Rebecca and I make up stories in secret. I hear we’re not the only parents and children who do that, but how would I know? Joining a practice without much personal precedent is an eerie feeling. When you first start, you’re waiting for someone to catch you and tell you you’re doing it wrong, and at the same time you’re like two teenagers who’ve just reinvented the kiss. Then, seven or eight months later, it’s become a normal part of life and you write a blog post about how it works. If you’ve done much tabletop roleplaying, you can probably see echoes of those creative processes in how I tell stories to Rebecca, since that’s my background, too. If you come at storytelling from a different direction, tell me about it in the comments!

1. Getting Started With Toys. If you want to make up stories with your toddler or preschooler and don’t know where to start, try finger puppets or other toy props. They provide a visual focus, but even more useful, they give the storyteller a set of characters to work with. Finger puppets tend to be iconic little critters, which means they tap into a set of stereotyped dramatic characters–for instance, a bear might be grumbly or a parrot loudmouthed. Let the characters start talking to each other and you’ll find that one of them wants something or has a problem, ideally a problem or desire that’s familiar to your child from her or his own life. From there the story virtually tells itself.

It might also be fun to walk finger puppets through the background of your favorite books. What catches their interest? With the right book, sometimes you can spin another tale alongside the main story. Or let the finger puppets read the book alongside you and see what they say about it. For example, our friend Bear is primarily interested in spotting other bears in a book, and he’s constantly misidentifying non-bears as his distant relatives. Both these activities scaffold perspective-taking and empathy.

2. What Now? If you’re telling a story and you don’t know what happens next, declare, “And then something happened!”–or “Something horrible happened!” or “Something wonderful happened!” Ask your child what it was. Or else, if you’re not enjoying the story because it feels too dry and obvious, try briefly switching into rhyme or meter. Finding rhymes helps add unexpected elements to the story.

3. Go For the Good Stuff. Tell stories that reflect what’s interesting or important to you. Our favorite story seeds come from family history, culinary history (“A long time ago there were no potatoes in Europe…”), and religion. These are stories where you already know the central facts, so you can concentrate on tailoring the details and emphasis to your audience. The best part for me is watching Rebecca make these stories her own and draw on them in play. For example, after she heard the Easter story, she built a cave over a dead bee in the garden and rolled a plastic strawberry over the cave door.

4. For Your Child in Distress. Stories can help with emotional processing when your child’s upset. (This is something I know first-hand, because I used to do the same thing with indie tabletop roleplaying.)

A few months ago, some friends came by to pick up our housemates for a fancy dinner, and Rebecca was devastated that she couldn’t go with them. I held her and talked about how she felt, and she cried and cried. She seemed to be feeling worse through the crying instead of better, though. So I held up two fingers and started telling her a story about how Ringman and Birdie went out to a nice dinner without Pinky. Rebecca got very quiet, and I continued: At the restaurant everyone was wearing fancy clothes and having grown-up conversations. There were little candles on the tables and waiters walking around with plates of bread for anyone who wanted it. But when Ringman looked around the room, there were no children there, and Ringman missed Pinky so much that he ran home to see her and hugged her all up. When I finished, I told the story again in more detail. After a couple iterations, Ringman still felt sad and missed Pinky, but now he was taking pictures of all the food so that he could show them to Pinky when he got home. In another version, he took Pinky with him and tried to hide her under the table–and so on, getting more and more lighthearted until Rebecca felt alright again.

Think of this as telling the story of a friend who’s been in a situation similar to your child’s, not as a direct analog for your child or how your child should act. It’s harder for emotional processing to happen if the story is transparently identical to your child’s situation–then there’s no space to step back and get perspective–or if there’s a strong message about how emotions should be handled. When you’re co-telling sensitive stories with adults, the key is being respectful, and I think the same thing applies to children’s stories. I include lots of dramatic details about how the characters are feeling, and try not to rush into a happy ending. Sometimes I run a couple endings past Rebecca and see which one is right.

Let me note, if you use this technique successfully, your child will very quickly become attached to your fingers or whatever other characters you use.

5. For Your @*$!@ Recalcitrant Child. It’s easy to get manipulative with these stories. The first time I did that was when we were travelling. I really needed Rebecca to pee, and she wasn’t inclined to, so I told a 3 minute long story whose punchline was that Pinky wanted to swim in yellow water. She thought for a second, and climbed on the toilet. (Pinky didn’t really get to swim in the yellow water though–that part was just pretend.) I felt mad with rhetorical power, but of course the reason it worked was that it also empowered Rebecca. A good manipulative story reframes the power dynamics of a situation, so that your preschooler can fantasize that she’s acted independently, gotten the upper hand, foiled someone’s nefarious plan, or moved higher on the social totem pole, all by doing what you want. It helps kids save face instead of getting into a power struggle. Not as good as giving kids more autonomy for real, but in situations where there really isn’t a choice, this can help smooth things over.

