Blue Kittatinny Tuscarora Allegheny

Things I learned today:

There are double bathroom stalls on the PA Turnpike that have a full-size toilet and a toddler-size one, and a changing table. (Yeah, I thought that was cool, too.)

A person can get very wet under the gas pump awning.

The midwest is closer than I think.

My hair does extraordinary things when it halfway dries during a downpour and then heavy Ohio wind whips it up around and over my head to finish the job.

I can happily listen to The New Pornographers' Challengers cd six times in a row.

There is a family who already loves Annoying Dog and is happy to have her.

It is possible to be so nice to me that I cry.

The headline that made me subscribe to the Onion

When we lived in Madison, we picked it up on the corner every week, but The Onion has yet to arrive in Philly. I grabbed a copy when I was home in DC over the weekend and just got around to looking at it.

"Everything Falling Apart, Reports Institute For Somehow Managing To Hold It All Together"

Yeah. I need me some of that.

Earworms, almost

This was in my head all weekend. Only the CAKE version, but this is the classic.




Now this is in my head.



(Sorry, couldn't find M. Ward.)

Union Maid

Phone call today:

"Hello, this is your union calling you"

It was a computer. I'm in Pennsylvania. The primary is tomorrow. I hung up.

Seeing as how I'm a small-scale capitalist by trade, I'm not in a union, but A. is. So if it was my union calling me, I guess the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has opened up a Ladies' Auxiliary.

Cool, hunh?

Gimme that cookie

We are at the dining room table. We are eating passover cookies, the almond kind with the almond on top, and the raw paste in the middle. Z. is surrounded by the remnants of cookies that have their almonds removed and their centers eaten out.

Z.: I know how to take dat off. (Reaches across to my plate and takes my cookie.)

Z. removes almond from top of cookie and hands it to me.

Z.: Here you go. You can eat dis.

Z. proceeds to bring my cookie to her mouth.

S.: Hey! (S. snatches cookie from her child's mouth.) You can't just take my cookie off my plate!

Quick, what's the weather forecast?

Z. got some new boots this week. They are purple, with white daisies on them, and just like when she got her ruby slippers, she had to get out of bed once and put her boots on to clomp to the top of the stairs and ask for water. Apparently having cool new shoes makes her too excited to sleep, and very thirsty.

I let her wear them to school Wednesday (the first day she was at school after she got them), but not yesterday. "Only if it rains, or we go down to the creek," I said, in my best mom-lays-down-the-rules voice.

This morning she woke up and said "Is it supposed to rwain today? After school, I want to go down to da cwreek."

Thank you, everyone, for a great birthday

Last year I complained in this space about having a distinctly so-so birthday. This year, I had a really wonderful birthday.

To everyone responsible, thank you. At a time when I have mostly been thinking about what a hash I've made out of my life, you all made me feel loved.

(Also, Facebook's birthday reminder function is pretty darn cool.)

Secrets in my house

Z. and A. are standing two feet from me.

Z.: Mama, I didn't tell you about da prwesents. I just told you I was telling *Mommy* about da prwesents.

New York City, there we were

We took a mid-week, one-night trip to New York last night to see a showing of some films. It was only Z.'s second time ever seeing a movie in a theater--her first time was last week, when we pulled her out of school early to see a matinee showing of a documentary about a kid we know from our neighborhood. She hasn't quite got the whispering thing down.

Here is something that might happen to you if you raise your child to be polite and to respect privacy by asking first. You might be in a quiet theater and she might ask to sit on your lap. And then she might ask if she can hold your breast.

*****

On our way to the car and home, I had the rolly bag and A. was herding Z. In the gutter of the driveway in front of the faculty housing where we were crashing: a bird's head, walnut-brown, long-beaked, red at the neck where it was severed. I bumped the bag up onto the sidewalk and went a few paces. I turned and waited to see what would happen when Z. got to the same place: would A. see it in time and head her off? But if I pointed it out, Z. would certainly see it.

Neither of them noticed it. I left it at that.

