Kid Lit Review: This Day in June

It's a picture book about Pride: something I hadn't realized we needed, but now know that we do.  This Day in June is a winner, and I'm glad that I bought a copy (a hardcover, no less).  I am not going to complain about gay kid-lit, because I'm glad it exists, but I will say that this book is so lively and energetic and refreshing, and it's also SO GAY and even SO QUEER.

The narrative part of the book is a series of couplets, for example: "Clad in Leather/Perfect weather" and "Artists painting/Sisters sainting".  So, clearly, this is not "my family is like yours, but a tiny bit different, but really alike."  This book celebrates not just gay families, but gay culture.  And the illustrations are fabulous, and very detailed.  LB was drawn to the "pink page," and B and I spend a long time looking at all the drawings.

There is also a reading guide in the back that provides background and history for all the themes explored in the book.  Someone in an online group I'm part of recently asked, "what does wearing leather and showing your butt have to do with being gay?"  Well, this book can give you the beginner's explanation.  And then we can all hang out and read Gay New York together.  [There is also a separate guide for talking to children about LGBT issues.]

As the LGBTQ tent gets bigger, and as it become more possible to both be gay and remain in the "normal" club, our shared history becomes less clear.  Almost everything I've read this year from the sort of progressive queer folk, with whom I share some political perspectives, has been wistful-thankful for a world where many of us (more so the LG&Bs) are not so marginalized, but wistful for past of shared politics and culture in the face of a seemingly ever growing contingent that wants to JUST BE NORMAL.  As an adult reader, This Day in June is appealing in part because it's Pride as I would love Pride to be.  It all the fabulous and quirkiness, with a mix of radicalness and staidness, without the cigarettes, cheap vodka shooters, and corporate sponsorships that make me shake my head.

Dana at Mombian has a nice review of This Day in June that puts it in LGBT kid-lit historical perspective.  Dana compares This Day in June to Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, a kid's book published in 1991 by the author of Heather Has Two Mommies that, like me, you may not have heard of before now.  GGGP is no longer in print, a key problem for kids "diversity lit."  Many titles are published through small or non-profit publishers, and if they aren't picked up by a major publisher they are out of print (gone) within a few years.  This Day in June is published my Magination Press, a division of the APA Press which is the press of the American Psychological Association (how far we've come).  Magination publishes books like Full Mouse, Empty Mouse: A Tale of Food and Feelings and The Boy Who Didn't Want to Be Sad.

I read a lot of kids books, and a lot of out of print kids books.  I think This Day in June could be a classic in some ten or twenty years, I just hope it stays in print long enough to have a chance (so you should buy a copy or three).

Short version: thumbs up (and let it be noted that I bought this book with my own money, although if someone wanted to send me some copies to share I would gladly accept).

Karl hates Thomas: in honor of International Workers Day

May 1 came and went here with a lot of labor, but not a lot of celebration.  But I didn't come here to talk about my May Day, I came here to complain about Thomas the Train.  LB became obsessed with this show (from chatter at daycare maybe?) a few months ago.  She loves some Thomas.  At first I didn't mind, after all it's got to better than whatever Sparkly Fairy Disney Princess Barbie Pink Craptacular little girls are supposed to be watching.  But there's the Thomas theme song with its inevitable earworm, and there's the oversensitive and whiny trains who can't let even the littlest slight just roll of their train backs.  Dislike.

Then there's the maleness and whiteness of Thomas.  Emily is now the token lady train, and all the bosses and conductors are men.  Then there's the whiteness.  Of the human characters, I've seen a black mayor have a bit part (in our racial TV taxonomy, he should have been Prime Minister or King, because surely if you have a show with a black King you can't be racist).  And maybe there is one black conductor?  I haven't been able to force myself to watch closely enough to be sure.  Perhaps this whiteness is supposed to harken back to the historical moment when railroads mattered (and I'll get to why, if that is so, it also sucks)?  But really, this is a show about talking trains, surely historical white supremacy isn't the detailed realism to which the creators need to cling?  In addition to the human characters, I also think the trains are meant to read white (their "faces" are grey). See my previous musings on the "race" of non-human characters in kids books here.]  [And see Bionics additional info about race and trains on Thomas in the comments, clearly I shouldn't be as annoyed as I am because I've been tuning out a lot of the show.]

Why can't the trains and humans on Thomas represent the racial realities of modern Britain.  And I don't mean that there need to be normal trains and then a Jamaican-Me-Crazy-Jar-Jar-Binks train.  How hard would it be to have train faces and humans in a variety of hues with a variety of non-stereotyped accents?

But maybe the racial representations of Thomas are just a nod to an imagined Industrial Revolution utopia, and if so-dislike.  I can't seem to find my copy of the Making of the English Working Class, but I can remember the vivid description of scrawny children sent into the mines, kept half-naked in darkness for 12 or 18 hours only to emerge like scrawny, blinded little moles.  And there are the children in Sweetness and Power, raised on sugar water, cheap treacle, and bakery bread as their mothers worked long hours in the factories.  And that my friends is your bedtime story about the Industrial Revolution.  Feel free to thank me for excluding details about industrial scalpings and limb loss.

