The Mother's Handbook.net

The Victorian Problem

themother — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:27:49 +0000

Speaking of murdering abortionists…

We were, weren’t we?

Victorian England was an interesting place. The sexuality and sexual politics were fascinatingly confusing. In the interests of saving my readers from a dissertation, here are the Cliff notes:

A wave of Protestant prudery about all things sexual swept through England in the early 19th century (and then wafted across the waves to America, which was already founded on Puritanical ideals and really didn’t need any help). Rooted in the concept of bodily purity, the idea was that sex and sexuality were to be eschewed as vices, except as necessary for procreation. In addition, no one discussed them, because they were filthy.

The old canards about women and their sexual voraciousness reappeared. In order to keep men chaste, women had to be kept in a box. Huge skirts with big hoops removed women’s sexual natures from view (and dragged the mud from the streets of London into their homes).

I know of no better illustration of this prudery than the fact that Victorians often covered even their piano legs with shirrings.

Since no one talked about sex, that folklore ‘women’s wisdom’ that had been passed down through the centuries was no longer discussed; women went to marriage not only virgins but completely ignorant of the age-old methods of limiting their families. Caught in the cycle of sex-pregnancy-birth, repeat, women sought shelter in the only methods available: upper class women claimed frailty, taking to their beds. Lower class women, for whom another child might mean the difference between bare survival and starvation, tried desperately to avoid their husband’s amorous advances.

With no sex at home, men turned to the euphemistically named ”social problem.” Prostitution was the disgrace of the age, bringing with it epidemic levels of syphilis and gonorrhea; no one knew how to stop it (the idea of loosening the prudish grip on sexual morality didn’t show up until Drysdale published his scandalous book in 1854 (not that GOOD people would READ it, for heaven’s sake). His story is coming up–watch this space). There were plenty of them out there, too–with no way to make a living, women who had no husband (often abandoned) and could not get a job in service (no kids allowed) were forced to turn to the streets just to put food in their mouths.

Somehow, the powers that be were convinced that the vice of prostitution was the fault of the fallen women; these vile creatures invaded the quiet Victorian home, infecting even the innocent wives of their victims. They enticed men, pulling them from chastity and destroying the social order.

Societies were set up to redeem these women. In the best possible tradition of Christian missionary zeal, the upper class stormed the bastilles of lower class neighborhoods daily, preaching to the fallen, teaching them of the right path (but paradoxically offering not a whiff of financial assistance). Laws were enacted, allowing the police to pull a woman off the street on the charge of ”disease,” but with no reference to her clients, who were deemed completely innocently led astray. The prostitute was the embodiment of all that was wrong with society. She was beneath contempt and must needs be eradicated.

It was in this millieu that the famous London prostitute murders began.

No, not THOSE London prostitute murders.

Shortly after Jack the Ripper dispatched a bevy of fallen women in Whitechapel, a new set of serial murders began in Lambeth. Except that it took the police a while to notice.

On October 13, 1891, Ellen Donworth, a 19 year old prostitute, fell into the street in agony. A passer-by helped her back to her boarding house where, in between convulsive fits, she told her landlady that “A tall gentleman with cross eyes, a silk hat, and bushy whiskers gave me a drink twice out of a bottle with white stuff in it,” and then proceeded to die. The doctor in attendance was quite certain that her combination of complete consciousness and tetanic convulsions could only be strychnine poisoning, a fact verified at autopsy.

But she was just a prostitute.

A week later, Matilda Clover returned from a night out on the town and began to have convulsions. A known alcoholic (one of the common symptoms of her way of life), no one thought much of it when she up and died, too.

In April, two roommates, Alice Marsh and Emma Shrivell entertained a balding gentleman with glasses who claimed to be a doctor. He gave them each three pills. They died within hours of each other, both from strychnine poisoning.

At this point, the police wised up. They exhumed Matilda’s body, adding her to the list. The manhunt began.

