Friday morning, October 16, 2009. Mighty Mouse's 67th birthday. The mail arrives with an unexpected package from mom--it's an etrog.

Flashback a few years--my mother and I went to the Jewish film festival in Houston, TX. There's a film about Sukkot. What matters is this: I learned that if a woman wants to have a baby in the next year, she is to bite the tip off the etrog (no circumcision jokes, please).

Back in 2009, I open the familiarly-shaped box, already suspecting that I was about to find a fragrant citron, and my husband walks in, asking "What's this?"

"Pretty sure mom sent me an etrog," I tell him, ready to chuck the thing out the window or feed it to the dog in order to avoid further explanation.

"???"

I explain anyway. He begins to laugh. He starts pushing the etrog closer and closer. He asks if it counts if he sneaks it to me, like at this point, I'd fall for the old, "hey honey, I made some lemonade...want some?"

Flashback, Simchat Torah 2007--I have gone to services with a lovely Jewish man, the first MOT I'd dated in over a decade. By the time we got the Barchu, we knew Gd was having a good laugh at our expense. We got buzzed on the etrog vodka our unicycle-riding rabbi was handing out and danced with the Torah.

But, in 2009, there's one other hitch. Tonight is the opening night of my husband's favorite childhood tale, "Where the Wild Things Are." Normally, we'd just go the movies. Ever since he first saw the trailer, and every time since, this cinematic event has become something more sinister. You see, every time, his hand slipped down to my belly. I eventually pointed this out, thinking we'd have a good laugh. Instead, he says," I'm ready when you are."

So, my husband's clock is tick-tick-booming, my mother has sent me an etrog, and the Wild Things have decided it is time to thrust us all back to childhood.

Dear Mr. Jonze, Mr. Eggers, Mr. Sendak, and Mr. Hanks (you're not getting out of this, Tom, I stayed for the credits--I know you were a producer):

I don't care what my mother has on you. I don't care that you just wanted to help us reclaim a touch of our exuberant innocence. If I end up pregnant in the next few weeks, I am holding each of you personally responsible. I expect monthly child-support payments equivalent to the amount I paid to see the movie: two IMAX tickets, one large popcorn, one package Whoppers, one large Coke. Oh, and you're calling my rabbi and explaining why I skipped shul.

For those of you as-yet-unaware of the Duggar family, they are a rapidly-expanding clan of fundamentalist Christians and reality stars based in Arkansas. They are also the future.

When Jim-Bob Duggar and Michelle Ruark got married, they were a typical Southern Christian couple. They had a few kids, and then Michelle suffered a miscarriage. Their doctor told them that Michelle's miscarriage was caused by their use of birth control pills in the past. Saddened and horrified, they then vowed to eschew all forms of family planning and let the Lord choose how many children they would have. [The Duggars are reportedly followers of the ultra-evangelical Quiverfull movement, but they deny it when the cameras are on.] Now, they're expecting their nineteenth - yes, you read that correctly - child in the spring. Each of those children has been given a name that starts with the letter J, for continuity purposes. These names include the ordinary (Jennifer, James, Jill), the oddly repetitive (Jana, Johannah, Joy-Anna), the painfully old-fashioned (Jeremiah and Jedidiah, who are twins), and the just plain mean (Jinger). 

Last night, the Duggars, veteran parents, became first-time grandparents. Their oldest son Josh, who married Anna Keller last year after a "courtship" that allowed handholding but no kissing or going anywhere without a chaperone, is now a dad. Anna gave birth to a daughter last night. The child, whose younger aunt or uncle is due around April 2010, was given a unique and rare privilege - a name that starts with a letter other than J. The new addition, Mackynzie Renee, will be the subject of her very own special episode of the Duggars' TLC reality series, 18 Kids and Counting, next week.

