sign, but the acid test is the way they teach.  I have had excellent teachers who had degrees, but again, my very best teachers had evolved their own methods.

Rule #10: Parents should observe the following in a good dance studio: 

A.  Students wear a uniform and their hair should be neatly tied back.  This helps with the sense of belonging and shared purpose.  A teacher can allow students to choose the color of leotard they wear that year, but then everyone must stick to it.

B. No very young student should go on pointe: typically, students start pointe at about age 11 and AFTER several years of training, though some may start a year or so earlier.

C.  The music chosen for classes should delight the soul and support the dance steps.

D.  The room should be sufficiently warm.  Muscles work best when they are well-lubricated with sweat. Beware of studios touting air-conditioning, unless it is used only to dehumidify the room.  You don't want cool air blasting in during a ballet class.

And Now, When to Listen to Those Doctors

At the very moment I thought I'd entered the loony bin of alternative health care, I got well.  After the usual rounds made by the discombobulated menopausal woman to gynecologists #1, #2 and #3, plus what turned out to be a totally unnecessary and completely ineffective D&C, which was supposed to stop menopausal bleeding and did not do so, and after turning down yet another stern recommendation from two worried doctors to take progesterone, a Chinese friend studying cardiology mentioned that she knew someone who did "traditional Chinese medicine.  I really don't know anything about it, but it helped my mother in China."  Off I went as a frantic last resort to the Chinese medicine center, where incense burned, a statue of Buddha presided, and behind the incense seeped a horrible smell that I thought must be pot.  It wasn't pot, but I wouldn't want to go through an airport with the miraculous herb that stopped the bleeding:  mugwort, or moxa, legally grown in Holland and other European countries.  My doctor waltzed in wearing a white lab coat and started burning a cigar of that stuff over my big toe, explaining, as she did, that Western medical journals had documented that Moxa helped turn a breech baby, and also stopped bleeding.  She smiled the way you smile at an ornery two-year-old and advised me to relax.  If I hadn't had a headful of acupuncture needles, I might have bolted off the table.  I'd already been required, as part of their alternative medical examination, to stick out my tongue at a bunch of doctors--which is more embarrassing than a gynecology exam--and had heard much discussion of yin&yang, "toning," and the importance of walking in nature quietly, all of which made me long for the noisy streets of the Upper West Side of New York, the rattle of the subway, and the taste of heavily sugared regular coffee while reading the New York Times.  Although I did used to love hiking in Vermont, the most time I spend in nature occurs when I take our guinea pigs to their outdoor cage on sunny days, and watch them fight over bits of food.

I lay on the gurney listening to New Age music, which was supposed to relax me, almost gagging on the smell of Moxa, which I feared would not come out of my clothes, and despairing at the time wasted with these New Age freaky doctors.

And then the bleeding stopped, just like that.  It never returned.  I took bland and sometimes nasty-tasting teas; I took funny little greenish-black pills; I told concerned friends who repeatedly asked exactly what I was taking that I did not know--all the ingredients sounded like "Foo-wing-wah-po" or something.  And I began to read about Traditional Chinese Medicine from the practitioners point of view as well as from the point of view of websites like Quackwatch.  I wrote a long, infuriated letter to the Quackwatch folks defending acupuncture and moxa--an amusing position to be in for one who had been intuitively on the Quackwatch side of the argument right up until the Chinese treatment really worked.  I continued taking various Chinese herbs and experimenting with products from alternative health care sites like youngliving.org and have felt better--more energetic, more peaceful, and in a better mood.  When I didn't want my then four year old daughter to endure yet another operation on the adnoids that had grown back again, I tried the Chinese medicine center, and the Chrysanthemum-based liquid they gave her worked.  That, and a little acupuncture.  I never thought I'd see the day.   So what is the moral of this story?  I have several:

Moral #1: Either that stuff works or I am incredibly suggestible.  But did you know that most cures are suggestion?  And I would rather have some non-toxic herbs that suggest me to health than a bunch of hormones.

Moral #2: Whatever works!  Antibiotics worked when I was trying to conceive.   The Chinese medicine folks shook their heads, telling me that antibiotics weaken the body.  Meanwhile, when I mentioned to my fertility doctor, the King of Antibiotic Treatment, that Chinese medicine had really worked for menopause, oh, did he ever shake his head.  "These herbs are DRUGS!" he protested.

Moral #3: Doctors are artists, too.  They have their visions.  No good artist can be swayed by the vision of another artist, and that goes for scientists.  The original thinker who cooks up an herbal concoction to cure menopause will have a hard time understanding the vision of one who cooks up a batch of antibiotics to cure infertility.  Although one Chinese practitioner listened to my tales of lavages of the uterus with antibiotics with interest, saying he'd heard of herbs being used topically for fertility in China.

But hey, Einstein couldn't talk to Freud.  One always has to find one's own way among the doctors.

