Writing for Marriage

Today there's a blog carnival going on about gay marriage, to raise awareness about the fight to defeat proposition 8 in California. I'm a married lesbian. How can I not write? So I'm writing.

But I'm not really sure what it is I want to say. I chose to marry because I am a lesbian. I wanted to build a home with A. and raise children with her and marriage was the way to get, oh, legitimacy, yeah, but that's not even the word I want. I wanted the mojo of all our family and friends in one place making it so that our relationship became a structure strong enough to raise kids in. It's a ritual magic I believe in. I wanted to stand up with A. and turn us into a family. I wanted the pictures to show the kids we hadn't conceived yet. I wanted my cousins to get the same invitations in the mail that they'd sent me. Well, for their first weddings, anyway.

I have my doubts about civil marriage, but that doesn't matter at all. It is entirely irrelevant to this post. What matters is that in California there are some really virulent people spending a hell of a lot of money to prevent the rabbis who married me and A. from, well, marrying me and A. This is a church-and-state issue, folks. If you're not in California, you can help by giving money. Our side needs $3 million by Friday night to match the homophobes.

Please, give. Whatever you can. Everything counts.

The home stretch

The potty fairy came to our house last night. You know the one. She collects the potties from the bathrooms and the living room, and in their various places she leaves presents from the stash of little bitty toys that your parents have left over from the days when it was all about filling out sticker charts every time you even sat on the potty.

No more bowls to empty. I can't quite believe it.

She's a long way from dry at night (but with hopeful signs). She's a long way from wiping herself (but with hopeful--oh, wait, she's still apt to run away with her pants around her ankles...never mind).

But!!!

The potty fairy came to our house last night.

Phew.

Store miscellania

Recently, I've been doing some long-overdue publisher orders, and the books that wind up on those orders are the ones that we have been living without for awhile, so I'm looking over the sales numbers, wondering. The rule of thumb is that you want to turn your stock three times in a year, so if a book has sold less than three times in twelve months, I'm getting more ruthless about letting it go out of stock.

I'm closing in on three years of doing this, which is as long as I taught high school full time* and I think I'm better at this part of my job than when I started, right there at the core of my work: judging what my customers will buy.

One thing they pretty much won't buy is cd's, so we're selling off all our adult cd's at more or less cost. What I finally realized is that this is the perfect chance to refresh the store's collection of cd's. If they make a detour to my laptop's hard drive before they make it into the cd rack, well, ya know. These things happen.

*I taught in high schools in one way or another for more like eight years, so I have awhile yet before I'm caught up.

Skyline and homecoming

Twice this past week, I've been in Center City with people who don't get there too often. Me, I used to live there, six blocks over from City Hall, and varying distances south.

I grew up in a city without skyscrapers, and I used to get absolutely tickled that I could look up and see those immense glass sculptures, vistas changing as I moved around town. It changed my sense of scale, and of homecoming. The moment when I rounded the curve of the highway and saw the glittering spires and felt myself settle back into my skin became the payoff moment of the drive home from my parents' house. Now that I'm often coming home from points north, and home is in the northwestern reaches of the city, I miss that moment.

(For the record, the best way to approach Philadelphia is from the south, on I95 or I76, or, as Jane Dark reminded me, the R1 from the airport. I have opinions on other cities, too: DC is best approached from the south on I295, and Boston from Route 2, coming in from Concord, preferably after a long day spent at Walden Pond.)

Z.: For prwetend, we'yeuh not vegetawians.

S.: (Filling dishwasher.) Oh, we're not? What are we then?

Z.: Well we'yeuh Jewish, but we'yeuh not vegetawians.

S.: (Still filling dishwasher.) How very meat-eating of us.

Z.: We'yeuh not vegetawians, for prwetend, so I have dis dog on a stick for us.

S.: (Turns and sees realistic-looking Folkmanis black lab puppy hoist on cardboard-tube "sword." Dissolves into fits of giggles. Heads to the computer to record every word.)

Z.: We can eat it!

I'm ready to go back to work now

The past week has included:

1. Firing an employee, by far the thing I most hate about my job. The employee spent the week avoiding calls, then quit right before the shift when we were prepared to turn her back at the door.
   
2. A weekend of grandparents (and my cousin Nick!): fun, but tiring, and especially fun-but-tiring for Z.
3. A full-staff meeting. Also fun, but tiring.
   
4. A court date for an incident involving the store. The incident was in May. The trial was Monday. Dude got 3-12 months.
   
5. Therapy.
6. A day when Z.'s daycare was closed.
7. One giant zit. Giant.
   
8. More therapy.
9. Another day when Z.'s daycare was closed.
10. Not enough time to swim.
11. Not enough time to walk.
12. Not enough time.
    

Does this happen in your house?

Okay, this is one for the two- (or more-) parent families out there:

Z. has serious trouble coping with the transition between spending a lot of time with just one parent and then adjusting to the arrival of the other parent. She ignores, she's flat-out rude, she pushes, she tantrums. We hold a fairly hard line on it, and she's gotten a lot better than she used to be, but the problem hasn't gone away. It's worse when she's spent a lot of time with A. and I enter the scene (A. thinks this is because Z.'s relationship with me is deeper and more intense so her reactions to me are deeper and more intense), but it can go in both directions.

Does this happen in your house? Are there tricks that work for you? Advice would be appreciated.

Wanting

A few days ago it was poverty awareness day in blogland, and I've been kicking it around, wealth and poverty. Well, the financial upheavals and my own risk-happy way of earning a living mean that I've been kicking this one around for a very long time.

One of the things I clicked on the other day was a poverty ranking tool, one that took your annual income and told you where you ranked in the overall poverty standing in the world. I'm not linking to it. It was cute, it was useful to have a jolt of perspective, but it was also beside the point. It embarrassed me, some, that I feel pinched when other people have so much less, but it didn't make me feel like I had more cash floating around.

Unless you are super-duper enlightened, whether you're feeling comfortable or deprived about money doesn't have anything to do with how much money everyone in the world has. It has to do with how much money the people have who are living next door to you have, or sitting down to dinner with you.

Last night, I was talking with a friend who told me how growing up where she did, she thought her family was poor because she didn't get a Porsche for her sixteenth birthday, making a point about how that setting warped her: we tend to judge our wealth relative to others', and we tend to think we should have the things that the folks around us have. Juliet Shor talks about this as the question of the reference group, the way we aren't necessarily looking at people with similar incomes when we judge whether our spending habits are reasonable.

This is something I struggle with, because I tend to judge my spending against my family's, but I am downwardly mobile. There is no way that in my line of work I will make even a little bit of the kind of money I was raised having access to, and even though A. is in a pretty darn secure, middle-class, professional kind of job, urban public school teachers ain't pulling it in hand over fist, you know?

