Looking for Eriskay

Ahoy, Hola, and Aloha One Last Time

2011-09-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

I always wonder when a blog I've been following doesn't get updated... for weeks... then months... what happened to the person? Why did they stop writing? Are they writing in a new blog somewhere else? What's going on in their life?

Now my own blog is one of those mysteries. Not so mysterious, really. I stopped writing because I didn't think anyone was reading it. I was weird and protective of this blog anyway and didn't tell any of my real-life friends about it. For some reason I only wanted people I didn't know to read about my life - but I wanted a whole lot of them, an outpouring of interest and support from a vast anonymous slice of humanity. I think that was too much to expect when my life is not that fascinating. And when I'm too nervous about privacy issues to post any pictures.

I think I started writing to express some of my sadness and insecurities. At the time they had to do with my relationship and my career, such as it was. Later on I was all mopey about being infertile. A blog is therapeutic in the sense that writing down a problem can often bring the solution into focus. But it's not a good way to get sympathy from the world at large. I only realized that that's what I wanted after I stopped writing.

I'm in a better place now, as maybe my last post indicates. I was grateful at the time I wrote it for more than just the things I mentioned. I was afraid to mention it and jinx myself, but I was incredibly thankful because I was pregnant again. I needed a lot of help to get to that point. Luckily I got that help, and I have a wonderful baby now.

So this is Erin signing off - not exactly 'mission complete,' because relationships and families are works in progress, and let's not even talk about the career right now - but at least 'mission under control.' And 'mission moving to alternate forms of expression for now.'

Thanks for reading. :)

Grateful

2010-12-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

Last night we took our daughter to a Christmas party. It was all adults, all couples, so there wasn't really anything for her to do. And dinner wasn't even served until 8:30 pm, about half an hour after she's usually in bed. But she was soooo good.

I had brought a book and a stuffed animal for her, and after I read her the book once, she curled up on the sofa and quietly read it to her cat. Then she toddled around nestling up to various adults, talking to them about her cat, and giving them shy smiles. I was proud of her social skills. She sat next to me at dinner and tried a little bit of everything on her plate. Then she played quietly by herself the rest of the evening. At one point, one of the women at the party, someone she had never met before, was asking her interested questions, and after a short conversation with her my daughter smiled and said, "I love you." I gotta teach her to hold her cards closer to her chest. :)

Honestly, I have nothing to complain about. I have an amazing, dishy, multitalented husband who I was so lucky to meet and marry. I have a beautiful little girl who is just the light of my life. We have a lovely home, and general security, and we're all in good health. I am blessed.

Canine Phobia

2010-12-15T07:18:00.000-08:00

I used to think, when I was a kid, that as soon as I was grown up I would fill my house with pets. I'd have dogs, cats, guinea pigs, birds of all descriptions - my house would always be full of activity and interest, and I'd never feel lonely. I guess my experiences with animals up to that point had all been pretty positive. My own pets could make me happy on the worst of days - so I didn't see why you wouldn't want to open your home to as many of them as possible.

Now I understand. It's not just the maintenance and cleaning that, as an adult, I'm now responsible for. It's also the experiences I've had with animals who weren't as friendly and loving as the ones I grew up with.

I have a regular route around my neighborhood that I like to run. On the course of this run, I'm routinely barked at by large dogs who lunge up against their fences aggressively. Even though I've learned where they live and am expecting it, it still scares me when a dog barks at me suddenly. More than once, a dog has jumped a fence or come through an open gate and come after me. I always stop running immediately, so I won't look like prey, and turn to face the dog and try to look alpha. Then I gradually back away until the dog appears to lose interest. I've never been bitten, but that may be just luck so far. I wish the owners would train them not to bark at passersby (our dogs never did that) or would make sure they couldn't get out and chase people. For the first time, since we've lived here, my dominant feelings about dogs have been that they are potentially dangerous.

I definitely don't want my daughter to feel that way or to realize that I do. When I'm pushing her stroller around the neighborhood and a large dog barks at us, I try to make light of it, saying "Hello dog!" So far, I don't think she's scared of dogs, but if one gets out and charges us when she's in her stroller, it will probably be frightening for her.

One of my friends also adopted a dog recently who is pretty much completely untrained and has a lot of energy. When we visit her, the whole time the dog is jumping on us, trying to chew on our feet, or racing around the room. It's difficult to have a meal there because the dog is constantly trying to get the food off the table and doesn't listen when my friend says "no." The dog also has growled at my child. After two visits, I don't feel safe taking my daughter over there any more. My friend doesn't use any discipline, beyond the occasional suggestion "please don't do that," which the dog totally ignores and probably doesn't even realize is directed to him. I feel like I can't visit my friend again until she either gets rid of this dog or it mellows with age.

I remember feeling total love for the dog I had when we were growing up - she was my best friend. But my daughter doesn't love dogs like that, and no wonder. I feel disinclined to get a dog as a pet in our family (even though I would train it, and wouldn't tolerate bad behavior), just because being around unpleasant dogs has soured me on the whole idea.

Another childhood dream, up in smoke?!

The Circle

2010-12-09T13:19:00.001-08:00

Today I had the day off from work so I joined my mom at her weekly sewing circle - a morning in a comfortable room flooded with sunlight, chit-chat, and animated discussion of projects, grand-children, holiday plans, and other pleasures. We drank tea and ate cookies. We admired one another's quilts. I sewed a potholder. It was so pleasant and peaceful and full of good female energy. At one point, as the group discussed all the things they want to do and see, my mother said, "How could anyone ever be bored?!" and many of the others laughed in agreement. I can't wait until I retire so my life can be filled with mornings like that.

What's Gonna Work, Part II

2010-12-02T04:47:00.000-08:00

I had a thought. I was reading about Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was married for eight years before having her first baby. She talked about how being with her husband for that period gave them time to grow and change together, so that they were a team when they finally had to deal with the stress and excitement of caring for a newborn. It sounds so sensible.

When I was younger, I always thought I would like to live with my husband-to-be for about five years before we actually got married, just to get used to being a team together. In the end, that schedule got compressed a bit. We weren't lucky enough to find each other until we were in our late twenties. I started to get scared that marriage would never happen, so I pushed for it to happen sooner, and then as soon as we were hitched I started pushing for a kid because I was so afraid I wouldn't be able to conceive.

Maybe some of the challenges that my husband and I have faced - the frustrations of not working together, not agreeing on priorities, not agreeing on whether to have a second baby - are due to us having a baby so soon after we got married. We didn't have a lot of time to just play around together - go on trips, learn about each other.

It was a relief to me when I got pregnant so quickly the first time - whew, met the age 30 deadline - and I have loved raising our daughter. But perhaps there would have been less stress and more teamwork if we'd waited. I often felt when our daughter was brand new that I had to shield him from the inconvenience or difficulty of the baby by handling what I could by myself. I did all the feedings, most of the diaper changes, all the laundry and planning and doctor's check-ups and scheduling and packing. He never had to get up in the night with her when she was little.

It wasn't until recently that I felt at all resentful of that - when I heard a friend who's expecting a child of his own soon mention confidently that he expected to take the late shift and feed the baby before going to bed, so his wife could go to bed early and catch up on her sleep. I felt sad that I didn't get help like that. (Realistically, I don't know how he could have helped, since I was nursing and didn't want to skip a feeding for fear of having my milk production drop. But I would have liked him to offer. Why couldn't he have magically read my mind and known to make such an offer so I could have refused it?)

Anyway. The thought was about how our lives might be different if we'd waited. Or if we didn't have children. Maybe we'd have more time for each other. Maybe we'd see each other more as partners in this whole endeavor. Maybe I'd feel more united with him and more trusting of his decisions. Sometimes I have the sense that everything (the joined lives, the house, the child) are my ideas that I've talked him into, and whenever it's not super-fun I feel apologetic. I promised it would all be great and I feel that it's my fault when it's not.

Is it too late for this to change, I wonder? Are my choices just to accept that he's the way he is, and not try to make him different, or to have serious conversations where I try to bully him into being different - is there no organic way for us to get there together?

Or are we just "in the belly of the beast" raising a small child, and things will all get easier as she grows older and more self-sufficient? Perhaps child-rearing is a challenge to the best of marriages, and there are better days ahead. Not that I think our marriage is strained. Just not as perfect as some other people's seem to be.

Priorities

2010-11-27T06:39:00.000-08:00

There's some old poem about how your kids will never remember that your doilies were starched, but they'll remember the trip to the park one summer day, or some such thing. It always makes me feel obscurely guilty to read it. I do take my daughter to the park, and we bake cookies together and do fun stuff like that. Every Wednesday we go to storytime at the local library. Every Saturday we do arts and crafts at the local nature center. Pretty much my whole emotional being revolves around her and being her mother.

But I also spend a lot of time cleaning, and occasionally ignore her in favor of cleaning. There are days when she's whining for attention, dragging on my arm or whatever as I'm trying to dust, and I go on with what I'm doing or tell her "Play by yourself." At those times, I know I'm putting the cleanliness of the bookshelves over her immediate happiness.

One of my mom friends is kind of the opposite of me. I think this particular friend is awesome. I have so much respect and admiration for her, and also just think she's a really nice person. She has been so supportive of me during my hard times. She's different from me in that she has a hotshot career she's not putting on hold to do child-rearing; she basically single-parents her son most of the time while her husband is on frequent business trips, but she's also working full-time and a rising star in her field. She's also different in that she does not spend time cleaning. Their house is always kind of chaotic and filled with a million half-finished projects, lonely socks, dog toys, etc. - the kind of house where the clutter alone tells the story of artistic, energetic people who have better things to do than dust.

Sometimes I wish I was more like her. I'd like to send the message to my daughter (and anyone who might visit our home) that what matters most to me is the time we spend together.

Other times I think of justifications for my cleaning obsessions, like:
Keeping the house relatively clean helps justify my working only part-time. I'd feel bad if my husband came home after a long day and found the house a disaster zone.
This way, I can always find stuff - I don't have to hunt through clutter looking for those missing jigsaw pieces or my green earrings. Everything is pretty much back where it belongs, at the end of each day.
If visitors are coming over, I don't have to make a special effort to clean up.
I like doing it. When I'm in the midst of a routine yet satisfying cleaning job, I feel like I'm achieving "flow" - that state of total absorption where you don't really notice the time passing, that comes as near to a definition of happiness as anything.

I'm not sure I can turn it off anyway. Last time we visited my friend, I had to fight the impulse to start cleaning her house, even as we sat around and talked. If she went out of town for a weekend, I would love to go over there and just wash dishes, do laundry, glue broken toys back together, and sweep until the house was clean. It's sick, right?

Flakes

2010-11-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

Why in the world are some people so flaky? I have a few old friends I'm trying to keep in touch with, who just aren't returning the effort. I email them from time to time, call and leave messages, but no response. One of my friends, an old college roommate who I haven't seen in a few years, actually stood me up at a restaurant where we planned to meet to have lunch. I was looking forward to catching up with her, but she never showed. I called her and got her voicemail as always. Later, when I emailed her to ask what had happened, she wrote back that she decided to take a nap instead. She didn't even apologize.

I tried to toss it off like it was no big deal. But I was so hurt. When I think about it now, I'm still hurt, even though this was some time ago. I don't think I've ever done anything to offend her or been anything but a loyal, fun friend to her. I guess she just has bigger fish to fry.

I have enough friends who do seem to care about me and whose company I really enjoy. For some reason I feel compelled to try to keep up the friendship with these few, however, who don't seem to be giving anything back. I wish I could just let it go. I'm like an ex who can't come to terms with the fact that I've been dumped.

What's Gonna Work? Teamwork!

2010-11-16T18:57:00.001-08:00

I love the WonderPets. (My daughter's summary: "A piggie, a turtle, and a duck... go in a boat... and get lots of animals!" That's about as accurate a description as I could come up with.)

The first time I saw the series, the cutesy voices made me squeamish. The voices are done by little kids who lisp and say things like "We'we a gweat team!" But I've gotten past that and learned to appreciate the finer aspects of the show. Here's what I like about it:

1. The pacing. Each episode opens with a crisis - an animal's in trouble! - and the WonderPets have to go to the rescue. There should be an underlying sense of fear and urgency, what with the need to build the flyboat anew (from the pieces scattered around the classroom in unpredictable places), get to an unknown destination, and solve some puzzle to save an animal that's in danger. Each of those tasks seems difficult. But the WonderPets don't hurry, and they don't worry. They take their time discussing the situation ("A baby seal... stuck on a rock... this is sewious... we have to help her..."). Then they mess around in the costume chest looking for their capes, and slowly put the boat together. They don't worry about how to get there because the boat just finds its way magically right to the animal. They don't feel trepidation about solving the puzzle because they just know that they'll find the tools they need. They trust each other completely and know that they'll win. I wish I could approach unknown tasks with the same calm faith in my own success.

2. The solutions. The tools to solve each puzzle are always right there, often in the early experience of assembling the flyboat (if they have to use a flashlight to retrieve a piece from the closet, then it's a sure thing they'll need a flashlight later to rescue the animal). Other times there's a pile of bricks or a rowboat right next to the homeless animal or the river. There is always one right way to do it, and they always find it.

3. The simplicity of their enjoyment. They take time out from their rescue missions to giggle and try on other costumes, slide around on the ice, or dance their way through the forest. They don't fight or whine that they're tired, like real preschoolers, or argue about the best way to go, or complain that they're bored. They just seem to find pleasure in everything that happens.

4. The clues. The decorations in the classroom are always relevant to the later adventure - if they're going to be rescuing a frog, there will be pictures of frogs, a diorama of a pond, and stuffed frogs displayed around the room. It's fun to notice these things and predict the storyline.

5. Old-fashioned charm. The classroom is a one-room schoolhouse of the most comforting, archetypal kind - cupola with bell, flag, peaked roof, maple trees planted all around. Very New England. Each episode opens with the children's voices saying goodbye to the pets, cheerful and friendly. Compared to the way my daughter is often crying and fighting as I try to transition her from one activity to another, the simple good naturedness of the children as they leave seems idyllic.

6. The supportiveness. The WonderPets really seem to like each other. They're always saying appreciative things - "Great job Tuck! You're really good at swimming!" "And you really helped when you found the wheel!" They don't take opportunities to cut each other down like real people do when they're working on a team project. They are just constantly pumping up each other's self-esteem. I wish people were like that.

Breaking the Taboo

2010-11-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

I'm in my first cycle of fertility treatment. I feel like trumpeting the news to everyone. For some reason, it seems to be kind of a taboo topic - other people who are having fertility problems don't seem to talk about it, and people who are not having problems don't seem to want to know. I have the impression that if I do talk about it, I will just make them uncomfortable. One person I told (over email) responded to every other part of my email except for that bit of news, and another person I told (at a group dinner; we were sitting side by side) immediately turned away and began a conversation with the person on the other side, as though I hadn't spoken. I have to just assume that the topic made them uneasy and they didn't know how to respond.

I think when I mention to people that I'm doing fertility treatment, it's akin to saying, "I'm in pain. I have this great sadness in my life, and I'm trying to get help to fix it." I think the ideal response would be to recognize that pain and to express some kind of support. I guess what I'd like to hear is something like "I'm sorry you have to go through that. And I wish you luck." That would be nice.

Of course some of my friends have been wonderfully supportive. They do me the favor of asking periodically how it's going. I feel sometimes that I'm desperate to talk about it, because it's a big absorbing thing in my life. It's affecting a lot of facets of my daily existence, what with the pills and the injections and the waiting and hoping, so it's such a relief to be given permission to talk about it. One friend even confided that he and his wife are having similar problems but didn't know where to go, and I was able to recommend the fertility clinic I've been visiting.

My strongest support and ally through this whole process has been my best friend, the one who went to the same clinic and is now pregnant. We're easily capable of talking about this stuff for an hour at a time. It's amazing how much we have to say to each other about it. I still wish we were pregnant together, but I'm hoping we'll still have young babies around the same time.

Halloween Finery

2010-11-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I took my daughter to the Halloween parade at her daycare. It's one of those iconic traditions, like the first day of school or the first loose tooth. Just like when I was a kid, all the kids marched around the playground in their costumes, occasionally peeling off to grab their parents from the sidelines or chasing each other across the hopscotch markings. There was much carousing and fun.

Oddly, I didn't notice a single homemade costume. Some of them were dimestore-type Superman capes and plastic masks, while others were beautifully stitched Renaissance tunics with velvet boots, but they were all new looking and from a store. When I was a kid, I made my own costume every year. In fact, I had been thinking about sending my daughter in a cat costume. I made the ears using a black headband and pipecleaner wires, with black tights stretched over them. In the end, she went as a dragon instead, because I happened to have an old purple dragon costume someone had given us.

2) In my daughter's class of 15 kids, every other little girl was a princess. They were all wearing really pretty costumes, too - sparkly tops, tulle skirts, tiaras, magic wands, sashes. A couple of them had glittery fairy wings too. I watched her marching around rather grimly in her potbellied dragon suit - and then I saw the other little girls skipping and laughing together in their beautiful costumes, tossing their hair - and I felt such a pang for her.

She's only 3, but already I worry that she's going to be sidelined, ignored, or bullied by the popular girls in the years to come. There are a million reasons they might find for ostracizing her. She doesn't talk enough. She doesn't have "pretty" hair. All her clothes are hand-me-downs or from the thrift store. A fair number of them are actually things that I or my husband wore when we were little. She doesn't watch TV, so she doesn't have that pop culture connection. I keep the radio tuned to classical, so she doesn't know about Hannah Montana or popular music. She doesn't have a Barbie.

Most of the time I send her off to school wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, sometimes overalls, and sneakers. The sweatshirt is often something that a boy might wear. It seems like a practical, simple outfit, exactly what I would pick for myself. When I see the other girls at her daycare, though (on a regular day, not Halloween), that's not what they're wearing. They're all dressed in little skirts with tights, sparkly ballet-flat shoes, and Gap shirts. They all seem to have long hair that their mothers put up in bows or ponytails that cascade over their shoulders. My daughter's hair is a basic bowl cut, too short to put up.

I thought I had a few years before I needed to worry about her peer group, but perhaps at age 3 they're already noticing that she's different. I don't know how to equip her to deal with it. My own strategy was basically retreating into my own mental world, which was dominated with ancient Celtic mythology (Rosemary Sutcliff novels), horses, and fantasies where I had telekinesis. Whenever anything bad was happening to me, I just shrank away inside so it was almost like it was happening to someone else. Bullies eventually gave up on me because there was so little reaction. And the popular kids didn't notice me. That's not what I want for her, though. I want her to be happy in her own identity, and to choose her own friends - not just be stuck with whoever she can get.

Patchwork Quilt

2010-10-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

My favorite part of the day is walking home from the train station. It's about a half-hour walk, through residential streets and across a park. This time of year, the whole way is carpeted with scarlet and orange maple leaves, and the trees lining the street are flaming, almost shimmering with color - gold and yellow and crimson and violet. It's gorgeous. It always makes me think of the Babes in the Wood fairytale where the forest birds cover up the lost children with a patchwork quilt of autumn leaves to keep them warm.

In a week, when the time changes, it will be too dark to walk home and I'll have to start taking the bus home (in the dark), which is kind of gloomy. And I'll miss the fresh air and exercise. The knowledge that my walks are almost over for the year makes them especially bittersweet.

But I can't complain... this has been the most lovely autumn in recent memory. We've had day after day of warm, 70-degree weather with blue skies and golden trees. Wearing short sleeves and racing through crunching autumn leaves is wonderful fun. When February is getting me down, I'll just have to remember how lucky we were to have this time.

Brought To You By Glycine Max

2010-10-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight we had a really great dinner. Stir-fried vegetable dumplings, with just a drizzle of soy sauce, steamed edamame, and brown rice. Man, it was good. As I was eating it and enjoying it, it occurred to me how much of it was soy based. The dumpling shell, probably, and the contents, more or less, the sauce, and the edamame of course. And my daughter had fake chicken nuggets, which are also probably entirely made of soy. It's so versatile. It's amazing that you can get bread, meat, vegetable, and milk (not to mention ink, fiber, and probably other things) out of this one plant.

What is wrong with me that as I sat there thinking about soy, I realized I knew the scientific name of the plant?

How To Have a Great Funeral

2010-10-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

I started thinking about this because we had a going-away party for a colleague at work, who was fired - or "let go" is the polite word for it. Her job position was eliminated. Anyway, she had worked for the organization for 10 years and was well liked, so a lot of people were at the party. We went around the table and shared our well wishes and our memories of working with her. One person spoke about her successes in her job, another about her warm and convivial presence in the office, someone else about her artistic talents (she does crafts, needlework, photography), someone else about her great sense of humor, someone else about how she'd learned a lot of botany from her, and so on. There was a great diversity in the comments and they seemed to build up a really nice well-rounded picture of a life.

It occurred to me that if I leave or am fired, I won't have a goodbye party like that because people at work don't really know me that well. I have lots of interests that are separate from my work life, but I don't really bring them up at work. No one there knows about my poetry or how I like to run or my interest in young-adult fiction or my loud bird or my projects around the house and garden. No one knows I used to be a competitive ballroom dancer or that I have tree-frog reveries. For a long time I kept my personal life so separate that no one there even knew I was in a relationship until I asked for time off for my honeymoon.

That's OK; I don't care about having a great going-away party. But it did get me thinking about how if you want to have a really good farewell - or, for the ultimate in farewell parties, funeral - , you have to have a life that's full of variety and interest. You have to connect with people on lots of levels. Otherwise no one will have much to say, and it will be kind of a dull occasion, the equivalent of a yearbook full of messages like "I didn't really know you that well, but you seemed nice. Have a great summer!"

So here are my suggestions for having a good funeral:
1. Be a pillar of the community. Have a career like pediatrician that touches lots of people, or even better orthopedic surgeon to an athletic team, so you get to meet lots of famous people. This will generate a lot of memorable encounters that friends can recall at your funeral.
2. Be talented at stuff. Sing, paint, weave, whatever - create things that are beautiful.
3. Be funny. Not in a weird quirky way like me, but in a way that will allow other people to share jokes that you made later, and that will get a whole room laughing.
4. Travel a lot and have a bunch of amazing life experiences like parasailing, skiing in the Alps, participating in a marathon or cross-country bike tour, etc.
5. Get married and have kids and grandkids so you will have a lot of family memories. It's ideal to have at least one child of each gender so no one will think you "missed out" on raising one type. Don't get divorced.
6. Write a book that touches a lot of people.
7. Have the kind of joie-de-vivre that makes people see you as an inspiration.
8. Stay in touch with childhood friends but make new friends wherever you go, so there will be people who knew you from all the different times of your life.
9. Be a joiner in the community - church, civic association, Girl Scout leader, etc. so all your neighbors know you.
10. Bake really great cookies that people will remember decades later.
11. Be musical. For some reason this really goes down well - and gets people smiling when they remember it.

That's all for now. Looking over this list, I can see that I'm really falling short so far. I bake so-so cookies, write short stories that I never let anyone else read, make friends easily but don't quite have the knack of holding onto them, and make a living by cobbling together office work and largely solitary freelance work - nothing spectacular. I don't have a very loud voice and people often don't hear the things I say. Sometimes I'm even being quite funny and no one hears me. Maybe that's why I prefer writing.

