Snub

Yesterday, in the library, my daughter took a shine to a 10-year-old boy who was picking out books. She toddled up to him (yes, she walks now!) and tried to catch his eye, giving him a winsome smile. He walked away, so she followed him. I went after her and found him crouched down pulling out another book from a low shelf, while she watched him. She was grinning - she likes kids, even big kids. I smiled at him too, kind of a "my baby likes you!" smile that I've shared with cashiers, old ladies on the street, and various other people she has flirted with. But the boy just looked back at me stone-faced and said, "Can you take him away."

The smile crumbled off my face as I said sure and picked her up. I wanted to snap at him, "It's a girl!" or "She wasn't bothering you, just looking," or "This is public space, you know." I know not everyone likes kids, and not everyone is going to think my kid is cute. I don't expect that. All the same, the rejection hurts. I felt glad that she's so little she didn't understand she was being rejected - all she knew was that I picked her up and took her away.

I guess it will be even harder when she's old enough to recognize rejection for what it is - when a preschool friend doesn't want to play with her, or the other girls in her class don't think she's cool, or when she's grown and a man she loves doesn't want her. I don't know how I'll help her deal with those things. All I can think to say is, "But *I* love you!" and sometimes Mom's love just isn't enough.

Money Again

Recently I was reading about debt and savings. Just a couple of generations ago, most Americans lived within their means and even were able to sock away some savings every year. It must have been a great feeling of security to know that, even if your daily grind wasn't much fun, you were "making progress" all the time toward a better lifestyle and a comfortable retirement.

Now, it seems like everyone has thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and everyone is signing up for first-time-homeowner mortgages that are about 20 times my annual salary. I come across articles all the time about people who, after decades of hard work, had no savings to show for it and were plunged into bankruptcy by an unexpected illness or the loss of a job. And the housing market is swooping around like a rollercoaster. One couple we know bought a house a few years ago, then watched as the value of their house plunged to half of the mortgage they had committed to.

Whenever I read those articles, I eagerly check out the tips for saving money at the end - but it's always mundane things like brewing your coffee at home instead of going out every day, or trying to carpool instead of driving to work by yourself. I don't drink coffee and I ride the bus. And those things really don't save much money, anyway. I can't pat myself on the back for my coffee-free lifestyle or my lack of credit card debt because people who DO go to Starbucks every day generally earn a lot more than I do. And they have much greater earning power and potential for advancement. I feel like, even though I have a solid education and a good work ethic, I'm incapable of earning any more money than I do now. I can't envision a job I would be capable of landing and doing competently that would pay more than the one I have now. I had a lot of potential back when I was in school. It bothers me a bit that I seem to have maxed out now at such a low level.

Wasting Money

I've decided I can't be trusted with money. I have made some stupid decisions recently that I wish I could undo.

First, I forgot to buy more minutes for my cell phone before last year's minutes expired, so I couldn't roll them over. And it was a lot of minutes. No amount of begging and pleading with the phone company convinced them to give me my minutes back once I realized what had happened, two days after they had expired. Man! If only I had remembered in time! I just wasted the annual salary of a family in India, by letting that slip my mind.

I also got caught by one of those speed trap cameras. I was going 35 in a 30 mph zone and it cost me $40. There's the salary of a family in... uh.. Namibia.

I also seem to go on these spending sprees with food, mostly at farmers' markets where the produce is beautiful but the prices are high. Farmers' market food is a good thing to buy, but I don't need to buy as much of it as I do. My parents spent a weekend in New York and all they bought was a couple of bagels. They literally got by the whole weekend without buying anything else, because the hotel had a continental breakfast and they were "too tired" to bother going out to eat after a full day of activities. I am never too tired to eat. The amount of food that I buy and tote home and prepare for our family and eat, in huge heaping portions, is prodigious. We're only two people and an infant; there's no reason to go to the grocery store every few days or to spend several hours every evening puttering around in the kitchen. I bet I open and close the refrigerator 30 times a day. Good thing our utilities are included or I would be fretting about the electric bill too; as it is I only have to deal with the guilt of adding to climate change by wasting energy.

