Ha Ha Get This! My Kid's Sick! Featuring Perky Juju

Back when I was a 2J¹ working mother, I used to spend a fair amount of time commuting and driving up and down the state of California. It was while I was on these longer trips that I would listen to Dr. Laura - mostly because for some reason her show was the only thing that my radio picked up in parts of the California boonies.

I wasn't very fond of her, and at times she really pissed me off - mostly when she started ragging on 2Js (like me). At the same time, deep down, I knew she was right and that pissed me off even more. Well, suffice it to say, I have changed my mind about good old Dr. Laura and Kudos to her for getting on the radio and making types like me mad.

So this morning I tuned her in as I was making a quick run to the grocery store. Her topic was a certain perky Juju Chang of ABC and her recent video blog entry titled The Fix: Juggling a Sick Child. When I got home, I watched perky Juju discuss report on yack about the "Classic mommy dilemma" of where to dump your child when he or she has a fever.

Her options were:

1. Give the kid some Tylenol and hope the school nurse doesn't call (hee hee)
2. Fob the kid off on friends or relatives (hahahahah)
3. Bring the kid to work (giggle)
4. (D) All of the above

Her answer was (D) all of the above. She then scrunched up her eyebrows for 3.4 seconds to indicate the seriousness of this topic, quoted some idiotic statistics and that was that. Nice, light-hearted piece with lots of fancy camera action and edited down to the minimum to demonstrate how faced paced perky Juju's life is, and just how gosh darn important she is.

The thing is, perky Juju is just that important! But not to me, and probably not to 99.99999% of America. The only person in the world that measures her importance as highly as she does is that little boy in the video. To him, she is everything.

So it hurts a bit to watch her asking her son to "cough for the camera" although I guess I should be grateful his ailment isn't accompanied by projectile vomiting. And I kind of resent perky Juju's co-conspiratorial tone about "the other mothers complaining" when she sends her sick child to school to infect the other kids - so that she won't be hindered in the pursuit of her career.

What a crock. Make no mistake, this is not a Mommy issue. This is an ego issue. Perky Juju is telling you that she doesn't mind imposing on others when the need arises - that she is more important than you, while trying to pass it off as some higher-cause "feminist" issue. Perky Juju is just plain selfish. Notice she didn't even mention forking over some of her busy, career woman dough to hire a sitter or a nanny.

I call BS, perky Juju.

RH


¹ (2J = Job + Job, I am hereby doing away with "working mother" meaning working outside the home, because as any mother can tell you, raising kids and looking after a family is a full time job - I am open to suggestions on the 2J thing)

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Another Case of the Palin Syndrome

"Nanny accused of dumping children at unlicensed day care" reads the headline of an article in the LA Times. We are supposed to be horrified at the evil nanny who outsourced her babysitting duties to a cheaper provider in Hollywood - an "unlicensed daycare" or in reality, a lady who watches kids in her appartment. The Nanny

"agreed to care for children in the Hancock Park and Larchmont areas, but dumped them off at an unlicensed day-care center in a Hollywood apartment so she could work selling produce."

The "victim" in this case? An attorney and mother of twins who has been left "feeling betrayed". She even goes on to say this about the nanny:

"I treated her like a member of my family. I trusted her with my children, who are the most precious things in my life," she said. "I believed she was a good person, and I was shocked to find out that I could have been so wrong about somebody."

I was shocked that Ms. Betrayed Attorney wasn't arrested for child abuse/neglect. You see, she employed this nanny for SIX YEARS. What kind of mother doesn't clue in for 6 years that her kids are being dumped off at some Hollywood appartment on a regular basis? Did she ever talk to her children? Call home to check in on her kids? Ask them about their day?

What gets me is the unmitigated gall of this women to claim that her children are the most precious things in her life when it is quite obvious that she has nothing to do with them. She can consider herself lucky that her nanny only wanted to sell fruit instead of watch her kids and didn't get any more sinister ideas.

Yacking about how precious your children are and then abandoning them for 12 hours a day to be a lawyer is just gross. Gag me.

RH

A Crock Of Quality Time

quality time
-noun

A Boomer buzz phrase of the 1980's designed to alleviate a mother's guilt as she drops her kids off at the daycare center and heads off to work. See Latchkey kid.

[Origin: 1985–90]

Mothers don't let your girls grow up to be cowboys! Scroll back to the 1980's if you will, for I have a story to tell! It is of a young, impressionable girl, eager to make her way in the world and find her place in the sun, faced with the daunting task of somehow becoming the woman in the Enjoli Perfume commercial. (For those who joined us later in life, the Enjoli gal had the unique ability to bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never, never let him forget he's a man, because she's woman...Enjoli. Equally impressive was her ability to fry bacon in a pan, and do so wearing a silky satin dress without splattering bacon fat all over it.*)

Our girl was armed to the teeth with the life-tools required for her journey: Feminism, a subscription to Cosmo and important life lessons learned from watching "General Hospital" and "All My Children" (Not once has my husband turned out to be a Russian KGB agent, an impostor, who via the miracles of plastic surgery had been made to look just like my husband, but really wasn't, because my real husband was being held captive somewhere on an island, and the impostor husband had fallen in love with me but those darn Russians were just not so understanding about the whole thing and wanted him to blow up the world anyway. No, that is one of life's little pitfalls I (Oops she!) have/has managed to avoid!)