Perhaps it doesn't really matter, because after all I won't be at my own funeral. And the people who really know me will still miss me, so why try to impress those who knew me only peripherally? Still, it is something to think about.

Whimsy

2010-09-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

I love my dad. I think we have a lot in common as far as personality - both of us a little high strung, a little prone to depression and social neediness, both introspective but thriving on friendships and being around other people. I think a few years ago he went through a low point of sorts when he was struggling to figure out what to do with his time - unable to find meaningful work or social contacts. Things seem to be looking up for him now.

The other night at dinner, he was being so funny - he had stuck a couple of little white dots on the side of his index finger and made a closed fist and then wiggled his thumb up and down so it looked like a little misshapen face was talking. He was using a funny voice for it too. My daughter was laughing like mad. One of the little dots kept falling off, so he stopped. Later in the meal, someone noted that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and he said, "Arr, well in that case, ay'll just stick my one eye back on and..." and at that point I was laughing so hard I missed the rest of what he said.

To really get why this was funny, maybe you had to have known him a long time and known how he used to be (from my perspective, anyway) sadder and more emotionally fragile. I remember years when he was so miserable at his job, and other years when he was so miserable trying to find a job and not succeeding. To see him so relaxed and whimsical and able to be silly like that was wonderful.

Then later in the evening he was setting up my daughter's travel crib for her to sleep in, which is the kind that folds up into a bag, and my mom made some comment about how it was like setting up the Big Top, and he started singing this tweedling ridiculous falsetto circus music as he jiggled the legs into place. Which was hilarious to me all over again. I am so glad to see him happy like that.

Special-Needs Girl

2010-09-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

I'm editing a book about special-needs kids and educational strategies. The whole process is presented as being very encouraging and caring - if Tier 1 strategies like working in small groups don't help a kid who's having trouble learning to read, then the team meets to develop plans for more intensive interventions, like working one-on-one with a teacher to practice reading skills. There's never a word about blaming the child. It's all very positive and geared toward just helping him or her get up to speed. The underlying theme is that if a child is trying and not succeeding academically, it's not a personal failing, it just indicates that the child would benefit from a little extra help.

I like this philosophy so much - it's really refreshing and I almost feel like I'm getting a bit of therapy on the side, just from reading it. Because I am so angry at myself and ashamed of being infertile. I keep blaming myself for it, half-hoping someone will say "It's not your fault," but no one ever does, so I go right back to mentally bashing myself. There are these messages floating around and getting into my head that if I just relaxed, or tried harder (whatever that means), or ate better, I would get pregnant like all my friends who get pregnant without even trying. Which boils down to my infertility indeed being my fault.

Anyway, as I'm reading this book I have such sympathy with the kids who are struggling to learn to read, a basic skill that everyone around them seems to be picking up with no problem, and I can imagine how frustrated and sad they feel, and how painful it is for them to judged "stupid" by their peers. And what a breath of fresh air, like a guardian angel, a reading therapist might be, someone nonjudgmental who knows that they're doing their best and can sweep in to help them before they really sink into the mire of self-hatred. That's what I need. An infertility therapist to come save me.

What Am I Doing with My Life?

2010-09-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

I just spent an entire day indoors, working on my computer. A glorious late-summer day it was, too, in the 70s with warm sunshine and low humidity and brilliant blue skies. All day, as the time was passing, I was longing to be outside, and conscious that this day would never come again. And now it's gone.

The reason I was chained to my desk was that I stupidly said yes to a bunch of different freelance projects at different times, and they all arrived on top of one another and are due soon, so I'm pretty much working all weekend. Sometimes the freelance life really gets me down. It has allowed me to maintain a decent income after I cut my hours back to half-time at my regular job, and I get to spend a lot more time with my daughter this way, and we save money on childcare. But it often means that I don't get any time off. In the evenings when other people are relaxing in front of the TV with their feet up, that's when I have to go to work - even though I spent the day taking care of my daughter and cleaning the house and running errands and cooking, and I'd like to rest too. Sometimes I find myself really looking forward to the weekend just because the freelance work is piling up and it will be my chance to crank through some of it while my husband babysits.

I weigh this lifestyle against the alternative all the time. If I was a normal person, with a full-time job, I'd be enjoying a three-day weekend. I'd have gone out to spend the day with my husband and daughter - they rode the train, went to the playground, had lunch downtown. We'd have had fun together. Then we'd have come home and the two of us could chat, or read, or whatever while she napped. Then we could have a family dinner and go watch our Netflix after she was in bed. A great day.

Instead, I just worked on the computer for 12 hours more or less straight, with breaks to get a cup of tea or eat junk food. Once I went out on our deck and breathed in the sunlight and fresh air for a few minutes, leaning on the railing with my face raised, and tried to just absorb some of the day through my pores. Then I went back inside.

And for what? I don't earn very much freelancing, no more than I do at my jobby job. But once I've agreed to do an assignment, I have to follow through with it. And when I'm offered one, I'm always scared that if I turn it down, they'll never call me again. So I get myself into these fixes. Yesterday was like today, and tomorrow will be the same. All for a little bit of money, when I would rather have had the day.

Fongo Fever

2010-08-31T20:11:00.000-07:00

I have discovered a new dish that I love. Last week, we took a quick vacation to Puerto Rico, and I ordered this every single night. It is

MOFONGO!

It's basically mashed, fried plantains stuffed with fried meat or vegetables. It's often served in a big wooden mug, like the kind of thing a pirate would sip grog from. It's kind of like baked potato, or yucca, or taro (all of which I love), but even better. Each night, I had a stomachache from eating too much mofongo, but it was totally worth it.

Yesterday I bought plantains and tried cooking them myself. My husband laughed at me as soon as he came in the door and saw me frying them: "Someone's got the fever for the fongo!... Haven't you learned your lesson?" But it would take more than a stomachache to deter me from eating this stuff.

As it happened, I bought the wrong kind - ripe ones; they turned out good, but they're sweet like baked banana. The starchy flavor and texture I liked was from green ones. So I'll pick up some more and continue my experiments in the kitchen soon. Wish me luck!

Happy Fifth!

2010-08-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, I've been keeping this blog for five years now! I am amazed. I didn't think I'd stay interested in it that long. I figured either I would get sad that no one reads my posts, and give up, or I'd get nervous that too many people read my posts, and go silent. Well, I am a little sad that no one reads my posts (snif!). Except for my one loyal and awesome reader who knows who she is.

I wonder what the secret is for getting lots of readers. Maybe having a wild and interesting life? But some people just write about their kids and post pictures of the new lamp that they ordered from a catalog and get 1000 comments a day. Being terribly funny? That's beyond me, although I can be wry or funny in an unintentional, tripping over my own feet way. Emailing real-life contacts and asking them to read the blog? But then I wouldn't be able to write about them behind their backs.

Perhaps the secret is reading other people's blogs and posting comments on them. But I do that sometimes, and never get a return visit. Realistically, I will have to just keep deriving satisfaction from writing this blog and not from hopes of being "heard."

I read my first entry and had to laugh. I was being so coy. I don't have a sister! And my middle name is not even Phoenix, though it would be great if it was. Anyway, I look back on the person I was five years ago and I've definitely changed. As I read those early entries, I see how desperate I was to be liked. I was nervous that no one - my boyfriend, my coworkers, my friends - liked me enough and I was going around trying to be really sweet and appealing so that they would. I'm not so much like that any more. I feel stronger inside and more capable of shrugging things off.

There was also an element of hopelessness and fear in some of the early entries, because I wanted things (marriage, a house, kids) that seemed unattainable. And now I have them. I am just rolling around in those riches every day. Really, I am much happier for having them, just as I knew I would be, and the fact that I got the things I wanted so much makes me feel a bit more secure. Plus, motherhood has given me a self-esteem boost because I've learned how to do all these things I never had experience with before, and I'm endlessly capable and magic in my child's eyes. Even though I'm ranting and raving these days about being infertile, secretly it's not throwing me too badly. I feel confident that I'm going to overcome it and either manage to conceive or manage to be OK with a one-child family.

I wrote a lot more about what I was reading, back in the early days. I still find time to read nowadays, mostly on the train to work. I should write more about that. Right now I'm rereading Heart's Blood by Jane Yolen. I feel like she is really writing about a real place, the details are so well worked out. I can feel the hot shimmery desert sun, and see the fields of burnwort, and hear the dragons houghing and smell the heaps of fewmets the bondboys are shoveling. I wonder how much time she put into imagining all that stuff, before she even started writing the story.

I also used to write a lot about cleaning, and how guilty I felt for doing that instead of going out and being an interesting person. As though some invisible outside presence was going to judge me for not being well rounded enough. I don't worry about that any more. I still like cleaning, and I still spend way more time at home than I do expanding my horizons, but it's all right with me.

All in all, it's been a good five years.

Vicarious Happiness

2010-08-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

My friend is pregnant! The one who has been going to the same fertility clinic as me. Back when I found out she was receiving fertility treatment too, I wrote that if only one of us could succeed, it should be her. And she's done it. She actually got pregnant just a couple of days after our heart-to-heart. When she told me today, I was so happy and excited I was jumping up and down. She's like a sister to me, and there's no one I know who's more deserving of the chance to be a mom. She's very worried that she'll miscarry and hasn't told anyone yet, besides her husband and mother. But I have this joyful, calm certainty that it will all be just fine.

I wish I was pregnant too. (Duh. That's like the duh statement of the year.) The day that I ovulated all on my own, back at the beginning of July, was the same day that I knew she was having her IUI, and I had this wild hope that we would both get pregnant on that same day and go through the whole experience side by side. I imagined raising our babies together and having them be like siblings, or at least cousins.

Now that she's succeeded, and I haven't, I feel like I'm watching her run away down a racetrack while I got left at the starting gate. I should be running down that track too. It feels wrong that I'm still stuck here and can't, due to various factors, even start my own treatment for two more months.

I was genuinely, thoroughly happy for her for about three hours, with not even a flicker of anything else - and the joy of her pregnancy was on my mind continuously during that time. But then around midafternoon I started to feel a sadness creeping up on me. I ought to just be simply happy for her. It's stupid to feel that twinge of sadness and envy. It'll be my turn eventually, I hope. But I want it now.

It's almost as though the universe was listening when I made my bargain that if only one of us could get pregnant, it should be her. Well? the universe is saying. You got your wish. And I feel greedy and selfish all over again because even though she did get pregnant, I want to be too.

Cutting Some Slack

2010-08-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today I was thinking about that standard list of things that people say to women who are dealing with infertility, that are intended to be nice but are actually hurtful - you know, "maybe it's for the best," and so on. And the general gushing that people do who aren't infertile, basking in babylove, talking about how many children they will have, etc. It's hurtful because it's little nagging reminders of that thing that seemingly everyone around you can have, merely by deciding they want it, whereas for you it's out of reach and only obtainable (sometimes) if you spend a lot of money and time, and sometimes not even then. So fundamentally unfair.

But. Something it's important to remember is that the things people say are intended to be nice. People whose lives aren't consumed by infertility don't always realize what the emotional landscape looks like. I've been guilty of that myself.

Years ago, before I was even married, I was talking to a coworker who was trying to get pregnant and had so far been unsuccessful. "Maybe you're working too hard. You should just take some time off," I said. I was repeating something I'd often heard about infertility. Another friend who was with us said, "Have you considered adoption?" Our coworker said, "Maybe. And yeah, I've thought about it." Looking back on that conversation, I realize how stupid our comments were. Her infertility probably had nothing to do with working too hard. And yes, she had probably considered adoption. She didn't need us to suggest it. But the two of us, unthinking 20-year-olds that we were, thought we were providing support and suggesting helpful things she might not have thought of before.

Another time, a friend confided to me, soon after the birth of my daughter, that he and his wife had been trying to have kids as well, but she had had a miscarriage. I said, "Oh dear. I hope you'll have better luck next time." That comment haunts me - what a flip thing to say to someone who had been through the deep misery of a miscarriage. I'd probably be inconsolable if I actually got pregnant and then miscarried. And that I said it to him with my healthy newborn in my arms was probably the salt in the wound.

I want to cry out in protest whenever people say things that hurt me. Just today a friend sent me a video of her kids playing together (her daughter is exactly my daughter's age, and her young son was conceived right around when I wanted to get pregnant again and realized I couldn't). She commented, "They're going to be best friends for life!" That's what I want for my daughter too, and I can't have it. I felt so frustrated and upset as I watched the video. But true courage, I think, is cutting people some slack and just clamping down on that internal dialogue of pain - smiling and replying as though they said the right thing. Because they probably meant to.

Summer Is Over

2010-08-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

It's only just turned August. But just now a cricket started piping under my study window. The sound conjures up so much nostalgia for me, it almost makes a lump come into my throat. Cool days, frost on the grass in the mornings, car doors slamming. Getting ready for school. Wearing a jacket with a hood in the morning, carrying it over my arm on the way home. Maple trees decked with sunset colors. Running from the bus stop to keep warm. I remember E.B. White's classic line in Charlotte's Web, the crickets singing, "Summer is over, summer is over, summer is over and gone." It makes me think of things quickening.

Happysingle

2010-08-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading an article about happy singles - women who aren't searching for a mate, who are actually content in their lives, all by themselves. They distinguish themselves from the "quirkyalones" who are single but don't want to be. The quirkyalones keep posting personality profiles on matchmaking sites and recasting their personalities in hopes of attracting someone who will appreciate them. If I hadn't met my husband, I would be a quirkyalone. Occasionally, maybe most of the time, I'd stray into depressedandmiserablealone territory. I often think how lucky I am to have him and how my baseline mood is so much better than it used to be when I was single.

But. If I knew somehow that being married would never be an option for me, could I be happy?

I thought about this for a while and finally decided that yes, if the pressure of the search was taken away, I would be fine. I could create a nice life for myself, packed full of all the things I like to do: gardening, reading, visiting friends, travel, animals, camping, poetry. I'd take art classes and carry a sketchbook with me. I'd go on long tramps across the English countryside in knee-high boots for the mud, hopping over stiles. I'd probably get a PhD in ecology and have a career in academia, with no family longings to distract me or encourage me to settle for less. I wouldn't have to compromise on anything I wanted to do - no apologies that it rained during the camping trip I planned and really wasn't fun like I promised it would be. It would actually be fun, if I didn't have to take anyone else's feelings into account. I'd lie there Buddhalike listening to the rain and composing haikus, then warm up hot chocolate on my camp stove the next morning and go for a long hike across the dewy fields.

Thinking about this life in another dimension I almost wish it's the road I'd chosen. If only I could live my life again, and again, and do it in every way.

Bandwagon

2010-08-01T12:13:00.001-07:00

I fell off the bandwagon. Quite a while ago, in fact; as it rounded a curve in the road, I just slid right off the tailgate and landed with a soft thump in the dust. Ever since, I've been sitting on the side of the road, eating the most delicious moist velvety chocolate cake with melt-in-your-mouth icing, while the strains of the band grow ever fainter in the distance. I can still glimpse the sunlight glinting off the saxophones and horn section when the wagon tops the occasional rise. I don't think they've even noticed I'm gone.

While I eat my cake, I've been mulling a few questions, including
- Should I try again, and see if I can be sugar-free for the month of August?
- Why is my willpower so damn weak, anyway? It shouldn't really be that hard to give up sweets. Millions, probably billions of people in the world live without sugar in their diets. But for me it seems to be this huge unconquerable mountain - I count the days, obsessing over what I'm not allowed to have and how much longer I have to do without it.
- That fact makes me feel like a terrible greedy slug. I ought to have my mind on higher things.
- For the first two weeks of July, I thought I might be pregnant, so it was easier to be pure. Then I found out in mid-July that I wasn't, and I was so disappointed, I binged on sugar just to try to stop crying.
- My husband isn't addicted to sugar. Giving up sugar for a month would be easy for him. He probably doesn't even realize that there are two Klondike bars in the right-hand side of the freezer, that have been there for a month, that are so prominent in my imagination it's like they're burning a laser hole through the freezer door and flashes of disco light are escaping into the kitchen from the party that they're having in there, and he walks right past the fridge like he doesn't even see it.
- My husband also doesn't particularly want a second child. Or increased family togetherness like I'm always trying to get us to have. Or better conversations. Or more emotional closeness. Or more travel to interesting places. Or more friends.
- What the hell does my husband want, anyway?
- Is this just how our lives and our marriage are going to be from now on? me always putting on a brave face and acting cheerful and trying to keep things lively, while he exudes inertia and spends the weekend in his computer chair if at all possible? Do other couples have to try this hard to find things to do together and to have fun together, or does it just happen naturally for them? I'm so grateful that we don't fight, that dinnertime is harmonious, that we are nice to each other. And underlying that, I'm so grateful to be married at all. But is that as good as it gets?
- Why doesn't he read my blog, anyway? He knows the URL. I was a little nervous about giving it to him, initially, because I thought that if he read it I'd censor my thoughts. Then I realized he never did, and was able to relax. Then I felt wistful, and wished he would, because if nothing else it's a good way to project, in a passive-aggressive way.
- If he had a blog, I'd check that thing every day, I'm that interested in getting a window into his thoughts. When we have nonconversations in which I come up with four or five things to say and he just doesn't answer at all, not even a grunt to show that he heard me, what is going on in his head? Is he lost in his own thoughts? Thinking about something completely different? Mulling over what I said? Not at all interested in what I said? How can you just not say anything when someone is talking to you?
- Being happy is something that you have to work at. I know that. And I never want to be one of those people who makes someone else responsible for their happiness, and who then gleefully blames them for failing. I've been on the receiving end of that and it's an awful thing to do to someone. So I do take responsibility for my own happiness. The day that I found out I wasn't pregnant, all I wanted to do was weep and lie around and be comforted, but I didn't even call a single friend, or ask anything of my husband. I came up with a plan that would get me up and out of the house all day with my child, to keep both of us occupied, and I pushed all the misery down inside. But. It would have been nice if he had noticed. Either the sadness or the way I dealt with it.

See, this is why freewriting can be so revealing. I started here thinking I wanted to write about my weakness for sugar, and I ended up talking about my relationship. I have probably written more than I should share. If he ever did read my blog, I know he'd be uncomfortable that I'm writing in this vein. But he doesn't, so he'll never know.

Living on the Edge

2010-07-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

I just finished Mary O'Hara's wonderful trilogy about life on a Wyoming horse ranch. This is from the third one, The Green Grass of Wyoming:

He had a sudden strange feeling that things were all in one piece, not strung out in time. Life was like a patterned cloth being drawn over a knife-edge. The knife-edge was the NOW and what was happening now - but the patterns were there on the cloth, all the same, before and after it had run over the knife-edge.

Wow.

Aha

2010-07-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Finally got some answers! I had an ultrasound that confirmed that I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. It was pretty clearcut - 16 follicles on each ovary, when I think the typical number is one or two. But the diagnosis is weird:

1. It's a kind of chronic long-term syndrome that usually crops up in early adolescence, not something that you develop later. But I had regular periods for years before I got pregnant the first time, and I didn't have trouble conceiving then. Why would I have developed this syndrome after my first pregnancy?
2. Often a pregnancy resolves the condition. In my case, it apparently triggered it, which makes no sense at all.
3. Some of the hallmarks of PCOS are being overweight, being diabetic or borderline, and having excess body and facial hair, acne, and painful periods. But those don't apply in my case (hmm, maybe the acne a bit, but it's not too bad). I guess I am an atypical patient.

At least I have a diagnosis. It was so hard not knowing what was going on and having to fend off suggestions like
"maybe you secretly don't want a baby, and this is your body's way of telling you"
"just adopt"
"maybe you're not trying hard enough"
"maybe you're trying too hard"
"maybe you're not 'doing it' right"
"oh well, it was easy for me"

The last is probably the one that drives me craziest. Some people have full, interesting, busy lives - they're advancing in their careers, traveling, doing home renovations, and still manage to get pregnant in their spare time without really trying. In my case, I've gone to soooo many doctors' appointments - expensive and time-consuming. I've been trying to relax, eat better, change my exercise routine, etc. all in hopes of improving my fertility by reducing my stress. And I'm still nowhere near the point where they'll be able to start treatment, let alone the point where I might achieve a pregnancy. It bugs me that some people have it so easy and apparently don't understand how hard it can be for others.

The standard treatment for PCOS is birth control pills (and as soon as you discontinue the pills, the syndrome comes right back). Obviously I don't want to do that. I have to do some more stupid tests now before I can schedule a consultation with my doctor and renew my requests for Clomid, the ovulation medication I've been asking for for a year. I hope he'll prescribe it. I read that patients with PCOS have a much harder time getting pregnant and have a 50% miscarriage rate (compared to the normal 15-20% rate), which is a bit scary, but I don't think there's much I can do about that. I just hope that in that area, I'll also be an atypical PCOS patient.

Update:
I talked to my doctor today. He said that the average number of follicles in a healthy ovary is 10-12, and that he'd rather see too many than not enough. So that makes me feel a little... well, closer to normal. Here I was thinking I was some kind of monster freak with my 16 follicles on each side.

I also underwent an HSG today (hysterosalpingogram), in which dye is squirted up through the reproductive tract to outline the uterus and fallopian tubes to make sure there isn't a blockage. Everything looks fine in my case. I was amazed to see that on the left side, the fallopian tube does a loop-the-loop! The doctor said that was perfectly normal and that the ovaries and tubes actually move around a bit in the pelvis and often are in unusual configurations, not just out to the side like the crosspiece of a capital T. Still. A loop-the-loop! Those little eggs have a long way to go on their roller-coaster ride to the uterus.

Bluffing

2010-07-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

Today I took my daughter grocery shopping and we got one of those carts with the little plastic car built onto the front of it. She always asks to get one of those, but I usually refuse because they're so heavy to steer. Today I relented and she was beside herself with happiness, giggling the whole time we were shopping.

Afterwards, I loaded the groceries into the (real) car and then returned the cart to the collection area. When I crouched down next to the little car and said, "It's time to go home now. Come on, hop out," she said, "No, I'm going to stay here."

I said, "Right here?"

She said, "Yes. I'm going to stay here all night!"

I said, "Want me to come get you tomorrow morning?"

She nodded solemnly.

"OK," I said. "I'll pick you up before breakfast, OK?"

"OK," she said.

"Have a nice night," I told her. Then I got up and walked (slowly) away, straining every second for her to call out to me. When she did, I stopped right away. She was scrambling out of the car, saying, "No, Mama, I change my mind! I want to go home with you."

"Really?" I said, feigning surprise. "Well, okay." I picked her up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She was giggling with relief as I carried her back to our car.

As we drove away, I thought
1) how much I love her
2) how someday, probably sooner than I expect, she'll call one of my bluffs
3) how it was almost as though we were putting on a show of how perfect and cute we are together, for a stranger who might think, "What a great mom. What a great kid," when in reality I don't always know what I'm doing, and she has her difficult moods, and it's not always sunshine and roses between us,
4) but most of the time it is.

Gotcha!

2010-07-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

Today I caught a rabbit. With my bare hands.

That's a lie, actually - I was wearing gloves. But still! I just reached down and grabbed it! It was like I tapped into some superhuman powers and moved so fast I was just a blur.

I was in my garden, staking vampires - I mean tomato plants. I lifted a leaf, and there was the cutest little coney hiding under it, with its ears slicked back along its back. Oh my gosh it was adorable. It was like the pictures of cute bunnies that artists do watercolors of for Easter cards, with huge eyes and plushy brown fur. Even as I was marveling at how cute it was, my inner farmer rose to the challenge and I cried, "What are you doing in here? Inside my garden? Git!"

