(no subject)
So, who wants an update on the drama with my husband's family?
Honestly, there hasn't been much of one. B is barely speaking to his parents. No one in the family is speaking to me. There's plenty of terrible things being posted on Facebook and to be directly in e-mails and text messages. To no great surprise, his brother-in-law is the biggest offender of this. When he's not claiming that Martyr and Mayhem spent $150,000 sending B to law school (no, they really didn't; they spent maybe $64,000 on tuition and books, and maybe another $5,000 on expenses related to preparing for and ultimately taking the state exams, but that's still nowhere near $150,000 for law school) he's busy broadcasting his beliefs that:
1. I'm lazy because I didn't go to law school. Neither did he, but apparently, he forgets this when constructing his ad hominem remarks.
2. I work for a 'Titty Feeding Committee/Rape Council.' Apparently, he's confusing my anti-rape advocacy work with my actual job, which includes but isn't solely limited to helping women receive breastfeeding support services. Also, according to him, it "isn't even a real job anyway." This from a guy who is trying to make his living by growing marijuana in his parent's basement.
3. Until I "got that job like five months ago," I was supported exclusively by Martyr and Mayhem. Really? Gee, I guess that totally explains why, while I was pregnant with Sephie, I was so broke I had to go on food stamps (yes, actual food stamps; not just WIC) and resorted to selling nearly everything I owned just to make my rent payment because I lost my job due to being pregnant in the first place. Oh, and why nearly everything of Sephie's came from Craigslist, FreeCycle, or other people. Additionally, my start date was in May; not February.
4. I'm a whore. Enough said. But apparently I must be good enough at being a whore, because B is "turning his back on the family" for "fuckin' pussy." This sexism is expected, because it's my brother-in-law we're talking about, but it's a little tired. I expect something more creative that run-of-the-mill misogyny. As a side note, it's worth pointing out that nearly every person in my life who has ever called me a whore has also maintained I'm ugly. How, exactly, does that work? In order to be a successful whore, doesn't one need to also be attractive? I realize it's a little silly to be looking for consistency in slurs, but I'm genuinely perplexed by this schism.
B seems to be standing strong so far, but I'm worried that with Dad back in Kansas, his resolve might be slipping. It's easy to stand strong in the immediate aftermath, when you've got the father of your partner standing right there not exactly encouraging you to move forward but establishing that he'll support whatever you need. I don't know.
Obviously, this issue is about so much more than the daycare. It's become a power struggle between parent and child, employer and employee, and the real fight is over the dynamics involved therein. Were this a normal situation, it would have been resolved by now. But the fight is layered because it's going across several platforms. B isn't just asserting his autonomy as a child breaking away from parents, he's also coming into his own as the future leader of the business. There's no appropriate separation, so the growth is happening simultaneously in a way that is violent and jarring to all parties involved, despite its necessity.
Which begs the question: if it is about so much more than the daycare, why am I not willing to cave? Because even though the conflict between B and the Clan is about so much more with regards to our future, my involvement is limited to one segment, and one segment only: the safety of the children.
I can put up with a lot of nonsense, provided it doesn't threaten my kids. And I acknowledge I have a broader idea of threatening than most. As I said in a comment on my other, protected entry, part of why I plan to push B to pursue the raise he's entitled to as an attorney is because my children and I made sacrifices for him to attend law school, H more so than Sephie. But both kids basically spent the first two years of their lives without their father around. They deserve some kind of compensation for giving that up, like a piece of that better lifestyle he was always referencing as a way to buttress against the guilt he felt being away from them. Hard to obtain that better lifestyle without the raise commiserate to his education.
Anyway, the reasons why I will not budge on the daycare:
1. I don't want to be under Martyr's controlling thumb.
Martyr has shown a willful disregard for what is in the best interest of her grandchildren. Look at the situation with my sister-in-law, L. Here is a chick that is nothing short of a train wreck, whose rampant drug use most certainly played some part in her son losing his hand, and Martyr pulled every possible string to restore L's custody of her children. Even when she knew L was actively using meth.