I also am not very savvy about investments. I just want to lock my money up for as long as possible, in some inaccessible location where I won't be tempted to spend it on organic rutabagas, speeding fines, or unused minutes. I think that really I should just gather up all my savings and give them to charity, before I fritter them all away.

Invisible

I just Googled myself, as I do from time to time, and was pleased to find that I'm still invisible to the all-seeing Eye of Google (like the Eye of Sauron, sweeping across the landscape). I don't have a Facebook page, and I don't show up on any alumni sites or even on my company's website, except on one obscure page that you have to be searching for in order to find. Anyone looking for me would have to conclude that I just vanished into thin air after graduation. I like that. Privacy is safety. I feel like I shed a lot of spam and baggage associated with my old life when I got married and changed my name, and so far the new one is clean and unknown to the spammers and stalkers of the world. I wish my daughter was as invisible as I am. Her name pops up on a few pages, unfortunately.

It's hard to articulate why I want to be invisible. It just seems better that way - as though, in a deep cool forest, I was walking without a trace, leaving no footprints, slipping through life untrackably.

The Worst Possible Outcome?

One of my coworkers just had a baby - well, his wife did. Last winter when I was talking with him about pregnancy and babies, he mentioned that they were going to have a natural childbirth. It's funny how emphatic some people are about it. He said, "We are going to go natural," and told me about the Bradley classes they were taking. Another coworker chimed in, "My wife went natural with all three of our kids. Women don't need epidurals and all that stuff. There's no reason more births shouldn't be natural."

I listened and nodded - indeed, during my pregnancy I was steeping myself in Ina May Gaskin's Spiritual Midwifery and a Bradley guide and many other resources that all said the same thing - , but when he said that I couldn't help thinking with a funny little shiver, what if labor goes differently from how you planned? How do you know it will all work out? It also seems odd for a man to be making those kinds of decisions for his wife. Since she's going to be experiencing the pain, it seems to me it should be entirely up to her. Of course, perhaps these guys were just repeating what their wives were saying, but it sounded to me like decisions they were imposing on their wives. And how can you ever require someone else's pain tolerance to live up to your preconceived ideal?

Anyway, after I had congratulated him and heard all about the new baby and gushed over the adorable pictures, I casually asked how labor and delivery went. He said, "It was, frankly, completely awful. She was stalled at 9 centimeters for hours and hours, we tried everything, but she just couldn't progress. So it was a C-section. The worst possible outcome. Very disappointing."

Again, I got a funny shiver in my spine, like he was disappointed not in the situation, but in her. I felt like saying, "I'm sure she did her best! How can you be disappointed, when she's given you this beautiful son?" I really felt for his poor wife. I think they were so thoroughly indoctrinated by the Bradley classes that they started thinking women who have C-sections are copping out, and no matter what I'm sure she feels his disappointment as a form of judgment on her.

I also wanted to say, "That's not the worst possible outcome! My goodness. The worst possible outcome is a dead baby. Or a brain-damaged baby. Or a dead wife." Birth is a scary, dramatic event where a lot of things can go wrong, very quickly, and the C-section he's regarding as a terrible stain on their record likely saved the lives of both his wife and child.

In the end I just made sympathetic noises and said, "But you have a wonderful healthy baby, and your wife is all right. And a few years down the line it really won't make any difference how it started." He said he guessed so.

It makes me feel glad, first of all, that I wasn't clinging so hard to any particular vision of how my labor and delivery would go that I would feel crushed afterward when the reality turned out different. And that my husband was so totally supportive of everything I wanted. And that I can look back on my own labor experience with such a happy, peaceful feeling.

Nice Things People Have Said

"What a cute baby!"
"She's adorable."
"You have a beautiful child."
Purrr. These are things that random strangers took the time to say to me as I was out walking around the neighborhood with my kid.

