No word on whether she asked her friend why she asked about the kid’s presence, which might have cleared things up.  But I guess revealing the source of the friends’ reluctance to party down with a three-year-old might cast doubt on both the central premise of the post — that wanting a handful of adults-only spaces is misogynist — and on Maia’s description of her child as Cooler Than You.

Things devolved, as they do on Feministe.  This is a well-greased third rail.  Within the first ten comments, the original idea of “How dare you want to keep me from bringing my toddler to an all-night party or have a limited number of spaces where kids are not allowed” to “The childfree want to keep kids out of ALL public spaces, and that’s misogynist because it limits the movements of women in society, you bigots!”  While that would be the case if true, it’s, well, not true, and so: I call straw.  Particularly nice was the way that PWD were mocked for wanting quiet spaces, or service workers were told to just shut up and do their jobs if they complained about kids who knocked things (or people) over and created more work/a more dangerous work environment.

But I’m not going to rehash all the depressingly well-trod talking-past-each-other business; others have done so.   I’m going to follow up on Karnythia’s post and talk about kids and drunks, as someone who’s been there.

It’s a topic on which I am well-versed, having grown up with a seriously alcoholic father.  How serious?  He drank nearly a liter of Scotch every single night (in a little under three and a half hours) when I was growing up.  When I was little — as in the age of Maia’s daughter — I probably didn’t notice his drinking too much because a) he was not quite as bad then; b) I was in bed by the time he really got rolling, and my mother ran interference.  But of course, as you get older, you get a later bedtime, and I started becoming aware something was wrong as I started staying up late enough to see him really get sloshed.

Mind you, unlike Karnythia, I wasn’t brought to bars.  My father drank at home, and if we were out somewhere when he was drinking, it was a party or a barbecue or a bar/restaurant, and my mother was there as well, not drinking, and keeping an eye out for when we should get the hell out of there before he made a scene.  She didn’t always get him to leave before that happened, but she usually was the one to drive home (usually — I do recall some terrifying rides with Dad drinking while he drove).

So unless I saw drunk uncles or neighbors or friends of parents, my experience of drunks as a child was pretty much limited to my father.

And let me tell you, if he was any guide — and I found out when I was older and hung around drunk people at bars that he indeed was –  drunks are fucking terrifying.

I still get agita when watching TV with people who like to have the TV at high volume, because if Dad heard the TV when he had a snootful, he would probably come downstairs or into the basement and start bellowing at us, chasing us around, or on occasion, beating my brothers (once, he attacked my brother with a thick steel T-square, hitting him on the head; my brother called child protective services, which didn’t go down very well with Dad or Mom).  We couldn’t be assured that he was really passed out after 9, when he usually went upstairs, because there were a significant number of times when he came roaring down the stairs after he’d gone up and we’d all emerged from the basement or outside.

Same thing with yelling.  I get heart palpitations when people raise their voices around me (when it’s otherwise quiet), and I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.   Once, when I was 7 or 8, my sister and I found my parents’ first kitchen table down in the basement.  Since we didn’t have a desk in our room, we asked our mom if we could have it, and she said sure.  I know we painted it; she may have even helped us.  That night, we were in our room, in bed, when he kicked open the door and demanded to know where the marijuana was.  Kat and I cowered under our covers, screaming; we didn’t know what the hell he was talking about - I’m not sure we knew what marijuana was (did I mention I was 7 or 8?).  Turns out he smelled the paint fumes and assumed they were drugs — probably because he had no idea what weed smelled like.

The thing that made all of this so terrifying was its unpredictability* — you really just never could tell when he would go off, even if you had a general sense of what might set him off; as in the paint fumes/marijuana incident, you could be woken from a sound sleep by bellowing, banging, roaring.  A lot of drunks are like that; they can be happy one second and violent the next, but if they’re strangers to you, you don’t know the triggers or the warning signs or how many drinks it takes to go from one to the other — or how many drinks they’ve had.  Not that knowing makes it any better.

Which, you know, makes taking your toddler** to a bar a really stellar idea.

If that makes me an oppressive child-hater, I will wear that name proudly.