The bottom line issue is that Martyr cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of my daughter. I will give credit where credit is due and say she does a slightly better job with H, but the difference really is marginal, and only serves to substantiate that Sephie is subject to disparate treatment because she's my child, versus P's.
What finally cemented my decision is when I came to pick Sephie up from the house the week before last. Martyr was nowhere to be found, and Sephie was just sitting in her booster chair, on the island in the kitchen. It turns out that Martyr was at the beauty salon, and Sephie had been left in the care of my brother-in-law. The same brother-in-law that I expressly stated was not to watch her under ANY circumstances. He was downstairs getting high. This was just a few days after she had been left in his care, and he passed her off to the gardner's eight-year-old son to watch.
In either case, she could have been injured, perhaps even seriously. And that was the day I made up my mind that Sephie was not going back to that house. Especially since, the following day, he had another woman staying at the house that B's niece confided was not safe to be around kids.
When someone is that willing to disregard what is in the best interest of your child, would you want to be financially beholden to them in any way?
2. I don't want to deal with P.
When P threw the gigantic temper tantrum about how I wasn't allowed to be around her, including the Mother's Day brunch at the preschool, it got me thinking about how unreasonable she has always been. It would be easy to say that she wouldn't try to pull those shenanigans next year, when Sephie would presumably be enrolled as well, except that that doesn't jive with who P is. This is the same woman that told DH and I we are to "report" to her with anything concerning H even before we talk to each other, who got pissed that we didn't ask her permission to give H a laxative, who flipped out on us for cutting the snarls out of his hair while she shaved off all of his hair last week.
You cannot apply reason and logic to a situation where there isn't any or a person who has none.
I don't want the kids to be put in a position where their respective interests will be pitted against each other. I don't want to have to be put in the position where I have to choose between showing up for my daughter, or not showing up for my son. So eliminate the need for me to even be present by taking Sephie somewhere else, and then P can claim Mother's Day all for herself with no issue from me, and I can celebrate those events at Sephie's preschool, assuming they have them. If I'm being honest, H would rather have P there, and if I'm not present, she has no excuse not to show up.
As I've mentioned before, I also don't want to have to share Sephie with P. Maybe that is petty, but I would think understandable, given the dynamics involved. When B pointed out it was basically the same thing she said about my involvement with H, I responded that while she has to share her child with me both legally and literally, I have no such obligation to share mine with her. She doesn't get a choice; I do, and I choose not to.
3. I don't want the kids competing against each other, or being compared.
Sephie certainly isn't a perfect child, but she doesn't have the emotional hang-ups that H did at her age, and she generally has a sweeter disposition. Given that H is already demonstrating issues of jealousy with regards to attention paid to Sephie, I'm not interested in fostering an inferiority complex where he believes everybody likes Sephie more, simply because she has a totally different personality.
Neither do I want Sephie dismissed. H had twice the vocabulary at her age, for example. He was very much ahead of his class initially, but his development has started to level out a bit. I'm not necessarily convinced one is smarter than the other, but their intelligences are different, and unfortunately for Seph, hers are a bit more...unconventional. It's something that I'm afraid will get lost in a preschool setting that features a lot of student, versus a smaller settings.
Which leads me to...
4. I want a smaller class size.
H's preschool isn't gigantic, but there are about six to nine kids to a class, with four classes total, and on any given day, there can be as many as 40 children running around. This isn't huge, especially since the preschool does a good job unifying the kids only for recess and then breaking them down into their respective age groups for structured activity, but it can be really overwhelming for shy children.