Doctors, When to Listen, When to Ignore, part two

Never concede the authority of your common sense to a doctor--especially if you are feeling fine.  They may be nice, they may have your best interests at heart, they may mean well--and then it's hard to say no.  It's easier when you don't like them.  But then of course--you wouldn't go to them for treatment, right?  Catch 22.

I really liked the obstetrician who cared for me during my second pregnancy.  She was young, a snappy dresser, had a Swedish-modern and Ikea waiting room well-equipped for children as well as mothers, and she was willing to listen.  But she also went by the book.  I was old, she said.  Indeed, older than any mother she'd ever seen in the small European city in which we lived.

"I'm from New York," I offered, "Lots of woman older than I am give birth daily there.  When my friend Nancy went to her obstetrician worrying--at 38--about her age, the doctor laughed and told Nancy she was her youngest patient."

"We have a different attitude toward age here in Europe!" she said, looking grim.  A little jealous?  She was forty, I learned, younger than I was, and sometime in the course of my pregnancy--and I was 45 at the time--she got pregnant too.

 At the end of this conversation she insisted that I take progesterone.  This was eleven years ago, and at that time intra-vaginal progesterone pills were believed to prevent a miscarriage by thickening the lining of the uterus.  

"You want to prevent a miscarriage," insisted my doctor.   Sometimes I  think that if she'd only had kitschy office furniture that I hated or if only I'd not liked her so much, especially after running into her at the local swimming pool where she played with my firstborn,  I'd have had the sense to say "forget it--I am healthy.  I don't need this."  But that kind of common sense comes with age and experience.  As George Bernard Shaw said, "Youth is wasted on the young," and indeed I was younger.   And I'd already had a painful and very saddening miscarriage, and wanted to avoid a second one.  So I went along with her progesterone prescription for the worst possible reason:  I felt scared.  I took the progesterone for several weeks, even though I felt fine and the baby looked fine on the ultrasound.  The immediate results--extreme fatigue, dizziness, and a compulsion to eat despite morning sickness--proved unbearable after a few weeks, and I went off the stuff and felt much better.  But I gained a great deal of weight, which I've never lost.  The baby was enormous and a second cesarean.  Who knows?  He might have been a normal birth without the progesterone.

P.S. Nobody prescribes progesterone to prevent miscarriages anymore.  Another medical fad gone with the wind.

The moral of the story:  Never go along with any prescription or treatment out of desperation.  Go for a second, a third, a fourth opinion until you feel like you know every possible option.

Doctors: When to Listen to Them, When to Ignore Them (part one of three)

Once upon a time not long ago, I went for a check-up.  I felt fine, but I'd been told to have that Mitral valve prolapse checked every two years, so I chose the nearest hospital--for its proximity alone.  In strode a self-confident young physician, probably a resident, who ordered a stress test in addition to the usual EKG and blood tests.   The first drop in confidence came when I realized the place was a playground for medical students--each person in a white lab coat who tested me looked way under thirty, and the one who did the stress test stayed on his cell phone the entire time, inquiring whether this or that value meant what or which, and what did it mean when this happened?  Halfway through the test my contact lens started hurting, and I asked to take it out.  No, I couldn't do that, he said, with a sharp interpretive glance.   I was sent back to the young doc who'd ordered the test.

"These are abnormal rhythms!" he said.  "I think we should order an angiogram."

"Isn't that . . . like, invasive?"

"You'd be out in a couple of hours, no strenuous activity for two weeks."

"Is this really necessary?"

"You have abnormal rhythms!"

"Wait a minute--am I at risk for a heart attack?  I'm not overweight, I'm not diabetic, I have low blood pressure, I have the right kind of cholesterol, and I feel fine--I have no symptoms."

"You know--" here he really stuck out his jaw--"one day, that heart muscle could just decide to stop working!!"

I leaned across the table.  All of a sudden my heart, which I had never noticed before except in romantic situations, was thumping almost painfully.  I was definitely scared.  But I asked anyway:

"Listen, if you were me, with my heart and my cholesterol levels and my weight and my age and my gender, would you really get this test done?"

He wagged his finger at me, schoolmaster-style:  "THE POINT IS!" Now he was yelling, "THE POINT IS that your heart muscle could decide to stop working!"

I said no thanks, I didn't need any test.  His jaw muscle twitched.

"You will get a letter," he assured me in a rather unfriendly tone.  I got a letter and took it to my primary care doctor, who told me that hospital was a "red flag" for her.  I wondered if they just wanted to be able to charge for the tests, but no . . . it turns out that young doctors must perform at least 75 angiograms per year in order  to keep their hospital privileges.  And I guess he figured I was a safe bet--he wouldn't be doing me any harm.  I did go for a second opinion, because despite the common sense I thought I possessed, I was nervous.  

"You are very low risk," said Dr. Second Opinion, who was also a much older doctor, "But if you want to make absolutely sure you don't have cardiac ischemia, I could send you for a test . . . "

"Yes, yes, yes," I burbled, until I realized the test took six hours and involved dyes injected through my veins.  No, no no.  I left, and did some retail therapy on the way home--a really nice red shirt.  Now that was good for my heart.