If Thomas is visually a celebration of early capitalism, its message is a celebration of late capitalism.  I opened my Marx-Engels Reader to this passage: "Rather it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso...."  A page later Marx goes on to say that in this context "the worker appears as superfluous."  Like Thomas, perhaps, where there are owners and managers and machines, but no workers of the kind that gets dirty-no one who develops lung problems from breathing coal dust, or a bad back from shoveling coals, or losses a leg under a train wheel.  And in this world of bosses and machines and work, no one ever goes home.  There are no "8 hours for what you will."  For the trains work is self, and the workers who make trains go are invisible.

Luckily for LB, I don't think Thomas will warp her view of the value of workers than The Little Rabbit with Red Wings warped my view of the value of individuality.  And for better or worse, I'll make sure to provide plenty of indoctrination about the value of workers.

Christopher Robin is white, and some African American children's books that should be classics

Most people trace the beginnings of African America children's literature to the activism and art of the Civil Rights Movement.  Books like The Snowy Day (1962) and Corduroy (1968) brought young black protagonists into the mainstream of American picture books.

However, before the 1960s there was a small and lovely body of African American children's books.  The first of these books came from small Black-owned publishing houses, while later books were published by the big white-owned firms (and written illustrated both by black and by white artists), sometimes with financial subsidies from foundations committed to interracial understanding and to African American education.

The books below present some challenges for present-day readers.  Some have a scene, a theme, or an illustration that would be considered problematic by most teachers and librarians.  Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy has one in scene in which the African American boys in the story kidnap a little white boy and dress him up in blackface.  I don't mind having it in LB's collection, we'll just talk about it, like we'll talk about blackface in the Little House books, but I can understand why an educator would think it inappropriate for a children's collection.  Rowena, Teena, Tot is a very cute story, but it includes an illustration of a little boy eating a huge leg of chicken and African American women with old-fashioned kerchiefs on their heads-racially stereotypical images that Black librarians weren't entirely comfortable with even in the 1930s.

These books were created in a world where the vast majority of books featuring Black children were viciously racist.  Black child characters were almost always stupid, cowardly, supersticious, subservient, and ugly.  Against that backdrop, the books below are beautiful and life affirming

Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, Popo and Fifina (1932).  Aren't these illustrations beautiful!  I'm not sure all editions have these illustration.  Bontemps and Hughes often complained about getting stuck with illustrators who did not know how to draw beautiful black children.

Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy (1937).  Three boys from the rural south runaway to Harlem.  I love this book, it is such a fun story.

Arna Bontemps, Sad-Faced Boy (1937).  Bontemps (and Hughes) were always short of money, and kept a little bit coming in with their juvenile titles.

Fannie Blumberg, Rowena, Teena, and Tot and the Runaway Turkey (1936).  I love some of the illustrations in this book, although as I said above, some are racist by today's standards.

Eva Knox Evans, Araminta's Goat (1938)  Evans also wrote the Jerome Anthony series.  These are just nice fun books.  If I remember correctly Evans was a teacher and wanted to provide books about the everyday lives of Black children, similar to the existing books for white children.

Ellen Tarry, Hezekiah Horton (1942).  A story about a car-crazy boy in Harlem.

Marguerite de Angeli, Bright April, 1946.  Most of the other books included in the post take place in all-African American communities.  Bright April is one of the first books for kids that shows interracial friendship and racial prejudice.

In the 1930s, when these books began to be published, Black educators (and white fellow-travelers) were concerned that Black children would learn to hate books if they continually saw negative representations of Black people in books (if books lied to them).  (In his New York Times piece, Walter Dean Myers shares his own experience of hating books that didn't represent his experience.) They also worried that Black children were being denied a cultural heritage-finding a history in which they were either absent or slaves.  Despite the statistically sad state of African American children's books, Black children can find some books in which they are represented in positive ways.  But despite the fact that a lot has changed in 100 years, Black children are still being denied a literary heritage of their own. 

In the News: Multicultural Children's Lit

Today's New York Times brought two editorial about the dearth of children's books about people of color,  "Where are the People of Color in Children's Books" and  "The Apartheid of Children's Literature." The authors have different approaches to the topic, but both agree that lack of representation of children of color presents problems for those who aren't represented in books and for those who never encounter people different from themselves in books.

We live in a small New England city that is now a majority minority city.  For LB, that diversity is normal in her everyday life, but I've realized that diversity isn't as normal for her in books.  Aside from Dora, Black and Brown characters are unusual enough that she will point them them out and ask if they are related to one of the Black or Brown kids she knows in real life.  At three LB has internalized the idea that white people are the norm in books and people of color are the exception.

Apparently it's not just us, the Times states that only 93 of 3200 children's books published in 2013 were about African Americans, city a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at Madison.  You can find the study here.

I've always thought our book collection was pretty diverse, but it's about to get EVEN MORE DIVERSE.  It should not be so hard to find kids books featuring people of color, and it's frustrating how quickly the books that do get published go out of print, but their are some good options out there.  Below are some books that we already have and others that I am ordering now.

This was my favorite new book of 2013.  It's a family story from the 3rd Great Migration with lovely illustrations.