"Is she yours? Wow... you're so young."
Not really, but it sure is nice when people think that!

"You have body dysmorphia disorder. I think you look great."
- my husband, after listening to me bellyache about my belly

Ugh

Why is a visit to the DMV always such a soul-crushing experience?

Read This Book

I just finished reading an amazing book called The Diary of Ma Yan. It's the real diary of a thirteen-year-old girl living in a rural area in China, that was published after it fell into the hands of a journalist on a rare visit to the region. The area is so arid the government has declared it uninhabitable. About three million people still live there, scratching out a hand-to-mouth existence. Ma Yan describes her struggles to get an education, at a tiny school a 12-mile-walk from her home, and her deep admiration for her parents, whose ceaseless exhausting labor is barely enough to feed the family. She especially admires her mother, who has a serious medical condition that causes her such pain she occasionally sits down moaning in the middle of the wheat field she is harvesting - but the family can't afford to go to a doctor. No matter how hard the parents work, they are just one breath away from starvation. Ma Yan describes trying to concentrate on her studies when the only thing she has had to eat in the past 48 hours is a single bowl of rice.

I was awed and moved by this description. I felt like the discrepancy between this family's situation and our own - which until then I would have rated near the bottom among our circle of friends, since we are living in quite a small apartment with not even a separate bedroom for the baby - was extreme, nearly obscene. I looked around at all the evidence of wealth in our apartment, the Made-in-China baby toys, the fancy artisal organic cheese in the refrigerator that we are able to afford, the overflowing bookcases, the color TV and piles of CDs we hardly even have time to listen to. We have so much food that I complain about eating too much. It made me feel sick to think that I was munching away on blueberry tart while elsewhere in the world, young mothers my age are literally starving.

I can't imagine how all-consuming and horrific it must feel when your children are in real danger of illness and death, when your whole family is really just one catastrophe like an illness or a particularly bad drought away from destitution. It reminded me of the quote: "We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second." (Barbara Kingsolver)

To assuage a bit of my guilt I called up one of those international aid agencies and pledged to sponsor a child in India. I have two other sponsored children, one in Brazil and one in Honduras. It isn't very much money and it only touches a few individual lives - when what we need to address the global disparity in wealth is huge sweeping reforms and changes to the global currents of trade. But I feel slightly better. Mainly I just wanted some family on the other side of the world to feel that they weren't suffering in utter loneliness.

Very Berry Good

Last week I went blueberry picking at a local farm and brought home six pounds of berries. They were sunwarmed and so ripe and plump they almost fell off the bush and into my bucket - and into my daughter's hands and mouth (I was wearing her in a harness on my front and she was reaching for the berries with both hands). Blueberries right off the bush are really different from the ones you get in the pint boxes at the store - much sweeter.

Now I need to do some serious situps to make up for my excesses. But blueberries are healthy, you say. Yes indeed they are, but as I found out when I got home and reached for my cookbook, the best ways to eat them - after right-off-the-bush - are: slathered with cream, baked in a tart, in a pie, in a cream cheese pie, rolled in sugar, etc. I made a blueberry jam crumble and a delicious blueberry jubilee tart that I have been noshing on all week.

So far I've been able to avoid bringing any more sugar into the house, though. I did all my baking using supplies on hand. This blog keeps me honest.

The Kiddie Years

There was a magician show just beginning in the children’s room at the library when I stopped by to return some books, so we stayed and watched it. It was so lame. The magician had to fill an hour, so he spent ages just warming up the crowd, getting the kids to chant his name, pretending not to be able to hear them until they yelled it, pretending to lose his magic box of tricks, getting everyone to sing the ABC song with him, asking the kids what their favorite colors were, etc. I can sympathize with the difficulty of entertaining 40 rambunctious toddlers and their associated nannies, mothers, and young siblings in laps. But the show was so lacking in content. Finally about 15 minutes in he did a trick where he pulled a scarf inside out and it changed color. Then he went back to having the kids chant his name.

