Photo credit: Leslie Bird

When the recent Time magazine issue that asked “Are You Mom Enough?” and the article that sought to answer “why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes — and how Dr. Bill Sears became their guru” was first brought to my attention, my response was actually “Yes!” As a resident of crazy Los Angeles, I have met plenty of extreme parenting philosophy followers and I have always maintained that the actual founders of some of these philosophies are not nearly as fanatical as their minions.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to chit chat with Dr. Bill himself, and if you’ve ever dealt with the hardcore faction of AP or guilted yourself for not being the perfect parent and following his philosophy to the letter of the law, you might be surprised by what he has to say.

After a couple of minutes of idle chat where I told him about writing a chapter in Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay that discussed Attachment Parenting and bringing up my love for Real Housewives of OC (hey, he lives there) I got down to it:

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor:  First off, I agree with you on a lot of points. I had a tough childhood and always knew I wanted to parent differently than I was parented. I stayed home from work for the first year because my mother worked and went to school full time and the effects of that have reverberated through my entire life. But I wasn’t able to breast-feed and I felt horrible about it. What do you say to a person who agrees with your philosophy but can’t follow all of your basic tenets?

Dr. Sears: This is why we came up with the 7 Baby B’s [you can find these on Dr. Sears’ website]. They are tools not rules. You take as many tools as you can with the resources you have. I can’t breast feed but I can wear my baby more or I can respond to my baby more. I wasn’t breast fed. I was bottle fed. I turned out okay. Also with our adopted baby she was the first formula fed baby but it didn’t agree with her so we had donor milk. This is an option for today’s mom. There are many way of meeting your babies’ needs.

SWT: What do you say to the extremists who have taken your basic philosophy but distorted it and made it an all-or-nothing proposition?

One of my daughters was born two pounds at almost 34 weeks gestation. I had something called IUGR which stands for Intrauterine Growth Restriction which can produce a baby who is SGA or small for gestational age. Sadie is four and a half years old and weighs twenty-eight pounds –when weighed at night, on a full stomach, with socks on. She’s also a full head shorter than her twin sister Matilda and Matilda weighs forty-two pounds (in the morning, naked -if that gives you a better comparison).

What I’m saying is that if you don’t know Sadie, she can seem startlingly tiny. But Sadie is my child so when I see her, I see so much more than her small packaging. I see her curly, silly haircut (grown out from a DIY job she did after some alone time with a pair of safety scissors). I see her smile and her attitude and usually some stray glitter.

This kid has been through a lot: NICU, a bijillion doctor visits not to mention a g-tube for a year and a half, severe reflux, and almost daily therapy. Let’s just say we’ve traveled the bumpy highway of medical issues and we carry the road rash to prove it. But, we’ve moved beyond her size – so why can’t everyone else?

When I’m out with my twins, I have never been able to avoid people’s comments. Standing together, the girls look so much alike in hair, eyes and coloring but possibly eighteen-months to two years apart in age. And when people find out they’re twins, chaos ensues.

Oh dear Lord, it’s almost Mother’s Day. This is one of those “holidays” that’s fraught with unrealistic expectation and pressure on everyone. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the holiday Scrooge but it feels like so many of these forced commercial holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and obviously Tu B’ Shevat  only benefit Hallmark but leave everyone else feeling like it’s just another opportunity to screw up.

Okay, it’s really adorable when my kids make me something in school and present it to me on Mother’s Day morning all smiles and love and making me feel like the kind of mom who always makes fresh baked cookies and never ever raises her voice. As far as that goes, keep it coming. What I’m talking about the pressure that men feel to make Mother’s Day special or risk being thought of as unfeeling, insensitive and ungrateful of all their wives do.

Most husbands, even if they do remember the day, just give you a card and move on. It’s not that they don’t love us, ladies, they do! It’s that they don’t have gift giving in their DNA. That’s why so many TV commercials are aimed at men who don’t know how to shop for women. And that’s why so many women are sporting stupid drop heart diamond pendants around their neck- because their husband only understands that every kiss begins with Kay.

So, let’s forget about waiting for the fellows to give us our gifts and give them the gift of not having to shop for us. Men love it when you express your needs clearly. Help them help you have a great Mother’s Day.