I think these Lola books are super cute, and address issues of interest to LB (we met a support dog named Fletcher at the library this weekend and got to read with him).

 Rachel Isadora does a lot of nice books.  I particularly like this one:

I Can Do It Too! is a very compelling message for LB these days.

There are quite a few Civil Rights Era-related kids books out there.  The book about Claudette Colvin in one of my favorites, but too old for LB, so I'm taking a chance and ordering this book.

More to come about some of the multicultural kids books that should still be in print.  And if anyone has suggestions for other books, I'd love to hear them.

Books that should be written

I picked up this little gem from the library sale cart.  It was more appealing to me as a historian than as lesbian mom.  Zack's Story was published in 1996, and it's crazy to think that was almost 20 years ago.  At the company store, you can buy a new copy of this book for $119.00 or a used copy for 1 cent. 

1996.  B was a Sophomore at a Catholic high school, listening to Gansta rap, playing sports, etc. I was probably on my second break from college (not counting a "gap year," which at the time was just called "not going to college").  I was living in Boston with a bunch of people, working a crappy job, going to shows, drinking beer, eating tofu pot pie.  DOMA vaguely registered with me as yet another Clinton betrayal.  I had been a Rock-the-Vote-er in 1992, and Clinton's myriad betrayals (particularly on welfare "reform" and Don't Ask/Don't Tell) shaped my political self.  I kept voting in major elections, but Obama was the the first major party candidate I voted for after Clinton. 

Gay marriage did allow me to graduate from college.  I worked a minor scam, claiming to be gay married in order to live off campus, and therefore could afford my last two years of school.  Otherwise, gay marriage didn't mean much to me, I never planned to get marriage-having no interest in being bourgeois.  Ideologically, I'm still in that place, but live intervenes in one's non-bourgeois fantasies.  I was once talking to a woman who was a former Black Panther at a faculty dinner.  She told me "People your age, you can't understand.  We thought, we KNEW, the Revolution was about to begin-it was going to happen.  You don't save for retirement when you're planning the Revolution.  And here I am."

Zack's Story is a nice book.  The text is wordy for my taste, and the photos are old enough to be dated, but not old enough to be vintage, but it is nicely written.  I don't think LB will ever read this book, but I'm happy to have it for my collection.

I'd gone to the library looking for books about race and parenting.  I ordered from the library The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, although I think it's a book that many people have issues with-I wanted to check it out from myself.  The next book that came up was one published in 1929 that I used for my dissertation.  Nothing I found in the library system was really what I was looking for-more of a handbook about how to build coalitions among diverse groups of parents across lines of class, ethnicity, race, and language.  How do you do that?  If anyone out there has resources to suggest, I'd love to hear about them.

Labor Day Review: American Cab, Providence, RI

In honor of Labor Day, I'm writing a review of a great small business in Providence.  American Cab is my go to cab company.  It's a one man operation run by John the owner, but he does have another guy who covers when he isn't working (and I've also had a good experience with him).  John took me to my early morning airport flights for eight months (I can't believe I did that for so long), and he was early or on time for every trip, even the ones when I left at 4:30am.  He has a nice cab, drives safely, takes the direct route, and is just a nice friendly guy.

I'm a person who usually will take public transit, just because I've had such bad experiences with unreliable cabs, but there is no way to get to T.F. Greene airport at 4:30am without a car.  With John, I was so much less stressed about getting to the airport than I would have been otherwise.

The number for American Cab is (401) 487-2111
Since he's a one man shop, if you know ahead of time that you'll need a cab, call him the day before. 

(I received no compensation for this review.)

The Fosters vs. Orange is the New Black

I'm watching both thanks to the luxuries of cheap cable and a Netflix subscription.  If you haven't heard, the moms on the The Fosters are lesbians raising a multiracial, bio, adoptive, and foster family.  For a cop and a charter school principal they live in a really nice house.  There's plenty of scandal, but no more than on 7th Heaven.  The Fosters is like a nice, pretty girl your mom sets you up with.  She's got a car and a nice place, but she just can't make you feel anything.

And then, there's Orange is the New Black.  I've cringed through a good portion of this show, mostly because the caricatures of race and class, not because of the sex (even that one scene).  Also I really want to brush Natasha Lyonne's hair (in a non-sexual way).  But, this show is the girl with trashy blown-out tattoos, who doesn't have her shit together, who you find strangely irresistible.  It really does show the fluid and complicated nature of sexuality (here I considered musing about the parallels between women's colleges and women's prisons, but decided against it) , and it makes you care about the characters (Tasha! Poussey! Burset!  Diaz! and, of course, Alex's voice, which in itself is a major reason to watch the show).

On one internet board I read, someone commented that she'd never thought about what prison was like before watching OITNB.  I suspect the show should not be confused with something called reality, but if it makes people pay attention to mass incarceration, that's not a bad thing.  Maybe prison shows will be the new house flipping or cupcakes, and then, when we dismantle the carceral state we can move on to something else (reality shows about North Korea, and non-sad shows with cute animals are at the top of my list).

In my unofficial survey of lesbian I know (many of whom are also moms), people who know about The Fosters are glad it's on (but what they really want is gay families on PBS Kids), and some are watching it, but everyone is watching Orange is the New Black, and then watching it again.