My kid stared at him skeptically for a few minutes as the show was starting, then turned her back on him and spent the rest of the time looking at the baby sitting behind us. After 20 minutes I’d had enough as well, so we left.

Suddenly I felt acutely depressed – envisioning the years ahead of children’s theme birthday parties, sing-alongs, Disney stuff, Chuck E. Cheese outings, and so on that we will have to attend. You have to do these things with kids, right? I mean, she thought the magician was dumb. But soon enough I guess she’ll be into this stuff, and I'll just have to bear with it. I have to learn the stupid Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes song and that other one about the cheese standing alone, and find out who Dora and Hannah Montana are, and take her to Jonas Brothers concerts, or she’ll think I’m so uncool she won’t even be talking to me by the time she’s a teenager.

Maybe she'll turn out to be a weird socially awkward bookish child like I was, more interested in books and horse camp than boys, and so completely out of sync with her peer group that she doesn’t even notice she’s out of sync with them. Then I can give her all the horse books I loved as a kid, and we can bond over them.

Chocolate Rain

I went out with friends to a posh new restaurant specializing in chocolate. The menu has appetizers, salads, and five-course desserts all oriented around chocolate. It's amazing what variety there is - everything from chocolate vinagrette for the salads to grilled cheese topped with melted dark chocolate to chocolate-kahlua elixirs, and of course lots of desserts like fudge bars, white chocolate cheesecake, cream pie dusted with cocoa, and fruit plates decorated with curlicues of drizzled chocolate.

Most people order the themed five-courses, but in the spirit of restraint I just got a goat cheese and beet salad (yum) and the tiramisu. It was extremely good. One of my friends ordered the same thing but took some of the tiramisu home to her boyfriend, claiming that she was feeling ill from all the chocolate and couldn't finish it. I could definitely have eaten more chocolate. I can't really imagine having eaten so much chocolate that I couldn't eat a little more. I think I just have a higher tolerance for it because I habitually consume more. I'm like a smoker who can handle high levels of nicotine coursing through my system. She's thin as a rail and eats whole-wheat sandwiches with no mayo, carrot sticks, and small helpings of everything. Her body was probably like, "What IS this stuff?"

Most of the time I'm pretty happy with the way I look and with my food choices, but lately it has been more of a struggle. I feel myself descending into a newfound antagonism with food. I used to actually prefer healthy food. I never even liked chocolate very much until recently. But now, suddenly, I can't get enough of it. I crave fatty things like potato chips and cream and butter. I went into a Firehook Bakery last week and bought one of their giant chocolate espresso cookies. It seemed very unlike me, at least the old me, who I guess was like my chocolate-lightweight friend. The new me has a post-pregnancy belly bulge and a hummingbird's keenness for refined sugar. I even wander over to the kitchen at work sometimes just to see if there's any leftover food up for grabs.

I want to be better about all this stuff, embrace the no-mayo sandwiches and stop snacking all the time. I feel occasionally disgusted with myself when I look down at my paunch. Until recently I could justify the frequent eating with, "I have to keep making milk for the baby. Now's not the time to go on a diet." But now that she's a year old and is drinking formula and cow's milk in addition to breast milk, I could wean at any time.

What makes it hard is that I don't always feel strict with myself. Other times I look at myself and think I look fine, that there's no need to be extreme. Or, I simply feel unable to resist eating one more cookie.

Well, they say the first rule when you're in a hole is to stop digging. So here's my action plan. Starting now, I won't buy any more chocolate at the grocery store - even when the white chocolate bars that I love go on sale for $1 apiece and every cell in my body is urging me to stock up. No more ice cream or pound cake either. Or brownie mix.

I figure I can coast for a while on the cupboardful of sugar that I currently have. After that runs out, it will get hard. But I know that if you do a thing routinely, you start to enjoy it (which is the vicious cycle that has turned me into such a chocolate fiend), and if you can get out of the habit of it for a while, you stop enjoying it as much. So wish me luck - here I go!

