It’s a Girl

Seven years ago, when we moved to Oregon and started seeing a succession of dentists (two in Eugene, two in Portland), we soon realized that every initial dental visit was going to be the same: a look inside our mouths, followed by the dentist proclaiming, “Oho! You must not have grown up in Oregon!”

Many American municipalities fluoridate their water. Caleb and I grew up (on opposite coasts) drinking the stuff, which means that our teeth give off that telltale sparkle, at least to discerning dentists. But fluoridated tap water doesn’t exist here in Portland. And we can’t decide if this is a good thing or not.

If you drink a certain, minimal amount of fluoride, it actually helps build strong teeth from the inside out, as it were. This is useful for children, who are obviously growing teeth. (It’s also moderately useful for slacker adults who can’t be bothered to brush and floss regularly.) But if you drink (or eat) too much fluoride as a child, you wind up with something called fluorosis, in which the enamel of your teeth is mottled and streaky-looking. And some public-health authorities think that fluoridated tap water isn’t useful at all.

Because they’re so little, babies can get too much fluoride from public water supplies, which is why friends in Seattle have tried to find water filters that will remove the stuff, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, pediatricians here in Portland routinely prescribe fluoride drops for babies, because those kiddos aren’t getting any fluoride at all. (Fluoridated toothpaste isn’t recommended for tiny tots, because of the likelihood that they’ll just eat it, and eat too much of it.)

But if you think fluoride drops are just fluoride, think again. The drops we got at our local Walgreens include the colorants D&C red #33 and FD&C yellow #6, the preservatives methylparaben and propylparaben, and the mysterious “peach flavor.”

Does the presumed benefit of taking fluoride outweigh the unknown negative possibilities of downing chemical colorants, flavor agents, and parabens? Nobody seems to know.

I asked our local hippie grocery store if they sold pure fluoride for infants. Nope, but they suggested a local compounding pharmacy to try. The pharmacy, in turn, said that they couldn’t sell fluoride without preservatives because it would go bad within two weeks. (They also said that the company that made the creepy peach-flavored sodium fluoride drops, Hi-Tech Pharmacal, was an OK company to support because it was a local company. Well, me and Michael Pollan are all in favor of buying local food, but local chemicals? Not so much. Besides, the label on the box of peach drops says that Hi-Tech is based in Amityville, New York. So there.)

Some moms here in town just don’t worry about the fluoride thing at all, skipping it entirely until it’s time for their kids to use fluoridated toothpaste. Some are giving their kids the scary drops. Others have been buying fluoridated bottled water (Babies R Us sells it) and giving it to their offspring.

Frustrated, I decided to consult a pediatric dentist. Turns out the guy offers an entirely different line of sodium fluoride for kids; his version still has methylparaben as a preservative, but none of the other unappetizing additives.

As for bottled fluoridated water, he noted that beverage companies aren’t required to list fluoride parts per million on their products. Instead, you have to contact them directly (or check their websites) to find out whether their water contains the optimum level of 1 part fluoride per million. That water from Babies R Us might have too much fluoride, or too little, but you can’t tell just by reading the label.

So now Delphine drinks a little water, lightly fluoridated with the pediatric dentist’s drops, every day. I am still queasy about it, but I am also tired of trying to weigh so many unknowns. After all, Delphine still nurses at least four times a day, which means she’s presumably imbibing flame retardants along with everything else in my body.

Which chemical load is worse for my daughter’s future fertility: the parabens in the fluoride, the PDBEs in the breastmilk, or the hundreds of unknown chemicals drifting around our house and neighborhood?

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the lead that’s presumably in our pre-1970s house, or the radon wafting up from our basement, or . . . I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. The Worrywart Watchlist, signing off for now.

When I was 14, my parents remodeled part of their house. My father hung his various scholastic degrees on the walls of his new office. My mother took her own collection of degrees and hung them on the walls of the new laundry room. When asked why, she’d say, offhandedly, “I thought they should go there, since that’s where I spend most of my time.”

My mother, of course, spends more time at her job teaching preschool than doing laundry. And my father, for all the time sucked down by his basement den of an office, spends a few days each week grandparenting my niece, giving her his tireless, undivided attention for hours at a time.

That said, it remains true that my father has had an office of his own for more than two decades, while my mother had to make do with a desk in their bedroom. This spring, however, they finally finished redoing the rest of the house, and now my mom has an office of her own. Except, of course, for when the grandbabies visit; then her office becomes a joint study/nursery. Win some, lose some.

Around the time of that first remodel, I read the Virginia Woolf classic A Room of One’s Own. At the time, I found it both inspiring and frustrating. Claim your own space! the book seemed to declare. But how? I asked. For it’s only easy to claim your own space if you have everything Woolf had but (at least in my memory) failed to mention: enough rooms to spare one for an office, and enough servants to take care of things like laundry. (And cooking, and cleaning, and parenting . . . ) In other words, money.