Bits and Pieces

Good speech visit.  ST was impressed by LB's increased articulation, but we're not really sure how or why that happened.  LB wowed with her sorting and stacking skills, even though she didn't like this week's toys as much as last week's.

I loved this article "Why Finnish Babies Sleep in Boxes," from the BBC Magazine.  Scroll down to see a picture of the contents of the box Finnish families receive for baby.  There's also an interesting sidebar about Finnish babies napping outside in the winter.

Amazon is getting into the grocery business, read here.  I'm a little leery of trusting Amazon to be the company store for the whole country, but I think expanded  home deliver of groceries could be a good thing.  Thinking about the food desert issue historically, one of the things that has changed for people is that as cars became more ubiquitous, groceries stopped coming to people.  There must be some kind of efficiency involved in one truck brining food to people? Maybe?

Some 1970s nostalgia-"Brothers and Sisters" from the Free to Be You and Me album.  The first three minutes is kids chatting with Marlo Thomas, then comes the fabulous singing, dancing, and costuming.

The review of Water in the Park, a kid's book by Emily Jenkins in this past Sunday's NYtimes, made me want to buy it.  Austerity sucks!

I have decreed that this will be the Summer of Soup, so if anyone has any good recipes, I love to hear them.

Alike/Different

I've been planning to write a post on blogs I read by people who aren't like me, but then I got caught up in a circular internal debate about what makes a blogger like or not like me, and whether that is a weird/presumptuous/oppressive categorization.  Nevertheless I read a lot of blogs by people who seem very different from me, people who wouldn't want to be friends with me, people who might even be appalled by me.

I want to be very clear that I read these blogs because I enjoy them, even if I sometimes strongly disagree with the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors.  I'm a naturally negative person, so I don't need to hate-read blogs for my daily dose of negativity.  When I judge online, it's mostly in situations where people seem to lack the most basic sense of self-preservation for themselves or others: people who give confident hack medical advice online, women who know they are experiencing serious symptoms of preeclampsia but chose to do nothing to get it checked out, an otherwise nice family that chose to expose a preemie recovering from pneumonia to dozens of people including children, and then expressed shock and confusion when said child landed in the PICU with a scary case of RSV (he recovered).  Those cases make me frustrated, but otherwise I really enjoy reading about people who live differently from me.

For your edification

What Are Your Running For, a really informative preeclampsia blog I just started reading
http://whatyourunningfor.blogspot.com/

The Common Room, well-read, quirky, frugal, big Christian family
http://thecommonroomblog.com/

Held By His Pierced Hands, a young Catholic woman who is a self-described Hobo for Christ
http://www.piercedhands.com/blog/

Passionate Perseverance, Catholic wife and mom, caregiver for her young adult disabled daughter-I also find this "what I wore on Sunday" linky very charming
http://passionateperseverance.blogspot.com/

Put That On Your Blog, matching, outfits, decorating, and other stuff I know nothing about
http://putthatonyourblog.com/

In events in our lives, we, like many families in southern New England, used IKEA as our personal playground on Saturday.  LB's working on her cobra pose.

[need to find this pic]

Even, Even More Reviews of Books About Preemies

And now for something more substantive.

I think I've hit the wall with my reading of books about preemies and their parents.  Probably that's a good stage in my emotional health.  For this installment I read This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood by Vicki Forman, and Jenny Minton's The Early Birds: A Mother's Story for Our Times.  Forman is a professional writer and Minton worked in publishing and both books are nicely written and seem to reflect a good deal of care and editorial attention.

In This Lovely Life Forman has the more unusual and compelling story to tell, which is also to say the more tragic and complicated story.  She went into labor with her twins at 23weeks, and despite the wish of Forman and her husband that no extraordinary measure be taken to revive and support the babies, the hospital insisted on aggressive medical intervention.  Twin Ellie lived a few days, and twin Evan survived with significant disabilities.  He died at age four of complications related to one of his early surgeries.

Forman presents her story of mothering children who she wanted to let go in all its pain and confusion. I felt so much empathy and sadness for the Forman as they sought to do what they thought best for their children, and were blocked by an obfuscating institutional entity.  But, I also felt anger-both at Forman's father who comes off as a complete asshole, telling his daughter, among other things that "these children should never have been born."  It was also hard to take Forma sometimes, with her expectation that things like this don't happen to people like us (successful, wealthy, educated people) and at her surprise at her love for her disabled son.  This book was a good one to read so soon after I had finished Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree, because Solomon gave me greater context for the feelings Forman expresses.

[I find that as the mother of an early, small baby who believes strongly in reproductive choice, I am often in a confusing ethical and emotional place.  I believe that the Formans should have had more say in the medical decisions for their babies.  I don't think it is wrong to withhold heroic medical measures for a very early, very sick baby, but neither do I think it wrong for a parent to ask for all measures, and it isn't wrong to want your baby to live, even if the child is likely to have serious lifelong disabilities.  Those choices, it seems to me, must be made from the heart.  The parents need to do what love tells them to do.  I'm much less sympathetic to the sort of casual eugenicism that assumes lives live with disability aren't worth living.]