Life and Woods

Back in the middle of December, I took a walk in the woods on a Saturday in the middle of the day, not my usual time and not my usual day. The woods were a very different place from what they usually are for me early on a weekday morning: there was a whole pack of people attached to a five year-old's birthday party, who were searching out snacks and party favors secreted in different corners of the path. There were friends to greet and people I didn't know greeting each other and stopping to talk at length. There was, improbably, a cyclist on a mountain unicycle, who stopped at the end of footbridge as I sat at my place on the bank, and bounced in place three times to hop onto the bridge. There were no birdwatchers and not nearly so many dog walkers, and on the two blocks I walk to and from the woods, there were far more people hurrying to the co-op and milling around the cafe.

One of the people I met that December day, at the beginning of my walk, was the artist who made this installation. She's not someone I know well, but she's a good friend of our neighbors-through-the-wall, and I knew her slightly when I had my first-ever full-time teaching gig, a quarter-long leave replacement I did nine years ago, at the same time I moved to this neighborhood. Neither of us has been at the school for years--it was not a school that was good for the soul--and since I was just a long-term sub with far shorter hair and far less weight on my frame, I'd be surprised if she remembered me from then, but I tend to hang on to details like that.

That day, we stopped and talked for the first time since we were both at that soul-strangling school, me because I hadn't yet said anything to her about the installation even though I had blogged about it, she because, well. She was grieving intensely and freshly, she needed to talk to everyone there was to talk to. She told me her husband had died the very day after the installation went up. He'd had cancer for months, but it was the chemotherapy that killed him, so it was in fact sudden, and the installation took on a meaning she hadn't expected it to have.

After I talked to her I went to those papier mache trees, melting and disintegrating into the loamy earth, and I watched the birthday party making its way through the live, leafless, hibernating trees, and I went home and revised the post I'd written a month earlier, adding a final sentence.


Today, A. and I took Z. to the woods after a naptime that we grownups had used to wear ourselves out with talk. Z. bopped along the path, wearing her Queen Esther crown, making up games, jumping over roots and picking up sticks and futilely commanding us to stop. At the footbridge, Z. ran from one end to the other while I sat and listened to the water in the creek. When A. was too cold to stand around anymore, we ventured down to the creekbed to pluck a dirty plastic bag from the rocks ("We did a mitzvah forw da wateuh!") and made our way home.

On our circuit of the woods, I made a detour to the site of the installation. The papier mache is gone. The ground is exposed, still dark and loamy. Five young oak trees are planted in a circle.

Edited: the artist has a lovely site up about the work, but I don't want to link and show up on such a well-publicized neighborhood site. But if anyone wants to see it, drop me an email, scallen3@aol.com, and I'll send it to you.

What to do with this blog

I've been stuck on this blog for awhile now. Well, maybe you noticed. I'm not sure who I'm writing for, or why, and I'm not even quite sure what it is I was doing when I was writing more. Was it therapy? Was it art? Was it loneliness?

I lost my groove because I got more depressed, and I got really really scared, and my life got far too messy to be setting forth in front of strangers. Things are a little better now. But I'm not sure how to get back into writing.

The one idea I have so far for a new thing to be doing with the blog, if it happens, it ain't gonna happen this week. So I'm making my unofficial hiatus official for a week so that I can take blogging off my list of things I'm thinking about consciously.

Be back in a week.

Introducing the Pants Boss

I think that last one has been up long enough, don't you?

Co made a late comment I want to respond to here instead of burying it: Co, I can't imagine going through something like this, let alone something objectively worse, on a date that other people were always reminding me of--you have heaps and heaps of my sympathy. I also think you're right--as so many other people suggested--that having more layers of good associations with the date will help me. This was only the third time it's rolled around since it happened, after all. But I'm also thinking that knowing the anniversary was going to come in its inevitable time helped me contain the story more this year than I have the previous two years. Knowing I was going to open that box up no matter what let me leave it closed for longer, if that makes sense.

So in the spirit of both adding happy layers and closing the box up again, here are some joyful things that have come along with the arrival of the birthday:

An inundation of grandparents, a birthday cake, a Glinda snowglobe, a pair of ruby slippers, a wand, an inchworm riding toy, a puzzle, some videos, a toy Muppet, a scooter, some crayons for drawing on windows, and (preparing her for her future life of peonage in the family-owned retail business) a cash register. She has played with each of her presents intensely and happily and frequently in the past 48 hours. Three is an age when most things are interesting, but I also think that the relatives just did a good job of getting her and meeting her where she's at.