Why, you may ask, is this news? It's news because they're outbreeding us. I may dislike kids, but every time I hear about the Duggars popping out another sprog I start thinking I should procreate just to balance them out. Despite my dislike of their lifestyle, the Duggars seem like pretty nice people. They remind me of a lot of the evangelicals I grew up around in the South. To be honest, they're probably more fond of Jews than they are of, say, Catholics. That's not to say I'd like to strap on a prairie dress and join their clan - they adhew strictly to gender roles, eat tons of processed food, don't believe in evolution, and are homophobic. [Side note: one of my favorite games during an episode of 18 Kids and Counting is trying to guess which kid is gay. I mean, look - statistically speaking, the odds say there's at least one or two. I have my suspicions.] There are plenty of reasons to have a child, but building an army of automatons for Jesus shouldn't be one of them. Are the Duggars, with their apparent child hoarding tendencies, better or worse than my yuppie friends who spoil their only children with $27 a can organic baby food and handmade satin onesies? Perhaps part of the national fascination with the Duggars, the Gosselins, Octo-Mom and the rest is that they are the result of a country who worships childrearing to the point of fetishization. When we praise people for simply giving birth, what is there to discourage them from stopping? When we love watching outsized families on TV so much that a woman willingly implants herself with nine fetuses in the hopes not of having a happy family but landing a lucrative reality TV contract, what's to stop anyone else from having the same idea? When America finally tires of the let's-stare-at-these-huge-families craze, what will happen to the kids who were conceived solely to become breadwinners for their parents? Something tells me we'll wind up with a lot of children in therapy as they learn how to be regular people without cameras around and new, cute siblings at the ready.

Maybe, instead of trying to force my uterus to compete with Michelle Duggar's, I should just wait for some of the kids to jump ship. Hey, little Jezebel or Jehosophat: if you ever want to run away to New York City and become an evil secular liberal, give me a call. There's a couch - and a barstool - with your name on it.

The following is an excerpt from Sam Apple's new book American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Modern Adventures in Babyland.

Thirty minutes before the start of my son Isaac's circumcision, I had almost everything I thought we needed for a successful event: whitefish salad, bagels, regular and low-fat cream cheese, orange  juice, coffee, and topical anesthetic for Isaac's penis.

The only thing I did not have was a wife. Despite being in favor of circumcising Isaac, Jennifer had decided that the entire event was too much to bear and had taken refuge in a neighbor's apartment. I was disappointed that Jennifer wasn't going to attend the ceremony and was delighted when she walked back into the apartment ten minutes before we were to begin. It looked like everything was going to be okay, that we would share this frightening but important moment together as a family. Then Jennifer walked into our bedroom and witnessed the mohel dangling  Isaac's testicles above his head.

It turned out that what Jennifer saw was a small oval-shaped sponge that, after having been dipped in a mixture of red wine and sugar water, looked astonishingly similar to our newborn  son's genitals. Indeed, had thousands of people entered a contest to create a model of Isaac's scrotum, I sincerely doubt that even one would have come up with a more perfect replica.  In any case, Jennifer had seen enough. She turned around and  left the apartment.

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Four years ago, when Coleman was born, I sometimes attended a mothers’ group in my neighborhood, an obscure corner of the Lower East Side tucked away beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Like many new mothers in neighborhoods across the country, I had a rather conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, I was grateful, in those early days, for a place to go one afternoon per week, and for a group of women who were going through experiences similar to mine (lack of sleep, overwork, you know the drill). But though I made a couple of close friends within the group—friends with whom I’m still close and whose children have become Coleman’s friends, which is intensely wonderful for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint—I often found myself feeling alienated and alone, even as I sat in some nice person’s living room, picking at a cookie and wishing someone would magically airlift a double espresso from the coffee shop down the street. This was partly because, I suppose, I’m suspicious of groups, in general. In this group, as seems to be common, cliques quickly formed, and it sort of irritated me that these closed units of women felt the need to constantly chatter about the outings on which they’d gone together, the music classes in which they’d enrolled their kids together, the things they’d do over the weekend together, and so on, without thinking that this might, perhaps, make others feel excluded. Why go to the mothers’ group at all? Why not, I thought, just hang out together on Wednesdays between three and five, if you’re only going to talk to each other anyway? I tried to steel myself against the stupidity of it all, but couldn’t quite manage it. In other words, I felt like I’d returned to junior high, or maybe even high school (to be slightly kinder). In the years since, I’ve heard many other women complain about similar situations at their local playgrounds or whatnot, and I still can’t quite figure out what makes it so, though that knee-jerk feminist explanation has crossed my mind: That women are somehow raised to be competitive with each other. Even ostensibly liberal women who exclusively feed their kids organic baby food. The other explanation, I suppose, is that women shouldn’t, perhaps, be allowed to focus on their kids as much as do mothers of today, including myself.