The Shirt I Didn't Buy

There’s a thrift store across the street from where I live. It’s mostly old-lady clothes - saggy stirrup pants and garish blouses that smell like mothballs. But I still browse there occasionally; I've picked up some good deals from the children’s rack where most items are 10 or 25 cents.

I almost bought one toddler-size shirt not because it was cute but because it was just so awful. It had a picture of a pelican on it, and there was a flap of plastic attached to the shirt that was the top half of his beak, so you could lift it up and look inside his mouth. Inside, there were some shrimps hanging out at tables and drinking martinis, and there was a little stage with a jazz band (the performers were also shrimps). A banner across the top of the pelican’s beak proclaimed it to be “The See Food Lounge.” Hilarious! For 10 cents, I thought, I have to have this shirt. But oh my gosh it was ugly. In the end I didn’t think I could bring myself to put anything that ugly on my child. When I went back a couple weeks later, it was gone – so I guess someone else got a kick out of it.

Nature Deficit Disorder

I took the baby for a long walk yesterday. I felt the need to get out "in nature" - I was reading a book about camping in the Alaskan wilderness, and just wanted to be out somewhere quiet, in the cathedral-like gloom of a forest, with no one else around. The closest I could find was an old closed-off road that goes through a park. Technically pedestrians aren't supposed to go back there but it was the only woodland within walking distance of our apartment. So I headed down the road carrying the baby in the Snugli. Little birds flitted across the path in front of us. The wind shifted the trees overhead, making the patches of shadows dance. I thought about "the need to be versed in country things" and hoped that as we walked she might absorb some of the peacefulness of the setting and somewhere in her subconscious a love for solitude and nature might be sparked.

But five minutes into our walk there were things I couldn't tune out any more. Like the persistent honking of traffic from the highway next to us. And the regular pounding of hammers from a crew of roofers nearby, followed by the buzz of jackhammers from a construction site that we passed a little later. And the glimpses of houses on both sides through the trees. And the strong reek of raw sewage that apparently the city dumps directly into the creek (are they allowed to do that? really?). As the path dipped under an overpass, I saw a couple of orange construction cones and a sign that warned that this was a lead removal area, and that eating and drinking were forbidden. We kept walking, but we couldn't get away from it all. At all. I then began to worry that at this formative stage the baby might learn to associate woodland with the stink of sewage, and would grow up to hate nature.

Maybe we should move to the country. If we can find some place in the country with decent schools, liberal politics, and no confinement agriculture facilities nearby.

Guess What Book This Is

"Where's this bally Rush got to?" said Edmund a good deal later.
"I certainly thought we'd have struck it by now," said Peter. "But there's nothing to do but keep on." They both knew that the Dwarf was looking anxiously at them, but he said nothing.
And still they trudged on and their mail shirts began to feel very hot and heavy.

This is a shoe-in to guess because lots of people are reading this particular book right now. But it's a terrific book and deserves to be read a lot. I have probably read it a dozen times already and I still really enjoy it each time. I'm reading it out loud to the baby.

Happy Birthday!

Today is my daughter's first birthday!

I can't quite believe that she's really a year old. All day (actually yesterday and today) I was noticing the time and recalling exactly where I was, and what I was doing, a year ago.

