T and I registered for our baby shower last night. Eek.
It took 3 hours. Eek, eek.
Negotiating the ambiguous area between acquiring things one needs and hoarding instant junk is tricky. Going bourgie triggers a nervous response for me; I've devoted much of my life to thinking about possessions and how to keep them from possessing me. I grew up, you see, in a place where people acquired all sorts of stuff--vineyards, mansions, jet airplanes, etc.--and nobody seemed particularly happy about it. Many of the children with whom I played seemed quite, if you'll pardon the expression, fucked in the head.
So, I'm interested in keeping my own impending child from also being fucked in the head.
Undeniably though, we will use the tiny clothes and the pad for the cradle and many of the other items on our list of 43 things for which we registered at (gasp) Babies 'R Us. But when I clutched a pair of miniature Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers, it was out of that false consciousness of consumer rapture against which I try to maintain a certain guardedness.
Around the age of 22 I decided books and films were the only material things I'd allow myself to indulge in buying regularly and with little restriction. And I have. This self-imposed rule has worked for me, and it has restricted my forays into spastic bourgieness. When I impulse buy, it's almost never anything but books or DVDs now, and I suffer little to no buyer's remorse.
But now I sense the rules are changing. The kid will want things. Worse, I will want to buy things for the kid.
A professor friend of mine, who teaches the Bible as literature and was herself once a nun, told me she could not lead a spiritual life (meaning, for her, an ascetic life) because she knew she took too much pleasure in material things to ever give them up. She lives in a big, beautiful house with marble everywhere. I don't know her kid, but he doesn't seem fucked in the head.
Still, I think it's necessary to regard temporal things with a certain contempt in order to have good character. And yet there I was, in a hideous crackerbox store in a hideous suburb, firing away with a scanning gun at bar-coded merchandise with the expectation that friends and relatives might spend their hard-won money buying some of it for us. And what does a baby need sneakers for, anyway?
My god though, those mini-Chucks are so cute. I gotta have them.
5 comments:
Well again, I wouldn't worry about the class thing as much as gender politics (see previous curmudgeonly rant), but as long as you don't lose your sense of irony, right!
I suppose I'm ok. I do get a lot of irony in my diet.
so wait, you want the tiny chuck taylors or no? I mean if someone else buys them, it is not quite your fault or your bourgi-ness now is it?
Mini-chucks--yes.
Acres of plastic crap--no.
(Although you're actually supposed to have very soft shoes for the first year+ Still.)
I've spent lots and lots of time around the smaller set, and have seen some parents who do it well and others (most others) who do it piss poorly. Don't be afraid to tell family and friends what you don't want. Buy hardy wooden things (unpainted is best) and lots of books. Donate freely to charity. Good-bye Dora the Explorer! Good-bye Wiggles! (Or whatever turns your stomach the most.) Do this while you can. Soon, the child will have power and you will become weaker and weaker...
Be aware that you will get far too many friggin copies of Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss. (See my September 2006 post on this.) Some people, even nice people, can't seem to help themselves. Yes, I've heard that the caterpillar is hungry.
Dude--you're totally backed into a corner: this is precisely the situation that makes the capitalist machine run. Babies aren't just the biological future; they're the never-ending extension of the market. New flesh, with tiny feet. You might as well surrender. Just try to do it with some dignity.
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