1. Have your husband keep the kids in the other room while you watch two Lifetime movies in a row. Try The Baby Dance with Laura Dern and Stockard Channing. It’s all about a woman trying to adopt and getting taken advantage of at every turn. Happy Mother’s Day! Or you can escape from parenting and go with my person fave “Another Woman’s Husband” starring Lifetime movie great Lisa Rinna!
2. Get your husband’s credit card (yes I know it’s yours too but for the sake of “treating yourself” use his copy) and order in every meal. Yes, including breakfast. Or go out for breakfast but order in lunch and dinner. How about pizza for lunch and Chinese for dinner? No? Well get whatever you want then. Jesus, I’m trying to help you.
3. By yourself that cute white Michael Kors watch you’ve had your eye on for two years. You know the one with the diamonds and the clear band. You deserve it. Go on and do it. Or just order it for yourself on eBay. Don’t worry about the cost, he’d want you to have it.
4. Lay on the couch and play Angry Birds on your phone while the kids fight. Refuse to budge until you’ve made it at least six levels. Or does this only sound fun to me?
5. Opposite of spa day: eat a ton of candy and potato chips. In fact, do not even eat a single morsel of   anything that’s “grilled” “poached” “fresh” or in any way healthy sounding. It’s your day. And don’t share any of it with your children. They may have broccoli and they’d better be happy about it because God damn it, it’s Mother’s Day!

This has nothing to do with the post but it is pretty cute.

If you know me, you know I’ve been obsessed with going on a cruise lately. I’ve had some friends whose opinions I respect come back from a cruise ranting and raving about what an insanely great time they had. I actually allowed those friends to show me pictures! And the pictures made me go to the website! And the website got me all crazy about the idea of getting our whole family on board. I’m not sure if it’s the idea that there is all kinds of stuff for the kids to do where they’re busy and happy and I can hit a spa (I don’t know if you’re aware but I have three of them. I am painfully aware of this fact – at every moment –and I live to not be aware every moment).

Muffin Tops Are Cool

Now that Jessica Simpson’s had her baby, it seems the race is on for her take off the weight. I for one, loved that she seemed to have a devil’s food cake-may-care attitude about her weight gain and seemed to be giving the media the middle finger for daring to report constantly on her expanding belly. But I guess it’s because she had a multi-million dollar deal with Weight Watchers to cushion the sting. The rest of us are not so lucky.

We real women have to deal with constant headlines featuring celebrities who are celebrated for losing weight quickly (and might I add completely unrealistically!). Headlines such as all of these from People magazine:

“Model Alessandra Ambrosio Drops 45 Lbs. of Baby Weight in Three Months to (Nearly!) Bare All”

“How Jessica Alba reclaimed her famously fit form in record time”

“How Victoria’s Secret model Heidi Klum got runway ready in two months”

More recently we’ve been treated to “hot mama” pics of Jennifer Garner, Candice Crawford (Tony Romo’s wife), Hilary Duff and of course the no longer babyweightalicious Beyonce who eight weeks after Blue Ivy was born inspired this headline:

“HOT PIC: Beyonce Shows Off Rockin’ Post-Baby Bod in Tight Blue Dress!”

Okay, yes, it’s a little challenging to feel sexy these days. It’s not impossible, mind you, it just takes a more concerted effort now that I have three kids calling me mom. The thing is, a lot of us still want to be the sex kittens we used to be but life gets in the way — specifically children who wake up at six-effing-a.m., truckloads of laundry that have a way of making it into piles on my bed, and trying to come up with meals to cook for three different kids three times a day. Hell, I’m tired after breakfast!

But I know that we moms still think about sex because that book 50 Shades of Grey is the number one book on Amazon! That’s right, millions of women are riding buses and subways thinking nasty thoughts while reading their Kindle and no one is the wiser. Which just goes to show you, moms are still sexual beings. I just think that what we find sexy changes a bit after we have kids.

Overall, I’m a great mom. You know, not every minute because that would be impossible. And overkill. Since you asked, I’d have to say my parenting style is a combination of laid back, over-anxious, sappy, sarcastic, loose, fly by the seat of my pants, tense, Tiger mom, French, Kung-Fu and Atkins with a little co-sleeping thrown in. Which is to say that I do what works for our family.

There are times that I soar as a mom; holding  dance parties with all three girls on the bottom of my daughter’s trundle bed, keeping a cool head when a strawberry yogurt smoothie is spilled on the couch, apologizing to my kids when I neglect to keep a cool head over a spilled yogurt smoothie on the couch, listening to a four-year-old’s knock knock jokes thirty times in a row without yelling “Jesus, that doesn’t even make sense!” Mostly I believe I provide consistency, love and affection to my kids to the best of my ability. But I’m far from perfect.