So the way for me to feel wealthy instead of poor is to spend less, to want less. To feel that what I have is enough. To simplify. Shor calls this downshifting. It's really hard to pull off in a culture of abundance, which is, still, what we're living in here. Clothes are turning out to be the hardest thing for me to manage, I think because I've been losing weight and therefore my old clothes actually don't fit me. I do need to buy new clothing, and it's hard not to notice that the pants I think I can only afford on sale are often the least expensive ones in the catalog.

Special features

This evening, Z. and I varied our ritual watching of the Wizard of Oz by starting with the Angela-Lansbury-narrated animated storybook, which is far too abridged, but otherwise a really wonderful use of the original illustrations.

Then we moved on to the (also Lansbury-narrated) actor bios, and can I just say that I completely understand why Ray Bolger is my father-in-law's hero? What an amazing dancer. I can't say Wow! loudly enough.

Strangely, Judy Garland was omitted from the bio line-up. Do you suppose there was nothing they could find for a family-friendly DVD?

Debates

For all the time I spend online (and oh boy, I spend plenty), my inner Luddite holds sway in much of the rest of my life. We have a television, but it's about 12 years old and has no reception, which is extremely deliberate: we restrict our cable service to phone and internet. This means I've been following the debates via friends' tweets, having recently been inspired to start using the Twitter account I set up last Spring.

I gotta say, I think I got everything that was important to get. Anything I missed, I'll pick up on SNL videos tomorrow.

Patio camping

At kids' services on Saturday, I'm told the kids' service leader read the under-5's this Sukkot story and Z. has been in an ecstasy of living out the details of the book since then.

Last night, we slept in the sukkah. It was Z.'s suggestion but I was the one who made it happen--there aren't many years when it comes together: a warm enough, dry enough night, no guests, and no school for anyone the next day.

Sleeping isn't one of my strengths, and last night reproduced the conditions of both of the two longest consistently bad stretches of sleep I've ever had: the nights I spent in shelters on the Appalachian Trail, and the months in Z.'s second year when I slept close enough to her to touch her and her every twitch had an analog in my dreams.

So it was more of an aesthetic experience than a night of rest. Crickets, airplanes, traffic, a kind of nighttime hum from all the houses around us. The full moon, corona'd with a slight haze. The shadows of the garden on the green walls of the sukkah. The rough surface of the sleeping pad beneath me, the contrast between the warm covers and the cold, moist air. Sleeping with a hat on.

The sukkah is where I use up my tree-trimming energy, so we have a couple of boxes of harvest-y ornaments I've searched out in the after-Christmas sales, and they ringed us in two tiers. Usually I hang them all on the strings of lights that light the sukkah at night, but this year I contented myself with putting up the glass ones and strung up a line of purple cotton yarn at Z.'s level for the wood and metal and dried-gourd ornaments.

She was so serious and careful, making sure there was a green wire on each ornament's loop, hanging them equidistant from each other in each section of the wall. There's so much more her fingers can do now, and so many more things she's considering at the same time.

She needed me to soothe her through her buzzing excitement when we first lay down, and she woke a couple of times in the night. Once she saw I was putting my hat on, and wanted to put hers on. Once she thought she wanted to put the extra t-shirt on I'd brought out just in case she needed another layer, but she changed her mind and decided she just needed to rearrange her covers. Both times she went right back to sleep with no coaxing from me.

Me, I drifted into dreams and back out of them. Our street is eerily quiet at 4:15. A car starting up at that hour echoes strangely. Our three-storey house looms, when seen from the ground twelve feet away.

We woke and pulled on fleeces and sweaters to eat our breakfast in the sukkah: oatmeal, cocoa. A. davenned outside, with lulav and etrog (alas, once again, the etrog smells like wax to me). And then slowly our indoor lives took over again--showers, DVD's. Dishes.

We're sleeping inside tonight, but there is something comforting to me about having touched base again with that kind of halfway-sleeplessness, where my sleep weaves in and out of the night itself.

Withs Bees

There was a bee named Beauty who lived with her mother...no, Doodle, bees don't really have fathers...well, they don't exactly have mothers either, but closer...okay, so, she lived with her mother in a village of beehives, where her mother ran a bookstore-hive and Beauty helped her. She put the books on the shelves of the hive, and sold them to customers. And took their money, yes. I think they paid in nectar, or something.

One day, Beauty's mother was coming home from a bookfair, and she was so tired from buzzing along hauling those heavy books all that long way, and it was getting dark and cold, and she was looking everywhere for a friendly hive where she could spend the night. She was getting tireder and tireder and then it started to snow and it was so cold! Bees don't like the cold at all. It's very hard for them to fly when it's cold. They just want to huddle up with the other bees in the hive to keep warm, and Beauty's mom was all alone outside and she was so unhappy.

Just then she saw a castle-hive all lit up, and she thought she would just park her bookcart in a dry corner and fly over and see if someone there could help find somewhere warm to stay for the night. She buzzed right up to the door, and guess what? It was open! Just a crack, but enough for a cold, tired bee to fly in.

She called out--okay, she buzzed out--"Hello, is anyone home?" And she looked in every room, but do you know something? No one answered her. So she flew a little farther into the castle, and she found the kitchen, a big, old-fashioned kitchen with a big table in the middle and a beautiful fire keeping it warm. There were dishes of everything a hungry bee could want laid , honey and pollen and nectar all laid out, and a little note saying "You are welcome here! Please have some dinner and there is a couch in the corner where you can sleep tonight." And Beauty's mother looked into the corner, and sure enough, there was a couch with pillows and lovely warm, fluffy blankets, so she ate as much of the lovely bee food as she could and she curled up under the blanket and slept so, so well. But she didn't see anyone at all.

In the morning, she wrote a note thanking her mysterious host, and when she went outside there was a beautiful rose in the garden even though snow and roses are seasonally incompatible, and it made Beauty's mother think of Beauty so she picked that rose to take home to her daughter.

All of a sudden, a huge, big, ugly, scary HORNET-BEAST appeared and GRABBED Beauty's mother by the wrist. Er. Leg.

"I gave you food and a place to stay and you repay me by stealing!" he shouted and shouted, he was so angry. "I'm going to kill you!"

Beauty's mother was so scared, but she was most scared because if the Beast killed her, Beauty would never know what happened.

"I have a daughter who's expecting me to come home today. Will you let me see her first, to say goodbye, so she doesn't always worry about what happened to me?"

The Beast thought that was okay, so they went to Beauty's house, and Beauty was so happy to see her mother and so worried about the scary-looking hornet-beast. Her mother told her what had happened. Beauty got very sad and scared, but also very angry, and she said to the Beast, "Don't kill my mother! All she did was pick a flower! I think you're a very mean beast."