Which Sephie is. Sephie does not do well with large crowds. At all. She's very bashful, even with people she knows. She isn't unfriendly, but I suspect my poor piglet inherited her mama's social anxiety. She's much more comfortable with a smaller, more manageable group. She can do a preschool with 12 students total and two or three teachers. She can't handle four times that, and although she would probably calm down enough to participate, I sincerely worry that she would never totally integrate. And whatever possible comfort would be offered by H being there too would be pretty muted, because they would rarely be together, and H plays rough when other kids are around.
Also, I do know I won't get the choice about class size when she enters primary school. But I have the option right now, and as long as that's the case, I'll take it so I can work with her on becoming adjusted to larger crowds with more ease.
5. I want my parenting choices to be honored.
This is a small thing, but it is nevertheless a thing. H's preschool doesn't support cloth diapering. I don't like putting Sephie in disposables. I admit, I was kind of partial to her newborn disposable diapers because they had that cute Winnie the Pooh design, but we stopped using those when she finally put on enough weight to use the cloth diapers, and I personally never looked back. I honestly don't even understand why anybody prefers disposables.
I do, however, know why I don't like using them It's a waste of money when we have 30 cloth covers and 60 inserts lying around, it's totally unnecessary consumerism, and it contributes to the destruction of the environment. On top of all the other fees and expenses we have connected to child rearing, this is one we shouldn't have to have forced on us.
I feel the same way about breastfeeding. Although H's school has a semi-open door policy (you have to be on the approved list to get in) they're not crazy about mamas coming in to do the whole extended breastfeeding thing. They don't go so far as to say they don't support it, but they don't have much in the way of facilitation of it, and they don't accept bottles for expressed milk; children are supposed to be sent with sippy cups or juice boxes.
It's my feeling that cloth diapering and extended breastfeeding are lifestyle choices that should be honored, and those choices should not be abruptly altered, especially since these choices tend to go hand in hand with a parenting methodology practices the idea of letting children change when they are ready to change. I want the nursing relationship with Sephie to end because she's ready to wean, not because I can't figure out how I'm going to find a place to lay down with her so she can snuggle and grab my hair the way she likes. When Sephie is out of cloth diapers, I want it to be because she's decided she's ready to potty train, not because it's easier for a volunteer to toss a diaper in the trash as opposed to a prepared wet bag.
These may seem like minor things, but I had to fight to make these choices happen, and to be respected. I'm not just talking about the fact I had such a difficult time establishing the nursing relationship in the first place, but also the struggle to get people to actually use the cloth diapers rather than putting her in the first available disposable diaper they could access. After the fighting that had to be done to get this far, I'm simply not willing to cave overnight because the preschool is stuck 20 years in the past with their ideas of what modern childrearing looks like.
As a side irritant, they don't do anything with medications. Parents have to dispense all medications on their own. Sephie's eczema is severe enough that she requires a prescription of topical cream, and it's supposed to be applied at every diaper change. In order for Sephie to get her medication when she's due, I would have to come over any time she needed to be changed to apply it. Not exactly the most convenient thing, even though my office is literally two doors down.
A week ago, I had a conversation with celluloidheroes where he asked me what percentage I'd assign each of my reasons as factors in my desire not to send Sephie to the same school as H. Reason one and two make up about 70 percent of the piece. The other three reasons share a square 10 percent.
I know my reasons are valid. And I told watered down versions of them to Martyr when I initially explained why I did not want Sephie to attend the same school as H. I obviously didn't tell her about the first two reasons, because it would only serve to make her more defensive. Especially with regards to P, someone who can never do wrong in her eyes.
I doubt anything much will happen from here. I've already confirmed Sephie's enrollment for Tuesday, and although Martyr may try to continue to make an issue of it, she doesn't have a leg to stand on. What can she do, keep us from paying for it? That's very, very unlikely. And honestly, even if she were to suddenly do a 180 and restore her promise to pay for Sephie's preschool, the odds are I will tell her to keep her money. Because getting out from underneath her is THAT important, and accepting her money would totally gut our position of legitimacy.
It's stupid that I have to approach my in-laws with the same calculation I do debate arguments.