6. How to Make Repeat Stories More Interesting. Don’t worry about getting the story “right” the first time or even the third time; you just need it to resonate with your child. If you do that, you’ll have plenty more opportunities to get the details down later.

Thinking about children’s storytelling as a genre, the key feature is that a compelling story will be requested more than once. You might start out by thinking of your stories as being like stories in a book, with a discreet repeatable narrative. But when you start to treat iterations of a story as a stream or process–not mere repetition–it opens up a different set of experiences for the storyteller and audience. A slow shift in details can give the story a dreamlike feeling. A circular story can get funnier and more exuberant each time you tell it. If there’s a particular story or type of story your child likes, it can be entertaining to keep thinking up pretexts for it to happen again, or to transpose it to other settings (the Good Samaritan with trains, anyone?). I’m also starting to work on migrating descriptive motifs back and forth between personal stories to religious stories. I’m hoping to cultivate a sense that these stories are intertwined, and that our ancestors and the divine are present in the rhythms of our lives. In any case, meaning and emotional impact happen by juxtaposing iterations of the story as much as they happen within the story itself. That makes this kind of storytelling different than other mediums I’ve worked with.

7. Get Your Child Involved. Make storytelling interactive. Encourage your child to ask questions when they want more details. Or when your child makes a suggestion, say yes to the idea and run with it. This is something else I learned from indie tabletop roleplaying: the process of creative collaboration with lots of “yes!” builds closeness, increases creative confidence, gives you insight into your collaborators, and usually results in something more quirky and interesting than you would’ve come up with by yourself. But beyond that, I’m trying to help Rebecca develop her own storytelling abilities, because telling stories well is one of the most important social skills you can have, for entertaining other people, building empathy, and transmitting your experiences. I really hope Rebecca is better at it than I am.

8. What About You? So, who else here improvises stories with little kids? Can you tell me what it looks like? What kinds of stories, and has that changed over time? How much child input do you get, and at what points in the story? Do you have any tricks for coming up with story ideas or jumpstarting your creativity?

The museum’s animatronic Tyrannosaurus has spider webs between its teeth. I just noticed them yesterday. They’re hard to see unless you’re at the right angle.

Beckybean met Tyrannosaurus Rex last Friday. Her Gaga reports that Rebecca was so scared they had to detour around the dinosaur, but that afterward she wanted to go back and look.

Monday was day 34 of my cycle, the last day my period could come before I could say it was definitively late. I’d been exhausted all week and queasy off and on for the last two weeks. Everything smelled too strong and my abdomen and leg joints felt funny. Then on Monday I started spotting.

Whenever we get close to the Tyrannosaurus, I hold Rebecca cheek to cheek. I think she’s still a little bit afraid it might attack. On Tuesday afternoon the spotting turned to bright red bleeding, and from there it turned into a normal period.

Rebecca wore her new dinosaur shirt to the museum on Tuesday, and I said that maybe the Tyrannosaurus would think she’s its baby. On Wednesday she wore her fancy purple dress–the one she wore to my cousin’s wedding–and informed me that Tyrannosaurus Rex wears lots of dresses, too, because Tyrannosaurus Rex usually goes to a lot of weddings. I can only imagine.

By Thursday, Rebecca is running to the museum entrance while pretending that she’s running away from the Tyrannosaurus. I notice that one of the animatronic baby Triceratops has started clicking as it moves. My pregnancy symptoms finally go away.

This week we’ve made innumerable playdough dinosaur eggs, 6 jello dinosaur eggs, two volcanoes in a cup, one paper mache dinosaur egg, and several dinosaur habitats, including a dinosaur hotel room on wheels. We’ve bought one dinosaur shirt, two plastic dinosaur eggs, 12 small carnivorous dinosaurs, one book about Tyrannosaurus Rex, one bigger T-rex whose mouth can open and close, and we’ve lost one ball of cells that couldn’t quite turn into a baby.

It turns out that I buy more than usual when I’m exhausted and sick. New toys buy me time, after all, or at least a break from playing surgery or groceries over and over. I feel like I’m supposed to say no, but my no’s are all busy on other things. “Will it bother you that the Tyrannosaurus can’t stand up?” I ask as Rebecca carries it toward the cash register, gently discouraging, “What will you do with it?”

“Take care of it,” she says.

There’s this thing that happens at our house: Ted gets home and wants to play with Rebecca while I finish making dinner. Rebecca howls for mommy. I’m not going to ignore Rebecca for very long, regardless of who the parent on call is. I’m often not successful directing her back to her dad, either, so she ends up cooking and snacking with me while Ted does something on his computer. It works out, except that I feel bad for Ted and occasionally jealous.

