On The Very Very Best Mommy in All The Land

Rosalind Little is amused at this woman on her favorite parenting web site, who starts a thread like this:

"Is there no one else out there who still makes sure their kids eat HEALTHY? I mean, my 2 year-old son never eats any cookies, candy, chocolate, or sugar. He doesn't even know you that you put butter or syrup on pancakes, or what fast food is! I used to eat at McDonald's myself when he was a baby, but now I definitely don't because he's old enough to know what I'm doing and I want to set a good example. It seems like I'm the only one left doing this. Is there nobody else out there like me?"

Put differently: I strongly suspet that I'm the Very Very Best Mommy In All The Land, and that my child will grow up to be a sandy-haired, strong-boned athlete with white teeth who calls his mother every day to thank her for not putting syrup on his waffles and leading him down the primrose path to childhood obesity like those other kids with the Bad, Stupid and Lazy Mommies. I can't understand why there has been no public acknowlegment of my mommying so far. My play group has never even given me a certificate or medal, if you can believe it! (Lol, What's THAT all about?) But anywho, I just wanted to point out in a public forum that no one else there has gone to the Great Mommying Lengths I have. Thanks for serving as my foils.

My imagined response:

A promising start. But I must say, I am a little shocked to read that you ate at McDonald's while your child was a baby. That implies to me that a healthy lifestyle is a fairly recent change to your family, so I'm worried that your pride in feeding your child healthy food might be a little premature -- the zeal of the newly converted, if you will.

I myself HAVE never and WOULD never eat fast food, and its difficult for me to imagine why anyone who claims to value healthy eating would. To be honest, it's a little strange that you think it's okay to risk your health like that when you are your son's mommy! When you put that stuff in your body, you are taking the risk that you have fewer years of life, and those are fewer years with him! What if he needs you when he's forty, and you've keeled over from a double coronory? Pretty selfish to value those fries over your son's needs.

Every time I eat any bite of anything, I ask myself: would my daughter, when she's forty, want me to eat this? Is this the best food choice I can make to be the best mommy I can be? We make healthy food choices together!

Sometimes, we eat raw spinach together and make a game out of it! I say: "Okay, who can eat the most grams of fiber in one sitting?" And she says: "I can, I can, Mommy!" True, I do give her a time out when she uses the word "can." In our house we only eat vegetables fresh, to maxmize the nutritional value! No "cans" here! Only "can't" -- as in, "can't eat that cookie!"

However, I did want to congratulate you on taking some of the first steps to being a mommy in a household living by a truly healthy lifestyle. A suggestion for the future from my own home: put up a large picture of a little boy in the kitchen. Should your son ever make bad food choices - "sneaking" junk food or eating cupcakes or pizza somebody brought to school -- add a little extra cardboard fat to the picture of the boy. (First add it to his tummy, then his legs, and so forth.) When he gets too obese to fit on the posterboard any more, your son loses a privilege. It's a very clear and visible way to demonstrate to him the pitfalls of unhealthy choices! Good luck! You'll get the hang of it!

On Mothers Who Hate Playing Blocks for Two Hours

This is rather how I feel about motherhood.

On the Anniversary of Me

Today is Rosalind Little's thirty-first birthday. She is a bit down.

On Smart, Brave and Pregnant Meg Murry

Madeleine L'Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time, has died. She was a favorite of Rosalind Little's.

I found Meg Murry, the heroine of A Wrinkle in Time, terribly easy to relate to. She was brainy and awkward and possessing of an undirected and unwieldy sexuality. I mean, I knew girls like that. I'm just saying.


Wrinkle is without a doubt one of the most memorable books of my childhood. And of course the sequels were lovely, too. I especially liked A Swiftly Tilting Planet, where Meg is an older pregnant woman still preoccupied with saving the world.

I thought about that book a lot when I was pregnant. I liked to think of myself as an inflated creampuff superhero, too.

A Wrinkle in Time was written and published during the Cold War. When I reread it as an adult, I was struck by L'Engle's description of Camazotz, the planet that is under the thumb of the totalitarian-dictator, giant-brain IT. Everyone on Camazotz lives in some kind of surburbian dystopia, where every child bounces their ball at the same time, every father comes home from work at the same time, etc., etc. It is a place characterized by horrible, stilted conformity -- and those who refuse to comply are brought to face the terrifying IT.

Was Camazotz written to bring to mind American perceptions of life in the Soviet Union? Or was it a sly critique of late-1950s American culture?

L'Engle was sufficiently complex that either interpretation, or both, is possible. She also wrote beautiful meditations on Christianity, which I always admired and ached to agree with.

God bless her. As they say: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die."

On Liking Other Human Beings, Mostly

Rosalind Little is a fairly bad environmentalist.

Mostly because I have all this laziness to work against. I worry about this a lot. I have been trying to be more conscientious about my footprint on the earth. For one, my husband and my friends are significantly more diligent than me, and folks, it's REALLY not going to be a good world if I can't assume the moral high ground in conversation.