The Beast was very lonely, and he thought Beauty was very nice to look at, so he said "I won't kill her if you come live with me so I can have company and see you every day."

Beauty said okay, even though her mother tried to talk her out of it. So the Beast let go of Beauty's mother and Beauty moved in with him. At first she missed her so much, and she didn't like that scary Beast at all, but then she got to know him more, and she taught him some things, and he learned how to be nice and not to be mean, and they were friends, and her mother sent her lots of letters and visited sometimes, so it was okay.

One day, Beauty got a letter from her mother, saying that her mother was very very sick. Beauty showed the letter to the Beast, and the Beast said "You need to go home to take care of your mother, Beauty. I know that it would be mean to keep you here when your mom is sick," and he pretended that he wasn't sad when he said it, but really he thought that if she went home she would never come back to see him again.

So Beauty went home to her mom, and helped her get better, and when she went back to the castle, the Beast was so happy to see her that he cried. Beauty asked him why he was crying, and he told her that he thought that after she saw her mom she wouldn't want to live with him anymore.

"It's true that I didn't want to live with you when I first came here, but you're my friend and I love you, and I do want to live with you now."

When Beauty said that, the Beast turned from a Hornet-Beast into a regular old bee. A witch that he had been mean to for picking a flower had put a spell on him that could only be broken when someone loved him. That witch didn't think anyone would ever love him, and maybe no one ever would have if he hadn't learned how to love someone himself.

After that, Beauty and the Beast and Beauty's mother lived together in the castle, and they had lots of friends and parties and sold lots of books, and lived happily ever after. The End.

Storyteller's note: I can't tell you how much I hate the story of Beauty and the Beast, with or without bees.

The benefits of a religious education: an occasional series

Last night, A. and I listened from the living room as Z.'s voice drifted down to us in the energetic tones of a storyteller. She was telling Puppy Pie stories. For three hours.

Z. still shares our bedroom so, even if we're tired, we usually wait for her to fall asleep before we go up so that our going-to-bed business won't keep her going, but last night we gave up. We were never going to wait her out, not if we stayed up a million years.

I finished my toothbrushing at midnight and when I turned out the bathroom light and crossed the darkened hall to the darker bedroom, Z. cheerfully informed me that Mommy had fallen asleep. Z. was still zooping along, chattering the way she does at 1pm when it's clear there's not one shred of nap in her that day.

I sat down on her bed and rubbed her back. The tone in her muscles was like a gymnast's about to start a routine.

"Little boo, sometimes when we have a lot of thoughts we're thinking, it's hard to fall asleep, and the thing to do is to fold those thoughts up and put them away."

"I don't want to put dem away!"

"Well, you maybe you could think them one last time, and then say 'Thoughts, I will think you again in the morning,' and then just fold them up and put them away."

"I want to keep thzinking dem! I don't want to fold dem up!"

"Hmmm. Are you having a good time thinking your thoughts?"

"Yeah!"

"Well, you could dream about your thoughts when you go to sleep, and that would be like your thoughts coming to life while you're sleeping."

"Yeah, yeah! Dat's wright, Mama! Dat's a good idea! I could have a dwream about some pirwates who build a sukkah! I could have a dwream about some BEES who build a sukkah!"



It's like the night before Christmas, when my brother and sister and I couldn't sleep for the excitement of thinking about Santa. Only, it's Sukkot, and wiss bees.

Our sukkah is up now, and lovely. If I can find our camera, I'll take pictures.

How we arrived at the Apocalypse

Arwen, Els, and Rachel explain why those four horsemen are gaining on your retirement account.

For the original post by Arwen, animatrice extraodinaire, click here.

Things are getting worse but I feel a lot better

Five songs in a row by the Counting Crows this morning. I'm not complaining about the Crows; I'm the one who put so much of them on the iPod, it's just that there are times when you pull the thing out of your pocket to make sure it's still on shuffle, you know?

Last year, there was a month or two in there when every. single. time. I did my half-hour walk I could count on the shuffle giving me "Amy Hits the Atmosphere" before it was over. Right now I'm playing through all 485 songs in my nano before I restart it, and Amy came up a few days ago. I think this was the way the iPod elves were trying to remind me of it.

I know we all have these flickers in the random sequence. What are the things that make you suspect your shuffle is controlled by elves?

For Penelope (and everyone else): laughing! yes, I will write up Beauty and the Beast, wiss bees.

Yom Kippur 5769

Hi, all--I wrote this yesterday and then thought better of putting it up, because it seemed like I could just WRITE already. But Susan put up a similar post, so I changed my mind.

About this time last year I checked out from this blog, and I've been coming back to it very fitfully. Yom Kippur to Yom Kippur, it was an intensely hard year on several fronts, one I know I'll still be trying to make sense of for years to come. Very little of it was bloggable, some because it was intensely private, and not only for me, and some of it because blogging it could realistically have put me and mine at risk of physical harm. That didn't leave me feeling very free to use this space, but I miss taking the scraps out of my head and spinning them into something to put up in front of the little bitty world. I'm not sure exactly where it's going to take me, but I'm starting November early this year. I may finish early, too--retail season and all that--but I'm hoping it'll be more like I get into a groove I can stick with.

And I hope everyone who fasted had an easy one.

The forest for the trees

The little patch of woods near my house extends about four and a half blocks into the neighborhood and is three blocks wide at its thickest point. On a map, it doesn't seem like much, just a thumb of the larger Big Creek Gorge stuck into my shtetl like the World's Largest Urban Park was looking for a lift to some other metropolis.

But when I'm walking inside it during the months that the leaves are on the trees, I can see nothing but green as I look around, and for forty or more feet above me, just a canopy of foliage.

The past few weeks, they've been cutting down the Norway maples and it turns out a LOT of the trees providing that canopy are Norways. On balance, I'm in favor of removing invasive species, and they've only included about a half-block of the park in this project, so most of my walk is unchanged. It's jarring, though, to come up from the creek and find myself in a logged-out forest, all the leaves on the ground like a dozen blow-downs all in the same place.

Zen

Z.: I'm not going to answeuhr da question so da question can answeuhr itseuwf.

Thus it begins

Today I went to a "Kindergarten Tea" with Z. No, she's not going into kindergarten yet, but she will be in pre-K next year, and we have heard mixed things about the pre-K teacher at her school, and there are a goodly number of private schools* that start at pre-K around here.