I might note that the garden has no fewer than three types of fencing around it. There's a four-foot high metal fence (to keep out the groundhogs), a smaller-mesh plastic fence as an inside liner (to keep out the rabbits), and netting over the top (to keep the deer from jumping in). There are woods and fields and plenty of things in the vicinity for the local wildlife to eat, but they seem drawn to my garden all the same. Anyway, I have no idea how a rabbit got in.

I chased it into the squash plants. Then it slipped past me into the pole beans. Then I chased it into the Swiss chard. It ran back to its original hiding place and dove in there under the tomato leaf. Like I was going to forget about catching it if I couldn't see it. I lifted the leaf again, put my hand down, and just grabbed it.

It scrabbled in the air a few times with its hind feet, but I set it down inside a handy plant pot and put my hand over the top to keep it from jumping out. Then I carried it over to the woods behind our property and let it out. As it slid out, it seemed a little dazed. I thought, "poor thing, it's probably asphyxiating of fear." But after I'd taken two steps away, I turned to look back, just in case it was just lying there gasping. A blade of grass was swaying. The rabbit was gone. I had visions of it beating me back to the garden as I tromped back across the lawn.

Still don't know how it got in there. What do I need to do, dig a moat around my garden?!

P & P x 3

2010-07-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

I read Pride and Prejudice again recently (as a prelude to reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; I felt like I had to refresh myself on the original in order to get the most out of the parody. Zombies actually turns out to be the exact same text as the original, with "and turning, she rapidly slew three zombies in succession" inserted here and there.)

The first time I read it was in high school. I loved it. I couldn't wait to get through my math homework each afternoon so that I could read the day's quota of P&P. It seemed to have such relevance to my own life; I was in love, and I didn't know how to approach him, and here was a book all about a girl my age, dealing with misunderstandings and hurt feelings and social intrigue and gossip and class consciousness. I wrote him a letter pouring out my feelings. A few days later, we got to the part in the book where Elizabeth receives "the electrifying letter" from Darcy. I felt like I was burning with embarrassment and excitement at the parallels in my own life. At the end of the book, of course, love triumphs. At the end of the school year, we graduated and I never saw him or heard from him again.

A few years later I read Pride and Prejudice again. I remembered it being so juicy and full of suspense. But the second time through it seemed just silly. I couldn't understand why the characters spent time chewing over gossip and conjecturing what things might possibly have meant instead of just talking to each other directly and straightening things out. Why didn't Jane get in touch with Bingley herself, instead of pining? Why didn't Elizabeth go out with Colonel Fitzwilliam, who seemed like the nicest guy of the bunch? I felt impatient for things to get resolved and kept flipping ahead to see how many more pages there were. The women's exaggerated ladylike frailty seemed fake (Elizabeth colouring up every time she heard anything interesting, having to retire to her room for half an hour to regain her composure, Jane being sick in bed for days after being out in the rain for just a few minutes). I was working a job, sharing an apartment with roommates, and paying my own way in the world. I didn't have patience with such silliness.

This third time through, however, I loved it again. Partly because of the rich and intricate use of language. It's wonderful to read it out loud; the sentences start out in one direction, then curve over their own backs and interweave into unexpected spaces like a vine weaving its way through the ironwork of a railing. Partly because Austen does such a good job of blackening Darcy's character that even though you know he's going to be redeemed, in the early stages it's hard to imagine how that will be done. Partly because it was relaxing reading about people who have no obligation to earn a living and so much time on their hands that they can just while away their lives with needlework, long walks in the countryside, and social visits. The girls didn't even have to fix meals or do any housework, all that was done by servants. Partly because now that I'm married and boring and all the heart-pounding astonishment of falling in love is behind me, probably forever, it was nice to read about people having crushes on each other and being thrilled with the slightest mark of regard, and wondering with fascinated passion whether the other person still liked them or not. I could relive my glory days a little.

P&P is the only one of Austen's books that I've ever read. I'm so uncultured, it's awful. I have to at least read Sense & Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey, my mother's favorite.

So Far...

2010-07-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

One week in, and being pure has been easier than I expected. I've resisted the cookies in the kitchen at work, the ice cream in the freezer at home, my favorite sugary yogurts, the cereals in my cupboard, even things like ketchup and popcorn seasoning that have sugar in them. The cravings haven't been too bad. I am letting myself have fruit, so in place of my usual dessert I just eat a handful of raisins or something and then I'm fine. I'm also trying to eat more greens and whole grains, and fewer fried things. I have this idea that the more I do it, the easier and more natural it will be, and the less I'll even want the junk. I even watched Julie & Julia - all those dinners smothered in butter, all that rich chocolate cake - without particularly wanting to eat anything afterward. The part of the movie I liked was her cooking the food, not the idea of eating it.

I slipped up just once so far - at a Fourth of July dinner party. My friend had made panna cotta (kind of lime-flavored mousse made with mascarpone cheese and topped with wild blueberries). It was chilled, in goblets, and they looked so pretty all lined up on the counter, cream and violet. She had already set one out for me and I wasn't going to turn it down. It was heavenly.

One week down, three to go!

A Month of Purity

2010-06-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day of eating junk food for a month. I decided that my approach to my infertility so far (i.e., wailing and gnashing of teeth, getting angry at my body for being "wrong," and comforting myself with potato chips and ice cream) was not actually that productive. If I'm going to give myself a fighting chance, I really should be eating well so I am as physically healthy as possible.

Plus, this enterprising chick gave up eating anything produced by Monsanto for a whole month, which is way harder. Any processed food, anything with corn or soy, most vegetables, and most meats come from Monsanto or its subsidiaries, which doesn't leave a whole lot of options. She had to subsist on seaweed and nuts for a couple days until she found some suppliers of guaranteed Nonsanto food. In the end, she had a really healthy month - and she ended up pregnant! Which she seems pretty calm about, but for me it would be trumpets and banners and wild, joyful/tearful celebration.

Giving up the sugar is going to be the hard part for me. I crave sugar so much that sometimes when I'm reading a book or working on my computer I literally can't concentrate, my desire to get up and get something sweet is so strong. I can feel that 90% of my attention is devoted to wanting a cookie, and only 10% is on the task at hand. But I know refined sugar is bad for me. It ages the skin, it causes acne, it messes up the metabolism, it's hard on the kidneys, it's bad for the teeth, it's linked to various cancers, it makes one fat. I even made myself a list of 30 reasons why I should stop eating sugar. And I tried to give it up for Lent this year, but only lasted about a day. My willpower is incredibly weak when it comes to sweets. Last year I actually did successfully give up sugar for Lent - but oh, how I longed for it; it consumed my thoughts during the last few days. I stayed up the night before Easter and dug into a pie with my bare hands at midnight, and in the days after Easter I binged on sweets. Going sugar-free for 40 days didn't reduce my desire for it one whit.

Still. In the larger scheme of things, this should be an easy sacrifice to make. And I want a baby ever so much more than I could ever want a candy bar. So even if denying my sweet tooth can only distantly and very indirectly affect my infertility, by improving my overall health, it's still worth doing.

So, July is going to be a pure month for me. No sugar, no junk. And no whining. I will just think positive thoughts about my ovaries producing beautiful glowing white eggs.

At the same time, I am jumping through the hoops to get referrals and preauthorizations for treatment at a fertility clinic. Just passing all their diagnostic screening criteria to demonstrate that I have a problem (as if not having a period in three years wasn't proof enough) will take months, so it will be ages before I can actually get the treatment I need. But I'll try to be patient.

Last week I confided in a friend that I am going to this clinic. And it turns out she's going to the same one. She and her husband have been trying to have a baby for a while now, and she's been working with this clinic for the past year. No luck yet. I wish I'd known so I could have given her some support. And I feel greedy, somehow, that I am trying for my second child and working myself up into knots of self-hatred and sorrow about it, when she doesn't even have one child yet. I thought about it and realized that if I somehow had the power to choose which of us would succeed in this endeavor, if it could be only one, I would choose her, just because that would be fair. I really would. So perhaps when I'm feeling particularly miserable about being infertile I can remember that and a buddhalike calm will come over me.

Somewhere Out There

2010-06-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

Somewhere near my house, a fawn is having the worst night of its life.

I was walking home this evening when I came across a doe that had been struck by a car. It looked like she had walked just a couple of paces from the road and then collapsed right at the edge of the shrubbery in the park. Her forelegs were folded in and her head was tucked, the way our greyhound used to sleep. Her eye was liquid and dark and open. I stared at her for a long time, even though I was pretty sure she was dead, because I just couldn't believe it. I kept waiting for that eye to blink. I felt like somehow she couldn't be dead. One of her forelegs was scraped raw and bloody, but otherwise she didn't look injured. Usually when I see an animal by the side of the road, its eyes are just sockets, and it looks all mangled up and awful, but she looked like she was just lying down, waiting for me to leave.

I felt - not sad, but awestruck, I guess, at being in the presence of death. There before me was someone who had passed through that great and terrible experience that's waiting for all of us. I used to feel that way when I saw mothers with new babies - I'd think "She has been through childbirth," and I would wonder if it would ever happen to me. But death is infinitely more scary and you know it definitely will happen to you. It's too big for the mind to really process.

Then I noticed that her udder was swollen like a cow's. And I thought that she must have been returning to wherever her fawn was hidden, where it had lain all day, not moving, barely breathing, trying to be scentless and invisible. All day long it must have been getting hungrier and hungrier, waiting for its mother to return. Finally it was dusk and she was on her way. But she never made it back. And right at that moment, as I was staring at her, the fawn was somewhere hidden nearby, getting desperate with hunger, but perhaps still afraid to move. I wondered if it would eventually get up and wander somewhere, if it knew how to eat anything yet. I thought how I felt when I was nursing and away from my child, how as the hours passed I grew increasingly anxious to see her, how sweet and what a physical relief our reunions were - and how, if I were killed on my way back to her, my greatest sorrow would have been for her loneliness and fear, not for my own life unlived.

Humorectomy

2010-06-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has a theory that the act of getting married causes people to have a humorectomy. He noted how so many of his friends used to be interesting, spontaneous, funny, clever, etc. before they got married. Now they're just bland and never want to go out.

Another friend chimed in with, yes, not only is that true, but it happens, oddly enough, even to people who were living together and essentially married for years before they actually tied the knot. You'd think they wouldn't change, but they do.

Is it because they've "won," so they no longer have to act interesting and keep their beloved liking them?
Is it because they get caught up in nesting and don't care as much about the outside world?
Is it because they're following a standard behavioral mold set by those who have gone before (including, unconsciously, their parents)?

I'm definitely not as interesting as I used to be before I got married. I chalk it up to working too much (no time to read) and having a kid (no opportunity to go out). If I didn't have those things going on, I'd still be sneaking up forbidden spiral staircases in the cathedral at night, and rappelling down cliffs on weekends. I'd be going to Scrabble tournaments and entering strawberry shortcake contests and rehabilitating mourning dove chicks. I feel like the fun, slightly weird, loner-wild Erin is still in there, still inside me, just waiting until I have time in my life to be like that again. I hope she doesn't die. Hang in there, I want to tell her. I'm sorry I'm so dull right now, but I'll be you again as soon as I can!

Impasse

2010-05-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

All this angst about not being able to get pregnant again, all these hours spent Googling "secondary infertility", all these doctor's appointments and blood tests, and in the end I'm no closer to knowing what's wrong... and it all may be moot anyway, because my husband doesn't want to have another kid.

All this time, he thought I was trying to get my period back just so I could be normal again. When I said, "no, I don't care about that, I just want to get pregnant again," he said he thought one child was enough. He pointed out how exhausting it is to care for her, how we're barely holding it together. It's true that our lives aren't peaceful and well-ordered like they were prekid. We no longer have the ability to go out in the evenings, do fun stuff together, meet friends for dinner, or plan trips. Because I can only get freelance work done after she's in bed, I'm scrambling to meet deadlines all the time, perpetually sleep-deprived, and frustrated that I'm never able to have time for myself. He pointed out that just putting her to bed is a hassle - she malingers so badly (and fights each step of the way). It takes forever and usually ends in her crying. Listening to him say this, a number of thoughts went through my head:

"Yes. He's right. We don't have fun any more. And it's putting a strain on our marriage. We used to look at each other with such affection - now we're too tired to feel anything but resentment, because we're convinced that being this exhausted means the other person must be slacking."

"Well, but he IS slacking. He's complaining about the hassle of her bedtime routine, but I put her to bed six nights out of seven. I do the morning routine, every day. I didn't even get to sleep in on Mother's Day, damn it - even though I was up late freelancing the night before, as usual, I had to get up early with her while he slept in until 10 am."

"Yes, but he's also working full-time at a demanding job and trying to launch his career in science. He works harder than I do, even if I work longer hours. He's just as tired at the end of the day as I am."

"Besides, if I want to convince him to have another kid, and the sticking point with him is how much trouble it is to care for her, maybe I need to take on more of that work. Maybe I should put her to bed every night, and not ask him to pitch in on the weekends."

"But how will I ever keep up with my freelancing if I never get a break from the childcare? There's a limited number of hours in the week and I'm already a zombie."

"Besides, is it so much of an imposition to ask him to spend some time with his daughter on the weekends? Shouldn't he want to do that?"

"If stress IS the reason I'm not getting my period, and if I try to do even more work, I'll never get it back."

"I still want another kid. Even though it seems totally illogical to want that."

"Maybe we don't deserve another one. Sometimes I run out of patience with her and I'm sick of her asking 'what?' ten million times and never listening to the answer, and I just feel like crying. If I can't do a good job with one, maybe we shouldn't have any more."

"But everyone else who wants two kids gets to have them, even if they're not perfect parents. All my friends are pregnant with or have already had their second. We're falling way behind the curve."

"At least once a day some well-meaning person asks me whether we're having another kid. I laugh it off with 'oh, maybe, we'll see, this one keeps me busy enough.' If only they knew how much it hurts me to be asked that question. Just today my mom was on the phone with a friend who asked her if she was getting any more grandchildren, and she had to laugh it off the same way. How can he be insensible to that kind of pressure?"

"If we get divorced, it will be much more difficult for me to find someone new if I've got two kids."

"Maybe having another baby would keep us together though."

"Does that ever work? Celebrities are always trying it, and it always seems to fall through."

"Divorce? What am I thinking? Surely things aren't that bad. That's like my worst-case scenario (after him or my daughter dying). I'll do whatever I can to avoid that."

"But what if staying with him means never getting to have another child - and what if I could get divorced and have another with someone else, someone who would pitch in more and be more affectionate?"

"I don't want someone else. I just want HIM to pitch in more and be affectionate like he used to be. Anyway, all our friends have these perfect marriages where they totally love each other. How could we stand the shame of being the first to fail?"

"Arggggh. This shouldn't be so hard. No one else has to fight tooth and nail to get their guy to propose, to get him to have the first kid, to get him to have the second kid. Why doesn't he just naturally want the things that I do?"

And so on. I didn't actually say any of those things out loud, and the discussion was never resolved. He asked me how bad I wanted another kid, and I said, "I really, really want another. If I never have another child, it will be something I'll always regret." Then I tried to convince him that it would be a good idea by suggesting that this time around we could try for a boy, and he got sidetracked into researching online whether you could time conception to increase the odds of a boy, and was reading scientific papers instead of listening to me. Displacement activity to avoid finishing the conversation. He was absorbed in his computer after that and I couldn't get his attention back on me. At some point he left and went to clip his nails, his other stock activity when he wants to avoid finishing a conversation. He will clip them nightly if necessary, and he will spend half an hour or more doing it. I waited for a while, then couldn't afford to wait any longer because I had a deadline, so I gave up and went to do some freelancing.

I wish things were different.

Freak of Nature

2010-05-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

I went shopping for a new bra a few days ago, because none of mine fit any more. I used to buy B cup bras, the kind with stiff cups, just to look like I had a shape. They didn't actually touch my breasts, let alone support them - just curved stiffly around them. Then at some point I decided to embrace my natural flat-chestedness, and started buying A cups. But even my A cups don't fit any more. They just slide around on my flat chest and the straps are constantly falling down, like every five minutes. When I'm at home or on the weekends, I wear sports bras, which at least stay in place.

Anyway, I decided a racerback was what I needed, so off I went to the store. Alas, the bra companies of the world do not appear to make bras for people my shape. I need a racerback 36A, but A cups only come in size 32, which is much too small, and B cups are definitely too big. I would go braless if I could, but now that it's t-shirt weather I can't go around in public without one. I guess I'll keep wearing my old bras and pushing up the straps every few minutes.

I also was unable to find pants that fit when I was in a pants-buying flurry a few months ago. All the pants I tried on gapped in the back and looked egg-cuppy from the side. Size 2 is ridiculously tight, size 4 is tight in the crotch but gappy around the waist, and size 6 falls right down. I went to lots of different stores and tried lots of different brands, and they're all like that.

Between not being able to find clothes that fit the top or the bottom of me, and not having periods any more (my doctor is frankly confused and says she can't find a physical reason for it), I am starting to feel like a freak - no longer a "real woman." What is wrong with me?

My Kidlet

2010-05-09T07:46:00.000-07:00

It's Mother's Day and I want to write about my daughter. So often these days I'm charmed at her perspective on the world, which is coming through now that she's got more language to express it - and surprised at how much she really does understand and remember.

Yesterday, she was eating a slice of cantaloupe. She bit it into the shape of a crocodile - with bumpy eyes and even a slit for the mouth. Then she made it lollop across the placemat toward me, saying "Watch out - aump, aump, aump!" (biting noises) I said, "Ooh, what is that, a snake?" She laughed, "Aaoh, nooo, Mama, issa cocodile!" And at once I saw that it was indeed shaped like a crocodile. She made it gnaw on my arm for a minute before she efficiently dispatched it.

She's potty trained now (although she still wears a diaper at night) - for a while I thought it was hopeless, until all of a sudden she got it. The key was just putting her in underpants, even though she didn't seem to be ready. Once she was wearing the underpants she learned very quickly what the point of the potty was. Anyway, she'll occasionally wake up in the night needing to pee and will call me. A few nights ago, at 3 am, I heard her calling to me, so I took her into the bathroom. She pulled off her diaper, which had Disney princesses on it, and chatted away quite gaily to me as she peed. My eyes were half closed but I did pick up enough to realize, after a while, that she was pointing to Ariel on the diaper and singing an approximation of "Under the Sea." She has seen the Little Mermaid (actually just the first half of it) only once, and it was several weeks ago. I said, "What are you singing?" She said, "Singing like c'ab. In the water! da, da, da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da..." I said, "Oh, you mean Sebastian, the crab? When he sings 'Under the Sea'?" She got a huge smile on her face and said, "Yes!" I couldn't believe she had actually retained that from the one time she had heard it, weeks ago.

Another time, when we were walking around on the deck outside, I was being cavalier and not wearing shoes, and I got a big splinter in my foot. She heard my indrawn breath and said, "Mama? Hurt cherself?" I said, "Yes, my foot," and sat down to examine the sole of the foot. The skin was broken and the splinter was lodged in it. She leaned over it and kissed the sole of my foot. "There - all better?" she asked. And it was.

I have so many hopes for her. I hope she'll grow up strong and healthy, and be surrounded by friends. I hope she'll be pretty, because life is easier for pretty people. I hope she'll find work that inspires her. I hope she'll be more ambitious and self-confident than I am - I feel so incapable of confrontation in its various forms, particularly managing and directing other people, that many career options are closed to me, and I don't want her to be limited like that. I hope she will love the outdoors and animals the way I do (although I worry that she might not - so far she is clearly more interested in tractors and trains than in living things). I hope the world that she grows up into will be resilient enough to survive the harms that human societies continue to inflict on it. I hope she will find a man who appreciates and loves her and whom she can love as well - and that they'll make me some lovely grandkids. Mostly, I just hope that I can keep her safe as she grows up - guard her from all the perils - so that she'll at least have the options to achieve her desires.

Screaming

2010-05-04T19:29:00.000-07:00

I have a bird who is 20 years old. He's a gold-capped conure, which means he can live to 30 years or more. Sometimes that seems like such a long time, I wonder if I’ll make it to that point with my sanity intact.

The issue is that, being a conure, he screams. Piercing, deafening screams that ricochet off the walls of the room and make my ears ring. I think I have actually suffered some mild hearing damage from having him scream in my ear so much. He generally screams and bites me if he’s on my shoulder and I try to remove him. I can’t figure out a way to get him off my shoulder that doesn’t result in the scream-in-the-ear, so I try not to let him get up there any more, but sometimes he sidles up anyway.

Here’s advice to anyone who does not own a conure: For the love of God, don’t get one.

His screaming upsets me the most when I’ve just taken care of his needs and I feel like he should be satisfied for a while. I can understand screaming if he’s hungry or neglected. But after I’ve brought him out of his cage to share breakfast with us, petted him, cleaned the cage, fed him, left the cage door open so he can hang out on his platform if he wants, and given him some veggies or fruit to keep him busy, I feel like he has no right to scream. Yet he often does. Moments after I’ve left the room, he erupts in a volley of deafening shrieks.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly saintlike, I go back in the room and say in a gentle voice, “Please don’t scream,” and cover up his cage (even though he was just covered all night, and it seems ridiculous to be putting him back to bed just an hour after he got up). If I am feeling slightly more frazzled or my daughter is whining and pulling at me or we’re running late and need to get out the door, I close the door of his room as a way of at least muffling the noise so that we can carry on (though the screams through the door are still loud enough to make it difficult to hold a conversation in the house). Some days I just lose it altogether. I walk back into his room, intending to tell him nicely to be quiet, but instead I yell, “SHUT UP! YOU BASTARD!” and wish I could wring his little birdy neck. I feel really ashamed of myself after I've done that. He's just a bird - I shouldn't let him get to me like that. But oh - if you could hear the intensity of the shrieks and how difficult it is to accomplish anything else in the house while it's going on - you would understand.

It amazes me that I harbor such angry feelings for this bird. There was a time when he was the light of my life. When I got him, I was just a kid, and he was my best friend. He would sit with me while I did my homework after school. He was my baby. I really missed him when I went away to college and couldn’t take him with me. In those days, his screams didn’t bother me so much – what bothered me was that my parents would yell at me: “Can you do something about your BIRD!” I would defend him, saying that he didn’t know any better and was just trying to communicate.

Now I feel like I’m completely unable to see inside his birdy head to figure out what he’s trying to communicate. Why is he so ungrateful that immediately after I’ve spent time with him, he’s demanding more? Why can’t he understand that I can’t attend to him every minute of the day? There are times when he makes the house virtually uninhabitable. He screams so incessantly and so loudly that we simply can’t stay indoors – I hustle my daughter out the door and we go shopping or go to the park to “wait it out.”

A true animal lover and ethologist would look at the pattern of his screaming and develop a compassionate plan for teaching him to change his behavior. Hmmm, he generally screams at the following times:
- in the morning after I’ve taken care of him
- around noon during or after the two hours of classical music that the radio is programmed to play automatically for him
- when anyone comes home (it sucks to step in the door with your arms full of stuff, tired and looking forward to sanctuary, only to get screamed at)
- when anyone is trying to talk on the phone
- when my daughter is being rambunctious
- when he sees a shadow that he thinks might be a hawk, or possibly a leaf
- when we have friends over
- when it’s “too quiet”
- in the late afternoons when the sun is slanting into his cage
- when anyone walks past the door of his room
- in the early evening when he’s getting tired.

