Good for Travelling

The New Baby

2011-08-22T13:23:00.001-04:00

My second baby cries just like a baby. WAAH, he cries, squirming awake from a long, long sofa nap. WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH. His mouth turns down at the corners, his eyes are wet and confused. His misery is cartoonish, picture-perfect. WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH. The cries are sweet, almost conversational, and they make my heart contract sharply. I lift him into my arms, bury my nose in his soft, sweet-smelling, dark hair. He is different from his brother, though I'm not sure how yet. He's still so new, so far from who he will be. Also, as much as I'd like to believe otherwise, I've already mostly forgotten what his brother was like at this brand-new, larval stage, so I cannot quite say for sure, This is like, or This is unlike.

WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH, he cries, and I cuddle him to my chest. He is still too young to cuddle back. I do not know who he is yet, but I love him, fiercely, deeply. I weep as I nurse him, picking up where he leaves off, wanting only to be closer, to never let him go.

A Conversation

2011-08-19T11:25:00.001-04:00

Me: Hey. Are you busy?

My husband: Not especially. I can talk for a few minutes. What's up?

Me: Well, I've been thinking...you know how we always say that how crazy all of the Jackson kids are is proof that Joe Jackson was abusive?

My husband: Yeah, I guess.

Me: You know, because we're always like, it's impossible that they would ALL end up so fucked up without serious wrongdoing on at least one parent's part, right?

Him: Right.

Me: Well, I was thinking...maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's just genetics.

Him: What do you mean?

Me: Well, Joe Jackson was obviously crazy right?

Him: Yeah, batshit.

Me: Well, so his kids are crazy too. They inherited it. You know, genetics.

Him: Hmmm. I guess so. I mean, it must be a little of both, no?

Me: Yeah, of course. A little column A and a little column B. It's just I had never thought of the genetics angle before.

Him: How did you happen to think of this?

Me: Well, I just overheard someone on the street talking about robins -

Him: Robins?

Me: Yeah, you know, the birds. Robins. So I overheard someone talking about robins, and I thought of the song Rockin' Robin, and then I got to thinking about the Jackson Five, and then Joe Jackson...you see?

Him: Ah, of course. I love you.

Me: I love you too.

Him: You should post this on your blog.

Me: Maybe. It's not so interesting though.

Him: I take it the baby is asleep?

Me: Yeah, he's in the sling. We're walking across to the green train on 125th Street to go to work.

Him: Well, have a good day.

Me: You too. See you tonight.

Four Theoretical Ways to Be Productive While Your Baby is Napping

2011-08-18T13:47:00.002-04:00

1. Fold and put away the clothes piled on the chair in the bedroom and on the desk in the nook by the closet.

2. Finish up one of the million partially-written blog posts that are slowly rotting in your notebook and iPad - one with actual sentences and paragraphs.

3. Catch up on the sleep you missed while nursing the baby and cuddling the big boy when they woke each other up last night.

4. Prep fruit and vegetables for the big boy's after-school snack and for dinner.

Four Actual Ways to Be Unproductive While Your Baby is Napping

2011-08-18T11:45:00.006-04:00

1. Paint nails.*

2. Watch X Files.

3. Ignore partially-written blog posts with sentences and paragraphs, and post a couple of not-particularly-amusing-or-insightful lists instead.

4. Post a photo of your breakfast on Facebook.

*This one is extra-special unproductive, because you do it at the tail end of the baby's nap, so that your nails are not fully dry when the baby wakes, and thus smudge and chip immediately.

Question for the Universe at Large

2011-08-04T08:35:00.000-04:00

Am I alone in feeling that there are times when it seems not only desirable but also perfectly reasonable to open a bottle of wine and drink a glass or two at 8:30 in the morning?

Labor Story: Nuts

2011-08-02T10:33:00.001-04:00

When I was having my first baby, I read in all the natural childbirth books and heard from all the doulas and prenatal yoga teachers and childbirth educators and so on that it was important to eat during labor. Nuts were often mentioned as an example of a good, nutritious labor snack, so, wanting to do things right, I packed a baggie of almonds in my labor bag.

Somewhere in the middle of my three-day labor, my doula dug the almonds out. "You have to eat something," she said. I shook my head in a nauseous, confused haze. "Just one almond." She held it up between her index finger and thumb. "Eat just this one almond. Please. You can do it."