It was not long before the name of Dr. Neill Thomas Cream came up in the investigation. As his history unfolded, he became the major suspect. Why?

Dr. Cream was a graduate of the prestigious McGill College in Montreal. Their medical faculty was on the cutting edge of science (and morality, as seen through the lens of science). Despite being suspected of burning down his own apartments for the insurance money, he managed to seduce the daughter of a hotelier. Before they could be married, she suddenly felt ill; her family physician informed her parents that she had been illegally aborted. A shotgun wedding followed. Shortly thereafter, Cream headed to London to “continue his medical education.”

After seducing a few women in London, his wife suddenly died back in Canada. It seems that Cream had sent her some medicine. Huh.

By the time he arrived back in London (England), he had: set up shop as a woman’s doctor (a euphemism for abortionist) in London (Ontario), where a woman under his care died suddenly; moved to Chicago, where he was tried and acquitted in the abortion-related death of a prostitute; poisoned a patient and blamed it on the druggist; poisoned a patient and blamed it on the druggist while sleeping with the patient’s wife and attempting to sue the druggist for damages; been convicted of the last one and sentenced to life in prison; been released after a measly ten years due to a combination of bribes and politics.

Four dead prostitutes later, he was in jail again. In a sensational trial that kept Victorian papers in euphemisms for weeks, Cream was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He was hanged on November 15, 1892.

That he was insane, I doubt is in question. It’s tempting to wonder if he had neurosyphilis from all his contact with prostitutes, but he was pretty bizarre pretty young.

That he targeted prostitutes is a symptom of his time.

The Victorian Problem would not find a solution for many, many years. It was a slow labor, fraught with agony, the final product of which was nothing less than the liberation of women from the age old cycle of birth and death.

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Johnny and the Little Green Men

themother — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:03:24 +0000

Parque das Nações, Lisbon, Portugal

Meet Johnny.

Johnny is a normal boy being raised by well-intentioned, loving parents. Who, though, might be a bit odd.

Johnny’s parents have taught him that, once a year on the summer solstice, a few little green men from a galaxy far, far away pop into his backyard for a few supplies. If he just leaves out what they need (aluminum foil, four AA batteries, and a can of motor oil–apparently, in spite of their superior technology, they have a few gaping holes in manufacturing), they will leave a tribute payment (straight from the nearest Walmart).

This is quite fun for a while, until Johnny gets old enough to ask why, if the aliens can drop by Walmart for his tribute, they can’t just buy their own damn supplies. He decides to wait for the little green men, to ask them. He stays up all night, but, alas, there are no sign of aliens in his backyard.

He asks his parents the next morning. They tell him that the aliens have invisibility cloaks, like the Romulans.

The next year, he pulls out his telescope, expecting to catch a glimpse of the spaceship. No dice. Dad tells him that the ship is way out in space and they beam in with teleporters. He adds that, in order to receive his tribute payment, Johnny has to stop asking questions and just believe.

In the face of this conveniently unfalsifiable claim, and the risk of losing booty, Johnny continues to receive his tribute presents once a year and learns not to ask why or how.

Two things can happen now:

1) Johnny exchanges stories with friends at school, and is subjected to the derision of the other children who know damn well there are no little green men. He is mortified at his own stupidity and the loss of esteem to his peers, and comes home raging with anger at his parents, who taught him about the little green men to begin with. He vows never to trust anything they say, ever again.

2) Johnny, while eventually losing faith in the little green men, still goes through life with the lessons he learned, from his parents, about credulity.

Most parents would find the first scenario more worrisome. Discovering that your parents have been lying to you, even if it was well-intentioned, is a tough life lesson for a kid. They depend on us to protect them. What if they can’t trust us to do that?

Ask any number of psychologists about societal myths, and you will get as many answers. Many do point out that the parent generally gets more out of these stories than the kids (especially if the tribute payments are contingent upon behavior). But for every one who thinks myths are good for kids, you will find at least as many who either have personally negative experiences or patients with profoundly negative experiences.