Nevertheless, I really appreciated the work that Forman put into honestly representing her thoughts and feelings.  Evan died only a year before this book was published, and I'd be really interested to read what Forman would write in another ten or twenty years.  In this book, Forman's experience is raw and honest, but also jumbled and chaotic, I think a longer look back would allow her to shape her experience into a stronger narrative, although maybe it would be less honest.

Minton's story in The Early Birds is more ordinary: twins born at 31weeks, one of whom had a scary bout with NEC.  The book jacket states that "for 64 days [the boys] hovered, critically ill, in the neonatal intensive care unit,"  a description that seems overwrought and inaccurate.  In contrast, Minton captures the minutia of the NICU with a close eye.  The book is a straightforward narrative that takes the reader through pregnancy, birth, NICU and post-NICU babyhood.

Minton's larger point is a cautionary tale about fertility clinics and multiple births.  As she went through the process of getting pregnant and carrying twins, Minton was not warned of her risks of delivering early, and of the problems that early babies can face.  Potential parents should be more aware of the problems presented by a largely unregulated fertility industry and by preterm birth.  These are all good points, but to make a compelling case, Minton would really need to expand these parts of the book and provide more background information and analysis.

I'm not sorry I read these books, but overall I would recommend Alexa Stevenson's Half Baked as a more engaging preemie memoir, and Geoffrey Miller's Extreme Prematurity for a discussion of ethical issues related to premature infants.

A Day Without Mothers

At some point on Sunday, B leaned over and said "should we feel guilty that we aren't spending Mothers' Day with our daughter?" and I said, "we spend every damn day with that child." And I meant that in the most non-mean and non-cynical way. I love "that child" dearly and I am so incredibly thankful that she is ours.  Nevertheless, we spent this weekend galavanting around town while my parents spent time with (spoiled) LB.

On Saturday, we had lunch at Farmstead, where you can either go meaty or cheesy.  We went meaty, and now I'm a little sad.  Next time, we have agreed that we will just get a huge cheese platter and beers.  The meatiness was quite good, and we overindulged.  I really like Farmstead, and we have always had enjoyable slow service, which we stretched out even more with dessert and coffee.  After lunch, we wandered through Fox Point and College Hill and looked at all the historic houses, and I tried out my limited knowledge of historical architecture on B, "it's Federal!," "it's Second Empire!"

But, we didn't stop there, we went to the Cable Car and ate candy and saw a movie about ne're-do-well Scots and whiskey.  Then we waited a long time for the bus, and finished up at the Ivy Tavern for beer and seafood chowder-and please believe me that I would not eat chowder in a bar unless it generally had really good food.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the child behaved perfectly, weeded the backyard like a pro, ate healthy food, and accomplished various other unbelievable feats.

So, Sunday we went out for more on the West Side of Providence.  We started at Mr. Lemon for Italian ice, which is exceptionally soft and good.  I don't know exactly where we were, but let me just say that a "bad neighborhood" in Providence doesn't have anything on a "bad neighborhood" in Baltimore.  We got a little bit lost in the area around Providence College, and I saw the most heinous college slum I have ever seen: an entire neighborhood that was a debris field of red solo cups, shirtless white guys with lacrosse sticks, and rundown houses.

Next stop, New York System in Olneyville, home of the Hot Wiener.  We got some hot wieners and a coffee milk.  The fries were just okay, but everything else was excellent and it was a great old-school place.  We finished up at LaSalle Bakery for a pizza strip (red sauce on pizza dough served a room temp, delicious) and a cupcake.  We went home to a happy, tired child, and all was good.

Happy families are all alike

I think my eyes were bigger than my eyes.  This is not the book pile of a non-traveling parent, but I will do my best.

So far, I've read Heaven is Here by Stephanie Neilson, who has the NieNie Dialogues blog. I enjoyed this book, but it would be better as a novel.  Sweet, shallow, pretty girl has the perfect childhood, marries the handsome love of her life, bears four lovely children, and then has a tragic accident that threatens to steal everything that she valued in life.  How good would that story be in the hands of a novelist, who would take care not to create the unbelievably perfect early life that Neilson describes.

As a reader, I feel free to critique Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennett, and Harriet the Spy.  They don't care if I look for their flaws and discuss them with the world.  Stephanie Neilson is a real person with thoughts and feelings, and ownership over her life story.  As a reader, this first-person age of memoirists, diarists, and bloggers is problematic.  Can you read a strangers life story in a way that is both compassionate and analytic?  Can you say anything to someone like Neilson about her own story beyond the equivalent of a gif hang-in-there kitten?

There is so much interesting material in Neilson's story about body image and gender roles.  She reports that after coming out of a months-long coma, her overwhelming emotion was guilt.  Not just guilt about choosing to get in a plane that then crashed, but guilt that she was burned and no longer pretty (she is still a very attractive person) and no longer normal.  A fictional piece would be able to dig into this idea of the burdens of perfection, while Neilson can't quite go there-and it's her story, so she doesn't owe us any feminist analysis.