I want Rebecca and her dad to have a good relationship. I don’t care how often she goes to him for comfort or whether he can put her to bed at night, but I want them to enjoy each other’s company and seek it out. What do I do? They already have daddy-daughter dates for three hours on Saturday morning. Most other advice I’ve read suggests that if I’ve still got a mommy-focused kid after that, my options are to see it as a phase and ride it out, or else that I need to stop responding and strong-arm her into staying with her dad. I don’t believe in ignoring people I love, if there’s an alternative, so that’s not going to happen.

I’ve wondered if nursing and spending so much time with me were hurting her relationship with her dad. I’ve wondered if Ted’s just less fun, because he’s not as quick to figure out what she wants–he doesn’t have the context–and maybe he’s less likely to say yes to it–at least if it involves reading a book more than three times or starting something they won’t have time to finish. I’ve wondered if I should say “no” more often to make him look fun by comparison. I’ve wondered if I need to stop having so many boring grown-up conversations when Ted’s around, because maybe that makes him seem like the gateway to boring. In any case, I was stuck on the idea that our situation was someone’s fault, mostly mine.

Then I remembered something: love isn’t a zero sum game. Rebecca can have good relationships with both her parents, just like I can have more than one good relationship at a time. None of us are automatons who always go to the person we have the most intimate relationship with. When Rebecca’s relationship with her dad isn’t working right, that’s not about me unless I’m making it about me.

So no more guilt about being too awesome, at least not right now. I don’t know where the idea comes from that too much maternal attentiveness shuts out the father, but I think the reason it felt plausible to me was that it had a familiar emotional structure. It played on the fear that if you do something too well, you must be showing somebody else up. Typical schoolgirl socialization BS: Be careful how brightly you shine. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is exhorting you to do your best and do something amazing. You feel bad if you hold back, and you kinda bad if you don’t hold back, too. But none of that needs to apply to parenting.

The second thing I realized, once I got guilt out of the way and started thinking more clearly (and with some help from Playful Parenting again), is that Rebecca talks a lot about her dad during the day, as well as telling and requesting stories about father figures–but when he comes home, she distances herself. I’d thought it was bad luck that they were so out of sync, but it’s not. Rebecca spends enough time missing her dad that she’s standoffish and groggy with longing when they finally get together. She can’t reach out for the connection she couldn’t have without tromping back through all the pain of not having it. That’s when she insists on mommy instead.

Now that I know what’s going on and I’m not busy worrying about my role in things, I’m better at gently insisting that Rebecca and her dad connect. I know that’s what they both want, and that Rebecca needs a nudge. Now more and more often they’re giggling together or making off with the Doritos while I cook dinner, and everything’s just about how it should be.

The third thing I realized is, maybe Rebecca’s already hungry when her dad comes home, and when she’s hungry, she wants me. The whole transition would go more easily if we consciously incorporated a pre-dinner snack into our evening routine. Sometimes I overthink things.

The plane was coming down, on our last flight of the day. Your dad buckled you in. You wanted your seatbelt off, and you started to shout and fight against it. So I told your dad, pass me the rainbow snake! And I snapped it like a collar on my own neck, “Oh no! Get it off me, get it off!” You couldn’t quite reach the snake with your seatbelt on, but your dad helped rescue me. Then snake curled around your own leg and you took it off and on. Disaster-uh-verted.

One of my friends said that you’re a lot easier to redirect than her kid was at that age. I remembered that on the plane and decided it must be true. But if it is true, what business do I have being the one to redirect you, playing the heroic mom who rescues the dad? Wouldn’t it be better for him to solve it himself?

But Ted wouldn’t know it had to be the snake. Now, I couldn’t say why it had to be the snake–not a new toy, not a favorite toy–but it seemed to me that the snake would work, and none of your other toys would. I often feel that way when I’m redirecting you, and who can say if it’s true? Maybe I just surprised you by putting down my book and starting to play, and it was such a surprise and change of tone that you forgot all about the seatbelt.

Then yesterday afternoon I was reading Playful Parenting and eating chocolate cake, when I realized something: Having a snake around one’s neck is a lot like wearing a seatbelt. Get it off, get it off! Where you’d been powerless about getting buckled in, now I was powerless to the snake, and it was up to you and dad to rescue me. Even if you were stuck with your seatbelt, you could take the snake off and on, and that’s just what you did. That was why it had to be the snake.