Sometimes, while I was scooting around the hardwood floor of a shiny new apartment, trying to make sure Coleman didn’t inadvertently reset some stranger’s Tivo, I felt like a secret agent, a spy, sent to report back to HQ about the foibles of modern parenting. All around me, women would be talking about sleep training, and eliminating petroleum products (goodbye, A&D ointment), and spacing out vaccines, and the sugar content of YoBaby, and which nannies ignored their kids in the park (much pity was reserved for the parents of said kids), and a million other things that I basically didn’t think about at all. And in a way, I was a spy: I was (am) a writer. At that point, I was working frenetically on my novel—whenever Coleman slept, at the weekend, etc.—while doing some writing for magazines, as I’d done for years, and editing features for an online magazine called Nextbook (more on this in a moment). But somehow my work life seemed unreal and strange to many of the other mothers I met. One woman, when I explained that Nextbook allowed me to work at home, said, “Oh, so basically you get paid to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s nice.” Er, no.

The reason I bring all this up is because perhaps the strangest thing I encountered at the meetings of that group—stranger even allowing a baby to cry in his crib for an extended period of time in order to learn how to fall asleep on his own, stranger than the habit of writing down the contents of every single one of a baby’s diapers (!)—was an insistence that having a baby eliminated a woman’s ability to read. “I haven’t read a book since I had So-and-so,” the women, or many of them, constantly said. “I pick something up and then I just fall asleep.” One woman said she could make it through the whole paper each morning—which I found, and still find, deeply impressive, since I tend to fade out around the “Business” section—but couldn’t commit to actual books, because her time was so interrupted. Whenever I mentioned a book I’d read—generally as part of a conversation with a college friend of mine who’d moved to the neighborhood—someone was, apparently, legally bound to good-naturedly call out, “How can you read? I just can’t read anymore.” That’s weird, I thought, the first time it happened. And then it kept happening.

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Last summer, when I told my agent that I was pregnant, she honestly offered her heartiest congratulations - she's a warm, generous person - but I could see a flicker of anxiety cross her pale, pretty face. "So you're due when?" she asked, slicing open a delicate square of ravioli with her fork.

We were having lunch in the garden of an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park - the sort of place at which your average person only dines when on expense account - and I had already plowed my way through my own too-small bowl of pasta, my first-trimester hunger having stubbornly hung around through the first weeks of the second trimester. "December," I told her. "The beginning of December." She arranged her features into something resembling composure. "And the book's out in April," she said. "That'll be fine." Clearly, she was comforting herself as much as me. "Coleman was an easy baby, right?" I nodded. This was true. Coleman rarely cried and slept pretty well, which is pretty much what people mean when they say a baby is "easy." But he was still a baby and, thus, required almost constant attention. (Like most babies.) He was also huge, which meant that he needed to eat pretty much around the clock. Most of my memories of his first months involve sitting in a chair nursing him or racing around various parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn frantically trying to find a place, any place, to sit down and nurse him. (Note to new moms: The Gap and its sister stores will let you nurse in their fitting rooms, no questions asked. You don't even need to pretend to be trying something on.) "This one will be easy, too," my agent said. "Yes," I told her, and I truly did believe this to be so. According to my mother, who sometimes takes a rather romantic view of the past, all babies in our family are easy. Besides, easy or not, this baby would be four months old by the time my novel, A Fortunate Age, came out, which was pretty much old enough to be left with my husband or sister for a couple of hours, if I needed to do a reading or suchlike. We'd left Coleman with a sitter-or, okay, a pair of very close friends--for the first time when he was just shy of five months old. With our second, we'd be more carefree and cavalier, or at least less nervous, right?