I wanted to be a good student - my doula also being my prenatal yoga instructor - so I ate my one almond, and it was awful. It was dry and papery, falling apart between my teeth and crumbling over my tongue in the most unappetizing way. I wanted to spit it out, but I didn't want my doula to reprimand me, so I swallowed as quickly as I could and did not eat another.

Later, I saw my doula eating cashews from her own snack stash. The cashews looked beautifully plump and oily, the exact antithesis to my awful papery almonds. It was suddenly obvious: cashews are the Perfect Labor Snack I cursed my stupidity: why had I not brought cashews instead of almonds? Maybe my doula saw my envious look, because she offered to share. But I would rather have died than take her snack away from her, so I just shook my head and tried to forget it. Next time, I thought, I will bring cashews.

Over the three-plus years that passed before I had my second baby - the baby in my arms right now - I often reminded myself of the almond debacle. Remember, I told myself, to have cashews ready for when you are in labor. They are the Perfect Labor Snack. Accordingly, about four weeks before my due date, I bought a container of cashews and hid them in my labor bag, which was finally for me after over two years of service to other women. I couldn't wait to eat my cashews during the coming labor, the second labor that would correct all the errors of the first.

This time, labor was not three days, but seven hours. About four hours in, my midwife said, "You should eat something," and I directed my husband to the hidden cashew stash. He gave me two or three cashews, and I chewed, waiting for Perfect Labor Snack ecstasy to hit me. But there was no ecstasy. The cashews were awful. They were dry and papery, and they fell apart under my teeth and crumbled over my tongue. I swallowed them as quickly as I could and did not eat any more for the duration of the labor.

Tomfoolery

2011-07-25T10:46:00.004-04:00

When I was younger, I had assumed that, at a certain point in my life, I would be old enough and wise enough to no longer do stupid shit. This theory turns out to have been entirely unfounded. I still am, and always will be, the same person that I always was; the stupid shit is hard-wired in, and will never go away.

This morning, feeling a surge of can-do energy after many weeks of lying around listlessly on the couch watching the entire nine-season run of The X Files with my newborn baby, I decided to take self and baby to Red Rooster for coffee, muffin, and work. The baby usually sleeps long and hard in the morning, so it stood to reason that I would have a good chunk of good writing time, and be able to accomplish a good chunk of good things. (First warning sign that things will go poorly: a reasonable, well-founded expectation that things will go well.)

The first problem was the bus fare. There was only $1.15 on my card, and I did not have enough change to make up the difference. So I got off the bus, losing the $1.15, and took a taxi, for which I had to pay the $7 minimum fare, far too much for a fifteen-block hop.

Once at Red Rooster, I settled in with coffee, muffin, and computer, geared up for what I hoped would be at least an hour of productive writing work. No more than ten minutes had passed, though, when I became aware of a strange vibrating sensation in my midsection, right around where the baby was sleeping in the sling. I patted my torso and baby confusedly, thinking that my cell phone had somehow gotten into the sling with the baby. As I slid my hand over the baby's bottom, however, I realized that the vibration was not my phone ringing, but rather my baby taking an enormous, gassy shit. By the time he finally finished vibrating with this chart-topping shit, it was clear that he was sitting in a veritable lake of poop, and, as might be expected, he began to squirm and fuss. It was at that moment that I realized that I had forgotten to bring a diaper. In fact, upon examination, the diaper bag - and I was, for once, carrying an actual diaper bag - turned out to contain absolutely nothing for the baby at all. No wipes, no burp cloth that could double as a diaper in a pinch, no wetbag, no nothing. I had left the house carrying only the things that I needed for a nice long coffee-muffin-writing session.

I hoped, briefly, that the baby might be bounced and nursed back to sleep despite the poop lake, but after a few minutes of escalating volume, it became clear that nothing would do but a fresh diaper. So I put my computer back in the diaper bag, paid my bill, put myself and my now howling baby in a taxi, and went back home. About half and hour after I got home, it occurred to me that I could have simply hopped across the street to CVS and bought a pack of disposable diapers, but by then it was too late. I had spend nearly $20 on an entirely abortive outing, and I was back on the couch with my baby, who was now fussing determinedly, the poop episode apparently having caused a short circuit in his morning sleep routine. I put on The X Files, starting back at the first season again, and nursed the baby. Eventually, we both fell asleep.