What is a "Kindergarten Tea," you ask? Well, it's exactly like a college fair, but for preschoolers. It was held in the basement of the Unitarian church, and because of various other things happening in my life today, like rain and grocery shopping and new discipline strategies and snack, by the time we got there, folks were starting to clear up. But there were name tags to fill out and stick on, and banquet tables all around the edge of the room (not a very big room), and sign-up sheets, and professionally assembled information packets, and admissions officers or PTA parents sounding very cheery. In one corner, there were baked goods, and a samovar with tea bags, and cider with clear plastic cups to pour it into. I did manage to put our name down on some mailing lists, and I took a little subversive pleasure in writing "MyFeminineFirstName and A.'sMasculineFirstName OurSharedLastName" on the line for parents...little do they know what they're getting! Yeah, yeah, I know we're far from the first lesbo family for any of these schools, but I do kind of like that we won't particularly stand out on the mailing lists, since in the end we won't wind up being affiliated with most of them. I am all about flying under the radar until I know what the territory looks like.

Anyhow, I expect we will start to get catalogs in the mail in a week or two, and there will be open houses all fall and then applications and admissions visits and oh, lots of stuff to juggle in the coming months, and possibly all of this to do all over again next year.

One thing I did learn: it was a little hard to sort out the guests from the hosts, but it seems that you are supposed to be wearing a black t-shirt and khaki pants if you're either a Quaker-school admissions officer or a Unitarian mom.

*Why private? Long story. I'll tell you sometime if you're interested.

Our spate of dead possums

Tuesday night, A. was taking out the garbage while I was finishing the dishes. She came in with trepidation in her voice.

A.: S.? I think there might be a dead animal in our yard. Like a mouse or a shrew or something.

S.: Where?

A.: Out there, on the walk. In the shadows.

(S. goes out to the patio in bare feet and peers down the darkened walk)

A.: I'll do the rest of the dishes if you take care of it.

S.: Can I wait until morning, when I can see it? (comes back inside) You don't have to do the dishes.

A.: Yes, sure, just so long as I don't have to do it.

S.: This is where my secret butch powers come into play.

A.: I don't think there's anything secret about them. You went to dead animal camp. I went to music camp.


In the morning, there was the usual September getting-ready-for-school oyster carnival, so the dead animal was still there in our path as I was finally ready to drag Z. from the house to school. A dead possum, a young one, larger than a mouse or a shrew, maybe a little smaller than a squirrel (not counting tails.) How to keep her from seeing it? I eyed it from afar. I flicked and pushed and pulled the elements that set the stroller up, and put my three-and-a-half-foot three-and-a-half-year-old into the stroller while still on the patio five stairs above the street. We rolled down the walk until I needed to lift the stroller up and over the remains.

Z.: Why ah you doing dat?

S.: Because there's something on the path. (Returns the stroller to ground)

Z.: What is it?

S.: (Opens gate) A dead baby possum. (Pushes stroller through)

Z.: Why is it dead?

S.: (Lifts 50+ pounds of kid and stroller down stairs.) Something killed it, another animal, you know how some animals eat other animals to live. (Deposits stroller on sidewalk.) It was probably an animal that wanted to eat it.

Z.: But it DIDN'T eat it. (Stroller is rolling towards school.) I thzink it prwobably smelled bad.

S.: I'm sure it does now.

Once home, I used the spade and a Whole Foods bag to deal with the problem. Trash was still on the curb, so I counted my blessing as I deposited the paper bag into the can, and when the garbage truck rumbled in place in front of my house, I had the happy thought that the possum was on its way to return to the earth, and not the earth in our yard, either.

In the bath that night, Z. told me she wanted me to have my arms around her when she died. I told her that one of the special things about mamas and their babies is that whenever the baby dies, even if she lives a long life and she's an old woman when she dies, is that she can feel her mama's arms around her then. Even if her mama has already died, she can feel like her mama is holding her. Z. told me that after we both die, she wants me to hold her.

I promised her that I would.



Epilogue:

Hunter Dog has still been taking a suspiciously long time to return to the door when we call her in, and her digestion has not been of the best. Last night she whined me up in the middle of the night to visit the outdoors and this morning I came downstairs to a note on the door from A.

"Hunter Dog has apparently been getting at the possum again. I put it under the big flowerpot in the middle of the patio so Z. wouldn't see it. :(, <3 Thanks! A."

A nest of dead possums? Either Hunter Dog is living up to her name or there's a killer cat on the loose on our block.

Anuddeur one

Can you tell me da stoawie of Beauty and duh Beast, just, wiss bees?

Transitions are not our friends

The beginning of the school year, yeah? Meltdown, meltdown, meltdown. Z. does not do well with transitions, like the ones between taking her pajamas off and putting her clothes for the day on. Or the one between not having a toothbrush in her mouth and having one. And going home? Well, in the time it took us to go from daycare to parking our car on the block, one of her classmates' moms had already walked her kid past our house to The Co-op on the Corner, completed her grocery shopping, and was passing us on the way back to her house. And we still had two more pauses for acting out and discipline before we made it to our gate.

Yeah. We are having some fine, hysterical times around here.

But I do think that Z. gets to the end of the day and she just needs to be hysterical for awhile.

Magpie helped us out today, by giving me the link that led me to this little piece of toddler catnip:



It's the most hilarious thing she's seen in months. She had to watch it twice, of course. And then when Mommy came home, she needed to jump up and down on the furniture for awhile.

Z: I want you to get off dat chair so I can double over wiss laughter.

As I recall, this doesn't last all school year, but it's gonna be a long September.

Halfway to Four

The semi-annual tooth-cleaning of the boo was yesterday, and as it happens, it was also her half-birthday.

We are bopping along in the car on our way to the dentist, listening to a cd a friend of mine put together for me for my own birthday a bunch of months back, and Z. is singing along to the words she can decipher.

Z.: "Happy Birssday..." When I listen to diss I sink dey're singing about me!

S.: Oh yeah?

Z.: Yes, because it's going to be my birssday soon!

S.: Sweetie, your birthday is still a long time away. As long as it's been since your last birthday, that's how long it is until your next birthday. There are a lot of months between now and then, and a lot of holidays first. Your birthday isn't until around Purim.

Z.: Dzat's vewy soon.

S.: Well, it's getting closer every day.

Z.: Dat's TWUE! En den it will be my BIRSSDAY!

1. My uncle once gave me a piece of wood from the petrified forest.

2. Never in my life have I been to Australia.

3. When I was five, I moved away from paradise.

4. High school was the first time I learned about friends leaving me behind.

5. I will never forget the feel of my daughter's head under my fingertips as she crowned.

6. Once I met an irresistible force.

7. There's this girl I know who's having a hard time, and it's twisting me up, too.

8. Once at a bar I saw a bottle fight between two women who looked like your high school gym teacher.

9. By noon I've usually found three different ways my life is a mess.

10. Last night I was asleep before 11:00.

11. If I only had a couple million dollars and a two-family house.

12. Next time I go to shul will be to pick my daughter up from preschool.

13. What worries me most is that I may crash and burn.

14. When I turn my head left I see a mess of books and papers.

15. When I turn my head right I see my fig tree, through the corner of my window.

16. You know I'm lying if I tell you things are fine at the store.

17. What I miss most about the Eighties is working theater tech. Lord help me.

18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I'd be Peter Quince.