Four-odd months later, in December, when Pearl was born, a parade of friends came to visit and, as I've written about elsewhere, anxiously asked about the novel - when was it coming out again? - after they'd finished cooing over the baby and presenting her with organic onesies and miniature cashmere hoodies. "April," I told them, and watched their faces melt into that odd mixture of concern and anxiety, and, in one case, a bit of Schadenfreude. "It'll be fine," they told me, as my agent had back in July. "It has to be," I told them, "since Pearl isn't going anywhere." And I did truly believe this to be so. Sensibility-wise, I tend not to worry about things until I'm deeply mired in them, which is to say, I tend to think that things will just work themselves out. (And when they don't, well, okay, I sometimes completely freak out.) This is basically how I feel about having kids, in general. For years, I listened to friends say things like, "I just don't feel like I'm ready to have a baby," and nodded sympathetically, but the truth is that I don't think anybody is ever ready to have a baby, an event that, no matter how cool you are, kind of eradicates your life as you knew it. You just have to make the decision, know that nothing can prepare you for what's to come, and hold steady as the walls come tumbling down.

This was what I was prepared to do regarding the whole baby-and-book thing. But as the publication date approached-coincidentally, it happened to be Pearl's four-month birthday-my resolve became a bit shaky. The problem, I suppose, was less simply Pearl's existence and more that there was also Coleman, who was doing his own bit of freaking out about this new baby sister who, like him before her, was basically on perma-feed (she'd clocked in at nine pounds, six ounces, so she was even bigger than her brother at birth, a fact I've been hesitant to share with him lest it instill some sort of inferiority complex), keeping me locked in our tattered glider for the majority of the day and way too much of the night. And there was our less-than-ideal living situation, with all four of us in a studio, while our apartment was renovated. All of which somehow contrived to prohibit me from doing anything at all. When getting myself a glass of water seemed like a challenge--Coleman would scream and throw himself on me the minute I started toward the kitchenette, then stick his grimy hands in the glass once I'd returned to his side-it seemed impossible to do the million publicity-ish things one is supposed to do when publishing a novel, things that are not quite my forte even on a good day.
Despite this, the novel proceeded on its march to publication, and my publicist proceeded to book me a bunch of readings in the city. With each new date, I felt a little thrill-I would be reading at KGB, where I'd seen favorite writers read over the years, and at two of my favorite bookstores-but as the calendar began to fill with events, I began to worry. Pearl was, as expected, an easy baby. Even easier than her brother. She started sleeping through the night at eight weeks. She smiled all the time. But because, again, of our weird living situation, she wasn't really on a sleeping schedule. How could she be, when the minute I got her to sleep, a wild-haired four-year-old jumped on her screaming, "I'm a leopard seal and Pearl's a BABY PENGUIN." (You guessed right. Leopard seals eat baby penguins. These are the sorts of things he learns at his hippie preschool.) If you have a baby, you know what I'm about to say: Because she wasn't (and isn't) on any sort of schedule-as Cole had been at that age-there was no way we could leave her with a sitter, for she might wake at any time and need to eat. And to eat, she needed me, since like her brother she'd refused the bottle. Evan and I, in the two minutes we had alone each day, had hushed conversations about what to do, but we couldn't come up with an answer. Meanwhile, I frantically lined up sitters-once again, if you have a baby, you know the difficulty of finding sitters for six nights in the space of two weeks - knowing, at the very least, we couldn't bring Coleman with us. Not unless I wanted top be accompanied by a floor show.

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Whether you were aware of MIA's pregnancy before Sunday's Grammys or not, well, you are now. Girl is huge, and still rockin out, g-d bless. Something tells me that if her maternity wear looks like this she won't become some bland Bugaboo-pushing earth-goddess like some celebrities who have experienced the transcendent wonder of childbirth. 