The screaming can be silenced sometimes by covering up his cage, but not always. He definitely knows I don’t like it – when he’s been screaming and I approach the cage, he scuttles back into it like he knows he’s in trouble. But why does he keep doing it then? The ungenerous part of my brain wants to interpret his behavior as malicious: doing something he knows is aggravating.

Maybe he is just lonely and bored. Maybe he screams more than he used to because he doesn't get enough attention. I feel bad about that - after all, he's my pet, and it's my responsibility to meet his emotional needs. But I don't see how I can give him more. Like I said, I'm trying not to let him get on my shoulder any more because of the inevitable scream-and-bite, and having him on my hand makes it difficult for me to get stuff done. And most of the hours of the day I am either at work, busy freelancing, doing housework, taking care of my kid, or running errands. If I had any extra time to sit around... I'd use it to sleep.

So it's tricky. Besides the time issue, I am not sure I can really work with him to teach him anything different. For one thing, it would require me to be in perfect control of myself as I respond to each of his screaming fits – and that’s a time when I’m usually feeling furious. For another, I don’t think he is smart enough to learn anything. The way he screams when he knows (or should know) by now that it’s not the way to get what he wants, and the way he still freaks out about hawks or imagined hawks or falling leaves (when nothing has ever hurt him), suggest to me that he’s not the brightest bulb in the light string. Also, I would have to be really consistent about my response to his screaming. And that’s exactly why his screaming upsets me so much. I can’t drop what I’m doing every second to attend to him – that’s what I think he is demanding with his screams, which is unreasonable and spoiled of him, and I want him to understand that he can’t have that. I will give him daily affection, keep his cage clean, give him fresh food and water, regular baths, time outside, and toys – but I can’t be at his beck and call every moment.

Of course, my unwillingness to try to change his behavior means that the only course of action is to wait it out. It’s another 10 years, or more, if I take good care of him. It feels like a punishment.

Let Me Go To Rehab: I Say Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

2010-04-24T17:16:00.001-07:00

I was reading an article about women who have severe post-partum depression – like, really severe, to the point that they’re having suicidal thoughts and just can’t function. There are a few clinics around the country that specialize in that condition where women can check themselves (and their babies) in to get round-the-clock care until their condition resolves.

Then I started thinking about drug and alcohol clinics, and rehab in general, and… I don’t mean in any way to make light of how serious these conditions are – beyond anything I’ve experienced, for sure – but honestly, it just sounded… nice. I wish I could check myself into a clinic somewhere, to recover from life in general. Recently I’ve been staying up late to work– it’s the only way I can meet my deadlines, since I can’t do editing work while my daughter is awake. On the days that I go in to the office, my typical day goes like this:

7 am: get up and take care of her, feed the animals, tidy up, pack lunches, get ready for work
8-9 am: commute to work
9 am-5 pm: work at my jobby job
5 pm-6 pm: commute home
6-8 pm: fix dinner, wash dishes, put her to bed
8 pm-2 am: work at my freelance job
2-7 am: sleep

I am so drained and exhausted from the late nights. I nod off at my desk all the time, during the day. I’m falling behind on my work, despite my best efforts. On the days when I don’t have to go in to my jobby job, I just slouch around home like a zombie – trudge to the park pushing the stroller and sit glazed-over on a bench while she plays, scoop Spaghetti-Os out of a can for her lunch, participate in her games and potty training and other activities in silence and like I’m moving in slow motion. I have to use every minute of her nap time to edit, or I'll fall further behind – though what I want most in the world is to have a nap of my own.

To me, the idea of getting away to a clinic where I could sleep – sleep! – and someone would bring me meals, and people would talk to me about how to resolve my problems – it sounds heavenly. I have fantasies that the stress is the only reason I’m not menstruating, that if I could just get a little more rest, my fertility would come back, and my clear skin, and my shiny hair, and my husband would look at me with adoration again. But right now I’m on a treadmill and I feel like I'll never be able to get off.

Gettin' Served

2010-04-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

Today I had blood drawn to figure out why, oh why, after all these months I am still incapable of getting pregnant again (no angst there), and then, because it was a fasting blood test and I was about to faint, I got an oatmeal at Starbucks. In both places, I had the sense of being cared for by efficient, warm, service-industry people who had to get through hundreds of transactions a day but still managed to be kind to me, the individual customer they might never see again. I've been reading a psychology book about people who have trouble interacting socially (diagnoses like autism and severe antisocial tendencies). I thought how, at a basic animal level, my psyche would interpret both encounters as random strangers expressing caring for me, and if I was antisocial, they might represent a small bit of progress.

The phlebotomist greeted me with a warm smile and asked me if I'd had a good weekend. While she was filling up vials with my blood, she said, "Doing ok?" She was calm and reassuring, the kind of person I could imagine coaching me through any painful experience. The Starbucks cashier said "Sure thing" when I gave my order. A few minutes later, another employee noticed me standing there, even though the place was crowded and busy, and asked "What are you waiting on, ma'am?" and when I said oatmeal, he pushed the bag that had been sitting on the counter (which I had suspected was mine but was too shy to reach for) over to me. I thought it was so nice that he even noticed I had been standing there for several minutes. He could easily have ignored me and focused on serving more assertive customers. I walked out with my oatmeal (delicious - warm, perfectly cooked - and it comes with a packet of brown sugar, some dried fruit, and nuts to mix in), feeling, even though I had just conducted business transactions with various strangers - loved.

Riddle-me-ree

2010-04-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here are two riddles that my clever husband thought up.

Riddle #1:
"I look surprised, but I'm the one who shocks."

I guessed "electric eel," which just made him shake his head sadly. The answer is not electric eel. But it's something that you can guess, if you think about it.

Riddle #2:
"If there's just one, it's real, but if there's two, it's not."

This one is obviously impossible to get without a hint. So here's a hint: It has to do with Vietnamese cuisine.

And just for good measure, here is his all-time favorite joke (that I think he also made up):
"Why do giraffes make bad teachers?"

Because their explanations go over their students' heads!

Playing Her Like a Fish

2010-03-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

Two thoughts about parenting.

First, I think since my daughter's birth I have frequently had the sense, in a pervasive but generally subconscious way, of being superhumanly patient with another person's rudeness. That's a blunt way to put it. What I mean is, despite knowing on a conscious level that a baby is just a wild and helpless, uncivilized little being, not responsible for its behavior, not in control of its feelings, and having expected that from the time before I became a mother, and being fine with it - on an unconscious level there is a feeling of forbearance as I continue patiently, calmly, cleaning up after and reassuring this little person who is screaming bloody murder in my face.

When she's pitching a tantrum or hitting me because she's frustrated and exhausted, my instinctive response is to give as good as I get. I'd like to defend myself and wallop her right back, but instead I talk to her in a soothing, gentle voice, helping her calm down, reminding her that we don't hit. When she's overtired, I put up with her shrieking at me and basically taking out her unhappiness on me, even though I did nothing to deserve it. As she throws her dish of vegetables on the floor and yells, "No Mama! NO broccoli!" I instantly tamp down the flicker of anger that flares up and respond in a measured, thoughtful way. As she whines and clings to my knee because she's bored, I would like to kick her loose, but instead I ignore her and continue wiping the kitchen countertop to show her that that's not a good way to get my attention.

I'd never put up with an adult treating me the way she does. Having spent very little time around babies before I had one, for many years I've been accustomed to civility and reasonableness. With a kid, I have to set aside those expectations and rise above it. I am getting good at it. I wonder sometimes if this daily repression of my true feelings is going to have any long-term consequences. Is it going to just make me a much more patient and nice person, willing to turn the other cheek when adults treat me badly too, just because I've had so much practice? Or am I going to erupt in craziness one day because I'm so fed up with responding to ill manners with graciousness?

Which is not to say that she's such a monster. 90% of the time, she is adorable and sweet and so good-hearted. She hugs and kisses me all the time. I love listening to her pretend to read out loud to her stuffed animals. Her giggle is my favorite sound in the world. It's just when she's overtired or hungry that she turns into a brat. Because she is so wonderful most of the time, it gives me strength to get through the difficult moments and to try to have sympathy for her feelings.

My second thought about parenting is that I often get a vision of myself playing a big, powerful fish on a line. When I'm trying to get things accomplished or to get her clean/fed/dressed/whatever, I have to be subtle about it. I watch for my opportunity as she flings herself around, then quickly reel in some line, then let her fight a bit more, then when there's a chance reel in a bit more. Like when I'm putting her to bed and she's resisting. You can't just march her through the steps. You have to give her a five-minute warning, then subtly get her down the hall to the bathroom, then into the bathroom (and close the door behind you or she'll run back out), then calmly put toothpaste on her brush as she hurls herself on the floor whining, wait for her initial fight to die down before you hand her the brush or she just flings it aside, give it to her at the right moment, etc. Walk her through the steps of toothbrushing, diaper change, bedtime story, and transfer into the crib. It takes some skill. She's strong enough now to resist, and it's not always possible to force her to do something, so we have to be smart about it.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the sequence of events that has to transpire before we can get out the door and to a particular destination, but then I just shorten the focus to what's happening right now, and to the next step that I need her to take, and it becomes a simple decision: is she, at this moment, actively struggling while I wait for my chance, or is she resting and I can reel in some line?

These are not the kinds of thoughts I expected to have about parenting. Back when I was pregnant, I thought it would be all starry-eyed discoveries like "she can chew on her own toes!" and relating cute things my kid had said or done. Now I look at people I know who are less patient or less gentle than I am and wonder how they will manage when they have kids. It's both a bigger and a more interesting challenge than I expected.

Because It's There

2010-03-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

My husband bought a large jar of Nutella to make sandwiches with, and put it in the cupboard. It turned out to have a really short half-life. I guess I've forgotten how good Nutella is, it's been so long since I had any. It is amazing. It's this creamy, rich, chocolatey, very smooth and velvety delicious wonderfulness that is like licking the best ice cream in the world. But better. I found myself completely unable to resist sneaking out to the kitchen in spare moments to eat it directly out of the jar. Who needs sandwiches? My preferred method is a spoon.

At last, thank goodness, the temptation was gone. The jar was empty.

Tonight my husband wanted to make a sandwich and was looking for it. I tried to play it off at first. "What jar?" Finally I fessed up. "You're looking for the Nutella? It's right here." - patting my stomach. He was mildly horrified that I had actually eaten all of it. "But the jar was almost full!" Yes indeed. And now my stomach is. Honestly, I made it last for most of a week. It was pretty good restraint, considering how yummy I find that stuff to be.

"Oh well," he said, and pushed aside some stuff in the cupboard and hauled out a second, secret jar that I hadn't known about. Aaah! Now that he's opened it, I've got to deal with the roaring temptation all over again! I want to chuck that stuff out the window. Or put it in the lunchroom at work. It's like crack to me. As long as that opened jar exists, I will be conscious of it and wanting it - because it's there.

At least I do have a plan for coping. Last spring, I gave up sugar for Lent. It was really difficult - turns out sugar, or its equivalent, is in almost everything. Some of my favorite foods that I had to forgo included peanut butter, jelly, yogurt, popcorn with seasoning, tea with honey, pancakes made from a mix, a lot of cereals, and of course anything of the cookie/cake/dessert persuasion. I craved those things like you wouldn't believe. At midnight on Easter, I was watching the clock in the car as we drove home from a party, and at 12:01 am I was ripping into a blueberry pie and eating it with my bare hands. I vowed that I would never be so foolish as to give up sugar again.

Anyway, my new plan is not to try to give up sugar, but rather to pay for it as I go. I have a routine involving crunches and other ab exercises, that takes about 7 minutes to do. My plan is that I have to do that routine at least once a day, and again every time I eat a serving of something dessertlike. I don't get away with it if I'm too busy one day or if I forget - it just gets added to my tab and I have to do it at some point.

Good idea, right? The first day I put it into effect, it worked. I was sitting in my chair thinking about getting a slice of banana bread to eat after dinner, and then I thought about all the extra crunches I'd have to do, and decided not to eat the banana bread. Yay!

The only problem is that due to a few nights of abandon I've now racked up a rather high tab. I owe (the universe? myself?) 11 exercise routines. Doing the routine more than twice a day is really difficult, I find - my muscles get so tired and shaky I can barely get through it. In order to catch up to where I'm supposed to be, I'll need to both avoid sweets and do extra crunches. Urgh. I must be kidding myself to think that I could ever get through natural childbirth, with willpower this weak.

Again with the Childbirth Stuff

2010-03-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

What is it with celebrities? I'm convinced that they are able to defy the physical laws that govern the rest of us. I always figured that yes, they have the financial means to do whatever they like, and access to ridiculous luxuries that the common folk don't, and they live in some sort of exalted atmosphere where they all know each other and only date one another. But, I figured some things would still apply. Celebrity mothers who want to have their own babies still have to go through childbirth like the rest of us, for example.

But no. It seems that even there, the rules don't apply. I was reading an article about Gisele Bundchen's home birth (home birth, and especially natural birth, is very popular among celebs), and she said, "It wasn't painful - not even a little bit." That astonishes me. Childbirth pain seems to be a bit different in intensity for different people, ranging from "pretty bad but I could handle it" to "extreme torture and I wanted to die." But natural unmedicated birth not even a little painful? How is that possible?

And what's up with her modeling six weeks after the birth and apparently, being back in model-shape? How in the world could she get her flat belly back in that time? I'm 2.5 years post-partum and my belly skin still sags. My midwife told me not to do any kind of exercises (except Kegels) or housework for the first six weeks, to give my body time to recover and to avoid tearing the stomach muscles, which are all stretched out after delivery. Of course, models are used to just not eating for a few weeks at a time, which probably helps, but if you're breast-feeding, which she is, you have to eat. So how did Gisele do it?

And she's not the only one. I've seen pictures of Nicole Kidman two weeks after delivery, apparently wearing skinny jeans, and other celebrity moms like Jessica Alba who looked toned and completely flat while their babies were still only a few months old. I know they have access to personal trainers and special diets, but still! It seems miraculous. I have to assume that the same superior genetics that give them better than average looks also help them recover their prepregnant appearance so quickly.

Even the basic rules of biology don't seem to apply to them. I recently read that the "pregnant man" (Thomas Beatie) is expecting again. This will be the couple's third child in three years. That's a feat - bearing a child takes so much in the way of resources, it's impressive that he is able to do it back-to-back like that. My child will be three years old soon and I'm still not capable of getting pregnant again (sigh - the period I wrote about before wasn't for real after all). And he was conceiving and carrying to term in a body that had been confused for years by hormone infusions. It's surprising to me that after all those hormones (he has a beard, for goodness sakes!), his body still knew how to grow a child.

To top it off, his wife is breastfeeding each child. She was able to induce lactation with a combination of hormones and breast-pump stimulation, even though she didn't give birth. Lots of women who did go through pregnancy and give birth to their own children then find they can't breastfeed, for whatever reason. And here this woman who was not even pregnant is doing it like it's no big deal. I feel like less of a woman than either of them.

Birth

2010-03-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

My midwife who delivered my baby a couple years ago just had her own first child. I knew she was due right around now and was checking her web site every few days, hoping for good news. She just posted the pictures of her beautiful daughter and a brief birth story. She had her baby at home, a water birth in her bathtub, with her husband to help her. I am so happy for her that everything went well and that she had the "right" kind of labor and delivery that she wanted.

I feel like the stakes were higher for her than for other people - she's assisted thousands of women with their childbirths (and is a staunch proponent of letting things happen naturally and avoiding unnecessary interventions), so I think people kind of had their eye on her - thinking, "so when it's her turn to be in labor, is she really going to decline pain meds?" Not that she pressured me in any way when I was in labor. At prenatal visits, I announced my intention to try for a natural birth, and she said she'd do everything she could to help me achieve that. After 20 hours of labor when I asked for an epidural, she didn't try to talk me out of it, just said "OK!" and turned to the nurse and relayed the request. Afterwards she said, "I'm usually anti-epidural, but I think in your case it was helpful."

All the same, since she's assisted so many births and studied the process for so many years, I think people expected her to really make her own childbirth an example, do it the way she felt was best for everyone. And she lived up to that. I can't imagine that having a 10-pound baby with no pain relief in your bathtub could be anything short of excruciatingly painful, but she did it, and didn't sound too phased by it in her birth announcement. I'm relieved, not just that the baby is healthy and she's fine and everything is going well, but that she has nothing to kick herself about now. She will know forever that when it was her turn, she did it "the right way."

It does make me feel - even though I'm not in a position where I need to be an example for anyone; I'm accountable to no one but myself - that if I ever have another baby, I should really try to do it on my own. In other words, at home without drugs. A lot of women who have epidurals the first time around seem to be able to manage without them the second time. Maybe because labor is typically faster, maybe because they have the simple confidence that they can do it. Obviously I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about not having done it naturally, my first time, and I would like to be able to manage better the second time. I can't explain why this is important to me. I don't really believe that the epidural was harmful to my baby, and I really was in agony when I requested it, and since the option exists it seems silly to decline it. Like climbing Everest without oxygen, when you could just as well take some and lose a lot fewer brain cells getting up to the summit and back. It's that purist, black-and-white, right-and-wrong mentality that I usually like to avoid.

All the same. There is something so warm and wholesome and family-oriented about the idea of having that experience. Of proving to my husband how strong I am. Of doing something together that will become a part of our family history - having those first moments belong to us, rather than to a hospital room.

Grasping Nettles

2010-03-06T18:11:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I read a story called Grasp the Nettle Firmly, by Enid Blyton (1940s English author, par for the course - I read almost nothing but English children's books throughout my childhood). It was a kind of prissy, moralistic story (par for Enid Blyton, much as I love her descriptions of quaint WWII-era England) about how a boy named George gets in trouble by running away from his problems. He's washing his hands in the loo and the soap squirts out of his hands and flies out the window, and instead of immediately fessing up to the headmaster, he quietly mooches back to his seat and doesn't say anything. The next boy to use the toilet runs back and says, "The soap was gone! George was the last to use it, he must have taken it!" and everyone blames him. This is part of a sequence of incidents, each leading to the next; because George's hands aren't clean he can't eat his lunch, so the headmaster decides he's ill, so he gets sent home, etc. Everything just keeps escalating.

In the end he realizes that all the misunderstandings could have been averted if he had just faced the first one head-on and accepted responsibility. An old plowman tells him that if you grasp a nettle tentatively, it will sting you, but "grasp the nettle firmly and it can do you no harm." (I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me that the nettle's stinging hairs would puncture your skin no matter how firmly you took hold of it - you might avoid injury if you grasped it at a certain angle, or slid your hand onto the nettle brushing the hairs back as you went.)

Anyway, I was thinking about this story recently because I've had occasion to apply its lesson. At work, I had to get a bunch of participants conferenced in for a big meeting by phone, and I screwed it up. It was awkward, because everyone who was there had to sit around waiting while I got the folks on the phone, and it took some time. Even as it was happening, I knew my boss was going to take me aside later and have one of those talks with me, like she does every time I mess something up. I hate sitting around in dread, not knowing when she's going to call me in for it. My instinct was to just hide in the bathroom the rest of the day. But after the meeting, not giving myself time to even think about it, I went right to her office and proactively apologized for wasting people's time. I explained what I'll do to avoid the problem in future and explained why I had made the mistake in the first place (thought our phone system could do something it couldn't). I could tell she appreciated my forthrightness. I noticed that she had written on her to-do list my name and "find out why not prepared for mtg." I saw her cross it off the list as I turned to leave the office, and felt a rush of relief at having gotten it over with. Whew!

I've also been feeling upset and worried recently about a situation with some of our neighbors. The utility company cut a bunch of branches from one of their trees and left the branches in a pile on their lawn. We also had some big branches down after a recent storm, too big to get rid of easily. After the work crew drove away, I figured they would be back soon with a truck to pick up the pile, so I dragged my branches across the street and added them to the heap. I thought the pile of branches would get picked up within the hour. Instead, it just sat there all afternoon, and all the next day. I started feeling intensely guilty for dumping my branches on the neighbor's lawn. I finally went over to talk to them about it - they weren't home, so I left a note in their door explaining what I had done.

Later, the neighbor came over to talk to me. He was sort of nice on the surface, but veiled-threat underneath, said some things about how he didn't know me, and how it's not right to "throw trash on other people's property." I was very apologetic and said (about four times) that I would remove my branches, but each time he told me not to, and ended with "if you take those branches back, I'm calling the police to arrest you for trespassing." It seemed like it might have been a joke, except that he wasn't smiling.

The trash pick-up day came and went, and no one picked up the branches. After a week of stewing about it, I finally called the county to see if I could schedule a pickup, and was told that it's the homeowner's responsibility. I felt really stuck - wanted to fix the problem, but he had blocked my ability to do so by telling me not to take the branches back. I felt dread and guilt every time I looked out the window at that pile of branches, to the point that I wished we could move away.

I finally grasped the nettle today. I baked a loaf of banana bread and took it over to the neighbors. The wife answered the door and was perfectly nice to me. I apologized again about the branches and said that we would remove them. Then I got my husband to help me saw them up into small pieces, tied them in bundles, and put them on our lawn. They should be regulation-size now so the trash guys will take them. (I hope I don't get arrested.)

Once I was finally able to fix the issue, I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I know I'm silly to let such a little thing throw me. I just can't handle confrontation. The whole time the banana bread was baking I was trembling with nervousness and didn't want to go over there - afraid of getting yelled at. I just told myself, "Take your medicine!" and went through the motions, wrapping the warm loaf in tin foil, getting my daughter's coat on, carrying her out the door with me, until the whole incident was over and I could relax.

Hoping now that I won't need to grasp any more nettles for a little while.

McOuting

2010-02-05T12:39:00.000-08:00

Today I took my daughter to McDonald's for lunch. We sat in a window booth looking out at the falling snow, eating chicken nuggets. She was totally happy, and, watching her excitement as she bounced in her seat, I felt happy too. It was like a bit of the American dream. I felt like I was buying into something fake and commercial and junk foody, the kind of thing that I'm supposed to avoid. (I should be feeding her organic apple slices, right? and encouraging her to play imaginative games with old-fashioned toys made of sustainably harvested wood.) But - sometimes I just get tired of trying to be responsible. And today's outing was so easy and fun.

One Sentence

2010-01-29T13:55:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting site: onesentence.org. The guy who runs it chooses the most interesting sentences that people submit to publish. I think he's eventually going to put them together in a book, which is an idea I wish I'd had. I submitted a few sentences but none of mine got chosen, so I'm going to publish them here instead. So there.

I should note that these may draw from an aspect of my real life but are not necessarily true to life.

In his own language my parrot screamed, "I am so glad to see you!" and in my own language I screamed back, "Shut up!"

No matter how many times I hit refresh, he didn't write back.

Just when I'd given up hope, I started bleeding.

I miss the afternoons when I would run home from school, climb the tallest tree in the back yard, and sit for hours in my favorite fork, being alone and wild.

Tousled and hot from her nightmare, she reached for the cup of water and murmured, "sank you, Ma-ma," making my throat clench up.