The skeptical community, in contrast, exhibits no such waffling. It detests cultural myths. Why? Because by continuing to build unfalsifiable claims around the myth (and telling him that he may not question it), Johnny’s parents have taught him to be credulous.

But, we can teach our kids to think critically about other stuff, right? What’s the harm in a little, fun, present-giving myth?

What are we going to teach him to think critically about? As a matter of “respect,” we teach kids not to question:

1) teachers

2) the Bible and religious authorities

3) their parents

What’s left in a kid’s life? They’re too young to seriously contemplate scientific evidence. They grow up believing what authority figures tell them.

Which is why a guy in a lab coat can sell snake oil at $400 a bottle, and a playboy bunny on a tv show can convince people that vaccines are killing their children.

Cultural myths have power because we allow them to have power. There are unscrupulous people in the world, who will use this power to their advantage. No kid is born believing in little green men. WE DO IT TO THEM.

We can arm our children to protect themselves from the evil people in the world, but only by teaching them to think for themselves. And this means that we, as parents, cannot afford to reinforce these oh-so-not-harmless societal myths.

And we have to start with the little green men on the summer solstice.

[This rant was inspired by events on ck's Bad Mommy Moments, wherein she was confronted by a 5 year old who had just been told that her personal little green men were a lie. If you're feeling brave, read the comments. Scary, scary, scary.]

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Another Really Good Reason Not to Clean

themother — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:10:37 +0000

Bansky Spray Art, Chalk Farm, London

Any frequent reader knows that I detest cleaning.

Cleaning is a pointless activity. Entropy always wins; a room you clean today is just going to be cluttered tomorrow. Add to that the wasted hours that could be used to do something, well, useful, and it’s fair to say that I have given up housecleaning as a ritual activity not worthy of my time.

I have no fear of germs. There are only a few bugs worth worrying about, and we vaccinate for most of those. The ones on a dirty kitchen floor? Not.

To the extent that cleaning: a) is ego-dystonic, b) takes hours away from my exercise machine; and c) raises my blood pressure in annoyance, I have decided that it is hazardous to my health. So there.

But, so far, we are dealing only with personal distaste and personal opinion. Do I have a study to back me up?

Why, yes. Yes I do.

Cleaning products may cause breast cancer.

“Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health asked more than 1500 women about their cleaning product usage and found that women who reported using more air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control had a higher incidence of breast cancer.”

A really good reason not to clean. As if I needed one.

[Disclaimer: before anyone panics and throws out their Tilex, let me point out that this is a self-reported survey. No attempt to separate women with the known risk factor of bad genes was made, and there was no attempt to quantify exposures. In other words, some really serious research needs to be done before we can establish even a correlation, let alone a causation. For those of you who care about such details, what we really need is a prospective study of women who clean for a living v. ordinary ladies, with exposures quantified and their genes mapped to exclude those with already increased risk. Until then, it's just a good excuse. Feel free to use it.]

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Maybe You Can’t Trust a Midwife After All

themother — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:00:11 +0000

La Voisin, on (obviously) one of her bad hair days

The entrenched misogyny of the Church in the Middle Ages that we have witnessed (due to the fact that the people in charge: a. were celibate males who were terrified of women who might steal their chastity, and b. were celibate males who knew nothing about women) had a few concerns about midwives.

You see, midwives tended to command the respect of women in the community. They held court at births, to which the local women swarmed like flies. They were both witnesses and moral support, sisters in God (god-sibs, eventually bastardized to ‘gossips’).

What is more terrifying to a male, celibate clergy than a congregation of women to which men were not admitted?

Why, nothing. Nothing at all.

Try as they might, the Church could not reform the basic plan of birth. But they were very careful to watch out for it.

It has been suggested that the witch hunts of the late medieval-early modern period were directed primarily against midwives, possibly in order to make way for learned, male, clergy dominated medicine. But analysis of the women burned and hanged doesn’t really include a larger proportion of midwives than expected by their ratios in the population.