_________

* What made it really poisonous was that we couldn’t talk about it, except among us kids.  He didn’t remember a goddamn thing, and my mother wanted to pretend it never happened.   We lived our lives wrapped in shame and fear and furtiveness.  And resentment — oh, boy, did we live with resentment.  Even when he got sent to rehab by his company because he kept getting stinking drunk on business trips, he tried to blame it on us for having an issue with his drinking.

**  Not limited to toddlers.  I don’t like to see kids of any age at bars.  Leaving aside questions of the unsuitability of a bunch of drinkers as companions for children, bars are fucking LOUD even if they’re not playing music.  A crowded bar creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop of noise — the bigger the crowd, the louder it is, and the louder you have to talk to be heard.  I will leave a bar that’s too loud; I can’t imagine that’s good for the development of any kid’s hearing.  For that matter, what is wrong with people who bring their dogs and their sensitive hearing to loud bars?

There’s not much I can do for her now but keep her comfortable, love her and wait for her to tell me when she’s had enough.

At least I don’t have to worry about how stressed out she’d get by a potentially cross-country move, since she’s not going to last that long.

I’ve spent the summer looking for a permanent library gig, and it’s going well so far.  I had nothing, nothing at all for months, but this month everything’s started happening.  I’ve got some local interviews, and some on the West Coast; any of them would require me to move from my current apartment, if not from New York, so I’ve started packing up. All things being equal, I’d rather not have to change cities and buy a car.  I like my life here.

From what I’ve been hearing from some of my references, the potential employers who’ve been checking up on me don’t seem to really understand what it is I’ve been doing for the past ten years since I jumped off the partnership track — even though I’ve told them in the interview, and on my resume, etc.  It’s like they don’t understand that you can practice law even if you’re not employed by a law firm as a full-time associate on a traditional path.  Well, at least a couple of them have now been educated by my references.  This won’t really be a concern when I go for the next job, because I’ll have a track record as a law librarian, which is something they’ll understand.

Personally?  I’ve been using my time off to focus on fitness.  I looked back over my logbook, which I started in January, and I haven’t really been going to the gym as often as I’d like to think I do.  A lot of that had to do with injury, but a lot of it was just mismanaged time — I’d get a late start to the day, and then didn’t want to start a workout at 8pm when I had to go to work in the morning.  But now I have not a whole lot else to do, since it’s been so hot that a lot of the outdoor stuff I’d like to do seems unappealing.  The gym, however, is air-conditioned (though the weight room’s unit’s been out).  I’ve also just — like, this week — started running again.  It’s going well so far, though I know from experience it’s not until week 5 or so on the Couch to 5K plan that things start really going haywire with my ITB.  My plan is to do each week twice, and hope that’s enough time for my body to adapt, and to foam-roll the living fuck out of my lower body.

Dating’s sort of not been happening.  I’ve gone on a couple, but reluctantly since I don’t know if I’ll be here in a month.  Nothing’s come of them, but they were pleasant enough ways to pass the time.

The pets are both bad and good.  They’re all currently in good health, but Sugarplum had cancer surgery in April and just wasn’t healing, and wasn’t healing, and wasn’t healing.  Every time it looked like her wound was closing, I’d go to check on it and there would be A GIANT HOLE IN MY CAT.  The vet even did a second surgery to clean up the edges, but it still wasn’t healing, and he started taking it personally.  Finally, they decided she has really poor circulation and needed to be treated as if she’s diabetic.  So she spent three weeks at the vet’s office in a sterile cage, getting compresses and wound care and mainlining antibiotics and — strangest of all — snuggling up to the staff.   Amazingly, when I picked her up, the giant hole was down to nothing, and she was indeed all cuddly, for about a week.  Then she became the crankypants I know and love.

Oh, and I had the swine flu!  It was less than epic.  I was disappointed, what with it being a global pandemic and all.

Love, Mom.

The good news:  Since I’m about to graduate from my MSLIS program (well, in May), I decided to start looking for library/researcher work.  And there’s stuff out there, either temporary or permanent.  Maybe not quite the jobs I had been envisioning, but jobs in New York nonetheless.  And maybe jobs with health insurance.