The subject of this post, however, is to draw attention to the symbolic importance of MIA's baby-to-be, whose father is her fiance Benjamin Brewer, guitarist for Brooklyn indie band The Exit-

- and son of Edgar Bronfman Jr. (Insert record-scratch, "whaaaa???")

Now, trust, I know precious little about MIA and B.Brew as actual people nor do I need to know anything about their relationship or personal lives.  At the risk of pontificating obnoxiously about post-globalization romance, and hailing this kid as the future Barack Obama of music (is "Colombo and Columbia" the new "Kansas and Kenya"?), I contend that baby Arulpragasam-Brewer's existence is still noteworthy for the fact that his or her musical heritage will blend first-world and third-world methods of culture-making. 

Edgar Bronfman Jr. is the chairman of Warner Music Group, one of the big four media conglomerates that includes Columbia Records and Bad Boy Records.  They are responsible for many well-known acts like Puff Daddy and Madonna, and, to be honest, are often the people behind you not getting to watch certain videos on YouTube.  Huge media companies like WMG produce culture in a top-down manner, that is, hand-pick and groom those entertainers deemed market-friendly enough to warrant investment and blitz the radio stations (which they own), TV channels (see previous) and even highly coordinated "guerilla" or "word of mouth" campaigns that co-opt seemingly authentic methods of tastemaking.   I don't mean to imply that Mr. Bronfman is alone in this; I merely seek to point out the way his multi-billion business operates.  He's also definitely not the only Jew to be the businessman behind the commercialization of other people's culture.

Now, contrast that with MIA's rise to stardom.  Her family left Sri Lanka's civil war to live in Britain where she was exposed to hip-hop and Western pop, and experimented with fashion design and film inspired by radical artists, street life, and her own cultural background. Her music became popular in a truly grassroots fashion, through file-sharing, club play, and college radio.  The content of her songs is raw and heady, tackling war, terrorism, poverty, culture clash, inequality, religious persecution - topics not found in your typical Taylor Swift single.  She promotes artists from the developing world in her music and collaborative projects and has said "We have all these preconceived ideas of a kid in Africa...dudes in their African cloths singing under a tree with a stick, you know, and it's not like that. It's way more progressive. It's way more progressive than music in the West."

So I'm partially excited about MIA's child - Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s grandchild - for the sheer thrilling improbablility of those two worlds colliding.  Beyond that superficial appreciation, however, I think we all should be excited that this kid, and hopefully many others of his/her generation, will be able to synthesize an understanding of old-school and emerging methods of making and sharing art.  Hopefully those of us with backgrounds closer to that of EBJ than MIA can contribute to the creation and celebration of authentic expression wherever it can be found.

18-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of also-ran Vice Presidential candidate and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, gave birth to a son on Saturday. She and fiance Levi Johnston named the new addition Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. Depending who you ask, this is either Bristol's first child or her second.

Bristol did not finish high school (neither did her brother Track, who is in the army, which brings Sarah Palin's total of high school graduate offspring to 0/5), but will earn her GED via correspondence courses. Levi, who is also a high school dropout, is training to work as an electrician. Lest we worry that the young couple won't be able to support themselves financially, People magazine has reportedly ponied up $300,000 for the first photographs of little Tripp. Perhaps I should have seen that coming - after all, People got to break the news of the baby's birth, and the magazine has earned a reputation for paying outrageous sums of money for celebrity baby photos (past 'gets' included the Brangelina twins, Knox and Vivienne, J.Lo's twins, Max and Emme, and Nicole Richie's daughter Harlow).

If People is willing to drop a lot of coin for pictures of your infant, I guess that makes you by their logic a celebrity. What does this mean? It means that, for now, we're stuck with Bristol, Levi, Tripp, and the rest of the gang. That doesn't just include Sarah Palin, it includes Tripp's other grandma, Sherry Johnston, who got busted last week for selling OxyContin to an undercover police informant. Apparently Johnston's arrest and the subsequent media attention helped drive up the price of the baby pictures.

To quote an old Irish poem about a mother talking to her baby: "I hurl you into the world and pray."