He thought it was cute when I got a nose ring and took up smoking, but he still preferred the girl in his punk band.

I was about ten when I realized that despite my daydreams, I'd never survive in the wild.

After I had a baby, I didn't love my body any more, so by way of apology I fed it chocolate.

If I die tomorrow, I will profoundly regret having spent today glued to a chair.

"Twenty years from now," he said as he held me, our hips pressed together in the cold October dusk, "I'm going to think, "Man, I wish I was back in that graveyard."

I wanted to live a short, intense, breathlessly vivid life, but instead I got glasses, read books and lived a long, indoor, safe one.

His nose was running and I felt the cool moisture trail across my cheek as he fervently kissed me, but nothing about him could disgust me, and that's when I realized that I loved him.

Reading my childhood journals just makes me sad because I had so much promise.

At Thanksgiving I gave thanks for good health and my family smiled, because they didn't know.

I thought I might be the boy-next-door's MILF, but instead he ignored me, just the way boys like him did back in high school.

Vampires and Body Image

2009-12-26T14:26:00.000-08:00

I saw New Moon last night. My husband and his brother were going to see Avatar - which seems pretty cool, with the 3D glasses and all - but I wanted to see vampires & werewolves (and New Moon was my favorite book in the series) so at the last minute I went to that instead, by myself. I'm glad I caught it while it was still in the theaters. And I'm glad I watched it on my own. I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd had to drag anyone who might find it less absorbing than I did.

For me, it was all about the fantasy that you can be unfriendly and mysterious and sit at a lunch table by yourself gazing out the window wracked with sorrow, and others will find that alluring. When I was in high school and didn't have friends, and was full of unrequited love, no one cared. Everyone was too absorbed in their own dramas to even notice.

I might sound critical, but I thought the movie was great. I was in it, from the first scene to the last, drinking in the beauty of snowy complexions and wind-blown hair, the tensions of adolescent romance, everything against a backdrop of magnificent pine woods and cliffs. I loved the werewolf fight. The soundtrack brought just the right element of pathos and intensity.

Afterwards, I looked at my body in the bathroom mirror and felt... ugly. My body sags in the wrong places ever since I had a child, and my hair is rough, not shining, and my skin is dry and ordinary. I wish I still looked like I was seventeen. I almost want to cry, thinking that I never will again. In New Moon, everyone loves Bella because she is beautiful and sad, but there is nothing lovable about being ugly.

Plans for the Perfect Family

2009-11-24T08:39:00.000-08:00

Back in 2005 I started a draft of a post that I never finished. It has poignancy now because it's from the pre-kid time, even the pre-marriage time. Here it is:

Someday I want to teach the "when I first came to this land" song to my kids, if I have any. But I'll write new words so the guy will name his animals nice things (and he won't get to name his wife). The melody is really pretty and it's fun to sing. I would like to be one of those families where the kids sing and roll down grassy hills giggling and we all genuinely like each other.

So that I don't forget - here are some more basic things I want to share with my kids:

The Wishing Song ("Oh, I wish I was a hole in the ground...")
Books like The Ox-Cart Man, The Runaway Bunny, and Goodnight Moon
Sunday walks and the Path Pioneer tradition
Corn shucking, leaf raking, and other excuses to be outside
How to interact with animals and read their body language
Making popcorn on the stove
Howling at a full moon
Saying "rabbits" first thing in the morning the first day of the month
Making a wish when you drive under a bridge that has a train going over it (you also have to grab a button and take your feet off the floor as you are wishing)
Listening to classical music
Having tea after dinner while watching PBS or Mystery, like my parents do
When a family member comes home, meeting them at the door and hugging/kissing them

So, that was the draft. And now I really do have a family and a kid I can share some of these things with. I do read the three books that I mentioned to her. And we do make popcorn together, listen to music, and hug and kiss each time one of us leaves or comes home. So that's all good. The Path Pioneer tradition is one that I was thinking about resurrecting just recently. It would be easier if she could walk further - right now we're pretty much limited to routes that are paved so I can push her stroller. But we'll get there. Soon enough, I hope, she'll be darting through the woods ahead of me, spotting bracket fungi and pointing out birds and collecting leaves and rocks for me to carry and urging me and my husband to hurry up.

Chopped Liver

2009-11-20T22:01:00.000-08:00

The train was crowded as usual on my way home this afternoon. I was standing in the middle of the train car, gripping the bar above my head with one hand for balance and holding my book open with the other, crammed up against strangers on all sides.

As we pulled into one station, the guy sitting in the seat slightly to my left stood up and made his way to the door. I glanced at the man next to me on my left, checking to see whether he wanted the seat before I took it. Instead of meeting my eyes, he looked past me to another woman who was standing a few feet away and said, "Would you like a seat?" She smiled at him and said, "Why yes, thank you." She had to push completely past me to get to the seat. I had a moment of brief outrage when I almost said something. It's not that I wanted to sit down so badly. I just didn't understand why he had done that.

First I thought maybe he wanted to flirt with her. She was a bit younger than me. But she wasn't noticeably more attractive than me, and wasn't pregnant, carrying any bags, or otherwise in need of a seat. And the guy didn't speak to her or look at her again the rest of the ride, so he apparently didn't offer her a seat in order to strike up a conversation.

It was easier to pretend the whole thing hadn't happened, and to keep reading my book, than to speak up. I don't know what I would have said, anyway. "Hey, I'm right here!" was what I really wanted to say.

I guess that balances out the time in the train a couple weeks ago, when a young soldier hit on me. He was making eye contact from the time we were standing on the platform together, commenting on the crowd and the trains, though I tried to ignore him. Then when we stepped onto the train he started asking me about the bus schedule and I answered so as not to be rude. Before long he was talking about his time in Iraq, showing me a picture on his cell phone of his 6-month-old daughter (with an already-ex-wife), and telling me about his midterms. He was so forward. I wasn't being encouraging at all, not volunteering anything, just answering the bare minimum to not be mean. I did mention that I too had a daughter, thinking that would put him off. He scribbled his name and email on a piece of paper and gave it to me. He was obviously barking up the wrong tree, chatting up a married woman who's ten years older than him, but I couldn't help feeling a little "still got it" glow that someone noticed me.

A Period of Celebration

2009-11-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

I started my period today! Yay! I am ridiculously happy about it. It just feels so good to be normal again, at least for a little while. I don't know if I'll be able to keep it up, or if I'm just having this one period and then won't get another for another six months. I have been thinking of it in terms of a mental struggle, like it wasn't happening for me because I didn't want it badly enough (but I did want it!), and it won't happen again unless I really concentrate and try (but I don't know how to do that).

It shouldn't be like that. Most women don't have to concentrate and will their periods to happen, they just happen all by themselves. I guess it's mental for me because that's the only way I can have any control over it - I can't physically flex a muscle to make it happen - and because periods are responsive to your state of mind sometimes. Last time I talked to my obgyn about it she asked if I was worried or stressed out, implying that my period was missing because of my state of mind. I felt like she was one step away from saying, "It's your own fault that you're not getting your period. You must subconsciously not want to have another child." But I do want to have another child. It's been so frustrating and saddening to me not to be capable of that, when my first child is two and a half already, and all around me the mothers who had babies around the same time as I did are now having or have already had their second.

So, in short, I wasn't worried or stressed out before, but having this mysterious thing wrong with me was starting to make me that way. I've spent the past few months beating myself up mentally because I wasn't menstruating, and being angry at my body for being wrong and abnormal. Now, as relieved as I am that I am once again back in the realm of the normal people, I am full of fear that I won't be able to keep it up.

Well. For now, everything is fine. I will celebrate my normalcy and try not to think about whether it will continue.

Coffee, Carbon, and Climate

2009-11-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

Today I drank three large cups of coffee. I never drink coffee. Hours later, I'm still feeling the effects - I feel a little queasy, a lot nervous, and my hands are shaking. I think the coffee is partly to blame for me picking a fight with my husband about global environmental change when I got home. The day of lectures on ecology and climate change that I attended, which inspired and depressed me, is more to blame, however, and is also the reason for the coffee. I'm so perpetually sleep-deprived these days that I didn't want to nod off and miss anything, so I kept slurping coffee in between talks. Maybe now I need a shot of whiskey to sober up.

The overriding theme of the day was that catastrophic change is, at this point, inevitable. All day long we looked at graphs of carbon dioxide levels rising up from 280 ppm in the preindustrial era, past 350 ppm (the limit to the "safe" range to which our environment can be expected to adapt), to 390 ppm today, on its way to 450 ppm in just a few years. Ecosystems all over the world are poised on the brink of a tipping point beyond which they can't be brought back. The Amazon rainforest generates a large proportion of its own rainfall, for instance, through evapotranspiration. The percentage of deforestation beyond which the region will be unable to generate this moisture and will steadily head toward desertification is 20%. Currently, we're at 19%. This was just one of many terrifying statistics I heard today from the top experts in the field, who are certainly in a position to know.

The comment that touched off the argument with my husband was something the keynote speaker mentioned. Someone asked him about the prospects for future life on earth. He said, "Oh, the planet will survive, of course. It will even recover its biodiversity to current-day levels. It will just take a long time. Our species will not be around to witness it." That concept really struck home with me.

On the way home, I listened to NPR, and the day's top stories were all about the situation in Afghanistan, and the Fort Hood shooter, and the politics of human societies seemed so petty in contrast to the enormous environmental spasm our planet is undergoing. I felt irritated that our political leaders were being distracted by these stupid trivialities when they should be focused on climate change, exclusively. It's like someone said, "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." It's so frustrating that the political will to change is so weak, and most people are so clueless and ignorant about what's happening. The argument started because my husband suggested that if I knew anyone involved in the Fort Hood incident, that I'd rate that as more important. And I just don't think anything is more important than climate change. Period. How could the deaths of a few people, or a few hundred, or a few million, be more important than the certain extinction of most of the species on earth, including our own?

I felt like there was a handful of climate scientists and ecologists who understood what was happening, and the rest of humanity was either blissfully ignorant or willfully in denial about it, and I wanted him to be with me in the handful.

And It's Not Even Thanksgiving Yet

2009-11-06T18:58:00.001-08:00

I've cheered up. I never seem to stay down for long. Today a friend and I were counting our blessings, and we just kept thinking of more and more. She's a social worker so she sees a lot of people who are in desperate straits financially and don't necessarily have support networks to help them out - so one illness, one accident, or one downsizing is all that stands between them and ruin. We're so lucky that we're shielded from that kind of poverty, that we have families we could always go back to, that our options for employment are varied. Losing our jobs wouldn't be the end of the world for us. We're young and in good health. We both have the babies we always wanted and dreamed of having, and husbands we love dearly who cherish us. Neither of us has ever lost a parent, a sibling, or a close friend. The world is full of perils, but we're insulated from the worst of them. As we talked together, we felt better and better.

It's funny because we started out talking about all the things we're scared of - H1N1, rape, random violence. But then we just deliberately started thinking about how, more than likely, the worst wouldn't befall us. Which is not to get cocky about it - you never know what fate might have in store for you. But it is better to live appreciating your relative good fortune from day to day, than to live in fear of a multitude of disasters.

Whine

2009-10-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

Today I'm feeling terribly down on myself. I'm trying, but somehow I'm still letting everything slide. I make all these brave resolutions about eating well and staying on top of things and getting to bed at a decent hour, and they all come to naught. I end up staying up till 1 or 2 am, night after night, eating chocolate just to keep myself awake, working on things that were due yesterday. My willpower is weak and I self-medicate a lot to get myself through. I'm feeling frumpy and bulgy. My hair looks witchy. I'm so exhausted all the time and vaguely resentful that other people get to sleep and I don't. Sometimes, when I finally do get to go to bed, I waste the first half hour just lying there feeling sorry for myself, because I know I'll have to get up again in just a few hours, and it's not going to be enough. I wish I had my mom's ironclad willpower - she can resist anything - and my elf-friend's trim little figure - and my daughter's sleep schedule.

Love in the Time of the Brunch

2009-10-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I sorted through a drawer of mementos that I kept from a particularly turbulent time in my life (and threw out most of it). There were poems written by The Wrong Guy, cards and love letters, ticket stubs from concerts I went to with The Right Guy, the receipt from our evening at a coffeehouse together, cartoons we drew together, a short story he wrote, and much much more. Also a lot of angsty lists of things relating to the Wrong Guy relationship and things that he wanted me to do differently. We were in crisis all the time. Reading it all reminded me vividly of how awful it was being with him. He really tore me up. I still haven't and probably won't ever forgive him. I just invested so much into trying to help him and in return I got all this emotional misery and blame and anger pinned on me and he made me responsible for everything that went wrong - including things that I obviously had nothing to do with and couldn't change - and he was vicious to me when I couldn't fix those things. He would scream at me until I was crying and physically knocking my head against the wall and he still wouldn't stop. I am such a calm, reasonable person normally, but if I'd stayed with him I would've been suicidal - it was only a matter of time. I do remember crying hysterically nearly every day during the two months that we dated. I am still astonished at myself for getting into such a hurtful relationship. I lost a lot of trust in my own judgment because of that.

Anyway, I came to my senses and got out. And now I'm with this guy who is just a model of normalcy in comparison. He's loving and sweet and emotionally whole and never tries to hurt me. Our daily life is serene. Just reading over some of my journal entries from the earlier time was making me start to hyperventilate, and I felt so frickin grateful that that's not my life any more.

But at the same time I got glimpses - especially in the journal entries from the early days - of the good stuff that lured me in. Early on, he seemed like just the type of person I was looking for. He was artistic and creative and took a real interest in my poetry. He encouraged my writing. I felt like, "Ah! Here's someone I can share all those types of things with." We had these intense, philosophical, all-night conversations and we read Thurber's The White Deer aloud to each other and sang old English madrigals together. He liked all that stuff just as much as I do. We would both get lit up about the same intellectual things. Tracking down one literary reference would remind us of another, and so on. We could spend hours just reading snippets of things to each other.

I miss that. There isn't much that my husband and I can share like that. I've tried to get him to read books aloud with me - one of my favorite things to do, and I think it's so romantic. I am actually really jealous of couples that do this. It's not something he enjoys. Today I mentioned the short story he wrote, the only one he's ever written to my knowledge. It's an incredibly good story. I told him again how much I liked it and said he should do more fiction writing. He just shrugged and said he doesn't see the point of fiction. He didn't even consider doing it.

Lately I have been doing a lot more of my own creative writing. I've written a few short stories. Nothing much good, so far, but the process is fun. And I know I will get better as I get my writing muscles back. I thought he might be interested or curious in what I was writing and ask about it, but he hasn't. So I haven't even had the chance to say "it's not good enough to show to anyone." He hasn't even asked me, broadly, what I'm writing about. I was thinking that if I could work up his interest in writing again, we could have our own little writers' club and share stuff with each other. I would love to read anything he wrote. And being accountable to someone else would keep me producing. All my writing in the past has been done for creative writing classes or for writing clubs that I started with friends. I seem to need to feel accountable, to someone, or I just don't write. (All the writing clubs ended the same way, with the other members flaking out.)

Anyway, I got pretty much a non-response when I brought up the idea. It was part of a larger idea of mine, really, that we should go out for brunch at a local restaurant every Sunday. There are so many good restaurants in our area that I'm interested to try. I also think going out for brunch is a real treat - it makes me feel excited and happy to think of it, like a kid. I thought it would be good for us to establish a tradition, because then we can start to anticipate and wonder during the week, "where will we go next?" and save up fun stuff to tell each other at brunch, and so on. At home, we often are like ships passing in the night. I'm busy feeding the baby and myself or doing chores, while he's tapping away on his laptop, not even in the same room, and sometimes it seems like we don't even make eye contact all evening, let alone have a conversation. I thought a weekly brunch when we could reconnect and talk about our relationship, plans for the future, etc. would be good for our marriage. It would be like therapy, except without the therapist - our time to work through stuff together, with a side of home fries and toast.

So today was our first brunch outing. I loved the restaurant that I picked for our inaugural brunch. The food was delicious, the atmosphere was good, I was feeling chipper. He was more or less like a block of wood through the whole meal. I kept chatting away, holding up my end of the conversation and more. I brought up my sharing writing idea, and how many kids we might want to have, and our friendships with other couples, and our plans for the landscaping around the house, and a book I've been reading, and my plan to enter some 5K races this fall. He hardly said anything the whole meal. I would introduce a topic of conversation, and say a few things, unhurried, open, warm, and invite his comment, but he would just sit there. So after a while I'd say a little more, give a slightly different perspective or ask if he thought such and such. He would shrug, or look down at his food. I would think of some more things to say, and say them, with appropriate pauses in between and more invitation of his opinion. He didn't even look at me throughout most of the meal. I was doing all the work. I had energy to do it, but I also felt saddened that he wasn't making an effort.

It's unfair of me to write in this vein, because he wasn't feeling well. Halfway through the meal I decided to call a spade a spade, so I came right out and said, "OK. It's your turn to think of a topic of conversation now." And I just waited and smiled at him. He seemed to be tuning in from a long way away. He looked at me (finally!) and said, "Actually, I'm feeling a little woozy." He's been having weird health issues lately, episodes of dizziness. I said, "Do you want to lie down or something?" He said, "Maybe." So he went out to the car to rest, while I ate the rest of my meal and supervised our toddler's meal and paid for the food and got a box for his and collected the diaper bag and coats in one arm and picked up the kid in the other arm and picked up the food bag in my teeth and went out. I felt sorry that he wasn't feeling well, particularly that it was a feeling-woozy kind of not well, because I know what that's like and it's so unpleasant. (He perked up later in the day.)

I had flashbacks to The Wrong Guy relationship, though, because he had so many health issues and was always needing to be cosseted. I think part of my impatience now with people who are sick or fragile is a reaction to that. It's like the takehome message I learned from that relationship was, don't cosset people. Because they will just make it all your fault that they're feeling poorly, and throw it back in your face if you're unable to help them. If I could go back in time I wouldn't buy into his manipulativeness; half the time I don't think he even was feeling bad, just trying to get my sympathy. And using it as an excuse so the attention would be on him and we could work on helping him with his issues (again), shelving mine (again).

So deep down inside I have this little warning voice telling me that my husband was just trying to get sympathy and to get out of having to talk with me. The one time we had all week, our therapy time, and he played the not-feeling-well card to get out of it. I know it's completely unfair of me to feel that way. He has been having these mysterious episodes, and it's a bit scary that we don't know what's causing it.

To be honest, though, even though it's unfair to feel this, I was annoyed that he was so unresponsive and wooden. He is like that a lot, even when he's not feeling woozy. It's a basic aspect of his personality. Back in the turbulent time a few years ago, I loved it that we were so stable together. We could just sit and watch a movie together and not fight, and it was bliss. It was actually possible to enjoy aspects of life when he was around, whereas with The Wrong Guy everything had to be about our drama-filled relationship, and he was quite willing to scrap the evening's entertainments in favor of raking me over some coals.

But I do wish my husband would make a little more effort sometimes. It's like riding a horse with a hard mouth. You have to haul around on the reins to get them to even notice. The Wrong Guy was a feather touch. Especially if I wanted to talk about our relationship, he'd give me his full, intense attention and be ready with all this touchy-feely emotional psychotherapy. He was always interested in sharing our feelings.

I love my husband to pieces. I'm grateful to have him, and I know that what we have together is good in so many ways. My whole baseline level of happiness is way higher than it used to be. In fact, just the other day we were riding somewhere in the warm car, with autumn foliage outside, and a great song playing, and I was so happy to be with him. I thought, "This would've been an oasis of joy, at other times in my life. Now, it's just normal."

So, I'm not having marriage-questioning doubts or anything. Just recognizing that yes, that woodenness that drives me crazy sometimes is here to stay. And if I want a literary/inspirational conversation, I'm going to have to find someone else to have it with. And if I want to feel supported or encouraged about my writing, I will have to find that within. No matter how much French toast we order together.

Four Years Old

2009-09-30T14:07:00.001-07:00

My blog's birthday was August 5 and I missed it. Four years old - how amazing! I haven't been writing much lately, for which I have lots of excuses... Want to hear?

1) Life is busy. There's so much work to be done around the new house. Unpacking, cleaning, organizing, yard work. Since we're starting from scratch getting the rooms in order, there's a kind of compulsion to do it perfectly - as in, don't just put the chair there, but take the chair apart and clean it and, after much hunting for the missing screws, reassemble it, all of which takes a while.

2) Life is rich. In my spare moments when I'm not looking for missing chair screws I have been reading like mad. It's because we finally have space for bookcases and I was able to bring over all my boxes of books from my parents' house, plus a friend lent me a bunch of her books. Reading is one of my absolute favorite things to do, and having one whole wall of the living room devoted to books is like being a chocoholic and living in a Cadbury factory. Because I am also a chocoholic, or at least borderline, lately I have been staying up until the wee hours combining these guilty pleasures. My waistline is bound to show the sad results soon.

3) Life is serene. I always write more when I'm upset about stuff. I wrote a lot when I was afraid my now-husband would never want to marry me, when I was trying to talk him into having kids, etc. Now, happily married with a beautiful toddler, I don't have any angst to pour out. I am finally in the warm place I've been striving for since I was a teenager. Alas for my readers (reader?), it doesn't make for interesting blog reading.

Anyway, that's why posts have been sparse. No worries, just happy.

Adventures in Bleach

2009-08-10T20:18:00.001-07:00

The previous owners of our house were clean freaks, I've concluded. They left a lot of their cleaning supplies stashed under sinks and in cupboards - jugs of bleach, industrial-size refill containers of antibacterial soap, Windex and wood floor cleaner and Chrome Sparkle Enhancer. I didn't even know half those products existed. I've never used any of it before in my life. The only cleaning products I've used up till now have been Seventh Generation dishwashing liquid and laundry detergent. I read about environmental toxins all day and then I come home and I'm scared to touch that bleach bottle. I'm scared of the antibacterial soap too. What if I breed a new resistant superbug by washing my hands with it?

But, there it all is, and I hate to waste it. So I've cautiously been using it. For the past five years, we've been taking laundry over to my parents' house every week. Now, to my extreme delight, we have the capacity to wash clothes in our own home. I actually fall asleep grinning about this, it makes me so happy. Yesterday for the first time in my life I separated my laundry and did a load of just whites, and put a bit of bleach in with the detergent. I felt like such a typical suburban American as I did so - just freewheeling and not even worrying about the environment for once.

Gotta say I was underwhelmed with the results; my clothes came out clean, but not bright white like I was hoping. The socks in particular still looked kind of dingy. And all the clothes reeked of bleach, even after I put them out to dry in the sun for hours. I felt like my lungs were corroding with the fumes coming off them. But now I know. Reduce the bleach, and the expectations.

Our new home is a doorway to other "typical" experiences as well. When we lived at our apartment, I would put the baby in the stroller, sling a few canvas bags over my shoulder, and walk to the grocery store several times a week. Each time the amount I bought would be limited by what I could physically carry while pushing the stroller back. Now, because we're not walking distance to anything, I load the baby into the car and do a week's worth of shopping at a time. I push her around the store in a cart instead of a stroller. I wheel the whole cart out to my car to transfer the groceries. I almost feel like the rules don't apply, and it's okay to buy junk food and processed CheeseZips and so on. I have to mentally slap myself. No! Just because you're using fossil fuels just to GET to the grocery store does not mean you can throw nutrition out the window too!