Regardless, the vast majority of midwives were God-fearing Christian women who tried very hard to do the right thing. One almost feels sorry for the priests.

And then, in the enlightened world of the Sun King, there arose a midwife who really (apparently) was a witch.

Catherine Deshayes (or Catherine Montvoisin), known to the popular press as La Voisin, was a midwife (and abortionist?) in Louis XIV’s Paris. She had a thriving practice among the glitterati of the Royal court, and trained many a woman in her ways. They also dabbled in love spells, and occasionally poisonings.

La Voisin had a special room in her apartments in Saint-Denis that was completely draped in black. She appeared to those asking for her services dressed in an ermine-lined red velvet coat, green lace skirt and gold slippers. Capable of everything from an attic abortion to an elaborate black mass, La Voisin boasted a clientele that went all the way up to Louis XIV’s mistress, the lovely Marquise de Montespan.

Allegedly, de Montespan originally sought La Voisin’s aide in acquiring the king and ridding him of his then current mistress. She later sought help several more times to keep Louis’ ephemeral attention. Supposedly, these rituals consisted of the naked de Montespan, spread eagled on an altar, with black candles in each hand, and a freshly obtained infant on her belly. The Abbe Guibourg incanted over them, slit the child’s throat, and the deed was done.

When it became apparent that even magic was failing her in her attempt to retain the king’s roving eye, de Montespan turned to La Voisin again, asking her to poison the king.

At some point, the authorities were alerted. When is confusing. Why is also confusing. Regardless, La Voisin’s apartment was raided. The black room was discovered. An oven was found with the remains of many infants either aborted or sacrificed.

When it became clear that the scandal reached all the way up to Louis himself, the proceedings were sealed, and a special prosecutor called in. Nicholas de la Reymie, the Police Commissioner of Paris, was named the head of the “Chambre Ardente” (the burning court). All evidence was collected in secret, and there was no appeal.

Which means, of course, that we have no idea how much evidence he actually had for any of this.

La Voisin was arrested and tortured for eight hours a day. Like a great midwife, used to hardships, she bore the torture with humor and refused to confess to anything. She was burned for her crimes in 1679 (after her poisoning right hand was chopped off, that is).

Madame de Montespan was too embarrassing to go after. The Chamber records were sealed and she was allowed to remain at court, although she was marginalized from the King.

So, did she do it?

Who knows. Up until the 1960s, it seems, historians were buying the story hook, line and sinker. No one had any trouble believing in the Black Mass or witchcraft or that a midwife was also an abortionist and a poisoner.

Modern historians are realizing that there was no evidence; in fact, no evidence at all. No bodies of infants were actually discovered. No real evidence seems to have been presented, although there were plenty of witnesses willing to testify against La Voisin and her friends.

But then, she was a midwife. Does one really need evidence?

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Competitive Parenting

themother — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:32:07 +0000

We’ve all been there: at a school or social function, with other moms and their kids. The moms are all jostling for position, reaching for the ever-ephemeral “perfect mother” title.

Competitive parenting.

The problem is, no one knows the RULES.

It’s hard to win without goal posts. So I offer, free of charge, the very first Competitive Parenting Guidebook. A few simple rules are all you need to start on your road to parental glorification:

1) From the time one begins to contemplate production of offspring, one must be pure. Eschew any and all toxins that might influence your baby. Extra points if you lock yourself in a cabin in the woods, eat only organic produce and fresh spring water.

2) Give birth in said cabin, trusting your body and your child to do what needs to be done. No pain medicine allowed; extra points for a long and complicated labor that allows you to truly experience the birth and develop that special bond with the child that only massive agony can produce.

3) Breastfeed exclusively until a year. Bonus points if you have to wean him to send him to college.

4) Only organic, homemade baby food. Teach the child perfect eating habits that include massive quantities of green leafy vegetables and an abhorrence for hot dogs and sweets. Extra points if your child has never stepped foot inside a McDonald’s, even for a birthday party. Extra, extra points if he thinks McDonald’s is a farm with animals that make silly noises.