It’s a good thing I’m so smart, eh? When I’m with you, sometimes I speak the language of dreams, but half the time I couldn’t tell you what I’m saying. It bothers me that much of what seems to make my parenting style work is invisible to Dad and me. I haven’t seen any experts list analogical thinking or ritualization as important skills for parents to cultivate, either, and I doubt that wrapping a snake around my neck looks particularly smart from the outside. When these communicative feats poke into the waking world, I’ve been naming them maternal charisma or toddler redirectability, but I suppose those factors are the tip of things unseen.

We don’t use time-outs or other kinds of punishments; most people do. Inevitably when I get into a conversation about toddler discipline, the conclusion is that kids are different, and different kids respond better to different parenting approaches. It’s true that kids are different! And aside from being true, it’s a way of giving other parents the benefit of the doubt and affirming our diversity of styles. All of those are good things. So why do I find the line that all kids are different so unsatisfying?

For the first year and a half of Rebecca’s life, I heard the same rhetoric about a lot of differences that were unambiguously more practice-based than kid-based. When Rebecca was six months old, she ate grown-up food instead of baby food, rarely cried at night, and often peed or pooped in the potty when given the chance. A year later she was potty-trained. It’s not because she was special; it’s because we did babyled weaning (i.e. self-paced finger foods instead of baby food), cosleeping, and part-time elimination communication with her. I know there are kids who have different experiences with the same practices, because yes, kids are different, but I also know that these practices can work for most kids. Variations on them were the norm in a lot of times and places, before disposable diapers and before breastfeeding was discouraged.

Elimination communication, cosleeping, and babyled weaning were a good fit with me and my lifestyle, too. When Rebecca was a baby, the moments when she and I were in sync, sharing food or peeing at the same time or whatever–those were moments that fed my spirit and gave me the energy to take care of her all day. Even if they look like more work, the boost I got made them easier than the alternatives. The same practices aren’t going to suit every other parent the same way they suited me, and that’s fine. But it means that instead of saying Rebecca’s special, it would make more sense to point to the oddities of life as the stay-at-home mama to one babe, and how that brings out the side of me that gets excited about synchronized peeing.

I suspect that something similar applies to discipline practices for toddlers. In Guatemala, for example, there are no Terrible Twos. According to Mosier and Rogoff’s research, as summarized here and here, Guatemalans tend to follow discipline strategies that maintain harmony with their toddlers–i.e. letting them do what they want–and rely on social modeling to grow them into cooperative people. Their approach emphasizes interdependence and group harmony more than we do, individual rights and independence less, and that’s what’s transmitted through their discipline style. Other traditional cultures with similar values apparently have similar results with their children. The fact that our culture has so many emotionally explosive and rebellious toddlers by contrast is evidence that our toddlers are ending up in more situations they can’t cope with, and that our typical combination of practices and social structure is hard on a lot of kids / parents / families. (Yeah, who knew?)

If different cultural practices mean different apparent temperaments, then practices matter more than a lot of people give them credit for. It’s silly to reduce all the differences in kids’ behavior and parents’ responses down to the kids’ temperaments. But this is where it gets tricky to talk and write about, because no one who says “kids are different” actually means that practices don’t matter, and all of us wonder about the differences between our kids. If those differences were the starting point for a discussion of discipline instead of its endpoint–if we talked directly about different personalities and values and motivations and how they play out–then I think I’d be more satisfied. I’m skeptical that things like time-outs really are best for most families, but when it comes down to it, all I know for sure is that they’re not right for us.

But what can you do practically with the knowledge that things are different in Guatemala? Reading these research summaries from the viewpoint of discipline makes them sound like an endorsement of positive parenting, but if positive discipline isn’t your thing, then maybe you notice other differences. For example, I’m thinking that Mayan children probably spend more time in mixed-age groups, which provide a richer context for observing pro-social behavior and trying it out. I’m going to analogize behavior learning to language learning now, because I’ve read that Hmong adults don’t talk to their babies. The babies learn how to talk anyway, because they’re surrounded by spoken social interactions. Most American mothers and other caregivers are more isolated or ghettoized, and so the amount they talk to babies makes more of a difference. Does that mean we need to be more explicit about our behavioral expectations, whereas kids with a richer social life would just pick them up? Maybe.

In any case, even if my childrearing has elements in common with various non-Western ones, the same practices mean something different when Rebecca and I spend most of our time alone with each other (and with maybe some uninvolved strangers), than they would in a context where she constantly saw people taking care of each other and deferring to each other’s needs. In my context, listening to Rebecca and looking for points of compromise says less about group interdependence, more about respecting her as an individual–and I hope ultimately about respecting other people as diverse individuals, too.