Her birthday night, she got out of bed twice expressly in order to put on her ruby slippers. Normally if she gets out of bed, she just pads to the top of the stairs, but Sunday night she donned her shoes and her witch hat and outfitted herself with her new flashy purple wand before inquiring after a drink of water.


Here are some other things that have followed in the wake of three: she chooses her own pants now, in the morning--I figure it doesn't matter to me what pants she wears so long as they match her shirt, more or less, and I still get final say in her shirt. Of course she started by choosing the purple ones.

She has jumped to wearing big girl pants, even to school. I'm holding my breath, I really am, because she is still fighting us way too much on way too many trips to the potty, but suddenly she loves the big kid pants and she's doing what I've known she could do if she wanted to, which is pay attention and keep them dry, and she has been dry for two days straight now. Not overnight, she's still in a diaper overnight, but even for naps.

And.

Drumroll.

The Binky Fairy came to our house.

On the night after her birthday, we had a binky hunt. I distributed our binky stash so that there was one in every place that a binky tends to be left in our house: the sideboard in the dining room, the kitchen counter, the side of Z.'s bed, the edge of the sink. Z. and I took a basket and we hunted down all of the binkies, each and every one (there were 8, not including the one in her mouth) and she put them under her pillow (but not! the one in her mouth--until she exchanged it for the only purple one). When A. went to bed, she collected all the binkies and put them in a safe place (my underwear drawer) and in their stead she left a purple Kermit the Frog shirt of magnificent fabulousness.

Now Z. has a binky when she's sleeping or when she's riding in the car (but not when she has a friend in the car). And that's it. She misses her binky. She really, really wants a binky in her mouth, especially in the morning when she gets out of bed. It is clear that we have an addict and she's jonesing. But she's also doing it.

In the space of two days, she is transformed. No binky, no diaper butt. She has been tall for her age for ages (I'm 5'5", and her head is almost at my waist) but all of a sudden since Sunday, she has stopped looking like a baby.

I'm proud as hell.

Trauma, trauma everywhere

Hey all, Z. was born at 2:02 am on March 2, 2005. Seventy-five hours.

I'm gonna write youall a cheery "Now we are three" birthday party kind of post, but you'll have to come back for it tomorrow.

That day, her very first birthday, was the worst day of my life and A.'s, so far. The celebration, the amazement of her arrival, the jubilant end of the long labor nightmare, that sense that we had arrived at the far shore and could triumphantly collapse in its safety: that all lasted 20 minutes, until Z. passed out at my breast while her footprints were being taken.

After they took her from me, after they resuscitated her, after I had reached my hand into the isolette to say goodbye, after they wheeled her from the room and I didn't know where in the hospital the NICU was, after the door closed behind her, what I thought was: "so much for that pregnancy."* Not even "so much for that baby," because I hadn't held her long enough for her to seem real to me, really outside me.

For the first five days of her life, Z. was attached to machines and sedated to the point that initially her eyes rolled back in her head. This was all because of the misdiagnosis (seizure) that was offered to explain her agonal breathing. The breathing trouble was clearly was life-threatening, but it just as clearly ended with no lingering effects. A partially obstructed airway was what she actually had, and a correct diagnosis would have meant no need for a level 3 NICU. But a seizure diagnosis did mean a level 3 NICU, and that meant Z. left the hospital where I birthed her, and seven hours before the earliest moment I was permitted to release myself.

NICUs save lives, I'm totally clear on that, but my baby's life and health were never in danger while she was in a NICU. Maybe that's why I'm also totally clear that NICU's are in the business of separating you from your child and they believe it's for your child's own good, so they set out to convince you of the same thing at the moment when you are least confident of your ability to parent or your identity as a parent, if this is your first pregnancy, and your body is yearning, physically aching to be with your baby.** It is a godawful way to begin parenting. The hospital has your child, and the hospital decides the hoops that must be jumped before your child is given back to you, and the hospital doesn't always tell you what those hoops are, and the hospital reserves the right to change the hoops without bothering to tell you they've been changed until days later, and the nurses call you "Mom" like that word means you're four years old.