5) Don’t use diapers, and don’t ever put baby down until he is ready to crawl. If he cries, you’ve done something wrong. Subtract points.

6) Submit applications to preschool while the child is in utero, grade school applications during delivery, and hire a college consultant before the child starts middle school. Bonus points for Ivy League acceptance; add even more bonus points if you had to make a large donation to the President’s discretionary fund to get him in.

7) No exposure to toxins, ever. No drugs, no immunizations. Bonus points if he gets a common, preventable childhood disease and survives. Extra bonus points if he has the symptoms of depression or ADHD and you treat him with diet and natural remedies.

8 ) Protect your child from all possible negative experiences. Subtract points for every ER visit, every time they get a demerit at school for forgetting their homework or starve because they forgot their lunch. Bonus points for every run to school to fix something for your child; extra bonus points for twice in one day.

9) Raise the child within your own personal belief structure. Accrue points for each ideal your child retains from you; lose points for every issue on which the child grows up to disagree with his parents.

10) Bonus points if you move with your kid to college. Subtract tons of points if he comes back home to live with you afterwards.

I hope I’ve cleared up a few things. The full guide, with point values included, will be available by fall, just in time for the start of the competition season.

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Is Parenting FUN? Is it Supposed to Be?

themother — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:08:00 +0000

An article in Psychology Today this weekend was titled, “Why Parenting isn’t Fun.” The most interesting part:

When 909 Texas women ranked how pleasurable daily tasks are, parenting was ranked sixteenth, after cooking, watching TV, exercising, shopping, and housework.

Wow. We’d rather do housework than parent. Considering how much I hate housework…

Hubby came through, noting the title. “Of course parenting is fun!”

I pointed out that the article says that parents further from the primary caretaking responsibilities rate parenting MUCH more fun than the stay at home mom types.

Wait! Maybe we just have different definitions of ‘parenting.’ And, ‘fun.’

From Wikipedia: Parenting: Process of raising and educating a child from birth until adulthood.

Fun: 1) enjoyable, amusing; 2) Whimsical, flamboyant.

[Hubby now admits that 'fun' might not be the appropriate adjective. He has chosen 'rewarding.' I'm still thinking.]

Once upon a time, women had children because: a) they couldn’t stop themselves; and b) they needed the extra hands. Agriculture was a labor intensive way to make a living–children were both the slave labor that kept it all up in the air and a sort of retirement account for the parents.

Flash forward to modern day: Women (at least in Western society) have a choice about whether we are going to produce offspring, and we rely more heavily on our 401Ks than our children for our retirement.

SO–why do we do it?

Women who have children are no happier than those who don’t, at least in the recent studies. Women who don’t have kids tend to be financially better off, long term (surprising, I know).

In the absence of any real motivation, we have tried to convince ourselves that it is FUN, a concept that would have been completely foreign to a woman raising children anytime prior to, oh, 1950.

Producing said tiny human beings is certainly fun. [Unless you perforce did it the new-fangled way in a fertility clinic, in which case I will make no judgements about how fun it was. Except I'm guessing not.]

Birth? NOT fun. But nature has a way-back machine and she wipes that part of our brains, otherwise we’d never do it again.

There follows 20+ years of responsibility, frustration, terror, gut-wrenching concern, heartburn-inducing decisions, diaper bills and college funds.

Are we having fun yet?

No?

Most of us knew, deep down in our psyches, that we WANTED children. Whether that comes from societal conditioning or evolutionary programming, we just did. But convincing ourselves that it is fun is like convincing ourselves that marriage is about romance and candlelight and never having to say you’re sorry. It’s a trap that leaves women feeling frustrated and angry, and, worse, abnormal. Everyone else thinks it’s fun. Why don’t I?