Honestly, there hasn't been much of one. B is barely speaking to his parents. No one in the family is speaking to me. There's plenty of terrible things being posted on Facebook and to be directly in e-mails and text messages. To no great surprise, his brother-in-law is the biggest offender of this. When he's not claiming that Martyr and Mayhem spent $150,000 sending B to law school (no, they really didn't; they spent maybe $64,000 on tuition and books, and maybe another $5,000 on expenses related to preparing for and ultimately taking the state exams, but that's still nowhere near $150,000 for law school) he's busy broadcasting his beliefs that:
1. I'm lazy because I didn't go to law school. Neither did he, but apparently, he forgets this when constructing his ad hominem remarks.
2. I work for a 'Titty Feeding Committee/Rape Council.' Apparently, he's confusing my anti-rape advocacy work with my actual job, which includes but isn't solely limited to helping women receive breastfeeding support services. Also, according to him, it "isn't even a real job anyway." This from a guy who is trying to make his living by growing marijuana in his parent's basement.
3. Until I "got that job like five months ago," I was supported exclusively by Martyr and Mayhem. Really? Gee, I guess that totally explains why, while I was pregnant with Sephie, I was so broke I had to go on food stamps (yes, actual food stamps; not just WIC) and resorted to selling nearly everything I owned just to make my rent payment because I lost my job due to being pregnant in the first place. Oh, and why nearly everything of Sephie's came from Craigslist, FreeCycle, or other people. Additionally, my start date was in May; not February.
4. I'm a whore. Enough said. But apparently I must be good enough at being a whore, because B is "turning his back on the family" for "fuckin' pussy." This sexism is expected, because it's my brother-in-law we're talking about, but it's a little tired. I expect something more creative that run-of-the-mill misogyny. As a side note, it's worth pointing out that nearly every person in my life who has ever called me a whore has also maintained I'm ugly. How, exactly, does that work? In order to be a successful whore, doesn't one need to also be attractive? I realize it's a little silly to be looking for consistency in slurs, but I'm genuinely perplexed by this schism.
B seems to be standing strong so far, but I'm worried that with Dad back in Kansas, his resolve might be slipping. It's easy to stand strong in the immediate aftermath, when you've got the father of your partner standing right there not exactly encouraging you to move forward but establishing that he'll support whatever you need. I don't know.
Obviously, this issue is about so much more than the daycare. It's become a power struggle between parent and child, employer and employee, and the real fight is over the dynamics involved therein. Were this a normal situation, it would have been resolved by now. But the fight is layered because it's going across several platforms. B isn't just asserting his autonomy as a child breaking away from parents, he's also coming into his own as the future leader of the business. There's no appropriate separation, so the growth is happening simultaneously in a way that is violent and jarring to all parties involved, despite its necessity.
Which begs the question: if it is about so much more than the daycare, why am I not willing to cave? Because even though the conflict between B and the Clan is about so much more with regards to our future, my involvement is limited to one segment, and one segment only: the safety of the children.
I can put up with a lot of nonsense, provided it doesn't threaten my kids. And I acknowledge I have a broader idea of threatening than most. As I said in a comment on my other, protected entry, part of why I plan to push B to pursue the raise he's entitled to as an attorney is because my children and I made sacrifices for him to attend law school, H more so than Sephie. But both kids basically spent the first two years of their lives without their father around. They deserve some kind of compensation for giving that up, like a piece of that better lifestyle he was always referencing as a way to buttress against the guilt he felt being away from them. Hard to obtain that better lifestyle without the raise commiserate to his education.
Anyway, the reasons why I will not budge on the daycare:
1. I don't want to be under Martyr's controlling thumb.
Martyr has shown a willful disregard for what is in the best interest of her grandchildren. Look at the situation with my sister-in-law, L. Here is a chick that is nothing short of a train wreck, whose rampant drug use most certainly played some part in her son losing his hand, and Martyr pulled every possible string to restore L's custody of her children. Even when she knew L was actively using meth.