The Doctor's Orders, part 2

2011-03-10T09:28:00.009-05:00

The night before last, my son asked for some kombucha with ice to drink with his dinner. When I gave it to him, he took a sip and then pushed it away. "This," he said, "is not good for my tummy." I should have listened.

The thing about three-year-olds (well, one of many, many, many things that I could tell you about three-year-olds) is that they make a great number of statements - like "Yesterday, you make me cookies," or "This is a choo-choo train," or "I'm clean already, I don't need a bath," or "I don't like vegetables" - that are not true and/or can be safely ignored. So I didn't pay much attention to his kombucha comment, despite the fact that I knew the bottle had spent a fair amount of time out of the fridge. It bears repeating: I should have listened.

The next morning, I drank half of the remaining kombucha. Within a couple of minutes, I started feeling oddly gassy; within ten minutes, I was writhing on the sofa, in the grip of the most painful abdominal cramps I have ever experienced outside of post-AROM labor. Indeed, if I did not have so much experience with birth, I would have thought that I was in labor. As it was, I spent a few minutes attempting to use some labor coping techniques - the old-standby breathing, vocalization, movement, and positioning strategies - to manage the pain, but it was no use. The cramping worsened and persisted. I began to think I was going to die.

So I called my husband. I always call my husband when I feel like I am going to die, even when it is obvious that he is the absolute wrong person to be calling. This is because he is really the only person from whom I feel truly comfortable asking for assistance, even when he clearly will not be able to provide it.

"My stomach," I groaned to him. "My stomach is cramping. I feel like I'm going to die. I don't know what to do."

"Okay," he said, feigning infinite patience, "you need to CALL YOUR MIDWIVES ABOUT THIS."

"Right," I groaned, "my midwives. Okay."

So I hung up and dialed my midwives' emergency number. My main concern, besides the fact that I felt guilty for imposing upon them and calling so much attention to myself, and besides getting them to tell me how to make the pain stop, was to make clear that I was not having uterine cramps or going into preterm labor. If they thought I was in preterm labor, they would make me go to the emergency room, or worse, come over to check on me, which would make me feel really guilty, even guiltier than calling the emergency number made me feel.

"I'm sorry to bother you. I have awful abdominal cramps," I said between groans and gasps, when my Midwife M answered the phone, "BUT IT'S NOT MY UTERUS. I'm in so much pain, BUT I CAN TELL IT'S NOT LABOR. My whole abdomen is tight and distended, BUT IT'S NOT MY UTERUS. I'M NOT IN PRETERM LABOR. IT'S CRAMPS IN MY TUMMY, NOT MY UTERUS. But it's really, really bad. Please make it stop. Sorry to be a bother."

"Okay," said Midwife M, after asking some clarifying questions that I mostly answered by telling her that it wasn't my uterus, "I want you to heat up your heating pack and put it on your tummy while you draw a bath, as hot as you can stand. Then get in the tub, with your tummy in the water, for at least thirty minutes. Then call me back."

I crawled to the kitchen and then to the bathroom to follow Midwife M's instructions, groaning like a dying animal all the way. And now I want to tell you something about hot water on a bad tummy. IT WORKS. Why does it work? I have no idea. In my Certified Lactation Counselor training, we were taught that water, whatever the temperature, contracts myoepithelial cells (smooth muscle tissue), which is why it is the correct treatment for breast engorgement during lactation. Is this the same mechanism that made the bath work for my tummy? I don't know. All I can say is that, the moment I got in the tub and began pouring hot water over my tummy with my son's red plastic sand bucket, the cramping released like magic. As long as I kept my tummy in the water, the intestinal distress disappeared. After about thirty minutes, I cautiously emerged from the water, dried off, clapped the hot pack back on my tummy, and went to lie down on the couch. I felt weak and nauseous and hideously unready for any actual eating, but the pain was completely gone.