Because it’s not. It’s hard work. Rewarding, yes. Some fabulously fun moments, yes. Fun like a good novel or a great movie or a gathering of good friends liberally lubricated with adult beverages? Nope.

I am told that grandparenting is FUN. I’m not holding my breath.

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Wanton Whores? Who Says?

themother — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:31:56 +0000

Odalisque in Grisaille, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1824-34

Since time immemorial, it seems, women have been viewed as voracious sexual predators. It was taken as a given, since at least the time of Aristotle (who is said to have originated the idea but was probably just writing down the accepted wisdom of the time). Through Aristotle, it became known to the medieval Christian thinkers, most of whom were, conveniently, male priests and monks, with no female sex drive or sex partner of their own to use as a reference, and only their terror of losing their own chastity as a guide.

A monk named Albertus (subtitled “Magnus,” always a sign of his massive following) apparently taught this doctrine to his students (along with quite a few other canards about women in general, and women’s sexuality in particular), one of whom dutifully wrote it all down in a document called De Secretis Mullerium (Women’s Secrets). The basic idea was that women were inherently base and impure due to their complete lack of control over their menstrual emissions (while the nice, proper monks had TOTAL control over their own emissions, thank you very much). Those nasty emissions would poison anything which came in contact with them, including the woman’s puny little brain, which then becomes as corrupt and evil as her menses.

Composed in the 13th century, De Secretis Mullerium was THE text that entrenched all the misogyny and misinformation about women and their evil lack of control over their sexuality that extended clear into the late Victorian period.

[The evil woman hypothesis laid out by Psuedo-Albertus can be directly linked to that fabulous fable of medieval times known as the Malleus Maleficarium (The Hammer of Witches) that started the whole witch-burning thing. Some of the passages are directly ripped off from De Secretis Mullerium and its codified commentaries.]

Where was the evidence?

Who needed evidence? It was simply obvious from the way things were.

Don’t you wonder how many men got married and learned that they had been ROOKED???

It wasn’t really until Kinsey that anyone started actually studying women and their sexual responses. Imagine the surprise when they discovered that women’s sexuality just wasn’t quite as neat and tidy (or wild and unruly) as it had been painted since antiquity.

But we have to cut people a little slack. It wasn’t just women they weren’t actually studying. They didn’t actually study anything.

While the basics of scientific investigation had been laid out plainly since Newton, Bacon and Locke, it really didn’t apply to medicine. People were all individuals, who couldn’t be boiler-plated into any kind of scientific method. Don’t believe me? Then why does a plague run through a town, laying waste to the population, but five or six people just never get sick? Why does one treatment work for one person, but kill another? Hmmm?

The idea of applying that grand scientific thinking to the study of disease, or people, simply doesn’t seem to have occurred–until a few daring souls in the mid-19th century decided it was time to get their heads out of their dark ages arses.

Adolphe Quetelet was a Belgian polymath. Trained as a mathematician, he also wrote poetry, an opera, painted, and studied sculpture–the last two of which got him interested in the human body, particularly how to describe it mathematically (it is for this that he is best known: he developed the height/weight index that was then known as the Quetelet index, but is now called the Body Mass Index).

Quetelet managed to get himself involved in the Netherlands population census in the mid 1820s, successfully arguing that a random sampling was more than adequate to represent the entire population. While he worked with the data, he realized that all human characteristics fit the Gaussian distribution known as the Bell Curve–a fact which blew the whole humans-are-too-individual-to-be-studied-as-a-group thing totally out of the water.

So we can credit Quetelet with introducing probability and statistical theory into human studies, including medicine.

Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (whose mother obviously could not make a decision) studied medicine in Paris, practiced in Russia, and returned to Paris loaded for bear. He started collecting data (using mathematical methods) about blood-letting, still the favored therapy for just about everything. In 1828 he proved (p =0.07, not quite the modern accepted value of p , 0.05, but awfully close) that blood letting helped pneumonia patients die faster. Duh.

Louis is considered the father of clinical epidemiology.