3 pm yesterday - feeling the first cramps.
3:30 pm - realizing -omigosh!- those are contractions!
7 pm - walking around and around our apartment, breathing heavily.
10 pm - walking around and around, leaning over the sofa arm, groaning.
1 am - on the way to the hospital, feeling spacey and eager and a little nervous.
4 am - pacing the halls in the hospital in a stylish tentlike gown.
6 am - watching the sun rise, with my midwife at my side, and hearing her say something about how I'm still only in "early" labor. aaaah.
9 am - groaning, pacing, panting.
11 am - crouching in the tub. It doesn't help. Starting to feel panicky, like I can't keep ahead of the pain; asking for an epidural.
noon - blessed relief, lying in bed after the epidural. The room was dark, and my husband and I both dozed. I thought of how soon I'd have my baby in my arms, and my eyes filled with tears.
2:30 pm - time to push. Painful but exciting. I felt totally focused on the job at hand.
3 pm - the birth! seeing my beautiful baby for the first time, feeling how real she was as she wriggled on my chest, warm and wet and dark, all long limbs and big dark eyes. Feeling totally in love with her and with my husband.
5 pm - eating dinner with one hand while I held my baby with the other.
9 pm - surprise visit from my brother, after my parents and husband had gone home. In the warm, quiet room, we marveled together over the baby.

It was a wonderful birth day for her, and an experience I'll treasure always. Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me. I remember I held her in my arms and nursed her all night long, only putting her down briefly to go to the bathroom. I couldn't take my eyes off her. I felt that little surge of happiness that you get sometimes when something particularly good happens to you - but I felt that way for hours and hours on end.

And now she's a year old, a whole year of discoveries behind us. She's grown from a little 6-pound swaddled bundle whose only desire in life was to nurse, nurse, nurse...to a real little person who kicks and struggles and growls at me if I take too long getting her dressed - a person with ideas and a sense of humor, with my husband's ears and her grandmother's eyes and my dark hair. She's spirited and playful. We love her so much it hurts.

Single Moms

I am in awe of single moms. How do they do it - really, how do the logistics work? I was fairly prepared for our lives to change when we had a baby; I knew you can't leave a baby alone ever, so I figured we'd do a lot of swapping off baby duty so we could both keep going to our jobs, doing the grocery shopping, taking showers, and all the other necessary things of life - that, or take her with us. And with the help of my amazing parents, it has worked out. I feel like my share of the work is a bit bigger just because I'm still nursing, so I have to drop what I'm doing every 3 hours and pump or nurse, then wash out bottles and pump parts. I'll be glad when that phase is over.

Anyway, my husband is on a ten-day business trip right now so I'm on my own with the baby. I still have to go to my job and I have a huge freelancing assignment that is eating up all my spare time. I'm a bit stressed about finishing it. I get the work done in 5 minutes here, 3 minutes there, hopping up constantly to attend to the baby's needs. She plays quietly for a few minutes at a time, but then wants to interact with me, or goes after some hazardous item in the apartment, so I really have to supervise her with one eye the whole time I'm working, and it slows me down to a snail's pace. I get most of it done at night after she's asleep. Since this job is so enormous, lately I've been staying up till ridiculous hours to get my daily quota done. I'm only getting a few hours of sleep a night. I usually have to eat (raisins, chips, or something) the entire time I'm working just to stay awake - otherwise I find myself nodding off as soon as I sit down. Not to gripe; it's an interesting assignment and I'll be glad of the money. I just wish I didn't have to do it on top of everything else. I wish I was only working at my office job. Or only taking care of the baby. Or only doing the freelance job. Having to do all three, with no backup (except for the aforementioned amazing parents), is rough.

So having had a taste of working single motherhood, I just don't understand how it's possible. How can you look after a baby if you have to work, which if you're single you must, in order to support yourself? I guess daycare is the answer, but I know my salary alone would barely cover the rent on our one-bedroom apartment, so I certainly wouldn't have any money left over for fripperies like food or daycare. Do you just go deeper and deeper into debt until the kid is old enough to go to school, when (finally!) there is a safe, free, supervised place where you can leave them all day and you can start to make some headway against the bills? And if you are alone and have no one to pass the baby off to, how do you manage things like dentist's appointments, job interviews, or even a movie with a friend, where you just can't bring a baby with you? I guess you just get more aggressive about finding babysitters (so far we have yet to leave her with anyone but my parents and, twice, with friends). But babysitters are expensive. From every angle, raising a child alone must be a Herculean task.