 

X-posted at Offsprung.

No Babies: until I'm good and ready. And any rabbi who disagrees can stick it where the sun don't shineThere has been a lot of talk recently about women in the Jewish community feeling bullied into having kids. Here at Jewcy Izzy noted that a lot of the desperation and frustration that comes out of JDate is a result of communal expectations that good Jewish girls will have lots of kids to help populate Israel and stick it to Hitler. Much as I love Israel and hate Hitler, those are not good enough reasons for me to want to bear children. If I have kids, it should be because I feel able and ready to take care of someone else, provide for them, and love them unconditionally. And anyway, it’s not like women make babies all on our own—there are men involved, and it’s ridiculous that they don’t seem to be getting the same pressure as women.

Some of the best analysis of the push towards baby-making in observant Jewish communities is over at JSpot, where Hannah Farber has a post titled “I’m Going to Count to Three, and Then All Rabbis Need To Get Out Of My Uterus.” She writes:

I say: if the rabbis are so committed to making this a communal issue, the rabbis should raise the children. In fact, given their comfortable salaries and high communal status, they have no excuse: they should be adopting and converting children by the dozen. Given the impressive recent developments in medicine that prolong human life, I wouldn’t excuse any rabbi under sixty from performing this mitzvah. Wouldn’t that make a fine statement of commitment to the Jewish future?

And even when men are included in the directives for having kids, I’m still offended when a bunch of rabbis want to tell me how many times I have to grow a person and then push that person out of my vagina.  Did you know the Conservative Movement’s law committee (the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards) recently published a position paper that says any couple capable of raising more than two children, should do so, and Conservative rabbis should all be pushing this on their congregants? The extra children should be called “Mitzvah children” because they’ll ensure a Jewish community well into the future.

Rabbi Jason Miller notes on his blog that he’s heard Rabbi Elliot Dorff tell young people they should get married and start having kids in their early twenties, and they should have more than two kids. (I’ve heard Dorff say we should have a minimum of four kids, so I guess he was being a softy when he spoke to Jason’s class.) All of this when day schools are rising well above $15,000 a year for tuition, not to mention the inevitable college costs, and all of the other expenses of being an observant Jew. And what about those of who hadn’t found our soulmates in our early twenties? In the past year I’ve dated an obnoxious Israeli guy, an incredibly self-righteous administrative assistant at a Jewish political organization, a boring hedge fund manager, and a med student who didn’t have time for me. Should I have just picked one to marry so as not to waste any valuable time on my biological clock? Something tells me that would not have been a good plan.

I love babies, and I bet I’ll have one someday. But if my rabbi mentioned to me that it was high time I got hitched and knocked up, I’m pretty sure I’d stop going to shul.

To Breed or Not to Breed: is that the question?For a long time now, people have been insisting that I should have babies, and lots of them, and soon. It started around 9th grade when my best friend, a sweet, ingenuous, halachically-oriented, culturally traditional (does that paint a clear enough picture, for you?) gal who we'll call "Yael" disagreed when I told her that I "wasn't sure I wanted to have children."

"Oh, Helly," she scoffed, writing me off with a laugh and a condescending smile. "Of course you'll have babies. You'll have cute Helly-babies."

Sure, we were all of fourteen years old, still in our freshman year of high school--still virgins--but the conversation stuck with me. Here was someone--my best friend, no less--"disagreeing" with my most serious, emotionally-charged thoughts. She wasn't even willing (or maybe more to the point, able) to engage in a discussion about it. It was a wake-up call as intense and enduringly problematic as my first period, two years earlier. We were not going to have the conversation about whether or not I was going to have "Helly-babies," because there was no conversation to be had.

As I got older, the emphatic insistence that I should and would procreate came from other directions. I'm not so vain as to think that it's my babies in particular for whom people have this rapacious appetite. People are just baby crazy. Instinct is a bitch. This knowledge doesn't change the fact that certain relatives and friends of my mother are ravenous. And now that I've been in a serious, Jdate-procured relationship for the past year and a half, and I'm pushing 30, the pressure is on.