I frequently make the Freudian slips "when Z. died," or "Z.'s death" when I am talking about something that happened at Z.'s birth. That was what it felt like. Being home with my wrecked body and my wrecked emotions and no baby and no real idea when I would have the baby, leaving the hospital without her day after day, she began to recede from me just the way she vanished from me when the isolette left the labor and delivery room. I was sort of stupefied that relatives were celebrating this event that felt like a trainwreck to us.

My best friend was my hospital grade breast pump, and I sort of mean that non-ironically. Pumping gave me a way to feel like I was connected to Z, even when she wasn't being permitted to drink it yet. It was something I could do as a mom when we weren't with the baby, it organized my hours and my days, it was measurable. I could see I was getting better at the lactating thing, at least, and I could even control it to some extent, with fenugreek tea and massage to get my let-down going, though the pressure to keep up with hospital feeding protocols during the three days Z. was transitioning to breastmilk threatened my sanity more than anything but the initial separation.

When the nurse said "Mom? There's a problem with your breastmilk," moments before the protocol was set to start and Z. was going to have my milk for the first time, you can imagine how hard I hit the roof. When it was all untangled, it turned out that some other baby's urine tested positive for marijuana, but that baby's sample was labeled with Z.'s name. (The clincher in our favor? That urine sample didn't test positive for barbiturates. Which it should have. If it were Z.'s.)

I wouldn't say that moved me from disintegration to ferocity, because I was still plenty disintegrated, but it at least let me understand that I could dredge up another response to the circumstances. And the circumstances permitted more responses: once she was fully on breastmilk, the wires and electrodes started disappearing. We started asking the doctor and PA who knew us best what it was the staff was looking for to feel comfortable releasing Z. to us. While the answers still shifted around some, they all focused on X or Y staying the same as the barbiturate left her bloodstream.

But really the answer lay elsewhere, because in the end, the unit, which had been half-empty when Z. was admitted, started to fill up again, and someone saw no reason for a normal, sedated baby to be there when there were quads and twins arriving on the same day. Z. left the hospital at one week old with clinical levels of phenobarbitol still in her system, a drug that had last been given to her five hours after her birth.

My mother returned to stay with us Z.'s first days home, and when the baby cried in the night, the next morning she told us what a relief it was to hear it. And it was.


*At the time I had that thought, the pregnancy wasn't, in fact, over, because the placenta was still inside me. After 75 hours my labor shut down prematurely. You know how in childbirth class they tell you that your body's adrenaline can stop or slow labor? Well, even with the Pitocin drip in my arm opened all the way up, I wasn't having another contraction. While we waited to hear word about Z. from the NICU, my midwife extracted the placenta manually.

Beats twiddling your thumbs.

**Which is not a particular yearning that you get back when the kid turns three. Alas.

While we're all taking a break

Seventy-five hours. I was in a haze of endorphins, and time felt very strange--it was something that had texture and elasticity. Each contraction had its own pattern, its own colors, its own rhythm. I knew, going through it, that it was the most heroic thing I'd ever done, because it was a hard labor and it would have been if it had lasted six hours. The pain in my back was intolerable without counterpressure, and the contractions never got organized. It seemed like every few contractions I had to come up with a new way to get through them. I danced deep in my hips, I rocked, I got on hands and knees, I squatted, I knelt with my upper body draped on the birth ball, I sat and rolled on the birth ball while I nearly fell asleep leaning forward on the bed, I lay on my side with my upper leg propped with pillows. I held onto my spouse, my mother, my doula, my midwife. I climbed stairs sideways, I gripped the side of the bathtub from both inside it and out, I hung onto the banister, I grabbed onto a rope hung over door.

My water was broken. I vomited more or less daily. On the third day, I took castor oil and it got messier. I was at the limit of my body and it didn't seem like the baby was ever coming out. The baby started to seem like the enemy. The baby did seem like the enemy. I just needed her to come out so my labor would be over. When I talked to my midwife about it ("How do I stop thinking about the baby as the enemy?") she said the only other person in the world who was physically experiencing my labor with me was the baby.

Z. didn't have such a great time of it. A few months after she was born, we discovered that she started crying when she heard male voices singing. It was abrupt: happy baby, distraught baby. She did the same thing when I lowed like a cow for her: happy baby, distraught baby. I realized that was what the sounds I made during labor sounded like to her. She was traumatized by it, too.