Yup, everything was just humming along splendidly and according to plan until I became pregnant with my daughter. According to the makers of Enjoli perfume, because I'm a woman, this should be a cake walk! (Although admittedly, now that I think about it, there were no signs of children in that commercial... I just assumed them because who else would she be cooking bacon for?) Somehow it just wasn't adding up. I knew I was supposed to be a managing director or something by the time I was 30, and I was ready! I had the wardrobe and everything. But just how was that supposed to work with the kid part?

My trusty GenX's Guide to Feminism was not too helpful, apparently they had left out that chapter in favor of "How to Sue Your Employer for Sexual Harassment and Discrimination". Was I supposed to sue and then use the proceeds to stay home and raise my kids? Oh well I thought, it'll all work out somehow. So for the duration of my pregnancy, I dutifully arose each morning, put on my business suit and running shoes, stuck my heels in a bag and went off to work. We lived in San Francisco, so I walked to work every day from our cool and hip apartment in North Beach to the financial district. Yup I was acing this modern woman thing!

Until the baby came.

I took a four month leave from my job, instead of the allowed 6 weeks, we moved to a more family appropriate location (South Beach... which had just been conveniently cleared of freeways by the 1989 earthquake exposing a stretch of prime waterfront real estate...who knew? ) I settled into domestic bliss with my brand new baby girl. But a storm was brewing inside me as it became increasingly clear to me that it was not, in fact, possible to raise a child in 4 months. I dreaded the day when I would have to go back to work, but at the same time felt guilty for dreading it because they had not yet coined the phrase "Stay-at-Home-Mom" and "Housewife" was blasphemous which meant I would be nothing. A SLACKER!

So I went back to work to do some moving and shaking, raced home at lunch to nurse, and then raced back to work. Coming home in the evening, I did my best to get some of that "quality time" with my daughter that everyone was yapping about. I was exhausted all the time though, and by this time of day my daughter was cranky, so I felt guilty some more because it seemed I was lousy at quality time. I lasted another 10 months until salvation came in the form of my husband getting a job in Germany...where I would not be allowed to work! Score!

You see, quality time had not worked out so well for me. It turned out that a bit more went into the actual raising of children than reading them a story at the end of the day. In fact, it was the non-quality time that mattered more...being there when they got into trouble and guiding them out again. You can't schedule the important parenting times, or insist that they take place only at the end of the business day. If a child wants to fill the toilet with rocks or explore what's under the kitchen sink, they tend to do it on their own schedule. Even the routine, the mundane, the down right boring are important...not in and of themselves, but if you put them all together, in, say, a crock pot and let them simmer for a few decades, then you wind up with quality time!

RH

**Turns out I remembered the ad wrong... there were kids and bacon frying is done in a bathrobe!

Guilt and the Working Mother - The Secret Weapon of the Housewife

Before I was lucky enough to be able to stay home and pursue my new career of Retro Housewife, I was what we call a "Working Mother". Meaning I got into my car every morning and drove off to some office somewhere, and periodically, somebody not my husband would deposit money into my checking account, and I would spend evenings and week-ends frantically trying to cram in a weeks worth of mothering.

One of the biggest perks of housewifedom is being able to do the little things for my family that fell by the wayside when I was part of the rat race. Another unexpected perk is the sudden absolute superiority you have over the career woman/mother, which can come in handy in situations when the social pecking order is being established.

I was forced to use this new power on a ghost of my former self while building a fake hedge with the rest of the ladies on the school dance committee. I happened to strike up a conversation with a Mom I had never seen before at any of the meetings, and after we had gotten through the usual formalities concerning the proper way of arranging tree cuttings when building a fake hedge, we got down to some serious pecking and one-upping.

Men have their cars, women, their kids. It really doesn't matter what else a woman does in life, somewhere deep down inside, she will judge herself by how good of a mother she is. Even the thin, rich and beautiful woman becomes pathetic if she fails the motherhood test. (Notice I chose "thin, rich and beautiful" as the standard to envy and not "accomplished career", because that isn't even in the running...or how many girls have you ever heard say "I want to be just like Janet Reno when I grow up." Instead, we think "well at least she got to be attorney general".)

So if you find yourself in such a competition, and want to spare yourself some aggravation, it helps to quickly assess the worthiness of your opponent. If she is June Cleaver, then unless you are June Cleaver's mother, your only options are to quickly admit defeat and flatter her shamelessly until she invites you to join her cooking club, or suddenly spot a seriously neglected part of the hedge on the other side of the room and make like Snagglepuss.

My opponent on this particular day thought she had the upper hand as she casually related her numerous professional achievements to me while stuffing leafy branches into the holes in the chicken wire. I could tell she was quite impressed with herself, and had she not given me that polite but ever so slightly condescending smile when I told her I was a housewife, I would have spared her. It was a little too easy, like taking candy from a baby, and I knew I would feel a bit guilty afterward, but away I pecked.

It didn't take much; my first strike was to ask her, my voice full of amazement, how she "handled all that" (translation: you must neglect your children). Then I got lucky! I just happened to mention that I had taken my daughter to have her hair done for the dance that evening, and how hard it was to get an appointment because all the other girls were going to this particular salon as well.

There it was, the coup de grace.

The capable career woman turned to mush before my eyes. Her daughter had not had her hair done. Guilt oozed out of every pore as she desperately tried to explain to me why she had neglected to take her daughter to the salon. It was too hard to watch, and I did my best to ease her conscience.

It didn't seem to work though, because as I was leaving (after I had put the finishing touches on my part of the hedge), I overheard her frantically trying to explain to a group of three or four puzzled looking ladies, why her daughter had not had a hair appointment.

Use your power responsibly.

RH