That said, I still like to think that I do understand that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis. I get that the stakes are high. I'm not one of these I'm-a-freaking-idiot-who-hates-those-liberals-so-much-that-I deny-what-is-absolutely-obvious folks who denies there is an environmental problem. But that doesn't make the reaction to Alan Weisman's new book The World Without Us any easier for me to understand.


Do you all know this book? Here's the description from the web site:

"In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman takes on an irresistable concept: How our planet would respond without the relentless pressure of the human presence. Breathtaking in scope and filled with fascinating detail, this is narrative nonfiction at its finests that will change the way you view our world -- and your place within it."

This is a very smart idea for a book. Everybody vanishes. Like it was the Rapture, but everybody was saved. What happens to the world that is left behind? The book apparently describes how soon the New York subways would flood without human beings to operate the pumps, when biospheres would start to repair themselves from all the human damage, etc. It is a unique way of getting at the consequences of human action. Sounds intriguing. A good read.

What I don't understand is why so many people apparently think that this hypothetical premise is, like, a good idea. That there is beauty in the notion that humanity would disappear, giving the earth a chance to recover. That this is more than a thought experiment; that it is something that would ultimately be preferable to the survival of the human race.

I guess I feel like this: if you're not rooting for the survival of the human race, I don't know what to make of you.

Because I don't care if nature recovers beautifully if there's no human around to see it. I have a real soft spot for humans, you see. Call me sentimental for the species from which I sprung, but I dig their language and their societies and their food and their arts and their cultures. Individual people might annoy me, but I like the human race.

If there was really going to be a world without us, it by definition wouldn't be a good one. It would be a world of unspeakable loss. That's just my bias.

And since when did eliminating a species become an environmentally desirable solution to anything? If I proposed eradicating another animal species for the good of the whole, I would get lectured about biodiversity and the possibility of unforseen impacts. At the end of the day, aren't we just another animal species?

So often when people speak about the devastating effect of humanity on the natural world, they seem to be forgetting that humanity is also, really, part of the natural world. We are animals that evolved out of the same materials as all of this other plant and animal life around us. Our behavior is motivated by survival just like everything else's. In rhetoric, we might talk about how humanity exploits or suppresses or rapes nature, but in reality, we aren't separate from nature at all.

We are nature, and nature is us.

Granted, we're a species that has done really well in terms of survival. We have figured out ways to protect ourselves from predators, to eat well, even to achieve comfort and satisfaction. We have developed relationships to the rest of the natural world that seem to benefit us, but that have particular long term impacts. Hopefully we are a species that has developed reason enough to see that our current course is not consistent with our collective survival.

The strongest case for environmental sanity, to me, is that it is in the long-term interest of humanity.

Am I in error to admit that? Is it more noble to privilege the interest of the earth as a whole? Am I betraying my ignorance of the subtleties of these arguments?

Because this is certainly a classic case of Rosalind Little writing vehemently on a topic about which she knows very little. The margins of her knowledge: where one is prone to generalization.

Yet I cannot help but to wince when I hear people on the radio speaking wistfully of the end of humanity. Just call me a people person.

On Eight Presidential Elections

Rosalind Little has lived through eight presidential elections. She was alive for the 1976 presidential election, but just barely. She does not remember it, being preoccupied with drooling and bawling. She vaguely remember Carter being president. His name made her think of grocery carts. But she does not remember the 1980 election either.

In 1984, my elementary school had its own election. I remember wearing my Mondale button to school, and being surprised that other kids made fun of me. I was amazed that anyone I knew would support Reagan, who was obviously a putz. Plus, there was a girl running for vice president on the other side! As it turned out, I was the ONLY student in my third grade class to vote for Mondale. Sadly, the school's election probably mirrored the country's.

This was my introduction to the brutal world of presidential politics. Lesson one: it turns out your candidate doesn't always win. Lesson two: your friends don't always make good political decisions. Lesson three: a girl running is not necessarily an advantage.

In 1988, I was in seventh grade, and I represented Dukakis as a mock candidate in a debate during an all-school assembly in our junior high auditorium. There were particular topics we were supposed to research in advance, and I remember asking my mom what she thought about abortion. That was really the first time I was ever aware of the abortion debate. I also remember researching the environment and the defense budget, and it was my first serious introduction to those issues as well.

For me, anyway, the 1988 election worked out more happily than the 1984 election. My candidate still lost the national election, sure, but Dukakis won by a landslide at my junior high. I like to think my debating skills had something to do with that. Sure, I had only known about the abortion controversy for a few weeks. But it turns out there's really not far to go on that topic once you've made your mind up, now is there?


In 1992, I was in eleventh grade, and living in a much, much more conservative town. Because Georgia was a swing state back in those days, and because in those days he was only a governor of Arkansas, Clinton actually came to my home town to speak. I skipped school that afternoon to see him.

It was a beautiful, crisp, clear fall day. I went with some friends from the Drama Club, who dresssed in goth and flannel clothing to signal their political apathy. I wore a flaming red blazer, my braces, and a Hillary-esque hairdo. I carried a Clinton/Gore sign. We walked through the throng of angry conservative protesters out front, and entered into the amphitheater, and I was entirely taken with Clinton. It was a wonderful speech. Even the Drama Club kids seemed properly awed. I shook his hand afterwards. He smiled at me, and I was elated.