At our house, Caleb and I share office space. (My parents did, too, until I was 14.) We carved it out of the guest-room space. Should we ever have another child and find ourselves still living here, we’ll have to move into the guest space. Goodbye, guests. And maybe goodbye office.

We don’t live especially differently from our peers, who also scrabble for space and time around their day jobs, be those day jobs of the career-focused, remunerative kind or the stay-at-home-with-the-kids, paid-only-in-hugs kind. Most of our friends live the way we do, sharing the domestic chores as well as the career chores. Caleb does nearly all the laundry and dishes, as well as all the pet care. I do the shopping and the cleaning and most of the baby care. We share gardening and cooking duties.

But there never seems to be enough time to do more than the same routine over and over — changing the baby, feeding the baby, cleaning up after the baby, playing with the baby, encouraging the cranky baby to fall asleep. Taking a shower? If you’re lucky.

As a cousin of Caleb’s said who graduated from MIT, “When you arrive as a freshman, you’re told you can pick two out of three things to do: study, sleep, and have a social life. You can’t do all three, so you have to choose.”

On days when you’re starving and can’t find the time to cook or even shop, life with baby feels like being an MIT freshman all over again. In the photo here, Caleb was washing dishes while trying to encourage a grumpy baby to zonk out. But usually we’re too tired, and our brains are too fried, to multitask.

Back when I had the time and the tolerance for alternative healing, the naturopath I was seeing suggested that I could do some of her treatments at home while I was taking care of the baby. I could apply a castor-oil pack to my torso, for example, while I was vacuuming.

This from a naturopath who is young, pretty, and well-educated. Also — obviously — childless. Yes, it’s true that I’m generally the one doing the vacuuming. But sometimes Caleb does the hoovering. And maybe I can’t, or don’t want to, combine a supposedly relaxing treatment with the sweaty work of housecleaning. And maybe, just maybe, my naturopath is wrapped in a 1950s haze.

The television show “Mad Men” has been accused of glamorizing alcohol abuse and blatant sexism. Hardly. What it glamorizes is the look of the early 1960s — the furniture, the clothes, the enormous cars. It’s harshly critical of the midcentury attitude toward gender roles and expectations: the wife who is expected to feel fulfilled by parenting and housework, the husband who is expected to dress conservatively and bring home the greasy bacon. The Betty and Don Drapers, as it were.

Watching it now, nearly half a century after the era it depicts, it’s easy to feel smug about how much more enlightened we are these days. Now women can do whatever they want! And men are so much more sensitive!

Except that the show’s situations still come up today. Dads are still trapped at the office. (We have a friend who just became a dad, and took no paternity leave because his law firm simply didn’t offer it.) Moms are still trapped at home — or if they do pursue careers, they find themselves either forking over their entire paycheck to daycare and babysitters, or struggling to work part-time while the baby’s asleep.

My grandparents, who were raising kids of their own in the Mad Men era, didn’t live the lives of the so-called 1950s ideal. Yes, they had two kids and pets and little small-town houses with lawns. But they all worked outside the home. My father’s parents ran a radio station together. My mother’s father was a sporting-goods salesman, and my mother’s mother was a social worker. (And she still cooked them all a hot breakfast every morning.)

My own mom went back to teaching part-time when I was six months old. I went back to work part-time, working from home, when Delphine was just a few weeks old. Most of the moms in our playgroup also work part-time, either from home or in situations (such as a dad with a flexible schedule or a generous workplace) with free babycare.

As the authors of the popular baby book And Baby Makes Three point out, the idea of “the second shift” — of moms working a full day at work and then another full day at home, cooking and cleaning and all that — was bogus from the get-go. Dads have always done more work than they got credit for.

For Mother’s Day this year, Caleb’s present to me was to take care of Delphine for four hours straight. I went outside and did heavy labor in the garden. When I came in, I noted Caleb’s slightly dazed look, focused on the middle distance while Delphine quietly played at his feet.

“You have the babysitter glazed-over expression,” I commented.

“Well, you know what it’s like,” he answered. “You can’t do anything else, so you feel trapped.”

Last summer, I decided to paint half of our kitchen cabinets, to pep up the room a bit. I picked blue, because I thought it would contrast well with the cabinets’ dull-but-warm brown. (And because warm colors, like reds, oranges, and yellows, are used by food companies for a reason: They make you feel hungrier than you actually are.) It took me several weeks to paint just eight cabinet doors; caring for a baby, working, and dealing with post-partum health woes can really slow you down. But after we finally put the doors back up, we decided they looked very chic.

Then we kicked back with a round of “Mad Men.” And I realized that the blue I had picked out at the paint shop was the same tint slapped on the doors of the television show’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper.

Don Draper Blue, we dubbed it.

So welcome to my office. It has better lighting (barely) than my mom’s laundry room. It doesn’t have my degrees on the wall. But it’s where I spend most of my time. A room of my own? Sort of.