I was a homebirth mom; I only transferred to hospital after 65 hours of active labor at home, and I transferred because I needed to sleep. If I hadn't intended to have a homebirth, I would have had a cesarean, and I didn't need a cesarean. My health and Z.'s health would both have been compromised needlessly, and given that she was transferred to a different hospital for complications unrelated to my labor, our separation would have been even longer and more profound.

So, I do consider my hospital birth--anaesthetized, on Pitocin, and hooked up to machines--to be a homebirth success story because it was a vaginal birth I would not have been permitted if I'd started in a hospital setting, or even in a birth center. Thank god I had a midwife who trusted what she knew a normal birth looked like. Thank god that if it was going to take me that long to get there, I had someone willing to give me the time, and that she, A., my mother, and my doula all gave me the support that I needed to use it. Thank god.

But god has a sick sense of humor, you know? Because this homebirth sucess story was not a successful homebirth. My doula was calling me a birth warrior, but I don't feel like a won a victory. I feel like my body had this big ugly surprise that it waited my whole pregnancy to spring on me, and I'm still coming to terms with it.

(Oh, and restart your watches at midnight, okay? We'll be back on the clock, then.)

Pause in the proceedings

Z. was born in a non-leap year, so all of you with watches running, you can relax for a day. This one doesn't count.

I'll try to get back on later to talk about it more.

Hey!

Ever wonder what 75 hours feels like? Start your watches.

2005, my water breaks. Contractions start in 15 minutes.

Maybe next year I'll be over this instead of shoving it in everyone's faces all over again.

One of the great imponderables

The scene: we are reviewing an online shopping cart together.

Z: I want dat, an' dat, an' dat, and all of dose.

S: Do you just want everything?

Z: Probably I do.

Cut to the quick

The scene: Mama is singing Z. her bedtime song. There has been some debate about which verses will be sung.

Z: It seems to me ... I don't like you.

S: Oh?

Z: I sink dat maybe some kids like dair parwents and some kids don't like dair parwents.

S: (laughs and kisses Z.)

Z: Cuddle me!

Another year

Last year, I started blogging.

Yesterday, we were back at the Four Seasons for our circa-Valentine's Day High Tea, on yet another miserable mid-February day. The valet opened the car door for me again, and accepted the key to a different, slightly battered Civic Hybrid (the car we drove last year was totaled in May), and this year we had two second-hand carseats in back, one of them not yet installed, because while repairs at the usual building are ongoing, Z.'s daycare has had to move to new digs far enough away from our house that as of tomorrow, we are carpooling to spare the polar bears.*

Last year, I was still making my way back towards music; mostly, the radio was tuned to NPR. This year the front of the car is littered with cd's.

The trash in the seat wells is pretty much unchanged.


Blogging, blogging. Very few decisions have changed my life as much as my plunge into the Web 2.0 world. I went from isolation to abundant connection, and I figured out some seriously important things in this space.

When I began I felt quite urgent about writing, but the place the blog has in my attention has changed a great deal, and my posting has fallen off dramatically. I realize that I am at a crossroads with it. I'm not quite sure what is going to happen. I would like to be posting daily again--given the array of things I'm avoiding dealing with in my unbloggable life, I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, but I think that was a good discipline for me--only if daily blogging is a project I'm going to resume, I need to find an approach to content that does *not* use confessional journaling as its model.

This isn't really an announcement of change, though, more like an alert that this is a blog in search of a new mission statement. I'm hoping to figure it out when things settle down. You know, in my next lifetime.



*All credit to Phantom for the concept of teh polar bear points.

The news from your daycare co-op

Z. has been in a pulled-together daycare co-op a few days a week, with kids from another class at her school, just until the semi-permanent interim place opens in the middle of next week. I can walk her to the regular daycare location (currently closed for repairs). It's a drive to the co-op. It takes us just long enough to listen to this song twice, stopping the cd once to discuss the state of the snow on the ground, and taking time out between repeats to discuss Kermit the Frog's musical opinions.

Next week, driving to the semi-permanent place, I think we can probably memorize the song in one trip.

I feel almost like a commuter.