19. By this time next year I hope to be financially and emotionally stable. Or pregnant. Right now those sentences appear to be incompatible.

20. A better name for me would be what my family calls me.

21. I have a hard time understanding how my heart works.

22. If I ever go back to school it will be to qualify to teach middle-school science.

23. You know I like you if I have a conversation with you when it's not socially necessary.

24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be my mom.

25. Take my advice: never have a baby and start a business in the same year.

26. My ideal breakfast is full of protein.

27. A song I love but do not have is "Flower."

28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest this tea shop E. and I went to on Saturday.

29. Why won’t people figure out a better way of doing capitalism?

30. If you spend a night at my house, I'll show you the bookstore in the morning.

31. I’d stop my wedding for heat prostration among the main participants. It was hot that day.

32. The world could do without corporate personhood.

33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than its head.

34. My favorite blonde gave me dinner Sunday night.

35. Paper clips are more useful than pipe cleaners.

36. If I do anything well it’s raise Z.

37. I can’t help but stay up late when I've had too much coming at me.

38. I usually cry when I feel like I can't find myself.

39. My advice to my nephew/niece is to be gentle on your mama, getting born.

40. And by the way, that girl who's having the hard time? I miss her right. now.

Snake

This is inspired by jo(e)'s latest post, but so loosely and tangentially that it seems silly to put it in the comments there.

At one point in my AT hike, I caught up with my friend Fishdance, who was standing in the middle of the Trail, stock still. (Mo, were you there, too?) There was a large black snake spread all the way across the path several yards ahead. I stopped next to him and we discussed the snake for a second or two. It was big, seriously thick around the middle, and looked perfectly happy to stay there all day. It looked like it had nothing planned at all except to stay there all day. What to do?

Diva Dog, who was usually a little behind me, caught up. We called to her to stop, but it was too late. She passed us in her dog backpack.

Her paw came down on the snake, the pads spreading slightly as if she were stepping on a smooth stone.

The snake's gleaming, muscular body flattened out slightly under her weight.

Her paw came off of the snake.

The snake returned, unchanged and unmoved, to its original shape.

Diva Dog turned and looked back at us, curious about why we were focused on her, why we were stopped, and what we were making all the fuss about. Deciding it was simply her, and delighted at all the attention, she started to move back towards us, still showing no sign at all that she was aware of the snake's presence. Anxious that she not step on the snake again, I stepped across it. We all did. The snake took no action to move out of the way.

Clearly, we had given it no reason to change its plans.

Bee stories

For the past two weeks, Z. has been in a phase of wanting bee stories told to her. Bee stories are made up on the spot, and the protagonist is a bee. That's it, those are the rules of the genre in their entirety.

A. and I are getting mightily tired, not to say slap-happy, about the bee stories.

Z: Mama, will you tell me a stoawie about a bee.

S: Once there was a bee who got trapped in a car. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzzzzzz. She went all around the car, buzzing at all the windows, and the people in the car got scared the bee was going to sting them. Then a little girl in her carseat told the grownups to roll down the -- do windows even get rolled down anymore?--to put down the, to lower the windows, so the bee flew out. The end.

Z: Mommy, now it's youah teun to tell a stoawie about a bee!

A: (groans)

The benefits of a religious education

Z: Mama, I'm Pharaoh!

S: (opens mouth to speak--)

Z: But I'm not Pharaoh da man!

S: (opens mouth to speak--)

Z: I'm Pharaoh da bunny!

Don't try this at home

Putting that picture up in the last post, I realized I'm in this incredibly ambivalent place about my body. A year ago--well, actually, more than that, I know since I blogged it--Z. identified me as her Big Mama and A. as her Little Mommy.

When we met, A. was a size 10 or 12 and I was a size 12 or 14. We are built roughly the same, and in my deep denial about what had happened to my body over the years of depression, I was still imagining us as basically the same size. A. had crept up to a 12 or 14, it's true. But I was up to a size 20 at the beginning of last summer. I was more than 70 pounds over the weight that was my stable adult weight from high school until well into grad school. I was carrying more than half again the weight that I thought of as "mine," and I was sort of pretending that it wasn't really there. In a way, what the weight did was make my body so foreign to me that it wasn't really there. My body was gone, someone else's had taken its place, and it was all part of the project of my depression: erasing myself from my life, one piece at a time.

Z.'s wake-up call jolted me into realizing that her mother, the mother she loved, the maternal body she took for granted, looked like a stranger to me, and even at the depth of my depression, Z. had been the one part of my life I refused to absent myself from. I didn't want Z. loving someone I couldn't look in the eye in the mirror.

Sugar blues, sugar blues...I began writing down what I put in my mouth during the day, and what I wrote down looked like this:

Sugar
White flour
Chocolate
Sugar
White flour
Sugar
Maybe a little cheese
Sugar
Whole Wheat Flour and some vegetables
Sugar
Chocolate

I was going through my day from one sugar hit to the next. I was drugging myself with candy and pastries, basically.

I also wasn't moving my body much. I was walking Z. to school and back only when I didn't get lazy and drive (4 blocks! when I lived downtown, I parked my car five blocks away!). It was the end of May, and I knew even that little bit of walking was going to stop when the school year ended.

I made a commitment to swimming. I changed my diet not by setting out to restrict calories but by considering that I had a pattern of depressive eating that I needed to break, so I broke it. I had some issues with hunger that dated back to my halfway-thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1998, and I finally sat down and had a talk with them.

That talk went like this:
S.: I need to learn how to wait and eat when I'm hungry.
Issues: You can't let yourself get hungry! It will already be too late!
S.: No, I really need to do this.
Issues: You'll get dizzy! You'll get woozy! You might fall over and no one will find you for hours! Days! Weeks! You could DIE!
S.: Actually, I spend most of my day in the same building as a well-stocked refrigerator.
Issues: You do?
S.: Yeah.
Issues: Oh. (pause) You're sure about that?
S.: You need to trust me on this.
Issues: (crossing arms, chin on chest) Hmmph.


By the beginning of last Fall, I'd lost 20 pounds. My weight loss slowed over the past Fall and winter, when I stopped swimming altogether for four months during the bad part of my year, but even so, by Springtime I'd lost another five pounds. I recommitted to swimming at that point because without those endorphins and that time set aside for myself, to think and connect to my body's strength, my depression had bloomed again.