Not everyone was really happy about this development. Humans, reduced to numbers? It was just one step to total anarchy. Or totalitarianism. Take your pick.

The Romantic writers had a field day. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and Dicken’s “Hard Times” each ripped statistical biology a new one. But then, the Romantics weren’t happy about science, in general, preferring to glorify Nature in all her glory.

You know, the Nature that made women with tiny holes push out babies with big heads? THAT Nature.

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The Mother’s Guide to Groceries

themother — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:15:46 +0000

In some cultures, women simply pick up what they need for that day at the local market. No long term planning is required. This wonderful method requires that: a) one has a local market; and b) your kids don’t run out of food in a single day.

In America, most of us are used to the once a week or so shopping system. You load up your megacar with groceries for a week, slowly go through them, and do it again the next week. This is especially convenient for moms who live some distance from the local market.

In my house, we have an odd shopping system that goes like this:

Mom plans for a week, goes to the store, buys what she needs, only to find that more desperate needs have occurred during her absence. She then goes back to the store the next day to tidy up, returns home, and discovers yet another set of pressing needs. Rinse, lather, repeat (did you hear the one about the computer programmer who got stuck in the shower?).

When you have four boys and a milk budget of approximately 8 gallons PER WEEK, you really can’t keep enough groceries in the house for a week anyway, so I eventually gave that pretense up for the proverbial atonement holiday.

Still, I don’t really want to spend all week in my car, or in the grocery store. I do have other things to do, regardless of what Stretch might tell you.

So I instituted the whiteboard system of grocery planning.

I keep a whiteboard on the back frig with a magic marker. Kid needs, kid writes. If he wants a specific brand, that had better be there, too.

The notes are occasionally cryptic. “GOOD FOOD!!” shows up regularly, courtesy of the Goth. Helpful, yes?

“Shampoo!!!!” No idea which kid or what kind.

Sometimes they are ridiculously detailed. “Pretzel sticks. THE STICKS. NO other kind of pretzel will do!”

I take a photo of the whiteboard on the way out the door, and head to the local warehouse supplier where I buy the carloads of food my teenage boys can eat in a week.

They don’t have pretzel STICKS. They only have pretzel TWISTS. A quick call to the Goth’s cell confirms that he is willing to compromise, just this once, but can’t I complain to the manager????

Shampoo? Goth says it wasn’t him. Phone Stretch’s cell. Yes, he needs shampoo, desperately. What kind? Orange.

Orange. Great. I grab the only orange bottle in the store.

I get home with the carload; kids (including girlfriend!) unload.

So far, so good.

An hour later, I walk past the frig. New notes, with even more exclamation points than before.

Sigh.

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It’s Not a Good Idea to Blog when You’re Mad at Your Husband

themother — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:23:54 +0000

Probably.

At least, not if he actually reads your blog. And mine does.

You would think, after (nearly) 30 years of marriage, he’d know that pissing me off is a bad idea. It is, at the very least, always expensive.

One of our most expensive rows was right after our second baby was born. I was overweight (duh!) and had simply stuffed my body into some old, ratty clothes because it seemed pointless to invest in real stuff when my goal was to lose thirty pounds. Here’s the one-line argument:

Hubby: Why don’t you dress better, like all the other doctor’s wives? You know, we can afford for you to buy new clothes.

Uh-huh.

This morning’s conversation was a tad less expensive than an entire wardrobe and gym membership, but he is up for flowers (received), dinner (reserved, don’t know where, but told to dress ‘fancy.’ He’s lucky I still have ten pounds to lose, huh?), a manicure, and a binge at the local fabric store (25% off silk taffeta).

[I only bought eight yards. See how frugal I am?]

Groveling, though, is still free. I expect lots.

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Is that Queen Victoria on your Medicine Bottle?

themother — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:04:59 +0000

The 1880s were a great time to make a fortune in snake oil.

