Welcome to the September 13 14, 2009 edition of the Carnival of Feminist Parenting. Sorry it’s late, I was finding it hard to type yesterday due to having decapitated my finger with a potato peeler (don’t ask).
There have been precisely two…

When I casually asked my husband if he would consider BF, he responded “no” without thinking. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because he’s seen how much work is involved in BF or because it’s just something that women do, but the idea that men would refuse to use their own bodies to nourish their own children while being supportive of BF mothers is ridiculous to me. But of course he’s willing to feed our son with BM in a bottle.

To be clear: I think that this feminism does exist, but that the more individualist one tends to get more air time.

…that’s a pretty big assumption.

Also, some of us don’t leave our kids with babysitters or daycare because our children have atypical physical challenges (read: they’re sick, and not in an acute or temporary way) that means that babysitters aren’t qualified and no daycare would accept the liability involved.

I’m not granola enough for the AP crowd, but granola enough that the non-AP crowd thinks I’m weird. For me, the helpful part of AP is the idea that you don’t always have to ‘fix’ your child, or train them like a dog. You don’t have to teach your child how to sleep or when to eat, you just kind of roll with it.

It’s not so much a lack of discipline as it is an acceptance of how babies ARE, which is kind of annoying and inconvenient sometimes (no matter how zen you are, I do not believe you if you tell me that you do not mind growth spurts, when your child wakes you up 5 times in one night to eat or play or just cry, and you have to work in the morning, AND you have the flu), but that’s a feature, not a bug. Babies are needy because they have NEEDS, not because they’ve been raised wrong.

We co-sleep because we sleep a lot better when we don’t have to listen for a monitor or get out of bed when the babies cry. Rolling over and patting a baby is much more convenient than dragging your bleary ass out of bed.

I like a carrier. I do a lot of walking and bus riding (I can’t afford a car), and a stroller just isn’t as maneuverable as my own two feet. Also, it doesn’t make sense to me to push around x-whatever pounds of stroller in addition to however many pounds of baby I have to haul (even factoring in the fact it’s on wheels). Further, the distance between me and the baby in a stroller makes me nervous. what if he stops breathing, or has some kind of seizure, or swallows a bee, or…? if the baby is right on me, I at least know he’s still alive. as a frantic new mom, that’s reassuring.

when I’m on the bus and carrying my son in a ring sling, sometimes spanish-speaking bus passengers assume I speak Spanish. When I’m using my wrap and the baby’s on my back, West African bus riders tell me “that is the way to do it, like we do back home.”

of course, as I type this I realize that my average-white-mom’s privileged pissiness doesn’t really measure up against the cumulative effects of a lifetime of cultural insults.

But I am grateful for my carriers. they let me do stuff I couldn’t otherwise do and go places I couldn’t otherwise go. I can’t pretend I’m some sort of earth-mother goddess with magical mommy powers, but I am every day grateful for my global ancestors who make my own little mommy-bubble a saner place.

But to build on a comment I think bfp was making, be careful with how vigorously you attack that idea. I think some people are so insistent that “they would never choose to live the way they live if they had any other options” that what is implicit in their message is “those women would be white, mainstream Americans if they had any options- they aren’t primitive and happy, they are primitive and depressed.”

Both sides are essentially calling women from other cultures primitive. Would they all choose to use strollers if they had the option? Some would, some wouldn’t. Don’t glorify the “happy savage” but let’s also not diminish them to “unhappy savage” either.