For example:

I’ve given ice cream for breakfast.

Sometimes I give in to whining.

A lot of emails asking for classroom volunteers go unanswered.

I once let Matilda eat a peanut m&m that rolled out of a candy machine and onto the floor at the mall.

I  let my kids watch Dance Moms.

Sometimes Elby gets to play games on my computer in lieu of a bedtime story.

My kids don’t bathe every day. In fact, Matilda recently went so long without a bath I’m ashamed to say she smelled homeless.

Being a mother is some hard shit. That’s the truth. But you knew that right? You knew that because a ton of mothers —mothers who write about mothering, myself included — love to regale you with stories about the crap parts, the times that try our souls, and some people are sick of it. Maybe not you but some people.

A parenting blogger at Jezebel wrote a post about dealing with the terrible two’s that inspired some vitriolic comments about the nature of complaining about having kids. I’m familiar with this. This is my territory! When I had my first child I couldn’t believe what a train wreck I became in such a short span. By the time my daughter was four months old I was an unshowered, sleep-deprived, uninteresting, breastfeeding failure who fairly constantly spewed negativity to anyone who would listen. As you can imagine, my husband got a little tired of it. Actually most of my friends probably felt annoyed. I imagine that at some point everyone in my life probably said a silent prayer that I would strongly consider Zoloft. I don’t blame them but it had to come out.

In desperation to find someone who would listen, I started blogging about it and very quickly I got a book deal. My first book, Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay, was born a year later and it sold quite a few copies. To my utter amazement and joy, many other mothers wanted to hear this stuff. No, needed to hear this stuff and this stuff, to the untrained eye, sometimes read like a rant about babies.

A lot of new moms, including me, just want to find their tribe. A tribe where we speak our own language and have our inside jokes. To these other mothers, loving our children is our baseline. Yes, we all love our babies. We want them to feel loved, nurtured, breastfed (until they’re 15) have high self esteem, learn their ABCs (in Spanish, French and Italian) and always always always know how we love them so much we almost can’t breathe when we watch them sleep. We sometimes have dreams we can’t find them, dreams so real we wake up in a cold sweat, tears running down our sleep deprived cheeks and walk around not feeling right for the rest of the day. Most of us would throw ourselves into traffic to protect them but first take them on an educational trip to the frog exhibit at the museum. Yes, this is the parenting 101 part.

Google “Jessica Simpson” baby weight and it brings up over ten million matches. Ten million. That’s a whole lotta people interested in something that’s none of their business. The headlines include, “Jessica Simpson Baby Weight Controversy,” “Jessica Simpson Panned Over Pregnancy Weight Gain” and even “Jessica Simpson Will Never Get Her Pre-Baby Body Back.” I get panning her performance in “Employee of the Month,” but where do people get off panning her pregnancy?

Back when I got pregnant with my first child I was starving all the time. Couple the natural hormonal urges to stuff my face with an all-or-nothing attitude about food and you had the makings for one ginormous pregnant woman. Despite furious morning, noon and night sickness I put on an impressive ten pounds in the first trimester. According to AmericanPregnancy.org I should have put on between 1 and 4.5 pounds during that time. Ha ha! I ate an order of hash browns that weighed more than that in one sitting! By the time I gave birth to my healthy 7 lb 2 oz daughter I’d managed to gain a whopping 59 lbs.

And I’m not alone in this. Most women I know exceed the 25 to 35 pound “recommended” weight gain yet still have perfect little babies. So why is everyone really in an uproar over Jessica’s weight?

There seems to be some fake concern for her fetus. I’m sure she really appreciates the worry but I’ll bet she has an OB on the case as back-up. And doesn’t it seem like all this energy would be better spent dissuading pregnant women from doing crack rather than worrying that Jessica’s had a few too many French fries?

These babies. They seem so innocent, so pure and yet, the amount of disgusting work involved in parenting is mind blowing. “It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it!” is something I often told myself when I picked up my baby’s pacifier from the floor, sucked off the dirt and popped it back in her mouth. It’s also what I tell myself now when I find myself cleaning a sneaker in the sink that is contaminated with dog poop. What’s up with kids’ eyesight that they can’t avoid dog crap? If it was my shoe I’d probably toss it out -but my shoes come from Payless or Target and the shoe in question wasn’t as cheap. Also, it has Spider-Man on it. The bottom line is, as a mom, there are parts of my job that I certainly don’t relish but they seem to come under my jurisdiction, so I do them.