I'm also reading The Magician King by Lev Grossman right now, and honestly, his fantastical world of Fillory is more familiar to me than Neilson's world of happy families.  It's interesting to read Neilson's blog alongside the blog of her sister Courtney Kendrick.  Kendrick tells stories of family joy, but also one of family pressures and constraint.  While Kendrick's writing is more understandable to me, I'm not sure that it's more honest.  It does seem to me that Neilson represents her own psyche, her own worldview, as authentically as possible, although the world she describes is barely comprehensible to me.  Shortly before reading Heaven is Here, I heard this speech by Elizabeth Smart about human trafficking and the lesson that will help young people survive and save themselves.

Interesting stuff.

Review: Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

First off, I borrowed this book from the library.  I read this book for free!  How amazing is that?  I am really loving the library and trying to get in the habit of requesting books online as soon as I see something interesting.

I was telling someone how much I "enjoyed" this book, and he expressed surprise that I would use that particular word to describe my experience of a book that is about, among other things, children with severe disabilities, children conceived during rape, and children who become criminals.  The topics covered in the book are challenging, but Solomon has a thoughtful approach.  One of his central points, is the diversity and complexity of parental response to atypical kids.  While many parents go through a period of mourning and/or experience day-to-day hardships, they also find joy and meaning in their lives with their children.  He also explores atypical identities that bring individuals pride and joy, and those that bring burden, suffering, or shame.

This book is 702 pages of narrative, with another couple hundred pages of notes, which made me incredibly happy.  Usually non-fiction is just too short and I'm left with a million questions.  Solomon does a great job including multiple stories that illustrate his point about the diversity of experience.  However, I'd be very surprised if his editor didn't try to make him cut it down and tighten it up.  Solomon opens with the overarching theme of the book--the idea of horizontal identities, that is, identities not inherited vertically from a parent and instead tie the child to another identity group to which his/her parents don't belong.  At various points in the book, this theoretical center slips away, overwhelmed by the power of individual stories.  I was fine with that slippage, I love big, messy books, but I could imagine some readers finding in frustratingly meandering, particularly in the second section of the book.

Solomon is a gay man and a gay dad.  At the beginning and end of the book he talks about how these identities shaped his own life.  On pages 692-693 (if you're reading on a Kindle you're SOL) he describes so many of the feelings I had as a lesbian-mom to be (regret at not being able to have a child that was genetically related to both me and B, uneasiness with the fertility industry) that I would like to just photocopy those two pages and hand them out to anyone starting the process or asking me nosy questions on the bus.

If you are someone who likes non-fiction, particularly medical non-fiction, and enjoys a mix of personal stories and theory, I highly recommend this book.

This and That

LB's behavior as of late has been "challenging." I guess it's just a mix of toddler, March in New England, sick and fussy, and time change.  Sometimes B and I have responded with grace and good humor, and sometimes not.  My coping strategies have been several-fold.  Stuffing my craw with discount Easter candy, sampling the excellent beers that B selects (Lagunitas Brown Sugga' Substitute, check it out!), some IKEA retail therapy in search of mealtime and organizational solutions, and distractions of the watching, reading and listening variety.

If you've been thinking about DOMA and SCOTUS, the American Bar Association has helpfully provided links to all of the amicus briefs.  I've been slowly making my way through some of them, and it's interesting to see the varied perspectives that go beyond a simple liberal/conservative divide (including the Westboro Baptist Church's brief in support of neither party).

My FIL passed along a purported North Korean propaganda video about life in the US.  Here the Huff Post explains that the video is real, but the voiceover is fake.  B and I recently watched the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone, about the life of one of the only people born in a North Korean prison who is known to have escaped.  It's an interesting film that combines classic documentary elements with graphic-novel style reenactments I just finished reading Escape from Camp 14, a book about the same man by journalist Blaine Harden.  The book answered some of the questions I had after watching the film.  Both the book and the film were engrossing, but I was left with questions about the degree to which this one man's experience was representative of a whole population of prisoners.  I don't doubt the accuracy of the claims about the oppression and violence faced by prisoners, but I wondered if his descriptions of family life, and the lack of familial affection, were widespread or the experience of a dysfunctional family within a totalitarian environment.

This photo series of children with their most prized possession are poignant, hopeful and depressing.

I really enjoyed the article "About a Boy," in this week's New Yorker (which you may not be able to access for a while unless you have a NY subscription).  The article discusses the increasing options for trans youth and the ethical and practical challenges that come with those options. As the article points outs, it can be physically easier for young people who transition at an earlier age, however, early transitions may force young people to establish a gender identity before they are ready to do so.  The author makes the interesting point that perhaps adults are more comfortable with early transitions because if fits with our cultural desire for a strong gender binary.  I've recently gotten back in touch with someone I went to summer camp with back in the day who is a transwoman and a trans activist.  I'm curious to here her critique of the article.  As a thoroughly ciswoman, many of the authors concerns about early transitions made perfect sense to me, but for people who aren't trans I think it is really hard to understand on an empathic and elemental level.

And, so as not to give the young people all the attention, RI NPR has been running a series on aging in RI (I think we have the most aged population in the US) including this piece on gay elders in RI.

