November 2009 Archives

When I need a new pair of shoes, I buy a decent pair of sneakers--usually men's, because I hate all those bright white women's sneakers with glittery pink details--for about $75. Then I wear them until they literally fall apart around my feet, toss them and get a new pair.

I don't understand the women-and-shoes thing. I never related to Carrie in Sex in the City and her desire to own multiple pairs of hideously uncomfortable $400 high heels.

And that's why I have no idea where my kids' shoe fetish came from. It certainly wasn't my genetics. All my kids are shoe freaks, though Dylan is the worst. When he was a toddler I had to shield his eyes when we walked past the Target footwear department because he would lose his mind if he so much as glimpsed the shoes. He could have cared less about the toy department. And when it came time to actually buy him some shoes, he would scream bloody murder the whole time I was sifting through the shoes on the shelf, looking for the right size, and then he'd burst into a delighted grin while I was trying the shoes on him, revert to screaming if they didn't fit and I had to take them off, and then back again to a grin once I finally found the right pair. Shoe shopping with Dylan was a total nightmare.

Buying shoes for kids is a difficult task even when you aren't wrestling a now-screaming, now-grinning Jekyll and Hyde child. Dylan had wide feet so I couldn't just put him in any pair of size fives--they had to be a 5W, and they couldn't lace, they had to have Velcro closures because I just couldn't shove his fat little feet into anything else. And kids' shoes have to fit; active, growing feet can be damaged by an ill-fitting pair of shoes. These days I actually find it easier to buy shoes online--the better sites have really accurate fitting instructions, and shopping online is blessedly tantrum-free.

Now that Dylan is older, he doesn't have quite the same reaction to shoe shopping (his little sisters have taken over that role), but he still displays a strange attachment to his footwear. He slept with his first pair of cowboy boots for a month. Not on his feet, but tucked next to his head under the blankets. I used to cringe when I saw them there, sometimes caked with mud, but I left him alone because the consequences of removing them were far more severe than just washing a little dirt out of his sheets.

I'm still baffled as I watch my kids fuss over their footwear. I'll never know where that gene came from, though it appears to be a dominant one. Personally, I'd die a happy woman if I never had to wear another pair of high heels. Hailey, on the other hand, just can't wait to get her feet into the most spangly, purple pair of pumps she can find. Go figure.

Every parent wants to be perfect, and no parent is.

For the most part, no one expects moms and dads to be perfect, especially other parents. We've all seen parents in public who are clearly having a bad day. They snap at their kids, they wear faces of exasperation and exhaustion, their kids scream and they don't handle it well--and for the most part, we other parents are sympathetic. We've all been there, after all.

For the two-under-two mom, though, it's different. For the three under four mom it's even worse and for the three under four pregnant mom it's really, really difficult. You simply can't have a bad day in public. You have to be the picture of patience and good parenting. You have to be Zen, with a capital "Z." Because if your kids are screaming and you look frazzled, or if you snap at them or you behave in any way but calm, cool and collected, people shake their heads at you and think "Well, she can't handle all those kids. What was she thinking having so many of them so close together?" And they use that scene as an argument against closely spaced children.

OK I sound paranoid I know. But now that I am very, very obviously pregnant I am scared to go anywhere with all three of my kids. Just the other day I had to drag them all with me to my OB so I could get my swine flu shot. I was petrified of an outburst. I found myself speaking to them with more serenity in my voice than I ever use (if only I could be that way all the time) just so the nursing staff wouldn't mutter to each other about the absurdity of my fourth pregnancy. And in the parking lot I was actually approached by an elderly woman who looked at all of my kids and then at my belly and said "And you're expecting again? You know what causes that, right?"

In the end, of course, it doesn't matter what people say to me or how badly everyone melts down in public, I'm never going to regret having my kids in the order that I did. I love all of them, and I know that any difference in that decision would have resulted in one or more of my children never becoming a part of my life. I do regret that I'm not a Super Mom. I regret that I can't be Zen all the time, that I can't always talk to them with the same serenity I somehow summoned at my OB's. I regret that I'm not stronger. But regret my children? Never.

I'm not a perfect parent, and neither is anyone else. The number of kids I have doesn't really have anything to do with it. Now if only I could convince that mom at Target with her one child who is giving me a backwards look as my 19 month old screams bloody murder as we pass by ...

When I was a kid I had a few close encounters with bats. I remember getting dive-bombed by a bat while swimming in my grandparents' pool at dusk, and I can also remember finding a dead bat in that same pool. While camping a bat once flew so close to me that I felt its wings brush against my hair. And my mom once discovered a dead bat in our house--later she recalled "something black" swooping past her head when she opened the front door a few mornings earlier. Once there was a very suspicious bat flying around in broad daylight next to our barn; when we called Animal Control the officer failed to locate it and we never found out its fate. Of all the bats I've encountered, that one was probably the most likely to have been dangerously ill. I guess we were lucky that one of our dogs or cats didn't get hold of it.

Despite all these close encounters, I never once worried about contracting rabies. So how come my 18 month old's near encounter with a bat on Halloween sent me into a freakishly irrational state of paranoia?

Here's what happened: we were walking with a small group of fellow trick-or-treaters at dusk when I saw a bat swoop down to where my 18 month old, Natalie, was walking. It veered in quite close to her, flew back towards one of the houses, flew along the wall and then back up into the sky.

I don't know if it touched her. She certainly didn't react as if anything strange had happened, she just kept obliviously walking along in her (adorable I might add) strawberry costume. But for me it was the beginning of an obsessive search for information.

I called the pediatrician on call the next day. "There's always a small chance that a person could contract rabies from that kind of encounter," he told me. "But it's about as close to zero as you can get without actually being zero."

Of course, I didn't focus on the "close to zero" part of his answer. I focused on the part where he said "There's always a small chance."

The internet wasn't really helping me. It was full of stories about people dying of rabies after simply finding a bat in their bedroom, or about entire soccer teams getting rabies shots because a bat flew too close to them during a game. The CDC even went so far as to recommend rabies vaccination for "when a bat flies into a person." Of course, I had no idea whether the bat really did fly into Natalie, or whether it just came close.

And I read about Jeanna Giese, the world's only unvaccinated rabies survivor.That small glimmer of hope for what might happen if Natalie got sick because I didn't succumb to my paranoia and vaccinate her faded when I learned that the medical protocol used to save Jeanna had never been successfully duplicated. Rabies was still pretty much considered a death sentence.

So I waited until my regular pediatrician was in the office, and then I called her for a second opinion. She told me the same thing."I wouldn't vaccinate either of my girls in that situation," she said.

Those doctors must think I'm a basket case.

After talking to them I feel a little better. I guess. Still, this is just one example of what happens to you when you become a parent. I remember in my pre-child days worrying about myself--when the SARS outbreak was spreading through Canada, I obsessed over my own safety. Now my own safety means nothing to me, except of course for what it will mean to my kids if they lost their mother.

And my paranoia for them is far more severe than it ever was for myself. I am told this worrying and obsessing over the health and safety of my kids will never go away. I wouldn't really want it to, either, although I would prefer for it to be more of a rational paranoia rather than the lie-awake-at-night-worrying-about-slim-possibilities kind of paranoia.

I used to dream that one day I would have a nice house and plenty of money to spare. Now I dream that on my death bed I will be able to say that all of my children are happy, healthy and secure in their lives. And rabies-free.