On the positives list, we have a dining room now. Instead of balancing plates on our laps on the sofa, my husband and I can now eat dinner together at an actual table. We have conversations while we eat. It's such an improvement.

Not at Home Yet

2009-08-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

I wonder how long it will take to feel at home in the new house. When we first moved into our apartment, I remember I didn't want to spend any time there unless my then-boyfriend was there. I would come home from work, tired after a long day, but within moments of stepping in the front door I would think, "I just want to leave." He usually didn't get home until 8 or 9 at night. I would grab an apple and turn right around and go out for a walk, or sit in the park across the street - better to be obviously not home, than to be in this place that was supposed to be home and wasn't.

Right now, the new place doesn't feel like home. All our stuff is there, but I feel like spending as little time there as possible. I just want to get what I need and get out. Will it take months, like it did last time? Will it take having friends over and cooking a few big messy meals before I can feel like we've staked our claim? Even though the new place is good for so many reasons and I'm very happy we got it, I miss the comforts of our old apartment.

It must be even harder for our daughter, who's never lived anywhere else and who wasn't involved in the decision to move. For her, it was just a giant uprooting and upheaval. For the first time now she's sleeping in her own room instead of with us, and she's lost her neighborhood, the streets, parks, grocery store, and playgrounds with which she was so intimately familiar. The new house exists in a void because there aren't shops and such within walking distance - it's like opening the front door and finding that we're floating in outer space. You have to use the car to get anywhere, which is like a wormhole, so there's no connection or continuity to the geography.

To top it off she's starting daycare for the first time in her life soon. It will be so scary for her. I feel really sorry for her that everything is so new and frightening, and I wish I knew how to make it better.

Attitude

2009-07-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was riding the bus to work there was a huge thunk that made everyone sit up and look nervously around. An SUV had smacked the rear corner of the bus as it cut over to change lanes.

The driver immediately said, "Ah, man, why do people do that? Why, why? Did you see that? She just tried to cut across three lanes of traffic to make her turn." Sticking her arm out the window to gesture, she said, ostensibly to the driver of the SUV, although the driver couldn't have heard her, "Yeah, you DO need to pull over!"

Moments later, with the bus and SUV pulled over to the side of the traffic circle, the two drivers conducted a short conversation through the opened bus door. The SUV driver was inclined to be hostile, but the bus driver was in the better position. She was seated, looking down from a much larger vehicle, in uniform, with the trappings of authority about her.

"Honey, you hit me, it's your insurance that's gonna pay," she said, unperturbed. "It's all on camera. It's on camera. It's on camera. You can stand there and argue all day. It's on camera what happened. Now you give me your license and registration, and I'll give you mine."

The SUV woman told the bus driver to get out and follow her to get the information. "Oh no, that's okay, YOU can bring it back to ME," the driver said. The SUV woman said something snippy that I didn't catch. "All right, and that's how you wanna be, I hope you have a great day," the driver said in a mock-sweet voice. The SUV woman - a sharp-dressed professional in a power suit - stalked off, but she complied and brought the insurance info back. I was deeply impressed.

Here's how it would've gone down if I was driving the bus.

thunk

Erin: "Oh no! A car hit me! Ahh!... Oh I hope she pulls over. Oh, phew, she's pulling over."

I would then probably open the bus doors and hurry over to the SUV to conduct the conversation looking in her window from the sidewalk.

SUV woman: "What the hell were you doing?"

Erin: "I was just driving around the circle. I didn't change lanes or anything."

SUV: "You're an idiot. This had better be reimbursed." (gesturing toward her scraped front bumper)

Erin: "I'm sorry. Do you want to exchange insurance?"

SUV: "Yeah, you bring me yours."

Erin: "OK! Can you wait here?" (scurry back to the bus)

It's ridiculous, because even as the real-life conversation was going down, I was thinking how differently (and how badly) I would have handled it. I have one technique for dealing with authority or anyone aggressive: get really submissive and eager to please. It often works because people realize there's no point bringing out the big guns for a softie like me. They lighten up and get what they want without yelling. I can't handle yelling - it just destroys me.

Actually any kind of confrontation can leave me shaken up and replaying the incident in my head for days. When I do run into the occasional person who realizes they can jerk me around and I'll just go more and more belly-up, it's a bad scene. I wonder if, pushed far enough, I would be able to find the words to fight back. It's not that I don't want to. It's just that I go into such extreme "flight" mode in stressful situations, I can't even think what I should have said until hours later.

"Yeah, you DO need to pull over!" She was awesome. I should take lessons from her.

?, but no .

2009-07-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a period in three years. It seems astonishing when I look back on it. My last period was in August 2006, just a few months after we got married. It started on my birthday, a day that we spent hiking with friends in the mountains. I remember retreating into some shrubbery off the trail at one point to change a pad. (No, I didn't litter - I took the old one with me, wrapped up.) That seems like eons ago.

I've done some reading online about amenorrhea. It could be primary ovarian failure, a scary thought considering that I was hoping to have a second child someday. Could my ovaries really be puttering out, when I'm only 32 years old? Or it could be a thyroid disorder. Or it could be a pituitary problem. Or it could be an ectopic pregnancy. For brief moments over the past few months I've wondered if it was a real pregnancy - that would explain the gut that I don't seem to be able to get rid of - but the gut hasn't changed in all that time, and we use birth control. And honestly, I just don't feel pregnant. Now that I have been, I would know if I ever was again.

A friend chuckled when I confided in her that I no longer have periods, and said, "You're lucky. Enjoy it!" I did for a while, but at this point I just want to be normal. I feel like some kind of anomaly in the world, cut off from the cycle of reproduction in my prime reproducing years. I feel the way I did at 14 and 15 and 16, when all the girls I knew had started their periods, and I hadn't. As convenient as it is not to menstruate any more, I know it means there's something wrong.

Yes, I've been to the doctor. I've had blood drawn. I'll find out the lab results soon. I hope it will be an answer I can live with.

Labor

2009-07-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

I visited my friend today and got to hold her brand-new, six-day-old baby. The baby was adorable with her little grunts and snuffles, and her wonderfully expressive face. Even though I had one of those myself not too long ago, I forgot how tiny they really are. Her arms and legs were so fragile, they were like wrinkled red little twigs. Her triangular little face registered first doubt, then annoyance, then confusion, melting into a thousand-mile stare. She frowned as she stared up at me.

My friend was equal parts lit up about this baby, just besotted with her – and rightfully so – and shell-shocked by her labor experience. It sounds like she had a truly terrible time. She was in labor for 30 hours, including about six hours of transition labor (the worst, most intense stage, where you're basically having a contraction for 60-90 seconds during every two minutes). She begged for an epidural and got one but it didn't take on one side of her body, so she was still feeling every contraction. When she was finally ready to deliver, her doctor had gone home for the night, and refused to allow my friend be delivered by the doctor on duty at the hospital – so my poor friend had to wait, blowing through every contraction in an effort not to push, for an entire 90 minutes before the doctor made it back to her side. She described it as "torture." I asked her how she coped with the pain, and she said, "I screamed. I was screaming so loud with every contraction, I thought the other women in labor must be terrified listening to me, but I couldn't help it." I felt like crying for her that she had to suffer like that.

I've never experienced pain on that level before. When I was in labor, it was the worst pain I've ever experienced, and I remember feeling desperate for relief, and doing a lot of loud groaning. Luckily, when I got an epidural it worked. Up to that point the worst pain I had ever experienced was a urinary tract infection that made me whimper audibly. I remember feeling astonished: "Wow, that hurt so much I made a noise and couldn't even help it." Maybe I'm just really afraid of losing control, but I tend to not make noise if I can possibly help it when I'm hurt. The embarrassment of making a sound seems worse to me than the pain. For something to hurt so much that I would actually scream out loud – I can't even really comprehend what that must be like. I guess if I ever have a natural childbirth, I may find out. Anyway, my friend is the same way. She's a quiet, mild sort of person, not given to dramatics and never wanting to be the center of attention. I can't wrap my mind around her screaming, or the degree of pain it would take for her to make noise.

My friend said that she is still feeling so traumatized by the whole experience that she is considering getting therapy to help her work through what happened to her. She's having PTSD-like flashbacks, feeling terrified of ever being in labor again. (Fortunately it hasn’t prevented her from bonding with her baby.) In the pictures of her and her husband holding their newborn moments after the birth, they look wan – smiling, but haggard. She looks like she's just been through hell. He looks like he just watched his wife go through hell.

It makes me wonder: how come some women have – not an easy time, necessarily – but a manageable time during labor, whereas others don't? I've read birth stories about mothers who calmly walked during their labors and pushed their babies out with little fuss; mothers who rocked and moaned quietly and were in control of their experiences. That's what I’d want, if I went natural – but I'm scared I'd end up like my friend, screaming and out of my mind with pain, and not in control at all.

Across the World, Then Not Eaten by Me

2009-07-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

I bought a passion fruit at Whole Foods last week. I had never seen one before. It looks like a tiny purplish plum with a firm surface and a thin skin like a potato. I left it out for a while to ripen, but nothing seemed to be happening, so finally today I sliced it in half. Inside it was full of pulpy glop with hard black seeds about the size of apple seeds. I have no idea how to eat it. I tried a bit of the glop, but it was hard to eat around the seeds, and I don't think you're supposed to swallow them. They splinter like apple seeds in your teeth.

This little fruit grew on a tree in New Zealand, on the total opposite side of the world, was picked by some unknown farm worker and packaged, and was shipped across the globe, consuming fossil fuels all the way, all to arrive in a bin at Whole Foods and be bought at an exorbitant price by me. And I'm not going to eat it? What a waste!

I feel like such a privileged member of society, because throughout history, how few people have ever had the opportunity to eat the range of foods that is available to me? I pretty much have access to any food grown anywhere in the world. I live on a level far above that of any emperor of the ancient world.

All right. I have sufficiently guilt tripped myself that I'm going back in the kitchen now to give it another shot.

Reasons to Miss the Old Place

2009-06-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

1. Walking home today (something I won't be able to do after we move), I passed a full jazz band playing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an admiring crowd on a street corner. They were just getting to the part where it goes, "Oh when the saints! Oh when the saints!" and it was so peppy, I couldn't resist getting a spring in my step. City life is so full of vibrance and pulse and energy. I'll miss the excitement of feeling like we live in the heart of everything.

2. Despite being pretty antisocial, after living here for five years we know a fair number of people in our neighborhood. It's a friendly sort of area, and we run into the same folks over and over. Our regular supermarket cashier, the apartment manager next door, my mom friend a few streets away, the guy at the library, our two favorite sushi waitresses at the restaurant down the block, our upstairs neighbor and her grandson, my babyswap friend and her little boy with whom we have weekly playdates, and the building maintenance guy who greets me every morning are all people that we have friendly conversations with on a regular basis - and who I'll miss once we're gone. I guess we have put down roots.

3. Nine playgrounds, two libraries, a toy store, five grocery stores, and tons of restaurants within walking distance.

4. Living, eating, and working all in the same room. This is also a thing that I complain about. But I wonder if once we move, and after supper we all disappear into separate rooms to spend the evening on separate pursuits, I won't miss these days of enforced family togetherness.

Onward we go, eagerly, but not without a backward glance.

Reasons to Love our New Place

2009-06-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

1. Being able to park the car in our own driveway, right next to the house! It will be so great to just walk out the front door and there's the car, instead of having to cross a busy street and walk a block or two to get to our parking space. And unloading groceries, etc. will be so much easier.

2. My own office where I can set up my computer, printer, and files. When I want to scan something, I'll be able to just reach over and turn on the scanner. Currently my "office" is also the library, and contains two bookcases, a desk, a chair, and boxes of paperwork. And it's also Pigtopia where our guinea pig races around and nibbles on my toes as I work. And it's also the breakfast nook. And it's also about ten square feet in area.

3. Not seeing a roach or two scurry across the floor every time I turn on the light in the kitchen. (I hope.)

4. Bedrooms. One for our kidlet. One that is all for us. :)

5. Space for a dining room table, so we can invite guests over for dinner.

6. A gorgeous big yard backed by trees where I can grow vegetables, graze the pig, frolic with the kidlet, and hang my clothes on a ecofriendly clothesline to dry.

7. A deck where we can eat dinner on warm summer evenings. We'll sit out there watching the fireflies blink, feeling rich beyond measure.

GOT THE HOUSE!

2009-06-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

Yay!

I am so happy and excited. It has a beautiful kitchen, four whole bedrooms, a deck, and it even backs onto the park. I can't believe how fast the whole thing happened. We've been house-hunting for about a month, going to open houses every weekend, and made one offer on a house last week that wasn't accepted. I was pretty sad about that. Then last Sunday we found this house, which is even better than the last one - put in our offer on Monday, and it was accepted on Tuesday! I get happy all over again every time I think about it.

Now, all we have to do is sell our first-born to pay for it. haha

In Limbo

2009-06-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting to hear back.

Yesterday, I interviewed for a new job. A big jump in pay and responsibilities. I have the background and skills to do it, and I think I did all right in the interview, but a lot of people were applying for this job, so I'm not sure what my chances are. Today, we made an offer on a house. Very exciting. Again, it's a super competitive situation; multiple other people submitted bids on the same house.

I'm trying to tell myself that it doesn't really matter, that if I don't get that job I can just keep doing the one I have, which I'm good at and (most of the time) enjoy. And if we don't get that house we'll find a different one. I feel like there is a truck-load of disappointment waiting for me, right around the corner, and I'm trying to mitigate it by telling myself that chances are, I will not get the job or the house. Statistically, the odds are against it.

I can't even say for sure that I would be happier in this new more lucrative job, or that we would be happier in this new house. But I think we would. Oh man, I hope it works out.

The 100 Things

2009-06-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

I read about a guy who decided to be spartan and whittle down his possessions to just 100 items. He spent several months getting rid of things - giving away furniture, donating clothes, throwing out paintings and other art projects he had done. His final list included mostly electronic gadgets and t-shirts. He had an iPod, cell phone, BlackBerry, laptop, DVD player, TV, etc. and associated chargers. He also used up 20 items in his quota just on shirts. His rule was that if anyone gave him a gift during the "Year of 100 Things," he would have to choose one thing to get rid of, or else regift what he had been given. Sounds tough!

I thought about what 100 things I'd choose. I'm always complaining that I live in the midst of clutter, overwhelmed by possessions, so the idea of having such a spare existence has its appeal. I'd draw the line at throwing away things I had created, though. At the end of the year, he can go out and buy back the stuff he's been missing, but he can never get back his artwork, and someday he might really regret that.

Here's my list, based mostly on the things I use every day:
1. contact lenses
2. glasses
3. underwear (He "cheated" and grouped a bunch of pairs as one item, so I'm doing that too. Don't think I would try to get through the whole year on one pair of underpants.)
4. bra
5-10. shirts
6-15. sweaters
16. jacket
17. socks
18. sneakers
19. dress shoes
20. winter coat
21. makeup
22. deodorant
23. comb
24-25. laptop and recharger
26. backpack
27. cooking pot
28. frying pan
29. mug
30. Brita pitcher
31. silverware
32. umbrella
33. car
34. knife (for kitchen use)
35. hair clips
36-37. cell phone and recharger
38. pillow
39. toothbrush
40. workout clothes
41. shorts
42. broom
43. dustpan
44. pens/pencils
45. notepad
46. mattress

That's all I can think of. I'm looking around the apartment and I don't see a single other thing that I use often that I would miss. Lots of stuff I use daily, like the stroller, but I think that counts in my kid's quota, not mine. And the microwave, but I think that's built in as part of the apartment. And I have photo albums and diaries and such, but they're at my parents' house. I think I could get by just on the list I have. I'm surprised to see some items in there, like the laptop that I've only had for a year or so - but already I really depend on it.

Simplicity rules!

The Road Not Taken

2009-05-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

I'm in touch, sporadically, with a couple of old boyfriends. We're not really friends, but we do email now and then. One of them - the first guy I ever went out with - is now married and they're expecting their first child in a couple of weeks. It gives me a funny quiver in my gut to look at their online photo albums: the two of them setting up the crib, him with his arm around her shoulders at the baby shower, shots of her in profile documenting her increasing roundness each week. They look like they're very happy together. Even the captions on the photos express what a cute, bantery relationship they have, full of inside jokes and affection. I'm really glad for them. I loved this guy, back when we were together, and I wanted the best for him even if we weren't right together. It's great that he is about to experience the amazing roller coaster trip of parenthood.

Still, there's that funny quiver. Why do I feel this way? Is it jealousy, because it's hard to ever accept that someone who once loved me doesn't love me any more? Do I just feel left out because they're basking in all the attention now as glowing soon-to-be-parents, and it's (rightfully) all about them, whereas with a two-year-old I'm old news and people no longer stop me in the street to coo over my baby? Is it a flicker of annoyance that whatever I had to offer him, it wasn't enough, and what she offered was better? (even though, as I recall, I left him.) Is it just imagination whiplash, because we were on that marriage track for a while, and I thought that we would be setting up a crib together someday, and it's just odd now thinking about what might have been?

We broke up for good reasons, and we each married people we're better suited to than one another. But I can't help feeling, when I see his happy grin, that he was really a nice guy with a lot of good qualities, and feeling a bit sad that I'm so shut out now from his life. Being selflessly happy for someone else is not always that easy.

If Money Were No Object

2009-04-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

One more quote from the motherhood book, by Daphne De Marneffe, got me thinking about what I'd buy if resources were unlimited.

Money is a necessity; it pays for food and shelter, it can make the difference between the life we grew up with and a better life for our children. Money also buys advantages, from safe neighborhoods to SAT prep courses. And discretionary spending really does make one feel better. It meant a lot to me when I was able to get rid of that Naugahyde recliner and decorate my baby's room... Such seemingly superficial uses of money can confer an almost primal sense of pride and satisfaction.

These days, I always feel like I shouldn't spend money on anything beyond the necessities of rent, diapers, transportation, and food (though with food, I give myself a lot of latitude - we often eat out or buy things like avocados and salmon that I love but could do without). If a windfall comes my way, I tend to stick it in the bank right away. That way I have no regrets because I've basically postponed the decision of how to spend it - whereas if I exchanged it for something, I might easily wonder later if I'd really bought the right thing or if it was worth it. But I know exactly what De Marneffe is talking about with the primal sense of satisfaction.

So, I was daydreaming about a scenario with strict rules where I had to spend the money on myself or lose it (no putting it in the bank, no giving it to charity or a friend). Some things I might buy:

* A new carseat for my daughter - clean, with flat unwrinkled straps - not like the hand-me-down she uses which is mottled with old food stains I can't get out.
* A trip to the beach for our family.
* A "Mommy & Me" swim class at the local pool with my daughter, who loves water.
* Our wedding cake, again - it was a yellow cake with the most delicious white chocolate icing in giant swirls and flakes festooning the top and sides. I could eat a lot of it, then freeze the rest and have it a slice at a time for months.
* A plot in the neighborhood community garden and labor to help me tend it. I had one for two years, but had to give it up because I didn't have time to weed it. But I miss those fresh tomatoes and beans.
* A house.
* A bunch of science classes at the university. Ecology, evolution, natural history, Spanish, botany, insects, and animal behavior.
* Dance classes for me and my husband.
* Shoes that I can wear with a dress. Right now I have only four pairs of shoes: sneakers, dress shoes for work, and two pairs of sandals of a style that no one under 65 wears. They are comfortable, so I keep wearing them, but I should invest in something nicer.
* A warm winter coat for my daughter for next year.

That's all that comes to mind right now. I'm fortunate that everything on my list is a luxury, not a necessity - that we can afford to buy what we really need.

Kenison on Motherhood

2009-04-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

More quotes from the motherhood book. These are from an essay about how to celebrate the holidays with your children, by Katrina Kenison. I love her fresh, friendly voice. She just sounds like the kind of mom I'd like to be friends with.

In part the culture is to blame - as each holiday rolls around, we confront an ever-expanding array of merchandise to go with it. There is more to see, more to do, more to buy, than ever before. And how easy it is to fall into thinking that living well means partaking of all that's offered.

***

Whether you're decorating the Christmas tree, making latkes, or coloring Easter eggs, remember that the process is more important for your child than the outcome...Celebrate small blessings and offbeat occasions. Once we take the pressure off ourselves to do things in a big way, we find more reasons to celebrate life's little moments. My son Jack and I once made a birthday cake for Curious George. Half birthdays are reason enough to enjoy a special meal. Hot summer days suggest impromptu lemonade parties. For children, every day holds potential for celebration and ceremony - the first day of spring, the first snowfall, the harvest moon. A song, a poem read aloud, a ritual, or a special snack - it doesn't take much to create a celebration that affirms life and connects us to the natural order of things: animals, wind, sky, and earth.

Yes! That last sentence just says it all. I love traditions because they provide structure that helps make sense of life and keeps track of the passing time, and because they provide reasons for happy anticipation. Our family doesn't have very many yet, just a few like Thursday night sushi while we watch a favorite TV show, Sunday night visit to my parents' house, seasonal visits to a particular local farm and to favorite parks or hiking trails, annual bed-and-breakfast weekend for our anniversary. Just knowing that one of these things is coming up brings me so much pleasure, it's almost better than the event itself. I want to build in more traditions as time goes on. And especially to make them celebrations of nature. I would like my children to feel the same fascination for the natural world and derive the same joy from being outdoors that I did throughout my childhood.

Am I Fat or Not?

2009-04-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

I can't decide.

This is important, because being on the fence about it means I can never sustain the willpower I need to follow through on diet and exercise plans. Half the time I look at myself in the mirror and feel like I'm fine, I just look the way everyone starts to look in their thirties, post-childbirth, with a bit more of a gut than I used to have. I tell myself that, after all, life is short, and not to stress about indulging in sweets from time to time. Those are the high morale days when I feel generally good about myself.

Other times I think my stomach looks awful, saggy and paunchy, and when I suck it in it's covered with wrinkles, and how can it *still* look this bad when the baby is almost two years old already? and what if it never goes back to the way it was, no matter how many sit-ups I do? and it's so ridiculously unfair that there are women who are part elf who zip back to adolescent leanness within weeks of childbirth, whose stomachs are so flat that no one would ever think they had been pregnant, and that I'm not one of them. On days like those I make drastic plans about giving up sugar for Lent (which I did, successfully, not that it made any difference), and suck in my stomach until my muscles ache.

Technically I'm underweight, for my height. But I wear mom jeans, the kind with extra room for the paunch. I haven't even gotten my period back yet, since the baby. But at a recent family reunion, I was terrified that some well-meaning relatives would eye my gut and ask if I'm pregnant with #2.

It doesn't matter how often my husband says "You look great." I keep ricocheting back and forth between feeling like I look all right (if not great), and feeling not all right, at all.

Roiphe on Motherhood

2009-04-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

I read some great quotes recently in a collection of essays about motherhood. Here are two that really struck me, by Anne Roiphe:

There is inherent in motherhood a continual giving up of self, and few of us take to that without resentment, which itself creates a river of guilt.

***

The hard truth is that our ability to appreciate something is affected by the time we devote to it. Whether it is a person or a pursuit, one way we treasure it is through the time we give to it. The more time we spend on a relationship (with a child, with nature, with a piece of music), the more we know and the more we appreciate, and the more facets there are to love.