I have finally accepted what growing up in my family should have taught me, only I resisted learning it because it was being offered to me in the guise of lots of competitive sports: I may have the soul of a nerd, but I have the genes of an athlete and my body needs exercise, really probably a lot more exercise than other folks' bodies need. Since April, I've been swimming three times a week, 3/4 of a mile twice a week and a mile at some point on the weekend. I've found that 3/4 is about what I need to hit to reliably shift my mood. I think if I could be swimming a mile daily, I would be doing what I should be. But I'm getting close enough to what I need, now.

I've now lost nearly 35 pounds. I'm down to a size 16, and the 16's are already feeling a little loose. I am proud of that loss, but I'm also uncomfortable about it because I'm doing it against a background of deeply hating what fat has done to my body. There is a fine line between hating the bodily distortion that was part of the escalating cycle of my depression, and hating fat, period, and I fear I am not always on the correct side of it. I'm also very aware that what I'm doing is exactly not the typical weight loss story of restriction, plateau, and bounceback. I was a chubby kid, but was never fat as an adult before this escalation. I have no past history of dieting. During the period of losing weight, I have been doing what the fat acceptance movement calls for to learn to love your fat body: intuitive eating and healthy exercise. Except that I don't love my fat body and I do have a target weight, which is what I shouldn't have because it means my goal is weight loss, not loving my body at its genetic set point.

Only my target weight is (I think) the weight point my body is set for, the weight my body always used to want to be. I have been losing weight steadily for 14 months without much effort only because during the years of depression I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing to override my body's programming. Crappy food and a sedentary lifestyle. Now I'm reversing that. I'm listening to what my body needs and is comfortable with, satisfying that and then letting myself go until I'm hungry again. I'm not as good at thirst, but I've gotten pretty reliable about hunger, and feeding myself what I need, when I need it, and stopping when I'm done with hunger, before I feel uncomfortable.*

One of the greatest reliefs of where I am now is that the bones of my face are less padded, so my features are clearer than they were a year ago. When I look in the mirror, I recognize myself again. Thank god, thank god, thank god. I hated seeing a bloated stranger in the mirror. My face was the last part of me to show the fat as I put it on, and it's been the first part to re-emerge. But in some ways, that makes the strangeness of my body in pictures even stranger.

How is it that I still look like that?

________________________________

*(So's y'all understand my complicated eating history a little more: hiking the Trail, I needed so many calories that eating to the point of discomfort was necessary. I only fired up my stove twice a day--what I ate then needed to last. I was trying to maintain my weight during my hike, so on top of those two big meals, and I was eating 6 candy bars a day and chowing down in town--typical meal, a pizza, a pint of Ben and Jerry's and I would be raving with hunger again in an hour--and I still lost five pounds during those 2.5 months.)

Learning about erosion

After I threw a little sulk about how I have become invisible in our family pictures since Z. became independently mobile and left my arms (hard to take a picture of the baby without her mother when her mother's carrying her), A. has started taking more pictures of me.



In the local woods, looking at the erosion-containment efforts of the park commission. I'm the one with the grey taking over her hair, almost halfway to her weight goal.

Missed opportunity

Tossed over the phone line that stretches across the last block I drive before I park for therapy: womens' knee-high, white, vinyl, platform, lace-up boots.

Gone now.

What was up in NJ yesterday?

Driving home on the turnpike last night, a little more tired than was wise, with the music up loud to keep my senses going. At about exit 10 fireworks appeared above the tree strip off to the right, sparks tumbling in every sloppy direction, untidy but festive. Hunh, I thought. Somebody's having a fair, maybe.

Four or five songs later--let's say 20 miles--another rocket lifted into the sky far ahead of me, fizzling, a dud, but by the time I reached that spot on the highway, another went off, proud, high, a red sphere inside a yellow circle, and then I was past, aiming for exit 6 and the bridge across the Delaware, sleepy and puzzled, no one to ask.

Just passing through.

Hiking: snacktime

True queerspawn: I bought her the necklace at Lambda Rising.

Through the eyes of the young

Four comments! That's four more than I deserved, after neglecting this blog so long. I'm so glad you're all still reading...I've turned into a serious lurker out there in Greater Metropolitan Blogland, but I am still reading along.

This was the scene Sunday night: A. and I were in DC, driving home not too late after going out to eat for our anniversary. We were at a light on a street well known for being home to lobbyists, windows partway down because it was a pleasant night for a change.

A car full of college students--well, young men, but they struck me as college students--pulled up in the lane next to us, loud music rolling out of every open window like every stereotype you have of black men in their twenties, except somehow more scholarly. I'm not that good on car types, but I guess it was the kind of car that made me think, "studious kids." Still, I turned my eyes back into my car when theirs came to a stop, but eye contact happened first. Briefly, but it was enough.

The young man in the passenger seat proceeded to make a big bid for my attention. I kept my eyes on the light.

Finally he resorted to hollering this out into the K Street night:

"Slightly overweight white woman! I know you aren't going to look at me! But I'm smart, and I'm Nigerian, and I am very drunk!"

This blog ain't dead yet

...though I admit it's in a lingering state of suspended animation.



We went on vacation to a rural place a good deal farther south than we live, and far, far more tied to the military in its culture.

Best fireworks I've ever seen in my life, and I grew up in Washington, DC, a mile from the Capitol.

Allegheny Tuscarora Kittatinny Blue

...and I have been home now for a week without Annoying Dog. I'm not yet recovered from the drive (20 hours of interstates in two days) but I'm getting there. I no longer wake up to barking. I no longer enter the room to barking. I no longer live through an hour of barking before dinnertime. I don't need to do canine hierarchy management when I walk down stairs or through halls.

It has been like the story where the rabbi tells Joseph to bring the cow, the goats, and the chickens into his tiny, tiny house, and then finally tells him to kick them all out. It is so quiet in my house I feel like I'm floating. It feels like we've added several feet to every dimension of every room.

There are only two more days of the Daycare Relocation Carpool to get through, too. I'm hoping that the end of the commute will have a similar effect on time in my life, but somehow I'm not as hopeful.

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.

Good news/bad news

The good news? There's now an interim location for daycare--two, in fact, one for preschoolers and one for infants and toddlers--starting at some vague point next week. Rumor has it, on Tuesday.

The bad news? It's a 20-minute drive away, and the teacher who collects Z. on Mondays and babysits for her until we get home is going to be several miles away in the other location, so the childcare arrangements that allow us to go to couples therapy are now officially all shot to hell.

Crap.

Routine disruptions

Toddlers are people who, despite the chaos they engender around them, love order in their days because they need to predict what's coming and what's expected of them, and they need as much help as they can get. (Don't we all, really?) Z. has been matching colors since she was walking, and the order in which we prepare for school must not vary, and she has other small rituals that get her through her day: leavetakings are especially hard for her, and she has formulas she says (sometimes embellished with a hug or a kiss) to make this transitions manageable. "Dat one is foah somebody else," she says as she replaces an item on a shelf in the store. "We can do dat anuddeuhr day" she says about an activity that won't fit into the schedule. And so, somehow, she handles the things she wants but are not permitted to her. Not infallibly or without tears or fussing. But she gets through.

