I have a pair of friends who are doing their best to make sure that their children are well-licked rats.

One of the interesting bits of research that can be done on nature vs. nurture is on rats. Mother rats will accept ratlings that aren’t hers for the first several weeks, so you can swap them out. They took neurotic(for a rat) rat mothers and swaped babies with well-adjusted rat mommas. Turns our the well adjusted rat mommas produced well adjusted rat babies and neurotic rat mommas made for neurotic little rats. The big difference was in how much time the mother rats licked the babies. There have been other studies done that show something similar- if you take the rat babies away for a little while every day and then give them back, the rat mommas will over groom the babies, and it turns out those rats end up much more emotionally stable, willing to explore, have fewer stress hormones, and all other kids of positive changes.

I’m not going to pull up the research here but I’ve read enough primate psychology to think that grooming is just as importaint, if not more, for humans. I also have a hunch that a lot of what we consider beauty in our culture is time spent grooming with extra points for time others spend grooming you (hence, salons).

Anyway, I want to make sure that the kidlets are well licked rats. I did Girl Child’s hair when she was here and she’s been bugging B, who can’t do hair AT ALL, for hair play time. I think I will be able to spend some lovely one on one time with her in the mornings doing her hair before school. However, I can barely do MY hair…so I’ve been reading several blogs that describe how to do little girl’s hair. Some of them are fantastic.

They also make me feel a little, I don’t know… melancholy? Sad? My Mom knows nothing of how to handle hair (she’s kept her hair in a variation of a pixie for over 30 years, and finally branched into… a bob) and never did mine as a child. My clothes were usually hand-me-downs from adults that looked ridiculous on me, so I learned early on not to care about what I looked like because frankly, it hurt to much. I was never one of the well groomed children. I was always clean, but my parents were a combination of poor, ashamed, and distracted (both of them have serious Absent Minded Professor traits). My Mom was also HIGHLY conflicted about me dressing up or trying to look pretty, since she’d been the target of a child predator.

I am reminded of the bit in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows where Snape is describing James Potter. Snape’s a scraggly, unloved but brilliant child who is exquisitely sensitive, and knows exactly what he does not have and feels an odd mix of shame and stubborn pride out it.  Out walks James Potter, the treasured only child of elderly parents, who glows with a patina of being a well loved and cherished.

I want my kids to be like James (though hopefully kinder), and I strongly emphathised with Snape.

Anyway, I’m going to start doing Girl Kiddo’s hair when she moves in, even though she’s 8 and a little older than most of the girls in these blogs, they are great and totally worth reading!

http://babesinhairland.blogspot.com/ I read all the archives and spent a whole day looking at the pictures. SO CUTE!

http://hair4myprincess.blogspot.com/ Very cute little girl, and nice, clear instructions.

http://cutegirlshairstyles.blogspot.com There are also pictures there of Dad’s work, which is nice, and some of the styles are really cute and inventive (I love the 4-leaf-clover St. Patty’s day hair and the plastic-eggs-IN-the-pigtails easter hair). Seriously adorable.

http://pigsandponies.blogspot.com/ Great photos, some of the stuff is too young for Girl Child, but still- adorable.

If you know other good blogs for little girls hair for 8 year olds, let me know!

It looks like things are moving forward nicely for B and the Kiddo to move in with us. This puts me in a little bit of an interesting situation.

I’m legally Boy Kiddo’s stepmom, but due to incredibly painful and convoluted custody issues, he does not actually know this, nor will he until this summer. We are still in contact with him, but irregularly and it’s frustrating and heartbreaking, on everyone’s side. Boy Kiddo also has a Mom already, and I have no idea what the hell the Male Child will call me- I’m not his aunt, which is my usual name with kids, but if anything involving the word Mom or Mommy comes out of his mouth involving me, his bio mom will flip her gasket.

Girl Kiddo has a relationship with her bio mom, even though B has custody. She visits her bio mom every other weekend. I almost cried when B asked me to co-parent his daughter because frankly, that means a hell of a lot more coming from him than most proposals I have seen. The Girl Child and I get along fantastically and well before I’d even met her I was thinking of her as my kid.

To clarify a bit: I called several of my friends mothers Mom when growing up, and one of them I’m still close too and call Mom regularly. To me, being a mother has jack and shit to do with biology, and it’s all about being there, kissing boo boos, making sure homework is done, cooking, sewing, and putting money away in college funds for the kids. It’s about thining about what’s best for them now, figuring out how to bring about their talents, supporting their intersts, and using your adult perspective to try to smooth the path they want to walk on. It’s about providing for them now, but also providing for their future. As soon as I started thinking about science summer camps and baseball for the boy child, and enrichment activities for the girl child, I became their parent. They became my kid. Boy child is my son and girl child is my daughter.

I won’t be called anything like, oh this is my Dad’s new wife, or this is my Dad’s girlfriend. Both of those focus on the relationship between me and their fathers, which quite frankly has nothing to do with them. While that’s a connection we share, it’s not the primary one. I’m sure as hell not going to be giving up delicious Mojitos to put money in the college fund of a kid who just happens to have sprung from my current shag partners loins. I’m not going to give up sleep or worry about caring for a child who’s just a non-primary partners kid. Sure, I can be friends with the kid and help out from time to time, but that’s not the same thing as being a parent at all.

So, when trying to define a parent-child type relationship what do they call me? I’m going to leave it up to them. If they want to call me Mom that’s fine with me, and I hope it does not cause drama with my partners ex’s.

The trick is given my warped decidedly unconventional feelings about what makes a family, I don’t see any problems with a kid having 6 moms, or none. Love is what makes a family, the decision to come together and reach for goals together, and the people you choose to have as your family are just as much your family as the people you meet who happen to share genetic material with.

I’m so excited to start this new part of my life. I’m looking forward to finding out what sort of name the kids come up with for me. I just hope that it does not cause a problem.