All I could think was, Why didn't anyone tell me about this? How did I get to the age of thirty-two without ever learning that hot applications, particularly hot water applications, are a good remedy for stomach aches? It seems mind-boggling that I never knew this, and that if I had an obstetrician rather than a midwife, I would probably still not know this. It is mind-boggling, too, that I am currently receiving the best, most meticulous medical care that I have ever received in my entire life - from two home birth midwives (a CNM and a CM) and a heavily tattooed, fatally forgetful acupuncturist. There is something profoundly destabilizing about this realization. I mean, what kind of world (country? region? state? city?) am I living in, that I have arrived at proper medical care only via a combination of luck, personal curiosity, and slightly off-kilter lifestyle choices? I mean, what if I were not so lucky to have met certain people and had certain experiences, or not so inclined to research things on my own, or not so foolish as to routinely make life choices that leave me penurious and somewhat culturally isolated? Would I then not deserve proper medical care? Or would I simply never know that I wasn't receiving it? Would it even matter, as long as I felt satisfied? Truly, these are deep waters, and, for now, today, not ones that I am willing to take the full soundings of.

All I can say is that if I had the medical care that is standard for this city (state? region? country?), one of several things might have happened to me yesterday. I might have been directed, in my shaking, gasping, groaning state, to somehow crawl to a doctor's office and then a pharmacy. I might have been condemned to simply wait it out, writhing on the couch for the day and calling someone in the morning. I might have been commanded to go straight to the ER - after all, a preterm pregnant woman complaining of abdominal cramps is no laughing matter. But instead of any of these things, I got to take a long, hot bath, and then curl up on the couch, damp and warm in my bathrobe, to sleepily sip lukewarm water and nibble crackers, watching movies on Netflix until my husband and son came home.

The Doctor's Orders

2011-03-08T13:44:00.002-05:00

In the warm, thick-aired front room of a railroad flat on Ainslie Street, my acupuncturist scribbles away, left-handed, in pencil on a stack of blank white printer paper. She writes what I tell her - pimples on the back, irritable. She writes what she learns from my tongue and my pulse. She writes, on a separate sheet of paper, all of the things I am to do or consume or acquire. Almond pancakes, to be made with Benefit Your Life almond flour. Houston's digestive enzymes. (She is a poor speller, and she misspells Houston: Huston.) Bone marrow broth. Liver. A slow cooker. Soak my feet in warm water every night.

It is 10AM on a Tuesday, but her thick black eyeliner already seems smudged and weary, though not unpleasantly so. Did she do it on purpose? Or is it just her eye makeup from yesterday having migrated to her lower lids? Either possibility seems equally likely, and it seems just as likely that she may have simply been born that way, with Cleopatra black rings around her eyes and tattoos crawling down her arms marking her from birth as the strange, flaky, and infinitely wise Brooklyn-based healer that she was to become, just as surely as the boy Lhamo Thondup was marked, by tiger stripes on his legs, as the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

This week, I am to meditate every day, either once for thirty minutes, or for two minutes every hour. I am also to perform a separate ten-minute healing meditation three times a day. Has she stopped to think how much of my time and mental energy this will occupy, this along with taking the pancreas, liver, fermented fish oil, and now digestive enzyme supplements that she has prescribed, all at the correct intervals, matched with the correct meals? No matter: I am going to do it. I do everything she tells me to do, except that I haven't managed to eat liver yet, and also I buy cheaper versions of the supplements, not the fifty dollar brands she has recommended.

Today, she looks at me with infinite compassion when I tell her that the treatment has left me feeling a little enervated. "Yes," she says, in her slightly dreamy voice, "that happens. In fact, when you get home, you should go to sleep for awhile." Does she realize that I live forty-five minutes away by subway? That after the forty-five minute trip there, the hour treatment, and the forty-five trip back, a nap of any length whatsoever will basically mean that I have devoted my entire day to my acupuncture treatment? What if I had a regular job? How would I manage then?

However, I do not have a regular job, and the only thing that I absolutely must do today is to bake the banana chocolate chip "cake" (bread) that I promised my son this morning. And my acupuncturist - as always - is right: despite the fact that I haven't been much of a daytime napper recently, I am indeed powerfully sleepy when I arrive home in Harlem. I take off my awful squeezy maternity jeans (tight clothing restricts the chi), and sprawl on the couch, my hair still redolent of Nag Champa. I will sleep just an hour or two, then get up, drink some broth, take some supplements, and make a cake.