Every night, I sing Z. "Goodnight Irene" before she goes to sleep, and I sing her different words to the last verse depending on what's going to happen the next day. If the next day is a school day, I sing about that. If she's going to stay home with us, I alter the words to reflect that, instead. Z. is still shaky on the days of the week and how they arrive in an orderly, predictable pattern, so our song is part of how Z. keeps track of her schedule.

For the past week and a half, I have done a lot of improvising on that verse.

Z.'s daycare is closed for repairs, and the search for an alternate site is ongoing. Meanwhile, the 70 or so children who go to her school are improvising, and in that time Z. has not had one single day that looked like any other day. I have been home with her in the afternoon for naptime, but in the morning we have made different arrangements with swapped playdates or pooled childcare, and one day I simply stayed home all day, alone, with her.

We are suffering, she and I.

Neither of us is getting any exercise. Neither of us is getting any significant space from the other. I am getting almost no time alone, and I am having to cancel or give up various parts of my own weekly routine that help keep me sane. Therapy, for instance. I was at work for about five hours all of last week and less than one hour so far this week. A. leaves the house before Z. and I wake up so I've showered, oh, three times since Z. has been home.

That is the context in which we left town and had a car accident on Saturday.

Tomorrow is the first day since all of this started that we have somewhere for Z. to be all day.

I'm actually looking forward to going to work.

Imagine that.

Name that literary allusion

Z: What do you want fwrom me? I'm only just beginning to live!



Points if you recognize the book, and I swear, she chose it all by herself at the bookstore, (not-so-)vaguely disturbing sexual overtones and all.

Edited: The book is The Amazing Bone, by William Steig, and really, you need to check out the sample pages to get a sense of the flowering, blossoming, blooming, pollen-drenched world that Pearl walks through with a bone hanging out of her open purse. I mean, come on.

Da Storewy of da Tiyeuhr

This is because Z. thought that her aunties Lo and Co "must peuwrhaps want to know how we got into da tiyeuhr."

We were driving along the Turnpike on our way to see baby Jo and there was a tire in the middle of the road. Mommy swerved the car so we wouldn't hit the tire too badly, but she couldn't move too far because she didn't want to hit any other cars, so we did hit that tire a little bit. There was a big jolt in our car and we heard some loud crackles, like plastic breaking, but we were all okay and nobody was hurt at all.

We moved the car to the side of the road so that we would be out of the way of all the other cars and Mama got out to see if the car was broken. It was a little bit broken, but not too much. Mommy called the people who help you when your car is broken and they sent a policeman and a tow truck. The policeman came right away, and he moved the tire out of the road, but we had to wait for a long time before the tow truck came.

When the tow truck came he put a big hook under our car and he pulled our car up and up and up onto the ramp, and then the ramp went up and up and up and we were in the car on the back of the tow truck. The tow truck took us off the turnpike and then it put our car down and we waited for another tow truck to come.

The next tow truck had room for us all to ride in the truck, so we climbed up into the truck and it was so high up it had stairs to climb. Then we drove to where the mechanic looked at our car, and we all went inside and we sat on the couches and we were so glad that we didn't have to be in our car anymore.

After awhile, we got hungry, so we went outside and we walked along the big road to a diner, and it was hard to have to hold Mama or Mommy's hand that whole time we were walking. Sometimes Mommy was nice and gave Z. uppies. When we got to the diner, Mommy had a sandwich and Mama had a sandwich and Z. had fruit and cottage cheese. There were televisions at the diner, just like there was a television at the mechanic's place, but the television at the mechanic's place was showing better TV.

We walked back to the mechanic's place and we were still very, very tired. Mommy read her book and Mama did some knitting and Z. watched television and then after a long time the mechanic said our car was all fixed and we could keep driving again. But it was too late to see Auntie Lo or Auntie Co or Baby Jo, so we went right to Grandma and Grandpa's house and we had some dinner and we went to sleep.

And the next day we visited Auntie Lo and Auntie Co and Baby Jo and even Maggie. So it was okay in the end.

(But boy, oh boy, are Mama and Mommy going to think twice the next time it makes a lot of sense to drive somewhere on shabbos.)

Will someone toss her a cape, already?

Z. is naked except for diaper, between the removal of pj's and the application of actual clothes.

Z.: I put on my spauwkellies! And now I'm not cowld anymore!

Unbloggable

Like all of you, there are various things that happen in my life that I prefer not to write about for the entire googling public, out of concern for ethics, privacy, or both. The discerning reader will notice that I have almost never written about a staff member, for instance, and I rarely mention members of my family other than A. or Z. And so on.

However, there is now so much that I've put out of bounds on this blog that I'm wondering what's left. I'm coming up on my first anniversary of blogging in a few weeks, and I'm wondering not so much whether I will have run out of things I want to say, but whether I will have run out of things I feel I can say, at least in public.

It's made me wonder about this whole venture of musing out loud for an audience that can choose to stay invisible. I'm not a shy person, I'm quite able to take care of myself in a crowd of strangers, but I am fairly private about my inner life. I tend not to pass along relevant events in my life to my therapist, for instance: Z. fell down the garden stairs two weeks ago and I spent an evening in shock and PTSD flashbacks as a result. I got to my session and other things were uppermost, and I just never got around to telling her. For that matter, I never got around to telling the blog either--well, okay, now I did, and I'm fine, everyone--but it does seem like I'm not doing a very good job figuring out this whole opening-up-to-an-audience thing.

There was a point last summer when I realized that if I kept on blogging as I had been blogging--commenting frequently, clicking through links, committing to daily posts, putting a lot of focus on my stats--I might attract a reasonably large number of people to this blog, and if the audience became large enough that I felt like I didn't have a sense of who was reading, I would start writing quite differently. I decided I didn't want that to happen, so I became more of a lurker and Rhymes with Javelin has remained a sort of sleepy backwater of a blog. (I like to think of it as a blogger's blog, for the discerning, but hey, we all need our delusions.) I'm fine with that--usually at least one person is willing to say something about what I put up here, so I don't feel like I'm writing into a void, but the group of you I'm imagining out there reading this, you feel fairly cozy and friendly to me.

Yet there's more and more I don't say. Because I know people will find me by googling for "correct pronunciation shotput," or "ezpass mylar," or for various unlikely occasional rhymes. And because people who sorta kinda know me in real life may well find me and suddenly, a post or two of reading later, they are more intimate with me than I'd choose for them to be, and more intimate with me than I know that they are.