The problem, of course, is that even though I'm sixteen years removed from my 9th grade self, I still have the same reservations about procreating. Even worse: I know more, now, than I did then. I know that our world faces a number of serious issues related to population, for example:

It took all of human history until 1830 for world population to reach one billion. The second billion was achieved in 100 years, the third billion in 30 years, the fourth billion in 15 years, and the fifth billion in only 12 years. In 2005, world population exceeded 6.5 billion people, growing by nearly 80 million per year with virtually all of the growth taking place in the poorest countries in the world, where population already strains economies, environments and social services.

Rapid population growth causes or exacerbates poverty, hunger, environmental degradation, economic stagnation, resource depletion, disease and illiteracy – a surefire formula for global insecurity.

I know about the understaffed orphanages and "dying rooms" of China, the problem of female infanticide there and in India, the innumerable unwanted girls that are born in both countries each year. Knowing about the poverty, hunger, environmental degradation, economic stagnation, resource depletion, disease and illiteracy that exist in our world due to overpopulation, and knowing how many unwanted, abandoned babies need and deserve homes around the world, how on Earth can I rationalize honoring the Torah's first stated commandment to humankind?

"Be fruitful and multiply," we're instructed in Genesis 1.28. My translation actually reads "be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it." Well, I think it's safe to say that we've completed that task. So, now what? Aren't there enough people (over 6.6 billion, thank you very much) on the planet already? Isn't it wrong to bring a child into a world plunging headfirst into impoverishment and destruction? What boggles my mind most of all is how still, to this day, my concerns are laughed off, unheard, unanswered. People are still rooting for the "Helly-babies." Why? Is it ignorance? Denial?

In their 2004 book, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future Paul and Anne Ehrlich write:

Americans, probably the chief contributors to the population-consumption problem, broadly defined, seem mostly oblivious to the potentially massive threat posed by increasing numbers of people. Many Americans apparently have been lulled by contrary claims into believing that the population explosion is over, or that further growth doesn't matter. You would never know by reading the newspapers or watching television today that the numbers of people will greatly affect our own and our children's futures.

The affluent not only have a duty to learn the basics of how the world works; they also bear a responsibility to help their destitute cousins share in the rewards of modern life. The rich are primarily the ones who have the resources and opportunities to get the job done. To us, that implies a necessary, substantial change in the behavior of the citizens of industrialized nations, not just in how much we consume and how much assistance we give the needy but also how many children we have.

What's a 30 year old, Jewish gal to do? For me, the jury is still out, but here's what the Ehrlichs seem to be prescribing: Educating ourselves and each other, Supporting family planning campaigns in the poorest, least developed nations, Supporting the education of women in those countries (educating women and giving them job opportunities has been associated with sharply declining birthrates, and female literacy particularly has been negatively correlated with family size), Consuming less, Giving more, and Limiting the number of children we have. It sounds like an honorable plan steeped in Tikkun Olam, but it won't be easy to live up to.

No kid-ding.

Laurel and Lewis: Huzzah!I just wanted to let everyone know that former Hacker of the Faith and blogger extraordinaire Laurel Snyder gave birth to a healthy baby boy last Thursday. Lewis Abraham Snyder Poma, 7 lbs, 7 oz. 20.5 inches long. He was two weeks early, but Laurel and Lewis and the whole family are doing great.

He is incredibly cute. And he can probably already write sonnets and play guitar.
Welcome to the world, Lewis! Come on out and play! And a huge mazel tov to Laurel, Chris and Mose. Yay!

Too Cute: No really, some of this crap I can do without!It would seem that there are a number of Jewish traditions that accompany pregnancy and childbirth. Traditions that begin long before you have to throw a bris or a naming ceremony. But the only one I'd ever heard of, until now, was the tradition of doing nothing... 

Which is to say, the tradition of NOT preparing for your baby. NOT telling people you're pregnant until they can see fit or themselves, NOT revealing he names you're considering, NOT throwing a shower, NOT getting the baby's room ready.