Domestic Diaries

2011-02-25T20:40:00.006-05:00

Morning

My husband has gone out in the cold rain to take our son to school and then go to work, and here I am, snug as a bug in a rug, sitting on the sofa with a hot pack, watching the X Files on Netflix, just having eaten an enormous breakfast of eggs, toast, smoked salmon, goat cheese, and the coffee that my husband brewed but hadn't time to drink. I can't complain of anything really, I oughtn't, I have no grounds.

Afternoon

The domestic dilemmas...I've two eggs left in the fridge. Am I to use them for muffins as a treat, or for vegetable patties for dinner, with almond flour and broccoli stems? Muffins, of course, I will make muffins - my husband and son will enjoy them, and something sweet always improves the memory of an indifferent dinner, while even the loveliest meal can feel a bit flat without a little bit of something after. Anyway, I do think there are enough tomatoes left for pasta sauce after all, especially stretched with the mushrooms and the red pepper, so the veg patties can be for another day.

Bright news...I've finally found a good place for the coconut oil - in the cabinet above the sink, it neither melts to liquid nor hardens to rock. And, with the help of a fork, I've finally managed to open the new jar of ghee, after it mocked me for over a week with its stubborn impregnability.

I need to buy some more raisins and maybe some more nuts, for snacking, baking, and granola; also I'd like to get some cocoa powder, as I'd like to make a chocolate cake. It's things like this that make one's grocery bill so high, not the fruits and veg and grains really, but it's things like this that make one's home a nice place to eat, too, is it not?

On a furious, unplanned cabinet-organizing spree last week, I discovered that I own two boxes of powdered sugar - why? I literally never use powdered sugar. Ah, well. I cannot bring myself to throw it out. I will use some to dust over the tops of the muffins.

Evening

I prefer my muffins split, toasted, and spread with butter and maybe jam, while my husband and son eat them just like that, nearly whole in one bite, as though they are cookies. I think this must be due to impatience rather than true gustatory preference: they simply want to possess and consume the item NOW, rather than wait for a theoretical improvement to occur. They are small muffins anyway - or they look small compared with the boulders one buys at the cafe or bakery or diner - really they are normal-sized, or what used to be normal-sized anyway, before the boulders overtook the scene.

I can make muffins from scratch of course, and I shall some other day, but these are from a mix, because my mother inexplicably sent me a box of mix from Trader Joe's, and I do not wish to see it go to waste. I have added raisins and nuts - yes, I will certainly be needing more of those - and substituted coconut oil for the veg oil, just to make it feel as though I did something. Anyway, they will be a nice treat. My son will be happy to have one as his snack when he gets home from school.

I cannot decide if I ought to go pick him up, or if I ought to ask my husband to do it. The whole reason I am home-bound anyway is because I am in the middle of this awful, awful pregnancy - I mean, I'm happy to be pregnant, but really, this has just been horrible, one thing after another, and I do mean to tell you all about it one of these days - and today's ailment is a horribly aching lower back. It does not hurt if I sit very, very still with a hot pack, but if I get overconfident and start to move about too much, to make lunch, for example, or to bake muffins, it hurts again. So it certainly will start to hurt if I walk to school and walk back with my son - but does that actually matter? I won't die from the hurt. And it seems foolish to make my husband leave his office early, to come all the way from downtown, just to pick our son up at the school that is only three street blocks plus one avenue block from where I sit right now. It seems foolish, too, though, to do something that I know will make my back hurt, particularly since I will be working at the store tomorrow, on my feet most of the day, and oh Hell, am I teaching class too? I'm probably teaching a class; I'm always teaching one thing or another at the store on Saturdays, and try as I might, I never quite manage to remain seated while I teach, no matter how much my back hurts.

Night

My husband ate two muffins. My son ate one, and then a piece of another, and then threw out the remaining piece and requested a fresh one. I fished the piece from the trash and forced him to eat half of it before I gave him a new muffin, which he was crying for, and I ate the other half - it had landed on a clean spot in the trash can anyway. With the third muffin, it became clear that my son only wanted to bite off the top, the part with the powdered sugar - after doing this, he requested yet another muffin. I told him no more muffins at all after this one, and managed to convince him to eat half of it by putting some jam on it. I gave the other half to my husband, who was in the middle of delivering a long lecture about the band Killing Joke. I almost always listen to my husband's musical disquisitions, even though they make me tired sometimes, because I know they're important to him, and also because it's polite, and also because it actually is rather interesting a lot of the time, and I learn things that I wouldn't have otherwise.