The “patent medicine” business really took off at the end of the 19th century. Let’s face it–conventional medicine had not a whole lot to offer. Bleeding, mercurials, radical surgeries…

Can you blame folks for checking out the competition?

This is the age when homeopathy came to the fore. Take a sympathetic substance, dilute it to the level of one molecule in all the seas in the world, and sell it as a cure. It had a distinct advantage–it didn’t kill the patients. And some people actually got better. The placebo effect worked in the same percentage of the population in the 1880s as in the 2010s.

[Total aside: When the AMA was incorporating in 1848, they were doing so largely in response to the various quackeries--homeopathy, hydrotherapy, botanicalism. But they didn't have enough votes to get government backing until they made a deal with the devil and accepted homeopathy, a political compromise the ramifications of which we are still stuck with today.]

Most of those patent medicines have faded into obscurity. One cure for women’s ailments has become legend.

Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was a huge success.

Lydia was a true character. She worked as a schoolmarm as a young woman, spending her evenings working for Frederick Douglass’s Freeman’s Institute. She knew him personally (her sister, Gulielma Maria, was actually tossed out of the Lynn, Massachusetts, Methodist Church for–gasp!–walking arm and arm with Mr. Douglass in the street. No shrinking violets in Lydia’s family).

She married another abolitionist, a nice guy with entrepreneurial dreams but a pedestrian head. He bandied about with get-rich-quick schemes and the family’s fortunes rose and fell regularly, all while Lydia delivered approximately one child a year. Four of them made it to adulthood.

Lydia, being of solid temperance, abolitionist, Quaker stock, didn’t much cotton to doctors. She experimented with home remedies, keeping an exhaustive notebook of tidbits she heard and recipes she tried. She eventually settled on one which seemed particularly effective for “women’s complaints”: unicorn root, life root, black cohosh, pleuirsy root, and fenugreek seed, macerated and suspended in 19% alcohol (purely for preservative purposes, mind you).

It wasn’t too far from something Hildegard of Bingen would have prescribed, way back in the 12th century.

She never intended to sell it. She gave it away to neighbors, friends, friends of friends, the odd lady in an expensive carriage all the way from Salem. But when hubby’s latest make-it-or-break-it scheme broke both the family and his health, she had to do something.

She and her four kids put their heads together. If women were willing to drive down from Salem to get Mom’s home brewed female remedy, certainly they would be willing to pay for it! They organized the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine company in 1876.

But launching a patent medicine business in the height of the patent medicine business was tough. They barely made enough to cover expenses for the first years. Competing for space on apothecary’s shelves and in women’s hearts required a gimmick.

They found that gimmick in late 1879, when one son got the brilliant idea of putting his mother’s face on the label. A grandmotherly figure at 60, she was a picture of health, sending out vibes of a friendly matron one could count on to keep a woman in tip-top shape. Sales skyrocketed; in 1881, Lydia’s fledgling company grossed $200,000.

Her face was everywhere, and not only on bottles and handbills and newspaper ads. The engraving was just so handy that newspaper editors, in need of a photo of an older woman, grabbed Lydia and stuck her on front pages with captions that said, “Queen Victoria” or “Lily Langtree.”

The ubiquity of her image spawned drinking sons, school yard chants, and at least one hit record (Lily the Pink, by the Scaffold, 1968).

Sadly, the rigors of building a business took its toll. The two oldest boys died within months of each other in 1881, probably from consumption, unaided by Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Even more sadly, when Lydia died a year later, she left two surviving children to bicker over her company for 90 years.

While dodging challenges from the newly created Food and Drug Administration after 1927, Lydia’s company couldn’t survive the infighting between her survivors and their progeny. The company, falling apart from the inside, (and completely sideswiped by ‘modern’ medicine) was sold to a large pharmaceutical company in 1968.

You can still buy Lydia Pinkham’s Herbal Compound, “Nutritional support to help you feel better during menstruation and menopause.”*

* This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Lydia still looks out from the label.

Send this to the person bothering you today!