Friday roundup

A few random things:

Our apartment is being renovated, and is almost done, so I’m taking daily cyber-vacations on Pinterest and Apartment Therapy to help me envision the future. I’m obsessed with beverage dispensers. They’re so grown-up, so official. Beverage dispensers do for a party what big pearls do for an outfit: They let people know you mean business.

Internet nostalgia is A Thing, you might have noticed. Anna North thinks that it can be healthy, a kind of memento mori. We don’t encounter actual death and the cycles of nature the way we used to–but we’ll always have technology to make us feel old.

In any species, some individuals are going to be lousy parents. I learned this initially from my aunt, who bred German Shepherd dogs. Some of her dogs were attentive mothers who were sad when their puppies were taken away, while others were irritable with their offspring and happy to be rid of them. This fascinating article looks at how and why parenting ability–in humans and other species–varies across individuals:

It is not clear to me what makes this variability either – Selene, one of my best mothers, was the mother of one of my worst mothers. This doe had the experience of both good parenting and the genes for fabulous mothering, to the extent these things are heritable in goats, and she still was pretty much a loss.

Male parenting ability too is highly variable – we’ve had roosters who were incredibly diligent about bringing food to the babies and protecting them, bucks who stayed with the mothers and babies rather than foraging, and a goose father who got left to single parent when his partner took off for a neighboring pond, and did a fine job.

Author Sharon Astyk argues that parenting ability in humans might be likewise variable, which certainly jibes with my experience. We’ve all known parents who are simply good at it, even though they may have had lousy upbringings themselves, and no clear chance to learn a better way. My own parents would fit that bill. The problem, Astyk writes, is that “We tend to assume that all of us have some natural ability to parent, and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t – but the truth is that the level of insight that allows people to decide they would not be good parents is a rarer thing.”

I do have that level of insight, and people freak out when you tell them you don’t think you would have been a good mother. It’s like the worst thing you can say about yourself.

Some people find out they weren’t cut out for parenthood the hard way, which is one way of describing the slightly spoileriffic “Gidion’s Knot,” playing through June 22 at the Calderwood. What is the duty of a “good parent” when a child does something terrible? How do you assess risk where children are concerned? When does parental loyalty go too far?

Photo by Bridge Rep Co.

I can’t give away much more than that or it will give too much away, so between “Gidion’s Knot” and “Orange Is The New Black” I’ve been feeling spoiler-stuffed this week. It might make economic sense, but artistically and psychologically, releasing an entire season at once as Netflix does is just not optimal. Nobody knows when they can talk about anything! And the inevitable binge-watching detracts from the integrity of the individual episode.