Evidently, this is a custom particular to the Ashkenazic tradition, a minhag that seeks to avoid attracting the attention of evil spirits. And while I don't fear evil spirits so much, I do fear miscarriage. 

Been there, done that.

Let me tell you, there are few things more horrible than having to call everyone you know to report the unblessing of the blessed news. I can't even imagine having to get rid of unworn baby clothes, or having to paint over the rubber ducky mural in the nursury/study. I'd never want to fight with the good people at Babies-R-Us about returning a crib I'd already taken out of the box and set up.

I think that this particular Jewish tradition makes a huge deal of sense. I think it's instinctive, psychologically sound, practical--like a lot of Jewish cultural traditions, I think it's rooted in the emotional truths that underly superstition, and not just superstition.

So when I had my son, (though I did clean and repaint the room we planned to use for him, and empty it of the random piles of crap scattered around) I insisted that we didn't want gifts until he arrived. When I left for the hospital, I owned no baby clothes, no bottles.

Which was fine. I'm glad I did it.

But now I'm 6 months pregnant again, and big as a house, and a friend asked me if I wanted a shower this time. And I found myself feeling like Yeah! It's my turn!

Because I've bought a lot of expensive presents over the last few years for other people. I've blown up balloons, made sherbet-punch, played dumb games, and felt a little sad that it was never my turn.

But I still don't want to prepare for the baby. I don't want lots of tiny booties and hats that might never get worn. So what to do?

What to do?

What to do!

I told my friend I wanted a shower, but not baby presents. I told her I'd like an un-shower. Or that I'd like a mom-shower, and not a baby-shower. I told her that the invitations should say that I'd prefer gifts after the baby arrives, but that nothing would make me happier than an afternoon with my friends. Because although I don't want to fill a room with toys, I do want to sit in the middle of a bevy of ladies, and giggle and eat brownies and be the center of attention. For one afternoon, before the baby arrives and HE gets to be the center of attention forever.

It might sound selfish, but I want a shower that's about ME, not the baby.

I thought about asking for my gifts to be all things my older son could use, if something awful happend. Pictures books, or kiddie-music, or something like that.

I thought about asking for donations to a Jewish children's organization.

I also thought about (and this just seemed way to tacky) asking for presents for ME! Bath salts and books and music and so on. Things to make me feel special, as I head into this next hard (and wonderful) stretch.

But in the end, I figure the message here isn't about telling people how to spend money. A shower doesn't have to be about gifts. It just has to make mom feel like she has a community ready to support her, as she heads to the hospital, and her life changes forever.

Now if only that same mom could have a glass of wine at her un-shower! Sigh....

I can personally attest to the fact that few things require more faith than parenting.  So it’s good  that someone is finally starting to catch on to the fact that young parents are ripe for “outreach”.  Maybe now that there’s a story about it in the Forward, something will get done.  Maybe even in the neighborhoods where young Jewish parents live (which is often FAR from the JCC or a synagogue).

In fact, this is an issue I’ve been fussing and fuming about since I became a mother a year ago…  in truth because I just really need some good non-Jesus-filled subsidized daycare.  The Jewish community seems unable to catch on to the value of thefabulous  mother’s morning out programs  that churches run.

Leaving me to choose between cheap convenient reliable daycare (and a lot of Jesus-loves-me), or my religion.

But it’s not JUST cheap daycare I want. Truly.  It’s also that suddenly, as a mom, I want to know other Jewish families. I want my son to light candles and hunt afikomen with other Jewish kids. It feels crucial, although I’ve been too lazy to create that community for myself. I want it  for my kids.  I may have been a really bad Jew in college, and I may have intermarried, but having a baby changes you. 

So here’s a challenge to the Jewish community… to venture out of the safety of the Northern suburbs in every major city, and  into the (horrors!) City itself.  Try your “outreach” on some people who could really use it.

I’m ready for it, and I bet the Jewish friends I don’t know yet are too. 

And I’m curious to hear from other young unaffiliated Jews with kids. Have you joined a synagogue?  Would you for good cheap daycare?