I don't think I have a river of guilt about being a mother, but perhaps that's just because I'm lucky enough to have a flexible schedule, so I have a lot of time to spend with her. I also don't have outside forces in my life pulling me to do other things besides take care of her. But I can still sympathize with those feelings of resentment and guilt. Especially in the early days, she needed me so much and spent so much time screaming, and I just felt like my constant, patient, loving efforts were going unappreciated. But then she stopped screaming and started smiling and looking around her at the world I was only too glad to show her. And now she is full of giggles and so much fun to be with. The second quote just reminds me that there's no need for me to be stressed or feel overburdened - everything I take on is a choice. So I might as well lavish the time on without regrets and enjoy the experience.

In Ten Years

2009-04-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

I had a pseudo-job interview today - a conversation with someone who's hiring for a position that I might be interested in. I was calling just to find out more about the job to see if I wanted to apply. I thought I'd be asking all the questions. Instead, she started hitting me with stuff like "what do you like or dislike about your current position?" "what is your greatest strength?" and the real biggie, "where do you see yourself in ten years?"

As soon as she asked that, a range of completely inappropriate responses flitted through my head. Still married and loving life with my husband, of course. I'd like to have a second child by then. I'd like us to have a house of our own, with a nice back yard where the kids can play, maybe a dog. I want to have read a lot of great books. I want to have written something significant of my own - either finished my coming-of-age novel, or put together a reasonable collection of poems, or packaged my other essays into a memoir. I want to have the time and freedom to spend with family, enjoy the outdoors, visit friends, and pursue hobbies. I'd like my own vegetable garden.

I have no career aspirations. For me, a job is just a way to get money so you can get by. I don't particularly want more responsibility (even when I chafe at the hierarchy in my current position), or underlings, or a grandiose title. I just want to do something that isn't too stressful or boring that won't interfere too much with what I consider to be real life. None of which you can say to a prospective employer, so I just burbled on about wanting a position that would engage me and where I could make a difference, etc. It is a bit scary to contemplate the future though. I hope I can make that idyllic future that I picture for our family come to pass.

An Elegant Hedgehog

2009-03-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

I'm reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery for my book club. I don't really like it so far. The central twist around which the story revolves is that the main character has a menial profession and everyone thinks she is without education or culture (an impression she works hard to maintain), but secretly she loves art and great literature. What I don't like is the way she secretly sneers at the people she meets, criticizing them for not giving her more credit. But at the same time she actively hides her interest in "culture" and goes out of her way to appear dumb, so what are they supposed to think? I don't see why she can't just talk about reading Tolstoy last weekend, if she wants to. It's not like the social order of the world would crumble. Maybe it would hurt her too much to reveal her true nature and realize that honestly, nobody cares.

But, sprinkled throughout the book there are occasional thought-provoking or nicely written passages that I do like. There's a lovely description of a Dutch still life painting (it goes on for six pages, actually), so vivid that I can practically see the painting before me. And there's this passage which definitely gave me something to chew over:

"I have no children, I do not watch television, and I do not believe in God - all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease. Thus, as I have neither future nor progeny nor pixels to deaden the cosmic awareness of absurdity, and in the certainty of the end and the anticipation of the void, I believe I can affirm that I have not chosen the easy path."

When I read it the first time, it was a bit like a knife to the gut - augh! Someone sees through me. Here I am with a dead-end job, no idea where my career is going, finding most of my pleasure and satisfaction in my home life, wanting more kids because taking care of the first one makes me so happy, trying to figure out if just being a wife and mother is enough and I can dispense with the terrible obligation to have a career as well. But Muriel Barbery is on to me. So probably this is something that everyone knows, or secretly suspects. Probably children are a way to avoid confronting the need to make something of ourselves. Because they absorb so much energy, we try to fool ourselves into thinking that they are a purpose in life, all on their own.

I'm not sure about the rest of the passage. Television is sometimes used to fill the vacuity of modern life, but more often it is used by people I know to relax - after a long day at work they're burned out and long to just be passively entertained. It helps them empty their racing thoughts, rather than helping them fill an empty mental landscape. I'm also not sure about the bit about God. I think it depends on one's own brand of religion. Some visions of God fill people with fear and dread of doing the wrong thing, and aren't reassuring at all. And often people turn to God for a sense of comfort that even though things seem pretty bad in their lives, it's all part of some cosmic plan. They're not even thinking about the afterlife, just trying to derive reassurance that their current sacrifices have some purpose. So, it depends.

We shall see what other nuggets of wisdom the hedgehog can dispense in the remaining 147 pages.

Stars

2009-03-10T23:12:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I used to wonder how the ancient Greeks ever saw enough stars to make constellations out of them. Most nights the sky was overcast, or there was so much light pollution that the stars were far and few between. (For a while, I also didn't realize I needed glasses, and I remember thinking, "how did they see any stars at all?")

Then one night I went on a camping trip, and we camped in a field miles and miles from any towns. The stars were blazing with cold blue-white light, billions of them, sprinkled so thickly over the sky I couldn't count them. I was awestruck. I kept saying, "WOW, look at the STARS!" Periodically I'd see a meteor slide down the curve of the sky, leaving a trail of light behind it. It wasn't a meteor shower or anything special, just a regular night out in the country. I realized, this is what it looked like all the time before electric lighting. It was an incredible experience.

Rain and Cakes

2009-02-27T23:36:00.000-08:00

It's late at night. I'm typing away with the glow of the Christmas lights draped over the doorframe, and the whsssh of cars going by in the rain, for company. My man is out of town so I'll be taking care of our daughter by myself all weekend. Whenever this happens I get a kind of power trip - I feel strong, and excited, that I can actually take care of her all on my own, that I have such awesome responsibility for myself and another human and will, over the course of the next few days, prove myself worthy of it. I feel like doing all the fun stuff with her that my mom used to do with us when my dad was on business trips. Like spontaneous trips to the zoo, and breakfast food for dinner.

Of course, maybe that's just because I can smell pancakes cooking in a nearby apartment. Mmmmm. Right now there's nothing I'd like better in the world than for it to be Saturday morning, to be in the kitchen with my husband frying pancakes and making coffee together, with the whole day ahead of us. It can be raining - that increases the coziness. And on the pancakes we would have powdered sugar, and fresh blueberries, and whipped cream.

The Questions

2009-02-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

These are questions from an evening brainstorming session that seem to have no answers - at least none my husband and I could come up with, without getting off the sofa and doing any actual research.

1. People who live at high altitudes often have larger than average hearts and lungs. Why are these disadvantageous to living at lower altitudes?
2. Can nearsightedness be reversed by doing eye exercises, and if so how does it work? How can one prevent the development of myopia in the first place?
3. Why do women in Africa perpetuate female genital mutilation? They know first-hand how awful it is, yet they don't stop it, and in fact are responsible for continuing it.
4. Why is Harry Potter such a success?
5. Why do street lights wink out just as you pass under them?
6. How come it doesn't itch when you shave your legs, but it does itch when you shave some other parts of your body (that's as much as I'm going to say about that one)?
7. Are single mothers more likely to have daughters, because somehow their bodies "know" they are in a difficult position and that a daughter is slightly more likely to thrive than a son, so they favor the implantation of eggs fertilized by X-chromosome sperm?
8. Why are some people unable to accept animals' awareness of the world, to the point of denying that animals can even suffer or appreciate better conditions?
9. Why do people prefer political leaders who subscribe to belief in a higher supernatural power?
10. Why do women accept - even embrace - sexist and unfair codes of conduct in some societies? 11. Why do people feel attracted to the people that they do?
12. Is it true that UV radiation is worse on cloudy days, and if so, why?
13. Why are women more often cold than men, even though they have a higher percentage of body fat? Is the fat in "strategic" locations that do not efficiently insulate? Are manly muscles better at insulating or producing heat than fat? Do men burn more calories/kg?
14. Why are some doctors/nurses so mean to women who want a natural birth?
15. Is eye color regulated by more genes than skin color?
16. Why does acne persist beyond the teenage years? and why isn't it selected against so vigorously - acne-affected individuals failing to get dates or reproduce - that it would disappear?
17. Is there a universal standard of beauty?
18. Is Larry Summers right?
19. Why does labor have to hurt so much and be so risky? Why do some fetuses develop heads that are bigger than their mothers' pelvic openings (when before the advent of C-sections, they would have automatically died, and their mothers too)?
20. Is olive oil actively good for you, or just not as bad as other oils?
21. Are low light levels bad for your eyes, and if so why?
22. Why do some women get urinary tract infections and others never do?
23. Where do guys like Tony Cox get their motivation? (he's a vet who vigorously defends big corporations that use antibiotics routinely as growth promoters in animals, thus compromising the effectiveness of medical antibiotics in humans) Does he really believe use of antibiotics is necessary for farming to be profitable? Is he just prostituting his morals for money? Does he secretly know he's wrong but he's repressed that knowledge?
24. Why don't men want to have children? It's easy for them - and risky and resource-intensive for women - yet women are usually the ones pushing to have babies.
25. Why do women get emotional/social benefits from marriage and men don't (or don't think they do)?
26. If a child of British and American parents can have dual citizenship, and a child of Swedish and French parents can have dual citizenship, and those individuals marry, can their children have quadruple citizenship? Does it ever end, or can people collect citizenships without limit?
27. Why do I always get hiccups on Sunday nights?
28. How do you keep someone loving you forever?

Cold

2009-02-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

It's been really cold here lately. The kind of cold where the wind starts blowing, hard, blasting into your face, and you wait for it to stop so you can take a breath - but it doesn't stop, it just keeps blowing and blowing, and finally you have to breathe anyway. It's so cold that I wonder how people in areas of the country that are famed for their chilly winters, like Minnesota and Wisconsin, even survive. And I especially wonder how people who lived before the advent of central heating survived. Here I am feeling sorry for myself because I have to be outside for, at most, an hour a day in order to commute and run errands. But I can be indoors in 65 degree comfort, with still air, the other 23 hours of the day. Before central heating people never got a break from the winter until springtime. The Jamestown settlers had to struggle through wearing winter clothes that were all homemade, not like the microfiber and insulated coats we have today. They had to work outside all day, live in unheated buildings, curl up to sleep in below-zero temperatures and wake up with snow on their quilts. Laura Ingalls Wilder describes going out for sleigh rides with her beau, in weather so cold the horses couldn't even stop running or they would freeze. How did people keep their spirits up? Either they were made of far, far stronger stuff than we are today - or they were so inured to discomfort, from earliest infancy, that it didn't seem so bad to them - or they were miserable but saw no point in complaining. I should follow their example.

Fear and Loathing

2009-02-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

I have an unreasonable fear about sidewalk grates. I hate walking over them - the way cows and horses hate walking over grids - because I always picture the grate collapsing under me and falling into the cellar below. Has this ever happened, to anyone?

My other gripe of the day is that I hate getting ready for bed in the dark, which I always have to do because I'm always the last to come to bed. I tiptoe around getting undressed in the pitch blackness, barking my shin on furniture and trying not to curse. Half the time I can't find my night clothes and have to just crawl under the covers wearing underwear or nothing. Not being able to see, and having to guess where things like my glasses case and jewelry box are as I get ready for bed, really annoys me. I fumble around for them knocking stuff off the bookshelf and dresser top. We can't have a nightlight in the bedroom or it would keep the baby and my husband awake.

I think wistfully of TV land where couples get into bed with the lights on. They lie back on their pillows chatting about the day's events, instead of having to be quiet (for fear of waking the baby, whose crib is right next to the bed). They can lie in bed and turn off the lights when they're ready to sleep. What luxury! If we ever get our own bedroom with bedside tables and lamps and it's all ours, I will never forget to appreciate it.

Read Read Read

2009-02-16T22:15:00.000-08:00

One of my friends is a voracious reader. She's also really smart and great at literary analysis. Listening to her talk about books she's read (a huge variety of genres and authors) is like listening to a gourmet chef describe food. She has a way of explaining the premise in just such a way to whet your appetite without giving away what happens. Each title sounds juicier and more innovative than the last. I sit there thinking, "Yes! I want to read that too! Oh - I have to read everything that author has done, he sounds great!"

Then I go on one of my twice-weekly jaunts to the library and check out about 3 new books. The problem is that I don't have much time to spare for reading. I have periods of downtime each day, but I tend to burn them on crunches, or washing the dishes, or doing the crossword. I love reading, but I probably only read one book a week, which means that the unread books are piling up faster than I can dispose of them.

Right now, here's what I have sitting on my shelf:
Last Child in the Woods
Your Children Will Raise You: The Joys, Challenges, and Life Lessons of Motherhood
Ripening Seed (by Colette)
The End (the last in the Lemony Snicket series)
Love for Lydia
White Apples and the Taste of Stone (poetry)
Unpacking the Boxes
The Boat of Quiet Hours (also poetry)
Water for Elephants
The Extra Man
Love and Shadows
Smilla's Sense of Snow
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
Life Class
Silent Spring
Outgrowing the Earth
Winter World

I am excited to read all of these - actually I'm partway through about a dozen of them right now - but the list is a bit ridiculously long, is it not? At this rate, especially if I keep adding new books, I will never finish.

You Get What You Pay For

2009-02-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been trying to save money. I go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to save a few pennies here and there. I'm a bit myopic about investments - I know if I was informed and made the right decisions, I could save much more money that way. But I don't know how to do it. So I stick to things I understand, like buying in bulk at the grocery store when things go on sale, and walking a mile to avoid spending .35 on the bus. And, instead of buying new baby gear, I've been trying to get the clothes and stuff my daughter needs on Freecycle.

It's a little frustrating though. I wanted to get her a booster seat, for example, so she could have her meals sitting in an actual chair. I went to the baby store and found exactly the model I want. It costs $25 brand-new. Then I posted a "wanted" request on Freecycle and our neighborhood list-serve. I got a couple of responses, and, because I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth and thought it was kind of them to donate their booster seats to a total stranger, told each of them that I would love to have the seat.

One day after work I went to pick up the first seat. The couple who had offered it lived in a big house in the ritzy neighborhood a couple miles from our apartment. I felt more than a little outclassed as I opened the iron gate and proceeded up the front walk, which was paved in flagstones and surrounded by acres of well-maintained lawn. When the husband answered the door, he was dressed in expensive casual clothes, had a nice haircut, etc. Behind him in the living room, a grand piano shone. He greeted me warmly and invited me in. As he went to fetch the booster seat from the back porch, I gazed around at the art on the walls, the vases of flowers on the mantel, and the warm Oriental rugs on the floors. There was classical music playing on the piano. His eight-year-old daughter capered around, showing me the cartwheels she had recently learned to do in gymnastics class. When he returned with the booster seat, I saw right away that it wasn't what I wanted. It was way too big, was an ugly gray color, and had a fussy tray that took a fair bit of strength to snap in place. It was also grimy from being outside the past few seasons. But I thanked him profusely, said how kind it was of him to give it away, and took it. Then I walked the two miles home carrying it.

A few days later I went to pick up the second booster seat. I figured I would keep whichever one was better, and give the other to Goodwill. I didn't meet the second giver; she left the seat in a bag on her front porch, so I just picked it up there. Again the house was gorgeous though, giant and surrounded by nice landscaping. Through the cut-glass window next to the front door I caught a glimpse of elegant newel post and curving banister, and a table in the hall with a lamp and a mirror hanging over it. When I looked in the bag, the seat was the same model as the one I'd wanted in the store. It was the right size and was a decent color (white with a green seat back). But again it was filthy, and the plastic was scratched and scuffed. And the tray was missing. I can't use it without a tray - what am I supposed to put her food on?

I don't know now which seat to keep. I feel like I went to a lot of trouble just to save $25. And I still don't have the booster seat I want. I also feel that the people who donated the seats exist on a completely different social plane from me. I should be grateful that they gave me the seats, right? Not grousing that they didn't even bother to clean them off before handing them to me. But I just wish I was in a place financially where I could feel comfortable going to the store and buying the thing I want. With Freecycle, you get it free but you also usually get crap.

Capering

2009-01-30T09:36:00.000-08:00

Right now it's so easy to be a heroine in mu daughter's eyes. We go to the playground and I run in circles around her as she stands there giggling, or I start skipping, or climb up on the big blue plastic hippo. She thinks I'm hilarious. She admires me because I always have the solution to every problem - I can disentangle the strings, find the right hole for each shape in her puzzle, and even tie my own shoes. In just a few years, maybe she'll think I'm dumb and out of touch. She will notice things like, my shoes have holes in them and are the same pair I've been wearing since 2002.

If only, someday when she's a teenager, I can win her back by capering a few laps around the playground.

Bellyaching

2009-01-26T06:13:00.001-08:00

If I see one more banner ad with a 19-year-old model who has never been pregnant looking down at her perfect concave stomach in mock surprise and delight as she holds up the ends of a measuring tape (as though it measured any different from the last time or the time before that)... it'll be one banner too many.

Alas, here we are many, many months after the baby and even after I finished breast-feeding (after which, I promised myself, I would go on a strict diet and get back my girlish figure). I've been doing crunches almost nightly since April, and recently started running again. I'm a few pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight (the same weight that I was all through college and my twenties). My breasts are nearly nonexistent. But I still have a belly that looks like I'm about 3 months pregnant. Why, oh why, is my body hoarding fat there? I have exactly one pair of pants that is comfortable and that I wear continually up until the moment I must leave the house, when I put on a pair of pants that cut into my stomach. I don't understand why most women find it so easy to get back their flat stomachs after the first pregnancy (the second one, though, seems to be a different story) - but apparently this hasn't happened for me. When I run, I can feel my belly wagging slightly from side to side in front of me. Ugh.

I guess part of this angst is just my unwillingness to accept that I am getting older. I don't want to admit that I can no longer blend in on a college campus, and wear all the same clothes with the same ease that I did back then. I want to present an appearance to the world (as some women are capable of doing, and real women, too, not just celebrities) that says, "Child-bearing didn't change me. Here I am, still the same lithe and beautiful person as ever." But, clearly, child-bearing did change me. I have the marks of it all over my body - more stuff sags, more stuff is stretched out, there are pale, feathery marks all over my flanks. I wanted to manage the whole biological event with the utmost of grace. Instead, I have daily reminders that I am mortal.

Separation of Church and School

2009-01-25T07:38:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a blow-hard recently about kids and schooling. He has some young kids he's planning to enroll in Catholic school. His reasoning was, "It's too confusing for kids to get the different messages from home and school. I don't want my kids being told these contradictory things, and having to go to their teacher with, 'but mommy and daddy say this,' or 'my priest says this.' " I felt a sudden, quick, burst of sympathy for teachers who might be faced with such children. If I was a teacher, my blunt reaction would be, 'So what? I don't care what your priest says, this is how it really is.' It's not that I'm anti-religion. I just think that a lot of it is parables and poetry, and I don't have patience with people trying to substitute it for reality.

The blow-hard's other complaint about public schools was that science class never goes into the morality of certain issues. I guess he means sex ed doesn't tell the kids that premarital sex is sinful, or gay people are evil. I suggested that there was no moral consensus across cultures and that morality wasn't a scientific judgment anyway, so that was why schools didn't go into it. But I think my words fell on deaf ears. I know some people do emerge from the private school system with intact logic and reasoning, and a few even go on to become scientists. One of the smartest guys I know attended Catholic school. But I feel like a school that could mix morality with science (in fact, that deliberately planned curricula to do so) would stack the deck against its students. Oh well. If this guy wants to spend the money to send his kids to private school, I guess there's nothing I can do to convince him otherwise. I just feel a little that the kids aren't getting a fair deal.

Journey

2009-01-15T21:27:00.000-08:00

Today I was thinking how awesome and bold my husband is. I've lived in this same city all my life, including for college, and have never been more than a short drive away from my parents (who are still my best friends, and whom I still visit at least once a week just to hang out and chat). But my husband left his family of origin eight years ago and created a new one, in a totally new environment. He came east to attend a school hundreds of miles from home, where he didn't know anyone. He found a place to live, learned where to shop, learned how to get around on the public transportation system, made friends. He found a wife and started a new family. It seems to me that he's so brave for building a new life like that. Maybe it's easier for men to strike out on their own that way, and maybe it's easier for people who aren't quite as close with their parents. But he still gets props from me for doing it.

An Actual Serious Question

2009-01-06T15:33:00.000-08:00

This might come across as frivolous, but here's the burning question that is currently occupying my mind: How many kids should a couple have, for optimal happiness?

The whole time I was growing up, I worried a lot about the environment and the population crisis and vowed that I'd never have more than one or maybe two children, to avoid adding any more burdens to the earth.

Then the night my daughter was born, I was so over-the-moon full of joy I remember thinking, "That was great! I did it! I want to do it again - I'd love to have about four kids!" And so far parenting has been the best time of my life. I love being with my husband and my daughter, taking care of our family. I feel like I'm so much better at that stuff than I am doing my jobby job, earning my way in the world. In my daydreams I quit my job and stay home with the kids (lots of them) in a big rambling house in the country, and we all make our own butter and cheese, and the kids tend a vegetable garden, and we're all happy as clams.

But realistically. I'm too old to have a bunch more kids. And the environmental problems are still there, including climate change which threatens life as we know it, and is a menace no generation has ever had to face before. And even if it was guaranteed that the world we love is going to go on forever, and will be safe for our children to grow up in, I'm not sure my husband and I could afford to have more than one more child - not and provide the quality of life that I want for them.

So a lot of this speculation is just that, just hypothetical dreaming. If we *did* want to have two more children, the time to get cracking on that would be right about now, since I'm already 32 and I wouldn't want to take the risk of pregnancy past age 35. One of my friends who had her baby about the same time that I did is now eight months pregnant with her second child. I'm amazed. I haven't even gotten my period back yet. I'm physically incapable of becoming pregnant again, and here she's almost done carrying #2!

Anyway, back to the question of the hour. I can see that having one kid, even if it's a lot of work and fundamentally changes your life together, still leaves time for snuggling and the occasional date night and all the little joys. And one kid is portable - I can get around town on my own, carrying her and the stroller and her bag of stuff, and it's doable. But if I had two, I don't know how I'd manage to go anywhere. I just don't have enough arms. I can also see, based on the couples we know who have two young kids, that two soak up all available time - not that there is a whole lot remaining after the first one. These couples are in crisis all the time, slamming through the days, constantly struggling to keep food in the fridge, keep the house from descending into chaos, and collapsing into bed exhausted every single night. No more date nights, for sure. One tired mother told me, "One was fun. But two is just - I mean, we love him, but - we don't have a life any more. We're just hanging on and hoping it will get easier in a few years." Which means that three kids is a level of madness I can't even bear to contemplate.

But! but but but. Having a baby, the first time, was so great. And I loved watching her grow and learn. I couldn't even tell you what my favorite stage was. Wouldn't it be wonderful to get the chance to do all that again? and again?

So, back to the question again, which is: Have there ever been any scientific studies to determine the optimal number of children a couple should have in order to achieve or maintain happiness? The research would have to be relevant to young urban/suburban Americans living in environments similar to mine, of course. And the outcomes would have to be various, including both marital happiness for the parents and long-term happiness and positive feelings about their family for the kids. I wouldn't want to have a family where the kids leave home asap and never want to return even for holidays.