Finally, I read Hilary Mantel's novels  Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies a few months ago and loved them.  B has started reading Wolf Hall, and talking with her about the book is just reminding me how amazing it is.  The book switches perspectives and moves through time with few markers, but somehow Mantel manages those shifts without making the book seem overly technique driven.  The novels have the backbone of a really interesting story, even if you know how it will turn out in the end, enriched by the interior life of Thomas Cromwell.  I've also recently read Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost.  I must of read part of it before, because it seems awfully familiar.  In any case, I thought it was a good book, but not quite what I wanted.  I don't know if I'm just over the memoir, maybe I get my confessional fix from blogs now, or maybe all I want from Mantel is more Wolf Hall.

More Preemie Reviews: Little Man: A Documentary Film

Badger was away this weekend trying to find us a new home, so I hung out with a baby, ate a chicken box, and watched the six part BBC documentary Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.  Let it be noted that I did not do all of these thing simultaneously, and I may be a sick fuck.

I also watched the documentary Little Man.  The film was made by a lesbian mom with a son by surrogacy, who was a micro preemie.  This film was incredibly painful to watch.  I've been watching a fair number of documentaries recently because we got a Roku, so I can watch any streaming Netflix content on our TV.  After watching those films, I've decided I don't really like the first person documentary.  As a genre, it's just too raw and emotional.  I know that some people really like that unmediated quality, but I prefer documentaries that are more measured and analytical.  Little man was very close to death multiple times in the film.  Those episodes are presented quite graphically (they filmed while he was in the NICU), and that was hard to watch, but harder was the relationship between his two moms.  I searched to see if they are still together, and was very surprised to see that they are.  In the film, their relationship was in the land somewhere between non-existant and totally dysfunctional.  Their conflict was centered around the fact that one of the moms had wanted to terminate the pregnancy when they found out that the baby was likely to have serious health issues, and the other mom insisted that they would continue the pregnancy.  After the baby was born, the filmmaking mom continued to want a high level of interventions, while the other mom did not.  Seeing the two of them react to each other from a place of anger, distance, and perceived superiority was just so upsetting.  I don't know how B and I would have survived without each other, and I don't know how we would have a relationship now if we had failed each other in such a fundamental way during LB's early life.  Overall, the film left me queasy and unsettled.  I think some of the ideas embedded in the film about neo-natal ethics, family, and relationships is probably quite interesting, but I was too close to some of the subject matter to be able to consider those bigger ideas.

I definitely would not recommend this film for recent preemie parents.

Even more books about preemies

I've previously reviewed books about preemies here and here.

If you have been looking for books about preemies, you have probably come across the following books: The Preemie Primer: A Complete Guide for Parents of Premature Babies-From Birth through the Toddler Years and Beyond by Jennifer Gunter, MD and Preemies: The Essential Guide for Parents of Premature Babies by Linden, Paroli and Doron.  B. bought both of these books after LB was born.  According to B., both were disappointing because they lacked medical detail, and she would have preferred having a medical textbook about premature infants (this is, after all, the woman who was mistaken for a NICU worker for an embarrassingly long period of time by a group of med students).

I only wanted medical information on a need to know basis, but since I was so forgetful, it was nice to have a reference at home.  I think if I had to choose one of these books, I would choose The Preemie Primer because I found it better organized for my needs.  The Preemie Primer is divided by bodily systems (heart, lungs, eyes, etc.), while Preemies!  is divided by time period (first day, first week, hospital, home).  Since I was usually looking for information specific to LB's particular medical conditions, it was easier to find the specific information I was looking for in The Preemie Primer.  While these books can be useful as you try and formulate questions you want to ask the doctors and nurses in the NICU, I found it better to get my information directly from the NICU.  I suspect that the information in these book quickly becomes out of date, and the explanations lack the nuance you get from a conversation from someone working in the field.  LB's NICU was a teaching hospital, and our conversations with her doctors often when something like "Some studies have show A and some studies have shown B.  At this point we really don't have definitive evidence.  My preference is to do X for the following reasons, but some of my colleagues choseY for the following reasons, it's really a matter of preference."  Good doctors who you trust are worth a million books.  Seeing doctors and nurses at work in the NICU made me realize the mix of science and art that goes into caring for babies. Preemies can be so complicated and their symptoms often don't have clearcut causes, and no book can really explain that complexity, so the purpose of the books are to provide some basic information and some sense of control.

Watching Girls at 40

Every time I think the name of this TV show (seen on HBO), I hear the Beastie Boys song of the same name in my head, which tells you something about where I'm from generationally.  I've said aloud while watching it both "I can't watch this" and "I don't know why I watch this," but not because I think it's a bad show. For the first half of the season, my main takeaway was "When I lived this in the '90s it didn't feel as humiliating as it looks now on the small screen."  The second half of the season features some resolution, personal awareness, and a modicum of what passes for redemption these days.

A couple friends I've talked to about the show have said something along the lines of "I lived it and I don't really need to see it again."  I've definitely had the same feeling, but there's something about Lena Dunham that keeps me watching.  The way she uses her body in Girls is really interesting.  Seeing a woman be so deliberately sexually explicit, while also being deliberately un-sensual is something you don't see on television.  It's something I feel like I should have seen in many years of indie film watching, but Dunham isn't making a statement about how "all women's bodies are beautiful."  Instead, she seems to be implicating the viewer in the awkwardness of the show, after all we are the assholes who are watching.  If there's a message in this show, it seems to be something like "being a person is humiliating, being a woman is humiliating, and being a person who wants to lead an interesting life is humiliating, so enjoy it."