So I'm wondering, especially those of you who've been at this awhile, how do you handle the whole balance of exposure and intimacy?

Vocab update

The following words are now officially in Z.'s active vocabulary:

Lovely
Horrible
Miserable
Gorgeous

Danse Russe

A long time ago, E. pointed out to me that when I stay up into the middle of the night and on into the early morning hours, what opens up for me is not simply more time in my day, but time of a different quality.

E.'s comment has been sitting with me for all of these months, as I've been paying more attention to the rhythm of my wakefulness. My life is not much the same one I was living when I wrote the post she responded to that day--as far as sleep goes, the most important difference is that Z. is now sleeping through the night almost every night; therefore, I am, too. When I lie down, I now expect to sleep until morning, and I do, almost every night. During the years of broken sleep that started early in my pregnancy, sleep was not much more restful than waking. Other women look to the end of nursing as when they get their bodies back, but this is it for me. Sleep has become worthwhile again. The circles under my eyes are less fierce than they were, and I can imagine a time when they fade altogether.

I made a commitment, this Fall, to go up to bed when A. does, and to the extent that I'm able to honor that commitment, I am asleep before midnight, sometimes before 11. But I'd say about once a week, often twice, I'm not going up to bed at anything like a reasonable hour for someone who intends to get a toddler to school by 8, knowing that toddler takes a good two hours to get to school some days. Instead, I am staying up for hours past midnight, and sometimes until so late that there seems to be very little point in sleeping when A.'s alarm is going to go off so soon.

So there is something about those hours that I need, and those nights when I seize that time, I need at least two hours after my last human contact, my last email or goodnight kiss.

As the people I love go to sleep, I'm freed up to fritter. There are nights I've spent importing cd's onto my computer, nights I've spent reading the New Yorker, nights I've spent re-reading love letters, nights I've spent knitting and absorbed in the latest mystery novel, nights I've spent researching a topic I only just discovered I needed to know everything about, nights I've spent in tears writing email I knew I wouldn't send, nights of alphabetizing, shopping for clothes, doing laundry, sorting yarn, cleaning the stove. And one night last Spring that I spent washing the kitchen floor with a sponge, listening to NPR turned down low.

I have not yet danced naked before the bathroom mirror (yet!), but I have sung to myself "I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!"


Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?


And you, my friends? Are you ever also lonely, lonely, and best so? Tell me all about it.


(All due credit to Wm. Carlos Williams, and tonight I am going to bed now, and not two hours from now.)

Worried about the polar bears

The tulips and daffodils are coming up.

I guess she picked it up in school

Mama is opening a small package.

Z.: Dat comes in Bubble Wrap! Dat's Bubble Wrap! Is dat BUBBLE WRAP?

S.: (laughing) Yes, sweetie.

Z.: Can I have it when you open it up?

S.: Sure.

Z.: Oh, thzank you, thzank you, thzank you, thzank you! Thzank you, Mama! Thzank you!

No...Time...To...Blog...Must...Play...Scrabble

It's true. I joined Facebook. Blame Phantom.

Fish recipe (contains no fish)

Flouwr
Cwream
Zucchini
Appeuws*

You put it in a bowl. Den you stirw it and mix it and stirw it and mix it and stirw it and mix it and stirw it and den it fawlls out of da sky and PLOP! it goes on da dauuuwgs! Plop, plop, plop, PLOP, PLOP, PLOPLOPLOPLOPLOP! PLOP!


*or, alternately

Wine
Enchiladas
Grwape juice

One hundred and two

My mother loves finding patterns in numbers, so this is for you, mom:

Today is January 2nd, 01/02. It would also have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday. Mind you, she didn't want it to be: after her 90th birthday she often told people what a shame it was that "they made you live so long," but she hung on to 99. She started out at 5 feet, half an inch, and by the end she was a tiny, wrinkled person, still pronouncing a few words in a Scottish accent (shoogar) despite having spent most of seven decades in this country.

I think the thing she was waiting for was to know that all of her children were grandparents. A week before she died, my cousin's baby girl was born and so all of her children had grandchildren. I think after that she felt like everything was set and she could go if she had to.

My grandmother taught me how to knit. Not how to purl, just how to knit. I figured out how to make stockinette stitch on my own (that would be "flat knitting instead of bumpy" to all of you non-knitters out there) and she assumed I'd figured out purling. Eventually, I did.

My grandmother was also my first correspondent. I was seven, and she gave me stationery with my name on it, and sometimes she would send me stamps.

She gave me a way into yarn and a way into words, a way into art, though she would not ever have called herself an artist.

She was Presbyterian. I broke with Jewish tradition and gave my daughter her name. I consider it the best decision of my life.

Get your butt in gear

Wednesday Whining is waiting for you. And this week I'm hosting, so I will be embarrassed if you don't comment. Really. I mean that. If my own commentariat won't follow me there when it's my turn, good lord, I'm not much use as a host, am I?

Plus, I'm a lot funnier over there. Honest.

New Year's Day

Now that it's 2008, I figure I'm off the hook for the year-in-review post. 2007 just had me spinning at every turn. I need a whole lot of distance from the past twelve months before I can figure out how to talk about it as a year. Come to think of it, I've had a lot of years like that lately. (Hmmm. Maybe I should have been reviewing 2005 or 2006? Oh, wait, that's pretty much what I've been doing in this space since I started this blog.)

Instead of looking back, or at least instead of looking back beyond this week's anniversary effect that I can't avoid, I've been thinking about the year coming up: the things that I need to make happen, the things I've committed to doing as leaps of faith, the things that I can't control but I am hoping will happen through some combination of will, generosity, and serendipity.

There are things that I am currently letting slide, too, and I need to sort through them, figure out what I have to delegate and what I have to do and what I have to accept won't happen and what I have to simply take off my list, even knowing that sooner or later it will be back there again, in order to have a little less weight pulling at me.

In lieu of resolutions for the year, I'm going to try to set some monthly goals. I'm thinking about concrete things that I can measure, rather than large abstractions I want to embrace. I'm hoping that taking care of the details will add up to changes in the larger picture, but I'm not real confident about predicting in advance what direction those changes are going to take. That, at least, is one thing I learned from 2007. Life will surprise me.

But goals that can be reviewed and renewed or changed from month to month, that I can let go of and move on from regularly, that seems like about what I can handle. It could be its own discipline

Okay, thinking about my list, here's the one I'm putting up for public accountability in January:

The Living Room Project: address the piles of cd's in the living room, get rid of redundant electronics, clear off the built-in bench, find more storage for toys, and figure out a routine for keeping it a functional space in our house.

Anyone want to join me in the Resolution of the Month Club? Just put it up on your blog. We'll all see how we do.