My hope is that if you sample enough families a pattern emerges, like - two kids bring about the perfect balance between adult and kid pursuits within the family, whereas three kids make the marriage strained. Or, three kids are optimal for allowing different personalities to flourish within the family and to create a well-rounded whole. Or, four kids is just right for creating that warm tribal sense of belonging. I just don't know.

I would be really interested to learn more about this. Maybe I'll check out the department of family and child psychology at the local university and see if they have any leads.

Sanctuary

2008-12-23T08:43:00.000-08:00

This lion cub was rescued by Wild Animal Sanctuary from a Mexican circus where she was being mistreated. She's living on the Sanctuary grounds now. Some of the rescued dogs that also live there serve as her adopted litter-mates - giving her opportunities to play, socialize, and feel comforted. Usually I don't go for super-cutesy pictures of puppies and kittens cuddled up together - it just looks staged or anthropomorphic - but this is real, two real animals that have suffered abuse, have been rescued, and are deriving comfort from one another now. It's a good thing that organizations like Wild Animal Sanctuary exist.

Small is Beautiful

2008-11-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

I always complain about how our apartment is so small. It is, I think, the smallest living space of anyone we know. I'm already worried about how we're going to serve dinner to the couple we invited over in a few weeks' time, because we don't have a table. We usually just eat sitting on the sofa or standing up in the kitchen. Ah well, we'll manage. Maybe they'll think it's charmingly bohemian to sit around on cushions on the living room floor.

But - three things I really like and appreciate about this space, and will miss when we eventually move out:

1) It's always warm in winter. It's one of those old-fashioned apartments with radiators, and it's super-warm even when we don't turn them on. We can walk around barefoot in comfort and even crack a window open for some fresh air. Normally I would worry about energy use and the environment and all, but it's out of our control. Someday when we get a house and are responsible for our own heating bills, I will probably feel compelled to turn the thermostat down to 60 degrees all winter.

2) It's easy to clean. There's just not enough space to get dirty. I can whisk through and pick up clutter, wipe down countertops, sweep the floors, and have the place looking decent in only a few minutes. With a big house, the cleaning must be never-ending.

3) It's only two blocks to the grocery store. I'm used to dashing out to get something for dinner, or going to pick up milk in the morning before work. Most people have to get in the car and drive somewhere to get groceries.

So, with these things in mind, no grousing. :)

Biophilia

2008-11-13T12:08:00.000-08:00

My daughter's really into animals and animal noises lately. Things she knows:

Bears, lions, tigers, and - what the heck, most other animals - go "rrrrraaugh."
Cows go "mmmmmmmm."
Cats go "mmmmew."
Elephants go "aroooo-ugh." (based on my pathetic imitation of a trumpeting elephant)
Dogs go "eh. eh. eh."
Snakes go "ssss."

Things she doesn't know:

What a bear, lion, tiger, cow, elephant, or snake actually IS. She only knows their pictures in books. Doesn't she wonder sometimes, "what's the point of all this? Why do they drill me on this stuff, asking me 'What does the cow say?'" How do pictures of elephants - or even real live elephants - have any relevance to her life?

I should be teaching her useful stuff. Like, for example. what a table is. Or how to differentiate between a cracker and an apple. Or how to put on her socks.

We have an inordinate number of books with titles like Farm Animal Babies and Milo Goes to the Zoo lying around the house, either because most books for babies have animal themes, or because she's indicated an interest so those are the books I keep getting out of the library for her.

If she does just naturally incline towards animal pictures and noises, even without exposure to animals in her life, it suggests that there really is a kind of innate biophilia.

Teaching

2008-11-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

As a kid, I always used to think I might make a good grade-school teacher. I used to pretend that I was my teacher, Ms. Koster, and imagine how I would organize the lesson. I still get a kind of wistful happy feeling when I'm on school grounds. On Election Day, I voted at the local elementary school. The hallways smelled of crayons, chalk, and lemon disinfectant. The lines of voters wound past bulletin boards displayed "Our Super Stars" and essays on "Why I Like to Exercise by Mrs. Kimmy's Class." It seemed like such a friendly, cozy environment, one where I could thrive.

But maybe not as a teacher, maybe more as a school secretary or something. Teachers have such enormous responsibilities. They have to be attuned to the individual academic and socialization needs of an entire roomful of children. If anything goes wrong they're the first to be blamed for not noticing or following the proper protocol. And they're stuck in the middle between an administration that sometimes doesn't understand their needs and parents who are fiercely, insanely defensive of their children. It's scary to have any profession where you're responsible for other people's children.

Maybe that's not how they see it. I was at the school playground yesterday, after school hours, and 20-some kids ranging in age from 5 to about 10 were romping around the junglegym and swings while three teachers supervised them. I guess they were waiting for the parents to pick up their kids. It was a pretty chaotic scene. The kids were constantly hitting each other with sticks and jump ropes, getting in minor arguments over whose turn it was, tripping and bumping their noses, running off into the woods. My only job was to supervise one individual kid, my own, who is only a toddler so easy to catch and unlikely to hurt anyone else. But I felt slightly stressed even doing that because there was just so much going on. The other kids were all over her, wanting to touch her, asking me how old she was. I had to keep a sharp lookout and physically deflect the occasional frisbee or ball that was about to hit her, and keep her from getting kicked or run over as she toddled around. I felt like if I was the other teachers, responsible for about 7 kids each that were constantly in motion and in danger from themselves and each other, I'd feel pretty frazzled. I tried to keep track of one little girl for a few minutes but she was zipping around like a chipmunk, I kept losing her in the fray. Yet two of the teachers weren't even paying attention to the kids. They were chatting together and laughing. The third teacher was comforting a kid who had grazed his knee and was periodically calling out things to other kids: "Ramon you put that down." "Kelsey, it's Diane's turn on the swings." "OK Amy, that's enough." She didn't seem frazzled either, but calm and in control. All I could think was, if I had her gig, I'd need to really chill out from where I am now.

YEA!!!!

2008-11-04T21:51:00.001-08:00

We finally got it right. I am so happy.

Fabric Dreams

2008-11-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

On my way back to the office after my lunch break I stopped in at the fabric store. It's such a tactile experience, I felt like a toddler again, enjoying using all my senses instead of just my eyes and ears. I spent a happy ten minutes running my hands over different fabrics - lifting shimmery silks, testing the pile on thick velvets. For some reason I always seem to be drawn to "old lady" fabrics - dark, flowered velvety material that looks gorgeous on the bolt but that I can't picture using for anything besides pillow coverings in a fussily decorated parlor. Back when I used to work as a cashier in a fabric store, I would wait until fabric like that went on extra discounted super sale - and then buy a yard of it, just to have. Then there were the notions. I lingered over shiny buttons, iridescent reels of ribbon, and bowls of thimbles. I'm probably the kind of customer they hate because I touch everything but buy nothing.

No one I know makes their own clothes any more, but the store where I worked was always full of people (okay, women) with craft projects. They were buying Halloween print fabrics to make costumes for their grandkids, tartans to make skirts, yarn to knit caps and socks, fleecey fabric to make coats for their dogs. They all had more ideas for projects than they had time to do them. And just in case a customer walked in who needed inspiration, every season the store was redecorated and we'd put out the new seasonal print fabrics, notions, and catalogs.

Perhaps now that the economy is in the toilet there'll be a return to old-fashioned ways of doing things and more people will frequent fabric stores. Not to make coats for dogs, but to make coats for kids. Which sounds sobering, but really it can be a good thing. I'm all for home haircuts, home cooking, and homemade gifts, so why not clothes, too?

The Right Stuff

2008-10-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems like all of life is a quest to acquire and keep the right things. Get the right house, the right commute, the right job, the right shoes to go with that particular dress. Find the right man. Pick the right names for your children. Try to use up or wear out things that you don't especially like, like that hand lotion that smells of irises and chemicals, or the pasta sauce you bought five jars of because it was on sale (that, you discovered the first time you tried it, was on sale for a reason). Try to find clothes that work for you - when your shape, size, and style are a moving target. Try to find a circle of friends who are fun, reliable, share your values, expand your horizons, and enjoy you as much as you enjoy them. Comparison-shop to pick the right appliance. Find a brand of guinea pig pellets the pig likes. Get your money invested in the right funds. Use the right toothbrush. And all the time, figure out what to do when people give you things that don't fit, that you don't like or can't use, that fill up the space you have and make it wrong. I wonder how many more years it's going to take me to finally get it right.

Just Saying

2008-10-19T01:13:00.000-07:00

It's 1 am and the apartment is quiet. I can hear the wind rustling leaves outside the living room window, and some kind of night-insect creaking away. It sounds like autumn. A good time to catch up on reading, writing, and blogging, so here I am, typey-typing away. In the bedroom, my husband is curled up on the bed with the baby, giving her a bottle.

After a while, I hear some gentle snores from the bedroom, so I suspect he has fallen asleep on the bed with her. I should go check on them. But I keep typing. Then I hear her making a little noise of wakefulness: "eh, eh" like she's starting to thrash around. I hop up and go into the bedroom - just in time to see her roll off the bed and hit the floor. She lets out a scream of pain and surprise. I scoop her up and rock her as she continues to scream. My husband lifts his head; he was stretched out full-length on the bed, facing away from her, and sound asleep. She was down by his calf when she rolled off.

There are many things in this parenting game that he is better at than I am. He's better at playing with her, making her laugh, giving her baths, and figuring out what she wants to eat when she's in a fussy mood. He's more patient with her and more humorous. He is a wonderful dad who does his share and more.

But. She slept in our bed for the first six weeks of her life, nestled up close to my flank. Each time she woke in the night, I would breast-feed her before she even had a chance to cry. I protected her with my body from my husband's occasional roll-overs. I knew there was no risk that I would roll over on her myself. I was so alert to her that the slightest movement or noise from her would bring me fully awake, instantly. I would never have let her roll out of bed or have fallen asleep with her in a dangerous position. And the very first, only, time he slept next to her, he did. Of course, she wasn't really hurt. I soothed her and put her back in her crib, and she fell asleep immediately.

Just saying.

Tightening My Belt

2008-10-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

Everyone is in cutting-back mode. It's tough, after a few flush years there - the economy was booming, I was working full-time, there seemed to be plenty of money to go around. But now I'm reminded daily that I need to be conserving.

I started writing down everything I eat and everything I spend these days, because I read somewhere that this is a proven effective method for reducing such activities. It's supposed to give you the willpower not to reach for that extra cracker or make that impulse purchase, because you know you'll have to write it down later. Alas, it does not seem to be working for me so far. I just gamely list my consumption at the end of the day: "3 handfuls potato chips, 1 slice cheesecake, Heath bar..."

Another strategy is to be willing to put even the smallest bit of food back into the fridge. This is what my parents do (and they're not even trying to cut back). When I visit them, I find things in their fridge that I would never have bothered to put away - like two spoonfuls of pasta sauce in a little Tupperware container, or a slice of apple. I would just scarf that stuff down and wash the pot.

Then there's the strategy of finishing everything in your cupboards and fridge before you go shopping. It's supposed to ensure that you really use what you buy, instead of letting it expire.

Finally, you can always just be too busy/tired to fix something to eat, which is how I am today. And it's only Tuesday.

Mama Bear

2008-10-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

Now that my daughter is walking, trips to the playground or around the neighborhood are potentially a lot more exciting for her, because sometimes I let her out of the stroller to walk part of the way. It takes roughly 10 times as long, of course, because she stops to investigate every leaf, crack in the sidewalk, piece of litter, or ant that she sees in her path - and often stops dead in order to point at a dog or squirrel, or turns around and walks the other direction. But she loves it. She'll toddle down the sidewalk doing little shrieking giggles of joy that she can get places under her own power, and is being allowed to do so.

Then we get to the playground. When she was little, the only thing she could really do was sit in the swing while I pushed her. Now she can toddle around in the sandbox, pick up toys, climb the steps on the junglegym, even go down the slide on her belly. All of this stuff is so much fun for her. I stand around watching her with a stupid grin on my face, or sometimes try to make conversation with the other moms there.

The other kids are often a pain though. Part of the reason we go is for her to see some other people her age and get some socialization practice. But there are usually some kids just a little older than her, like 3-year-olds, who are stuck in the "Mine!" phase and aren't much fun to play with. When they see her coming, they immediately grab away all the toys and glare at her. If she does manage to get her hands on a little plastic shovel or something, she generally goes up to the closest other kid and holds it out. She assumes they'll take it and say "thank you" and then hand it back in a minute, the way we do when she gives us stuff. But the kids never hand it back, they just snatch the toy away. She stares at them, then looks up at me in bewilderment, plainly saying, Is that okay, what just happened? Or are you going to do something about it?

I always wonder - am I supposed to step in? Should I pull a toy away from someone else's kid, possibly making them scream or cry, in order to give it back to my kid? Because I'm a nonconfrontational sissy, I usually just smile encouragingly at her, as though nothing happened. Or I try to find something else to give her, but often the older kid immediately snatches that from her too. Grr. I want to kick sand in those kids' eyes.

Then there are the kids in the 5-7 year age range who are roughhousing, who are so busy chasing each other around the playground that they occasionally run right over her, knocking her down. Usually boys. But there was a girl last week who, in a fit of pique, threw a toy at my daughter's head. And there was a kid of unknown gender who threw open a gate, smacking it into her so that she fell to her knees. I rushed to pick her up and comfort her as she sobbed. The kid's mom was right there and I expected her to at least tell her kid "oh be careful honey," but she didn't.

I think I'm so used to being easygoing and letting other people call the shots in social interactions that I'm expecting, all the time, the other parents to do something about their little darlings' behavior. I know if my daughter took a toy away from some other baby, I would take it from her and hand it back. But the other parents never seem to step in. And I just feel weird about disciplining other people's kids. I'm scared that some kid will go running to his mom: "That lady took my shovel!" What's wrong with me, that I'm afraid of 3-year-olds? Where's my fierce mother instinct?

Holidays

2008-09-25T08:49:00.001-07:00

I was thinking of "home for the holidays" the other day, and I got an amazing rush of holiday nostalgia. Winter sun slanting in through the bay window in the living room. Music playing from the stereo, so lively and bright in the morning that no one wants to sleep in. The smell of bread and cookies baking. The cheerful, warm clatter of activity in the kitchen, my mom emanating a sense of comfort and peace as she bustles around. The knowledge of days off from school stretching ahead, and the prospect of family meals, presents, or other special activities. Most importantly, all of us being together. It seems like we need a special occasion to all join in a common pursuit. Normally my brother disappears into his room, my dad is watching TV so unavailable for conversation, and it ends up being my mom and me chatting in the kitchen - which is nice, but I like it when it's all of us.

I wonder if you ever manage to recreate that feeling of comfort in your second family - the one you build with your own spouse and children. So much of feeling happy at the holidays, for me, was basking in the sense of being cared for, of being a small cherished piece of the family unit. When I'm in charge of recreating that for my child, I can do it, I think - but will it feel as comforting for me?

Maybe I'll just enjoy it vicariously through her. I've noticed that many of the joys of parenthood come from living vicariously as your child discovers things. It sounds like it wouldn't be as good as experiencing things yourself, but actually I think it is. I get this huge glow of pride and happiness whenever she's happy.

Starvation

2008-09-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

I just came across a picture online that breaks my heart. When I saw it, I almost started crying. It's a photo of a baby in the last throes of starvation, all heavy head and stick-thin legs, trying to crawl toward a United Nations food camp while a vulture watches in the background. The baby looks too young to even know how to crawl yet. According to the caption the camp was a kilometer away. I wish I was there so I could pick up that baby and carry it to the camp myself. Or adopt it. I can almost feel how its bony little body would feel in my arms, how I would be afraid of cracking a rib as I carried it.

How can photographers take pictures of things like that and then just walk away? (As this one did - he apparently left the scene immediately after taking the picture so no one knows what happened to the child.) I know their job is only to document misery, not to alleviate it, that they don't have the resources to save every starving child they see, that they can't save one and leave others behind... but still. How could he not have intervened this once to carry the child that 1-kilometer distance that meant the difference between life and death? I know it's not that he wasn't affected by the scene. This particular photographer committed suicide just a short time later, alluding in his suicide note to the overwhelming pain in the world. He's right about that. The capacity for suffering in this world seems to have no limit.

Why I Don't Mind Paying Taxes

2008-09-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

Baby on my hip, I walked cheerfully out of the bank, holding up my car keys and jingling them to amuse her. "Keys," I said cheerfully as I unlocked the car. I tossed them on the front seat to have my hands free for buckling her into her car seat. Then I kissed her on the forehead and slipped into what biologists term a fixed action pattern: locked the car doors, shut them firmly, and walked around to the driver's side, reaching into my pocket for my keys as I went. Oh no. Oh, no, no, no! There was my baby, grinning up at me from the back seat. There were the car keys, sprawled on the front seat. There were the four doors, firmly locked. Ahhhh!

As the first jolt of panic hit my heart, I ran around the car trying the doors anyway. Of course none of them opened. Then I ran back into the bank. There were tons of people standing around in the lobby waiting, but my stride got the attention of the employee at the main desk, who glanced up at me in alarm. "I just locked my baby and my keys in my car! Can I use your phone?" I blurted. The phone didn't have a long enough cord to reach the counter, but he was nice enough to dial the number for me and hand me the receiver.

Quickly, I told my husband what had happened. He has the only other key for the car. "Can you come meet me?" I asked. But how? We only have one car, and we live about a mile from the closest train station. He would have to catch a bus to the station, then it would be a 45 minute ride to the closest station to me, then he still would have no way to get to the bank. As we talked, I thought of the sun beating down into the car. Of course, I had parked in the sun. "There used to be a spare key hidden on the car," he remembered. It was in one of those magnetic boxes you stick under the front bumper. "I'll go look," I said, and hurriedly hung up.

A few minutes later, I was road tar and oil up to the elbow, and my hands were bleeding from brushing over the fragments of glass embedded under the bumper. I couldn't find the box, though. I think it probably fell off years ago.

Next I sized up the car windows and tried to decide which one to break. If I could smash the little one in the back, I could probably reach in and unlock the door. But I couldn't see anything in the parking lot that looked sturdy enough to smash a car window with. No rocks or chunks of asphalt or anything. I also felt anxious about putting a rock through a window when my daughter's car seat was right there - even if it's supposed to be safety glass.

I ran back into the bank. The bank guy winced slightly as he noticed the oil and grease all over my hands, but he dialed for me and handed me the receiver again. "I can't find it!" I told my husband. He advised me to call the police. So in a minute I found myself speaking to a 911 dispatch operator. "Is the baby in distress?" she asked. "Not yet," I said. In fact, the baby had fallen asleep at this point, but that didn't diminish my panic much.

It probably only took a few minutes for help to arrive, but it seemed like ages. I leaned over the back of the car and tried to block the sun with my body while I waited. Inside the car, I could see my daughter's face was red and there were droplets of sweat beaded on her brow. She flopped around uneasily in her sleep. Finally, in the distance, I heard a siren - gradually getting louder - oh my gosh, is that for me? I had expected a single cop car. Instead, there was a giant rescue squad ambulance van, about as big as a fire engine but without the ladder. It took up most of the parking lot. A couple of guys in their early twenties hopped out and came over to the car, and, with a nod of greeting at me, started working on the problem.

First they wedged a tool that looked like an ice scraper into the side of the door and levered it open as far as possible. Then they used a pump to crack it open even more. With a wire they tried to roll down the window or jiggle the lock mechanism open. Minutes passed. After a while one of them glanced at me and spoke for the first time, with a sheepish grin: "It usually doesn't take this long." At least now I know the car is hard to steal. It took multiple tries with different tools from their kit, and about 10 minutes of work, before the door suddenly popped open. "Yes!" one of them said.

Quickly I opened the back door and hauled the car seat out so my baby could get some air. I gushed some thanks to the rescue guys, who were all business ("all in a day's work, ma'am") as they headed back to their van. The bank customers who were standing around watching the scene dispersed. I drove to my parents' house, which was nearby, so I could call my husband back and reassure him.

Later that afternoon, I got a couple of spare keys made. Of course, this will probably never happen again. But if it does, I'll be ready. And in the meantime, yea for 911 and emergency rescue services!

Umbrella Angel

2008-09-04T05:28:00.000-07:00

When I stepped out the front door, it wasn't raining. When I got on the bus, it wasn't raining. But on the way to work, the skies opened. By the time I arrived at my stop, it was a torrential downpour - water sluicing off the top of the bus down the windshield, wipers barely able to keep up - and I didn't have an umbrella. I scurried over to a nearby cafe and took shelter under their awning while I tried to figure out what to do next.

My office was three blocks away. First I thought I should just make a dash for it, but I saw a few people splashing along the sidewalk without umbrellas, and they were soaked to the skin. One guy was wearing a nice suit, plastered to his skin. I didn't have any dry clothes at the office that I could change into. I tried holding my backpack over my head and made a quick foray out, but the rain was so intense that after only a few steps I ran back. I wondered if I should just wait it out, but worried that it might be a while.

While I was standing there in an agony of indecision, a woman walked up to the cafe under a big umbrella. I barely glanced at her, but envisioned a perfect world in which she would just give me her umbrella. In this world she would say, "Hey honey, would you like my umbrella?"

Then she said it again, "Hey honey, would you like my umbrella?"

I turned and realized she was actually talking to me. She said, "You can bring it back later. I'll be here until six." She gestured at the cafe and I realized she was an employee there. I said, "Really?" I couldn't believe my luck. Here was a total stranger offering me salvation. I practically fell over myself thanking her. It was a good umbrella too, one of those great big ones that stretches out about two feet on all sides.

Walking toward my office, I felt flooded with gratitude. Whenever something happens to make me think that people aren't particularly nice - like that boy in the library - I get a reminder that indeed, most of them are, and that nice things happen far more frequently than not-nice things.

The office routine was petty, and my boss was in a foul, vengeful mood, as she has been for the past few months. But I felt like I was just floating above it. Nothing could touch me. I took the umbrella back at noon, and passed it over the counter to her along with a bunch of flowers. She's my umbrella angel.

Recapturing the Innocence

2008-09-02T06:23:00.000-07:00

The other night we went out to dinner. Usually I check to see if I'm wearing a clean shirt as we head out the door and that's it, but this time I felt like dressing up a little more. I put on a flirty little dress from my college days, and some makeup, and even a necklace. I felt like I was trying to be pretty for my husband to remind him what it was like when it was just the two of us out on a date.

Of course it ended up being our usual dinner out, tag-teaming, one of us eating while the other held the baby and tried to keep her from fussing. It was late and she was tired and fidgety. No romantic gazes across the table; we were too busy keeping water glasses out of her reach and snatching forks and knives from her fretful grasp. No stimulating conversation either; we talked about her nap schedule and how many Cheerios she'd eaten that day. As soon as the check came, we hustled out of there. That's life with a baby.

Next week we're going on vacation - without her. I'm going to miss her terribly. I won't be able to just let go and enjoy this trip as fully as I did our honeymoon (the last trip we went on) just because part of my heart will still be at home. But it will be good for us to get away and reconnect.

In a way this trip will be about recapturing that time when it was just the two of us. But I don't have any illusions about those days. People always sigh and say about their pre-kid life, "Oh, it was so great." In reality, I remember feeling pressured and anxious all the time, worried that he wouldn't want to marry me, that I was getting older, that we wouldn't be able to have children. Overall, despite the stress of everyday existence, I'm happier and more relaxed now than I was then.