What I really want to talk about with my husband, though, is Norwegian black metal, because we just watched Until the Light Takes Us last night, and for whatever reason, I have a lot to say about it, even though I hardly know anything about black metal at all.

Dispatch from a Broken Brain

2010-10-26T11:34:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, it was pointed out to me by some concerned citizens (beautiful and youthful concerned citizens, yes, hi ladies) that I have not issued any dispatches from the deep since July. There are several reasons for this, many of which have to do with the fact that the deep, inevitably, gets deeper and deeper, such that issuing anything besides farts or sighs gets more and more fraught with complications logistical, emotional, and digestive.

In a certain light, of course, you are never deeper down than in those early baby days, those strange dreamy months spent kneeling on the floor. (My rug, I remember, actually had blue smudges from months of being crawled upon by my be-jeaned knees.) But, from another perspective, it is in the end of the postpartum period and the putative return to real life* - mostly upright, mostly not carrying a baby, mostly speaking normal English to everyone in the house - that the rabbit hole truly opens up. Because you are suddenly expected, both by yourself and by everyone else around you, to act like a normal person. It is no longer acceptable for you to behave as though life should slow or stop just because you have a child. In the meantime, however, the child is doing his or her damnedest to slow or stop your life. I mean, as much as people talk about the newborn period being about loss of control, I have to tell you that you do not know what it means to be out of control of your life until you have a toddler.** It does not induce the desire to write poignant observations in a tastefully light-blue-and-cream blog*** as much as it induces catatonia.

Also, of course, the longer you do something, the more encumbered it gets. In the beginning, a thing is simple to do, and later, it is not. Such is the truth about everything in life, and blogs are no exception.

But really, these are small issues in comparison to Buffy. The real reason for my three-month communication freeze is Buffy.

Allow me to explain. In July, at the urging of concerned citizen LC, who I don't know whether to thank or punish, I began watching the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time. Now, I have been truly taken with TV shows before - Alias and Veronica Mars come to mind as having absorbed a great deal of my psychic energy. But NOTHING can compare to what Buffy did to me. For whatever reason, the show reached somewhere deep into my mind and sparked a hysterical intellectual brainstorm. For weeks, I vomited forth increasingly complex theories and ideas about superheroes, heroines, legends, horror, romance, archetypes, teleplays, screen plays, stage plays, fans, fandom, fanfiction, commercial television, pop culture, high culture, Romeo and Juliet, film noir, and on and on and on and on. Nothing in my brain or experience was left untouched: everything was re-oriented in the wake of Buffy, and I had to talk about every single one of these re-orientations until my throat was dry and my husband's eyes began rolling back in his head.

In addition to destabilizing me intellectually, the show also left me in ruins emotionally. I sobbed for literally hours over the horrifically star-crossed pairing of Buffy and Angel, completely unable to even rise from the couch after particularly tragic episodes. The emotional upheaval invaded every moment of my life. Sometimes, in the middle of perfectly innocuous conversations with my husband, I would suddenly gasp in pain.

"What's wrong?!"

"Oh...nothing...just...[sob sob]...I was thinking about Buffy."

I discussed the issue with my friend HA, who had also experienced Buffy upheaval. "Why?" I asked her, feeling desperate. "Why is it doing this to me?"

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "I think what happened is that it got at something in here," touching her forehead, "that was already a little broken."

And that is about the best explanation available: my brain was already a little broken, and Buffy broke it the rest of the way. In any case, broken-brained as I was, I yearned to put it all down on paper, to capture all that was wracking my brain and my heart. But the feelings were too strong, the thoughts too many and too inchoate. Write as I might, I got nowhere. And that is mostly why you heard nothing from me for three months. I tried and tried and got nowhere, and then fell out of the habit of trying.