What I draw from the anthropology of parenting is a sense for what’s possible. Sometimes, when a conversation indirectly sends the message that one or the other of you must be doing it wrong–that it’s okay to have different parenting practices insofar as kids are different, but that it’s best not to talk about the differences in what you believe or in what nourishes your spirit–then it’s a relief to see how much diversity really is out there. That’s why, when I feel awkward about nursing my 2.5 year old in public, I remember this piece on “extended” breastfeeding in Mongolia and I feel better. Looking at anthropology also renews my focus on how parenting strategies transmit values. Nearly everyone behaves well enough eventually, by their culture’s standards, so maybe the real question is the one Alfie Kohn asks in Unconditional Parenting: Beyond how to behave, what are our kids learning about themselves and the world as a byproduct of our discipline approaches?

An addendum to The Two Year Old Thing:

A year ago, Rebecca was in her magical communication phase. She wasn’t talking much yet, but she used things around the house to lay out her ideas or convey what she wanted to do. I called it magic because it invoked patterns via imitation and association, following the same principles Frazer laid out for magic in The Golden Bough. It was also hard to classify otherwise, since it combined play, communication, instrumental action, and quasi-scientific exploration.

Rebecca’s current insistence on proper procedures is the descendent of that sort of magical play, with the addition that she’s more interested in binary oppositions than Levi-Strauss. She’s still focused on enacting patterns: on the steps and the ritual, on the aesthetics and experience, and most of all on acting in harmony with the order of the world. If I interpret Rebecca’s requests as primarily instrumental or goal-oriented, the way I’d understand an adult request–if I approach them as prose instead of poetry–then I’m translating them poorly, and it’s no wonder I’m getting frustrated.

To a grown-up it’s obvious that who gets you your ice cream or puts you in your car seat doesn’t matter, because the end results are the same. But I’m wondering, should that be obvious? What if the only reason it’s obvious is that my mom insisted that those things didn’t matter? What if the only reason it’s obvious is that we’re swimming in the culture of consumer capitalism, which obscures the ways that process shapes product? So, what if Rebecca’s right? What if it isn’t just anthropological wankery to insist that the structures of meaning we draw through our actions are as important as their intended outcomes?

Products basically are congealed processes. If you want a particular outcome, you’re selecting a snapshot taken from a much longer sequence of things that happen before and after, and it makes sense that a toddler would have to learn which moment of the sequence is supposedly the important one. I keep having my own moments, too, when the project of separating things into ends and means seems silly. It’s osmosis from living around someone who’s so focused on process, and it’s the result of spending all day reading her What Do People Do All Day. It’s the effect of being a stay-at-home mother, too, because my hours and audiences aren’t segmented the way they were in grad school. Rebecca and I follow the days from beginning to end and back again, and I enjoy watching slow changes over time.

There’s something reassuring about that point of view. Sometimes the house is cleaner, sometimes dinner has just been plated, sometimes you’re really tired–but it’s all steps in a dance, and the aim is to make the whole process graceful and good, not worry about getting the perfect shot of it. And lately I keep thinking, I need to pay more attention to the ethics of where my food comes from.

We and our housemates joined the Fairview Gardens CSA at the beginning of last year, which means that we get a share of the farm’s produce. Once a week they set out boxes with a variety of vegetables, and we grab some of each or stick stuff we don’t want in the trade box. Then we pull stems and blemished stuff out of the discard box and go feed them to the goats, which is Rebecca’s favorite part of the experience.

I’d been trying to buy more things at the farmers’ market pretty much forever, but that never clicked. Getting a share of food at the farm every week clicked big time, and it changed the way I cook. The first thing is that I got more creative. I have trouble coming up with dinner ideas out of the blue, with the whole world of cuisine to choose from, and anyway, I don’t have time to be consulting recipes constantly. That means that when I got most of my vegetables from the grocery store, I ended up defaulting to the same meals a lot. Having a fixed set of vegetables I need to incorporate gives me a different starting point for menu planning, and it’s one that makes it easier to think creatively.

The CSA also pushed creativity via culinary boredom. After the second or third week of beets, I got tired of eating them in salads and started integrating them into stirfries and curries like I normally make. Now, I’d been worried about just that kind of situation–what if I get sick of having the same vegetables all the time?–but it turned out it wasn’t so much the ingredient I was sick of as the meal I was putting it in. So I started to really think about the flavors and textures of the produce I was working with, so that I could do new things with it. Even when I fucked up a meal, I still felt relatively okay about it. I mean, I was working with constraints, people! I had to use these beets. Most of the dishes I made were good, though, because I’d learned the ingredients’ properties in the course of getting bored with them. One time I made a pumpkin stew that was a cross between curry and mole–both stews thickened with nuts and using some of the same spices–and I have no idea if anyone else has done it before, but it won’t be the last time I make it. The CSA has also gotten me hooked on ingredients I rarely or never used before, like fava greens, turnips, and celery. A lot of new dishes came out of last year, and I’m looking forward to revisiting them this year.