Still, I was shocked when he won. Just floored. I'd never supported a winning candidate, you see, in memory. Moreover, Augusta was such a conservative place that I didn't actually know anyone else who had supported Clinton. Lesson Number Four: you can't judge the outcome of a national election by the political sentiments of your immediate neighbors and friends.

In 1996, I was a sophomore in college in Atlanta. College students by reputation are deeply politically active, but in 1996 I was not. I was busy with school and musical theater. I remember watching the election results on TV in my dorm, relieved but not surprised to see Clinton win again. That year, I remember being exposed to no controversy or debate over the election. I was surrounded by fellow progressives. I knew very few people who voted for Dole.

By 2000, I was in a place that seemed to have no conservative voters at all: Berkeley, California. I followed the election very closely, as I was in journalism school at the time. I was not an impassioned Gore supporter, and some of my Berkeley friends and neighbors were telling me I should vote my conscience for Nader. I didn't do that, as I was just paranoid enough about the possibility of Bush winning. It turns out I was right to be anxious.

And yet really it seemed unfathomable that Bush actually won. (Arguably, of course, he did not.) It seemed unthinkable that we had this man as a president. He was just so obviously inappropriate. I'm afraid I had to relearn the lesson of 1992 from the opposite vantage point: you can't judge the outcome of a national election by the political sentiments of your immediate neighbors and friends.

By 2004, I was back in Atlanta, married, barely pregnant with my Lucy. Indeed, we didn't know yet that I was pregnant. We went to watch the returns at some friends' house -- still optimistically, as this election was hardly a done deal -- and we brought little cut-out donkey cookies with us as a refreshment. When it became clear that Bush was going to win again, I drank several miserable glasses of wine. It didn't do Lucy any harm in the long run, but I worried about it later. Lesson Five: Do not drink if your candidate loses if it is possible you are pregnant.

It's striking how much one's life changes in four year increments.

On Rosalind's Favorite Film Scenes

Rosalind Little has a very short media attention span. She does not like albums. She prefers singles. She is well aware that this is not very indy cool of her, and that it implies she has shallow musical tastes. So be it. She just likes to listen to a good single again and again and again until she knows the words and can scream them like a fifteen year old. Is that so wrong?

I have more patience for films. I can enjoy an entire film easily. Yet I also have a certain fondness for the art of a good film scene. Think about this carefully. What are your favorite scenes in movies?

Think specifically of the scene itself: its mood, its dialogue, its beginning, middle, and end.

As I make a quick list, I notice that some of my favorite films, and some of the best films, don't make the cut. They are brilliant overall, but there's not one standout scene that is really amazing, that takes your breath away.

I also notice that early and opening scenes of films are especially close to my heart, because they can have such tremendous forward momentum, such an irresistable energy.

Of course a film can have a superb opening scene, one that makes your heart race, and still not be a very good movie. The film Contact (1999) is a good example of this. But the criteria isn't that the film be good. Just think about the scene.

Some of Rosalind Little's All Time Favorite Scenes in Movies:

- The opening of Contact: the long pull away from earth into space in which you hear snatches of radio broadcasts from the present into the past. I could watch this four hundred times in a row. (And have.) It's fascinating. It makes a sub-par film worth watching.

- The opening of Rushmore. Clearly an amazing, amazing scene, from a filmmaker who is a master of amazing scenes. The math problem, and then the montage of Max's activities. Over the one of the best soundtracks of all time.

- The opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Come on, it's a classic. It still gets you going.

- The scene in which Cole tells his mother his "secret" while in the car in The Sixth Sense. Creepy, tender, beautifully observed. The dead bicyclist out the window. Toni Collette's hand over her mouth as Cole tells her about her mother's message for her. Lovely scene.

- The scene in E.T. when Michael and Gertie meet E.T. for the first time. I mean, maybe I'm showing my generational bias, but does anybody make movies with such natural performances from children anymore? Do kids ever curse in films anymore? This scene is just spot-on, just perfect. If you've not watched it for a while and think of E.T. as being sentimental kids' mush, you should watch this film again. Gertie's sarcasm, Michael's Yoda impression, Elliot's anxiety: it's wonderful.

- Oh, and the bicycle chase in E.T. The one with the guns still in it. I dare you to watch it, watch the kids take off flying and the music swell, and NOT to start to get excited. I dare you.

- When Marty walks into downtown Hill Valley in 1955 in Back to the Future. Mr. Sandman is playing. As he picks up the newspaper and sees the date, the music turns ominous. This one always takes me back to the first time I saw the film.

- The sword fight between Jack and Will Turner in the beginning of the first Pirates of the Carribbean. This is the scene that clued me in that this movie was going to be better than I thought it would be. Funny, well-choreographed, charming. And both these men are so hot. I mean really. Rosalind Little is but a mortal heterosexual woman.

- The sword fight between the Man in Black and Inigo Mantoya in Princess Bride. Which is obviously cited in the Pirates of the Carribean fight. Another classic, at least for a certain age group. Love it.

Maybe I can think of more. Let me mull it over.