I actually stopped watching Buffy in the middle of season 4, no longer able to deal with the continuous torture inflicted upon the characters by what must be an incredibly sadistic team of writers. For whatever reason, though, yesterday, flopped on the sofa suffering from an ailment that I will tell you about later, I decided that it was Buffy time again. I skipped the remainder of season 4 and went straight to season 5, hoping that things might get a little better. A quick glance at Wikipedia, though, tells me that my hopes are in vain: this season, the sadists are going to kill Buffy's mom, bring Angel back for a few terribly wrenching moments and send him away again, and make Spike fall in star-crossed love with Buffy. Horror. I watched the first episode anyway, though, and I think I will watch the second today. My brain is already broken, anyway - how much worse could it get? And you and I, we're back in touch again, so things couldn't possible go too wrong. Right? Right.

*I know that many people think of the postpartum period as being far shorter, like six months or maybe, at most, a year. But in my own experience - and this may because I continued to breastfeed for so long and/or because I never returned to full-time work and/or because "many people" are invariably full of shit and don't know what they're talking about - I did not stop feeling postpartum until around the two-year mark. By which I mean that it was not until about 24 months after I gave birth that I stopped feeling physically and psychologically defined by the fact that I had given birth in the near past.

**Or until you have my toddler. A doula colleague whose son is the same age as mine recently said, "I just love this age, don't you?" And watching her son sit through an hour-long grownup meeting peacefully scribbling in a notebook without making a peep, I concluded that I, too, love her son at this age.

***Jeez, are you so fucking bored of looking at this color scheme? Anyone out there up for designing something new?

Snack

2010-07-19T18:06:00.001-04:00

So, the cloud is this: After having spent most of the day curled up on the couch with a headache, I finally managed to stumble out into the midst of a disgustingly hot, humid, government-heat-advisory day with the goal of going to Starbucks, obtaining caffeine (the lack of which may have led to the headache in the first place) and sugar and overpriced "micronutrient water," and then sitting down and getting some work done. (As abysmal a place as Starbucks is to get work done in - sorry about that preposition - it is a lot easier for me to convince myself to go there than to the library.) However, after I ordered my caffeine and sugar AND actually opened the dumb water and drank out of it, the clerk informed me that my debit card had been declined. Now, I knew that we had very little money in our bank account, but I did not realize that we had so little money that I could not obtain an overpriced snack. Indeed, a quick call to the bank informed me that we had precisely $0.78. On top of which, while I was on the phone with the bank, I at first pushed the wrong button, so instead of giving me my current balance, the automated system started reeling off check numbers and amounts with dizzying speed, but just slowly enough for me to hear that I have apparently bounced a check for $595, which is utterly mysterious because I cannot currently recall having written a check of that amount, and also utterly panic-inducing because (obviously) I do not currently have the money to pay that amount to whomever I had meant to pay it. In the meantime, back to the available balance/Starbuck issue, I had to tell the clerk to please put my things aside for me, and I would be right back with the money to pay for them. And then, boiling in embarrassment and the sun, I had to walk all the way home, get the $50 check that I (luckily) had just received in the mail on Saturday, walk to the bank, deposit the check, and then return to Starbucks to bail out my snack. When I got back to Starbucks, half an hour had passed, and the shift had changed, so I had to explain to the new clerk what had happened, and also live with the knowledge that the previous clerk probably left thinking that I had skipped out on my snack bill. By the time all this was over, I had lost about 45 minutes of the time that I had originally set aside for getting work done, and I was hot, sweaty, frustrated, in a state of souped-up financial panic, and aching with an unpleasant sense of humility, or maybe humiliation.

And the silver lining is this: When I got back to Starbucks, the new clerk inexplicably undercharged me for my snacks by half. BY HALF. Did she misunderstand and think I had already paid for part of it? Was she just not paying attention? I don't know and I don't care. I am confident that I earned the discount because I bore my trials with relative patience, without crying or screaming in frustration even once, and because I had the guts to actually return to Starbucks in the first place, when a younger, less stout-hearted me would have simply not gone back and then avoided the place for at least a full calendar year.