As I become more aware of what my vegetables are doing in meals, I enjoy cooking and eating them more. CSA produce is tastier than grocery store produce maybe three quarters of the time, but I think that the level of attention I’m bringing contributes to my enjoyment more than strict quality difference. That’s probably why farmers’ markets didn’t convert me before.

Then there was another set of changes. Once I started cooking from the mindset of “I have this, let’s see what I can do with it,” I started using radish greens, leek greens, fennel and chard stems, even carrot tops–all vegetable parts I would’ve discarded before. I’m not sure this is always an improvement, per se, but it’s a change in aesthetic. Food from recipes and from restaurants, with their expectations of uniformity, is starting to seem oddly neat and controlled to me, like running into formal gardens when you expect a forest. Being a mother has gotten me less fond of orderly institutional structures and more interested in following processes, in watching the quirky ways things grow. And that points to another way the CSA has changed me: I’m starting to approach vegetables as plants (!) instead of as standardized products that fit into standardized recipes. I’m starting to become much more interested in gardening, too.

I feel silly that I’m only jumping on this bandwagon now, when I have friends who’ve been there for years. On the other hand, I’m not sure that joining the CSA earlier would’ve had the same effect on me. Ever since I was pregnant with Rebecca and then started nursing her, my body has been more particular about its dietary needs, and that (plus the difficulties of childcare) makes the high-end restaurant food I used to idolize less appealing. If a meal doesn’t satisfy me nutritionally, then the flavors are just a gimmick. I’m also more patient with restricted choices now, whereas before I used to bridle at the idea of not getting whatever kind of vegetable I wanted whenever I wanted it. So I see my experiences of motherhood and cooking from the CSA as connected, but the irony is that I’m not sure the CSA is working for Rebecca. I mean, she likes the goats, but she doesn’t eat leafy green vegetables. I really need to be better about remembering to warm up frozen peas and broccoli for her.

Anybody else see resonances between the way you approach cooking and the way you approach other parts of your life? If you’re part of a CSA, has it affected the way you think about cooking?

My hands were covered in raw chicken when Rebecca asked for ice cream, so Vernon grabbed it for her. Rebecca was not happy. She doesn’t want the ice cream unless we follow the proper procedures. Likewise she’s unwilling to shortcut off the path to get down to the park more quickly. She wants Mommy to sit on Mommy’s couch and Daddy to sit on Daddy’s couch. And she always takes off her jacket when she gets into her playhouse, no matter how chilly it is at 6 AM, because houses are categorically warm. Getting the world to line up with her ideas about it is important to her.

Meanwhile Ted’s started getting up earlier so that he can see more of Rebecca and do his share of the parenting, but when he gets up Beckybean and I are already in a bubble that it’s hard to wiggle into. He offers to do things with Rebecca and for her, and I try to tell her that he can do them, but when they don’t fit with the kid’s worldview, our success is mixed.

I want to fight off Rebecca’s ideas about who should do what, because I’ve had a rough month and it would be nice if she didn’t scream when the wrong person tries to comfort her or get her out of her car seat or put on her pajamas. I want to fight off her ideas about who should do what, because a lot of them represent nascent gender roles that I don’t want to give her. And I want to fight them off because it makes Ted feel like she doesn’t like him.

But I also want to treat her desires respectfully. It’s hard to stick to saying no to her when she’s screaming for me to do something simple that I’ve done a zillion times before, and anyway, I doubt she’ll feel good about her dad helping her with her pajamas if he has to put them on her by force.

The fact is that Rebecca’s been weird lately. She’s wanted to stay at home most of the time, nurse a lot, sing silly songs and hear stories about how we took care of her when she was a baby. We’ve also been reading What Do People Do All Day? and a couple other Richard Scarry books for two to five hours a day, every day of January. She generally has a punishingly long attention span for things she gets interested in. It hasn’t coalesced into much externally, but on the inside her head must be exploding. On days when she doesn’t want huge amounts of physical contact with me, she’s been increasingly independent in her play, so I suspect that she’s also feeling challenged by her own independence and figuring out how she fits into the family.

I want to reassure Rebecca that I’m still there for her when she wants me to be, which means maybe now isn’t the best time to insist on challenging her ideas of how our family should work. I’m tired and sometimes jealous of Ted, but I can live with this situation and I probably won’t regret it. What’s galling is that we’re not turning out to be quite the kind of feminist parents we wanted to be or thought we should be, and I’m starting to hear that I’m over-attached.