I thought that this New Yorker review of Game of Thrones had compared the gratuitous, soft focus nudity of G of T (or as we call it, Crown of Thorns), with the aggressive realism of Girls, but apparently I remembered wrong.  In any case, I think some writer has made that comparison in print.  In Girls, Dunham uses her very ordinary body (not thin, not toned, not perfect) to heighten the awkwardness of the sex scenes and, I think, to provoke viewers to be hyper-aware of their objectification.  It's not fun viewing, but it's fascinating.

Another Book about Preemies

A month ago, I reviewed the books Extreme Prematurity and Fragile Beginnings here.  I recently read Half Baked: The Story of My Nerves, My Newborn, and How We Both Learned to Breathe by Alexa Stevenson, which is, among other things, a memoir about parenting a preemie.  I enjoyed this book, and if you like well-written medical memoirs, or you have smart, cynical friend who just had a preemie (and would not want you to buy her a novelty teddy bear hugging a heart at the hospital gift shop), you should check out this book.  If you just had a preemie, you might want to put this one aside and come back to it in a few months or a year.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the style of blogs to books.  I read blogs and enjoy the way bloggers write, but I often find that when I read a book I expect something different.  The breezy blog style doesn't always hold up and I often wish for more substantive chapters.  While I felt this way about parts of Half Baked, overall I felt that she managed the blog to book transition very gracefully. Alexa is still blogging here.

There were some experiences that she describes in the book the book that I recognized from my own experience with LB, particularly the brief period of post-baby euphoria, and an overall more relaxed approach to parenting post-preemie.

This book is the first I have read for pleasure as an e-book (on a computer, not on an e-reader) and the experience sucked.  I kept getting timed out, having to log back in, and waiting for the book to buffer. All that added to the fact that it is pretty much impossible to go back to a specific passage (in an e-book or a book on an e-reader), left me very annoyed.  I really hope the tech geniuses out there can fix some of the e-book design flaws before physical books disappear from the earth.  And don't even get me started on the Kindle, which clearly has its uses, but could only be considered a device of technical wizardry if we all went back in time and it was 1985.

Two Books about Preemies

When Ladybug was in the NICU, I did no reading about preemies.  In terms of preemie parents, I was probably on the extreme side of not wanting to know any medical details.  I wanted to hear that LB was good, and if that wasn't true, I wanted to know that she wasn't going to die, and I didn't really want to hear the details.  With the rise in the number of M.D.s from Google University, I think most people want to hear what a doctor has to say and then they want to go check it out themselves.  In the NICU, we were given a lot of information, which for me involved listening to excruciating lectures with my eyes glazed over.  The NICUs focus on statistical risk always seemed useless to me as a parent.  Of course for a neonatologist, statistical risk is a useful tool, but as a parent I really don't care how 10,000 babies respond to a particular treatment, I care about my Ladybug.  From the neo's point of view, I guess statistics give them something to say.  Without the numbers they are just left with the truth of "I don't know," or "I have a hunch."

I've always like medical non-fiction, and now that I'm further away from LBs preemie days, I've started reading about preemies.

I recently read Adam Wolfberg's Fragile Beginnings: Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU (2012) and I found it to be, not a bad book, but an odd book.  Wolfberg is a doctor and a medical researcher, but in the book he uses the experience of his own daughter, who was born premature, as a framing device.  Reading the book, I got the sense that either Wolfberg and his editor has very different ideas about the book, and/or that Wolfberg was uncomfortable sharing his families' experience.  I suspect that the author wanted to write a more scholarly book, and the editor wanted a book that would appeal to the broad audience of people who might be interested in the personal story of a preemie's survival.  The result of this tension is a series of interesting juxtapositions, a somewhat cold vignette about the author's daughter, following the story of a woman choosing to get an abortion at 23w 4ds, or a graphic descriptions of medical experiments on animals.  This back and forth gives the book a jumpy feeling.  Overall, this book was interesting and I don't regret reading it; however, if you know a family who has recently had a preemie and are wondering if this book is an appropriate gift, it is not!  Do not buy this book for anyone who has had a preemie!

I prefer Geoffrey Miller's Extreme Prematurity: Practice, Bioethics, and the Law (2007) and this preference is partly due to the fact that I find Miller's emphasis on ethics more interesting than Wolfberg's emphasis on brain plasticity.  Extreme Prematurity is a short book with a large amount of information.  The book contains sections on medical issues, bioethics, practices in different countries, and laws in different countries.  The author manages to be evenhanded, even when discussing controversial theories like utilitarianism.  I found the comparisons between the United States and other countries particularly interesting.  I definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in prematurity and bioethics, and I wish Miller would right an expanded version with additional detail.  Once again, this book is not one that I would recommend for families with babies in the NICU, but Miller has given the book a boring enough title that I can't imagine anyone mistakenly giving it as a gift.