The bottom line issue is that Martyr cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of my daughter. I will give credit where credit is due and say she does a slightly better job with H, but the difference really is marginal, and only serves to substantiate that Sephie is subject to disparate treatment because she's my child, versus P's.
What finally cemented my decision is when I came to pick Sephie up from the house the week before last. Martyr was nowhere to be found, and Sephie was just sitting in her booster chair, on the island in the kitchen. It turns out that Martyr was at the beauty salon, and Sephie had been left in the care of my brother-in-law. The same brother-in-law that I expressly stated was not to watch her under ANY circumstances. He was downstairs getting high. This was just a few days after she had been left in his care, and he passed her off to the gardner's eight-year-old son to watch.
In either case, she could have been injured, perhaps even seriously. And that was the day I made up my mind that Sephie was not going back to that house. Especially since, the following day, he had another woman staying at the house that B's niece confided was not safe to be around kids.
When someone is that willing to disregard what is in the best interest of your child, would you want to be financially beholden to them in any way?
2. I don't want to deal with P.
When P threw the gigantic temper tantrum about how I wasn't allowed to be around her, including the Mother's Day brunch at the preschool, it got me thinking about how unreasonable she has always been. It would be easy to say that she wouldn't try to pull those shenanigans next year, when Sephie would presumably be enrolled as well, except that that doesn't jive with who P is. This is the same woman that told DH and I we are to "report" to her with anything concerning H even before we talk to each other, who got pissed that we didn't ask her permission to give H a laxative, who flipped out on us for cutting the snarls out of his hair while she shaved off all of his hair last week.
You cannot apply reason and logic to a situation where there isn't any or a person who has none.
I don't want the kids to be put in a position where their respective interests will be pitted against each other. I don't want to have to be put in the position where I have to choose between showing up for my daughter, or not showing up for my son. So eliminate the need for me to even be present by taking Sephie somewhere else, and then P can claim Mother's Day all for herself with no issue from me, and I can celebrate those events at Sephie's preschool, assuming they have them. If I'm being honest, H would rather have P there, and if I'm not present, she has no excuse not to show up.
As I've mentioned before, I also don't want to have to share Sephie with P. Maybe that is petty, but I would think understandable, given the dynamics involved. When B pointed out it was basically the same thing she said about my involvement with H, I responded that while she has to share her child with me both legally and literally, I have no such obligation to share mine with her. She doesn't get a choice; I do, and I choose not to.
3. I don't want the kids competing against each other, or being compared.
Sephie certainly isn't a perfect child, but she doesn't have the emotional hang-ups that H did at her age, and she generally has a sweeter disposition. Given that H is already demonstrating issues of jealousy with regards to attention paid to Sephie, I'm not interested in fostering an inferiority complex where he believes everybody likes Sephie more, simply because she has a totally different personality.
Neither do I want Sephie dismissed. H had twice the vocabulary at her age, for example. He was very much ahead of his class initially, but his development has started to level out a bit. I'm not necessarily convinced one is smarter than the other, but their intelligences are different, and unfortunately for Seph, hers are a bit more...unconventional. It's something that I'm afraid will get lost in a preschool setting that features a lot of student, versus a smaller settings.
Which leads me to...
4. I want a smaller class size.
H's preschool isn't gigantic, but there are about six to nine kids to a class, with four classes total, and on any given day, there can be as many as 40 children running around. This isn't huge, especially since the preschool does a good job unifying the kids only for recess and then breaking them down into their respective age groups for structured activity, but it can be really overwhelming for shy children.