When I decided to be a stay-at-home mom and also do the night parenting, I didn’t realize how much those habits would carry over to other times. I probably should’ve, but I didn’t. I didn’t realize how thoroughly Rebecca would get in the habit of asking me for things and I’d get in the habit of answering without redirecting her to Ted. Sometimes everyone else thinks my conversations with Rebecca look like C3PO talking to R2D2, while I wonder why I’m the only one who’s answering her. And I definitely didn’t realize how much Rebecca would fight to maintain an idealized division of labor. Or just now, how she’d need a mommy recharge midway through my Saturday morning writing time. We ate noodles and read together, and it wasn’t really a problem, but it keeps on surprising me how important those recharges are to her. How do you gently transition a toddler into accepting basic care and comfort from someone else?

Or maybe that’s not the right question, since she used to be happier to have her dad take care of her than she is now. I suspect that it would help Rebecca if we got back into more of a routine. We never had a strict schedule, but the holidays demolished what we had and then we (mostly me) and our friends got sick for most of January, so we haven’t been going on regular playdates, either. Maybe if the rest of her life is super orderly she’ll cling less tightly to family order? I also suspect that Ted could choose a particular task that he’s always in charge of when he’s home, talk to Rebecca about it ahead of time, and then try out the new order when Rebecca’s not too tired.

But what I really want is for our lives to be flexible and our presences interchangeable. Bah.

When the nights are longest and you wake up at the watching hour, the way your ancestors did on nights like this, and there’s no way that you’re going back to sleep any time soon and you and your mama are both sick of trying, then it’s time to snuggle in the dark and tell stories about the sun (modified from Circle Round), and maybe even make cookies afterward.

Because the Sun’s been getting tired lately, I’ve noticed, waking up later every day and going down earlier, until the nights have gotten so long that you’re having trouble sleeping through them. I think the Sun’s problem is that he’s feeling bored and hopeless about how things are. He misses the summer, when he felt so strong and hot and everyone laid down on their beach towels to enjoy his warmth. But no matter what the sun does, he can’t seem to shine the way he did last summer, and it’s very frustrating.

So the Sun curls up in the arms of Night, who’s his mother. For a long time, everything’s still and quiet, and the Sun rested. But then Night started to sing a song in the dark, the same song she sang long ago while she was waiting for the Sun to be born. It’s the same song I sang long ago while I was waiting for you to be born, too, on a very long night when the whole world seemed to change.

And there in the darkness, the Sun started to dream that he could be something else, that he didn’t need to light up the same things he’d always lit up before. Maybe he could be a red sun or a green sun–or, what color do you think he could be? He could be a purple sun this year. Maybe he could feed new plants with his light, and feed some new projects for people, too. He dreamed and dreamed, hundreds of dreams, thousands of dreams. Maybe he could turn into a cookie. When the Sun thought about it later, some of the dreams were ridiculous and not all of them were things he really wanted to happen anyway, but he still liked dreaming them.

When the Sun woke up the next morning, he had some of his energy back. He felt like he’d been reborn, a whole new sun. He was excited about shining again, and each day he saw something new and interesting to shine down on, and each day he shone longer and longer.

Now, if you’re still not feeling sleepy, the next thing to do is make cookies. You’ve got to bake your sun cookies during the night or they won’t be real sun cookies. We use a cookie press, because it’s simple, and because some of the flower patterns that come with it look passably like the sun. And you’ve got to decorate your sun cookies during the night, too, though probably not the same night, because then you won’t have anything to do the next time you wake up. We decorate them in the most colorful and fabulous ways we can–this involves squeezing out some decorating gel and then dumping on lots of colored sugar–because the more fabulously you decorate them, the more fabulously the sun dreams. But when it comes to eating, you can eat them any time.

…

I don’t think we’ve got the Sun’s story in its final form yet, but it’s got most of the themes I want to celebrate at Winter Solstice. This time of year is about the dreaming dark, about staring into a fire shooting the shit until you start spinning fantasies and naming ambitions that you wouldn’t normally confess. Saying them out loud is magic, though, because then you’re ready to grab them when the chance enters your life, and you can see where they might mesh with other people’s fantasies and what practical kernels of desire you might draw out together.

The idea that Winter Solstice is about dreaming involves thematic migration from both Christmas–when you might get what you want, even if it takes magic to bring it to you–and from New Years, with all its resolutions. It resonates with the more general American theme of holding onto your dreams, too. But Yule involves more open communication about our desires than Christmas does and does more to support our best selves. It’s less stern and flagellatory than New Years, and it’s more madcap and free flowing than “hold onto your dreams” usually is. In the pregnant night, everything seems possible, and that’s what I like best.