A Handy Rhyme

Here's how to remember the difference:
Medicare is for people with no hair.
Medicaid is for people who don't get paid.

Or perhaps I'm the only one who gets those two mixed up.

In other news, I tried circus peanuts - the candy - for the first time in about 20 years today. I remember liking them as a kid, and I thought perhaps they would fall into the category of Things That You Know Are Bad For You But You're A Sucker For Them Anyway, like chicken nuggets and Reeses Pieces peanut butter cups. I'm happy to report that they are awful! I will have no trouble at all resisting them for the rest of my life. They are like plasticky pieces of styrofoam infused with chemical perfume. After I'd eaten one, the sickly-sweet plastic smell kept wafting out of the bag, until I had to get up and throw it away.

I Wore Pajamas to Work

By mistake. My neighbor was getting rid of a big bag of clothes, so I rummaged through it and was pleased when I found a few things my size that I really liked - a few long-sleeved casual tops, a pair of drawstring pants I can wear for yoga, a white pullover, and even some shoes that fit. Everything looked like it was still new.

This morning I reached for the white pullover, which is long enough to go down over my hips and tight-fitting in the sleeves, and has little tiny nubbins all over it. It seemed like a perfect choice for a day that was unseasonably chilly, and it looked sharp with dark pants and dangly earrings. It wasn't until I got home that my husband took one look at me, laughed, and said, "You wore your pajamas to work!" I said, "What do you mean?" "Those are long johns," he said. "Of course they're not," I said. Then I went to look in the mirror. He's right, dang it.

Luckily no one at work looked at me funny or said anything. Maybe I got away with it?

Watch Out for Farmers

Sometimes I really feel at odds with farmers. I am supposed to feel sympathy for them - farming is such a hard job, after all, and most small farmers have to work a second job in town just to keep ahead of the bills, and the loss of rural communities across America is so sad, etc. I guess I feel respect for the ones who are trying to do a good job - trying to farm organically or abide by humane standards in the way that they raise their animals.

But the vast majority don't seem to care much about things that are so critically important to me. Like the environment. They drench their fields in pesticides and rake over the ground with their tractors until the soil just crumbles and blows away. Or they stuff chickens into cages so small that any thinking person would hurt to look at them. They talk about vegetarians as though they're vampires - they talk, seriously and with great conviction, about how "vegans are out to get our kids". It's almost as though they get set, at some point, into a kind of antagonism with the earth and nature - bent on extracting whatever they can get from organisms that, they think, owe them a living. Even the occasional organic farmer that I meet has this weird worldview - what I think of as an exploitation complex - that the earth is here for us to use, by any means possible. One I met said he didn't believe animals could suffer - that what might appear to be suffering was really a misinterpretation on our part. I'd like to stick him in a farrowing crate, in a space so small he couldn't stand up or turn around, and misinterpret his cries for help.

At the Same Time

Before now, I never knew it was possible to be simultaneously ribby and paunchy. Not that either is an extreme - I don't look like a starvation victim or anything, and I think I am safely out of the realm where anyone could mistake me for being pregnant. I just look like a normal thin person with a slightly poochy belly. I wonder if I will always have it, if it's one of the trade-offs involved in motherhood that everyone learns about and quietly gets resigned to. It's like having a few white hairs and simultaneously a few zits - two other things I didn't know you could have at the same time. Alas, you can.

I read recently about a mom who's expecting her 18th child. She's only 41 and is planning to have "as many children as God will give us." I think it's so unfair that some friends of mine have invested thousands of dollars and untold emotional energy trying to conceive a baby, and recently have had to come to terms with the fact that they cannot have children. They're only in their late twenties. And meanwhile this couple has so many - surely more than they "need" to feel fulfilled, and far more than this overburdened earth needs from a single couple. I loved being pregnant; I hope I get the chance to do it again someday. But oh my gosh. 18 times? That's just too many.