I don’t have a working thermometer in my house. I used to have one. In fact, I have the broken, battery-less shell of one to prove it and another broken one, as well. The last old oral mercury thermometer shattered a couple of years ago. Through neglect, we’ve become a house without temperature-taking device.
Well, not quite. I do have pretty good hands and lips, plus a few mama fever detection tricks. One trick, if the bottoms of your feet are burning, you’ve got a fever.
Ditching the thermometer wasn’t a conscious choice, it just kind of happened. At one point, I meant to replace the thermometer. But which one would I replace? The digital oral thermometer seemed to spout wildly different temps, because the kids, at that point, weren’t really old enough to reliably keep it far enough under the tongue. That battery operated in the ear expensive thermometer also spewed a variable range of temps, depending upon how good a job the adult did at inserting the thing into squirmy sick child’s ear. Under the arm is a fever fact-finding joke, and while there are less pleasant possible sites for thermometers, uh, forget that. After a while, I realized I wasn’t in the market for a replacement.
Writing this down, I feel a little exposed, because I appreciate that this is potentially considered irresponsible, a bad parent move. At the risk of sounding completely defensive, I will say I’m pretty comfortable without thermometer, because if a child feels alarmingly hot I will know from fingertips to pit of stomach, clutched throat, seized heart and every other tension spot in between that my child is very ill. I will do what responsible parents do in that situation: either call the doctor, or head straight to the ER. I’ve done both.
I got to thinking about the thermometer reading Jennifer Margulis’ wonderful blog, in which she’s described making some pretty outside the mainstream parenting choices, including giving birth at home to her fourth child without a doctor, midwife or doula and not taking her babies to well baby doctor visits. I commented to her post about the well baby visits that if I were to have a fifth child (I will not), I would pretty strongly consider skipping most of those early doctor visits, too. It is counterintuitive to take a healthy baby to a place where sick people go, only to learn what you already know: that your baby is healthy. My comment continued that while she’s very observant and makes careful choices about her family’s health, the same thing isn’t true for all parents; for parents whose children would benefit from another set of adult eyes, the pediatrician visits might represent a valuable opportunity. Beyond the obvious point that we’re different from one another and accordingly have different needs, I also got to thinking about how measuring our parenting next to the next person really has its drawbacks.
Since Ayelet Waldman’s essay about loving her husband more than her children, the oeuvre of bad parent has mushroomed. As Katie Allison Granju and others have pointed out, there’s a kind of hipness to confessing to one’s poor parenting behaviors. Even after the lush mommy stopped drinking, there seems to be ample room for true confession tales of amusing parental negligence (mine included).
But that’s really not what Margulis’ eschewing of the pediatrician’s well baby routine sent me. I’m thinking more about how lonely it is to be responsible for another person or people sometimes. We turn to writer-parents to find some much-needed company in the endeavor. The parenting world’s rather large corner of the blogosphere is characterized by so many voices that—if you read them not to try to be better than or feel worse than—can help chip away at the isolation, and celebrate the small moments and the sorrow of the endeavor of caring for small humans. And that’s why I offer the thermometer. Or lack thereof.