Which Sephie is. Sephie does not do well with large crowds. At all. She's very bashful, even with people she knows. She isn't unfriendly, but I suspect my poor piglet inherited her mama's social anxiety. She's much more comfortable with a smaller, more manageable group. She can do a preschool with 12 students total and two or three teachers. She can't handle four times that, and although she would probably calm down enough to participate, I sincerely worry that she would never totally integrate. And whatever possible comfort would be offered by H being there too would be pretty muted, because they would rarely be together, and H plays rough when other kids are around.
Also, I do know I won't get the choice about class size when she enters primary school. But I have the option right now, and as long as that's the case, I'll take it so I can work with her on becoming adjusted to larger crowds with more ease.
5. I want my parenting choices to be honored.
This is a small thing, but it is nevertheless a thing. H's preschool doesn't support cloth diapering. I don't like putting Sephie in disposables. I admit, I was kind of partial to her newborn disposable diapers because they had that cute Winnie the Pooh design, but we stopped using those when she finally put on enough weight to use the cloth diapers, and I personally never looked back. I honestly don't even understand why anybody prefers disposables.
I do, however, know why I don't like using them It's a waste of money when we have 30 cloth covers and 60 inserts lying around, it's totally unnecessary consumerism, and it contributes to the destruction of the environment. On top of all the other fees and expenses we have connected to child rearing, this is one we shouldn't have to have forced on us.
I feel the same way about breastfeeding. Although H's school has a semi-open door policy (you have to be on the approved list to get in) they're not crazy about mamas coming in to do the whole extended breastfeeding thing. They don't go so far as to say they don't support it, but they don't have much in the way of facilitation of it, and they don't accept bottles for expressed milk; children are supposed to be sent with sippy cups or juice boxes.
It's my feeling that cloth diapering and extended breastfeeding are lifestyle choices that should be honored, and those choices should not be abruptly altered, especially since these choices tend to go hand in hand with a parenting methodology practices the idea of letting children change when they are ready to change. I want the nursing relationship with Sephie to end because she's ready to wean, not because I can't figure out how I'm going to find a place to lay down with her so she can snuggle and grab my hair the way she likes. When Sephie is out of cloth diapers, I want it to be because she's decided she's ready to potty train, not because it's easier for a volunteer to toss a diaper in the trash as opposed to a prepared wet bag.
These may seem like minor things, but I had to fight to make these choices happen, and to be respected. I'm not just talking about the fact I had such a difficult time establishing the nursing relationship in the first place, but also the struggle to get people to actually use the cloth diapers rather than putting her in the first available disposable diaper they could access. After the fighting that had to be done to get this far, I'm simply not willing to cave overnight because the preschool is stuck 20 years in the past with their ideas of what modern childrearing looks like.
As a side irritant, they don't do anything with medications. Parents have to dispense all medications on their own. Sephie's eczema is severe enough that she requires a prescription of topical cream, and it's supposed to be applied at every diaper change. In order for Sephie to get her medication when she's due, I would have to come over any time she needed to be changed to apply it. Not exactly the most convenient thing, even though my office is literally two doors down.
A week ago, I had a conversation with celluloidheroes where he asked me what percentage I'd assign each of my reasons as factors in my desire not to send Sephie to the same school as H. Reason one and two make up about 70 percent of the piece. The other three reasons share a square 10 percent.
I know my reasons are valid. And I told watered down versions of them to Martyr when I initially explained why I did not want Sephie to attend the same school as H. I obviously didn't tell her about the first two reasons, because it would only serve to make her more defensive. Especially with regards to P, someone who can never do wrong in her eyes.
I doubt anything much will happen from here. I've already confirmed Sephie's enrollment for Tuesday, and although Martyr may try to continue to make an issue of it, she doesn't have a leg to stand on. What can she do, keep us from paying for it? That's very, very unlikely. And honestly, even if she were to suddenly do a 180 and restore her promise to pay for Sephie's preschool, the odds are I will tell her to keep her money. Because getting out from underneath her is THAT important, and accepting her money would totally gut our position of legitimacy.
It's stupid that I have to approach my in-laws with the same calculation I do debate arguments.