Scientifically proven to be a bad mom

I feel like I’m getting kicked in the teeth by this parenting thing.  I made the genius decision to let my son have seven shots in one day, which resulted in his having an adverse reaction to his MMR shot.  ”Adverse” is what the doctor calls his actually getting measles (albeit a weaker case than he could have gotten without the vaccine, at least I hope it is).  The poor kid has been sick for days with a fever, rash and (bonus) diarrhea.

Even better? The psychologist who is doing that study on attachment I wrote about a while ago came over to give me our “results.”  Yeah, turns out that on a scale of 1 to 9 (9 being ultimate attachment), Oscar and I are at 2.3539. Yep, you read it correctly.  The lowest score so far has been 2 and the highest 7 (and those kids had been in foster care).  She was kind enough to tell me that the biggest reason our score was so low was because of the communication issues I’ve already written about.  Oh, did I mention that we did something called “Ages & Stages” and Oscar scored a 5 on communication?  Yeah, and that’s not on a scale of 1 to 10 – more like 1 to 100.

None of this is good.  I’ve been all over the place, trying to decide whether I think this woman has any real clue into our attachment (I can’t fight the communication test thing really, can I?  It just confirms what I’ve been thinking).  I am telling myself that it’s not possible for an outsider to assess the level of attachment in one two-hour evaluation, but our score still makes me a little sick.  Had I known that we were going to be graded I never would have consented to being part of the study.  I think what she’s doing is very important, but I know myself well enough to understand that receiving a poor grade on anything is a truly bad idea for me.  And a poor grade on the level to which my son has attached to me?  Come on, any mom would be horrified by this.

September 28, 2008 - Posted by Oscar and Etta's mom | Parenting | attachment, developmental delays, measles, vaccinations