I’ve only been to a Yule ritual with other pagans once, and it mostly involved rewritten Christmas carols. When I fall into Solstice-style thinking at Christmas parties–it’s where my head is–people usually don’t know where I’m coming from and look at me oddly. But this year our household sat around the fire pit a few days before New Years and talked about things we wanted, and it was wonderful. That’s what family feels like for me.

I’m pleased with making Sun cookies in the middle of the night, too. Rebecca still talks about it, even though she doesn’t like to eat cookies much. But what I’m most proud of here is that I spontaneously transformed a glum situation into a ritual that was perfectly tailored to its participants and their circumstances. That’s the kind of pagan I want to be and the kind of mother I want to be. It’s not what we usually do at 4 AM, but sometimes, deep in the long night, something new can happen.

My mom used to wear slim gold necklaces. People whispered to my dad at his office Christmas parties, that surely, being a doctor, he could afford to buy some nice jewelry for her. So he did, more than once. But she never liked it.

For years and years my dad wore a shoddy leather coat from Sears. People whispered to my mom that he was a doctor, and surely he should have a better coat. I don’t know if she ever got him one, but I don’t remember him wearing anything but the leather one.

My parents had working class roots and cheap tastes, and the culture of consumption they’d moved into never quite absorbed them. Buying things for their kids was different, though: lots and lots of Christmas gifts, not to mention Easter gifts, tooth fairy gifts, birthday gifts, and anything particularly good that came through the church rummage sale. Plus there were books, craft supplies, clothes, and candy whenever we wanted. We got allowances, but we hardly ever spent them, because sooner or later my parents would get us what we wanted.

Anything we stayed interested in for more than a year mushroomed into a collection, then a mammoth collection. I had a bookcase full of Breyer horses, shelves of nesting dolls and dragons, a top bunk full of stuffed animals, and so on. The problem was, the bigger a collection got, the less satisfying it was. That’s not because I was diluting their quality; technically I got nicer and nicer things the longer I collected them. But I never bonded with the late additions the way I had with the earlier ones. My collections got unwieldy to curate and overwhelming to play with.

Over time I wanted less and less. I’d come up with things to put on my Christmas list, because a Christmas list had to be made, but I was less and less eager, because manufacturing desire is work. The rituals of affection via gift-giving seemed more and more contrived, and more and more often I found myself not feeling so thankful. Eventually a funny thing happened: My brother and sister and I all grew up to have tastes and consumption habits nearly identical to our parents’. I buy myself virtually nothing (besides food and toilet paper and such), because I already have what I need, and I’ve had it for years. And though the three of us kids love each other, we frequently don’t bother exchanging presents.

Now, confessing to privilege and then saying “but it totally wasn’t a big deal” is always a dick move. I wanted the toys I got when I got them, and I was lucky not to have to worry about money. It would be disingenuous to say that I could’ve done without all those toys, because I know that I didn’t get my current values in spite of my background, so much as I got them because of it. Counterintuitive? Sometimes I hear about people raising their kids to be non-materialistic by not giving them many toys, or raising their kids to be healthy eaters by rationing their consumption of sweets. I suspect that strategy backfires if the kid feels deprived. Scarcity and lack of control over the things you want usually make people more obsessed with those things instead of less. Make what they want available consistently and undramatically, and you generally take away the craving. If we could afford it, I’m not sure I’d choose a different strategy for raising Rebecca (though the moral / environmental issues with consumption mean that maybe I wouldn’t).

Nevertheless, it’s a crapshoot whether that strategy would work again, because values are more complicated than a behavioralist account of scarcity and demand. It made a difference that my parents modeled fairly minimal consumption and happiness with what they had, but it wasn’t determinative. For example, my current food habits have little relationship with how I was raised, and more to do with a series of people I’ve shared food with: discovering ethnic food with Ted in Chicago and high-end cuisine when we started watching Iron Chef with our geek friends a few years later, then learning about locally grown food from my friends in grad school. You could tell the story of my other consumption habits the same way, as a history of the consumption cultures I spurned or joined up with in high school, in college, and in grad school.

The anomaly is my current purchasing habits. I’m out of step with almost everyone I know–and I know some of them find my lack of investment in home decor off-putting–and I’m conflicted about giving and receiving Christmas gifts. I take Rebecca shopping so that she can have the experience of thinking about someone and what they might like, because that’s important, right? I like the idea of showing your affection by getting people things that’ll make them happy. But most of the time I can’t get that account to stick to the actual things I’m getting and receiving. It’s not that we’re lousy gift-givers, though, it’s that we’ve been set up to fail. The scale of the holiday kills it, the same way it did when I was growing up.

Anybody else want to do some navel gazing and tell me the history of your consumption habits? How do you feel about the number of gifts you’re giving and receiving?