And silver lining Part II: After finally obtaining snacks and sitting down - and I got a whole table to myself when most of the other tables were being shared! - I discovered that there was a red wig lying under my table. This is truly, truly exciting, because now I can imagine that something very, very dramatic and very, very important was going on SOMEWHERE IN THIS VERY NEIGHBORHOOD, ON THIS VERY DAY. Like there was a spy or a detective or just a regular woman caught in some sort of dramatic and important and maybe even heartbreaking situation, and she was in disguise and maybe being followed and she had to quickly ditch her disguise or change into a new one, and she did it here at the Starbucks on 145th and Bradhurst, and now I am sitting in the EXACT PLACE where this very dramatic important thing happened. And it doesn't even matter that you and I both know that this wig was probably just dropped by a kid on the way home from summer drama camp, maybe at the Harlem School of the Arts just down the street; just the the very thought, the slimmest imagining that it might be something different altogether makes me feel brighter and energized and romantic again. We live in a magical world where there are wigs under tables, and the humiliation and the heat and the bank account don't even matter. They don't. They really, really don't.

Kloster

2010-06-30T14:18:00.001-04:00

And then suddenly, I am in Dresden, Germany, standing in a sun-drenched cobblestone courtyard, looking dazedly at the flowers while my boss stands in the office inside, ordering my meals.

By which I mean to say this: awhile ago now, maybe back when it was still cold, one of my two bosses at the the retail baby store where I work as a sales clerk and also teaching classes decided that it would be a good idea for her to go to Dresden to complete her babywearing certification training. (Yes, such a thing exists, and it is treated with deathly seriousness here in Germany, here at Die Trageschule. My boss's husband refers to the trainer as "your Jedi master," and this captures the situation pretty accurately.) Needless to say, as soon I heard that such a trip might be in the offing, I could not rest until I was included. I pestered my bosses pretty much day and night for a couple of weeks, and finally, worn down I mean convinced, my bosses declared that I would be going to Dresden, too, and the store would pay.

The funny thing is that because the store was paying for and organizing the trip, I did not do much travel preparation. Of course I made sure that my husband and son would be taken care of (they are packed off to Abuela and Tia in Arizona), and of course I made lists and packed, but I did not look at a map, I did not purchase a phrase book, and I did not bother to even think about things like itinerary or activities or how I might be getting from one place to another.

So it almost seemed as though it was by magic that I ended up, after ten hours of overnight travel, standing in a Catholic kloster in Dresden, Germany, on the hill that rises above the river Elbe, too dazed to even try to help my boss talk to the non-English-dominant staff about how many meals we wanted and when we wanted them.

There are two main buildings here, one containing dormitory rooms and one containing seminar and meditation rooms. There are flowers the color of a fluorescent orange crayon that is in my son's crayon jar, with deep, dark, velvety centers. There is a small meditation chapel with an altar and a few stools of unfinished wood. There are enormous tangles of jasmine spilling an inconceivably sweet, wild scent onto the walking paths that wind around the property. There are stations of the cross. There are dark, quiet woods uphill, above the buildings and the gardens. There are masses of lavender and a few trellised grape vines. There are glossy jetblack squirrels and small bobbing poppies with paper-thin petals. There is clover everywhere. There are sheep. The birds sing. There are wildflowers on the table with our home-made lunch, and there is coffee and tea and cakes at 4. I have stumbled, it seems, into paradise.

There are a few minor problems. Like: I wish I had brought my Buddha Machine and my green jacket. Or: I blew my breast pump out, and simultaneously shorted the circuits in my little room with white muslin curtains, because I am too stupid to figure out how to use a currency converter plug. Or: our babywearing Obi Wan is taking us out to lunch today and I am worried that there will be nothing on the menu but meat, specifically some terrifying German meat like wiener or wurst or whatever, and I will have to eat it in order to be polite. But these are only small blips, and I am mostly in a dreamlike stupor, allowing myself to simply be carried by the current. I sit in a puddle of sunlight amidst piles of baby carriers in the room where we are having our training. I gently finger the nodding flowers as I walk past them on the paths. I collect pine cones on my morning walk, shivering against the early chill. I eat crumb cake dusted with powdered sugar and filled with vanilla custard that is nearly identical to the stuff inside the Boston cream donuts at Dunkin Donuts, except better. I am away from my son, away from my husband, away from my home, away from my friends. I am reading, though not much. I am listening to music, though not much. I am not really even thinking. When I do think, my thought is that when I get back to New York, it is time to have another baby.

What Are My Feelings?*

2010-06-08T14:46:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, the hardest thing to know is what I am actually feeling. Is it true that I would feel better if I worked less? Is it true that I feel better when I spend more time with my son? Is it true that not spending time with my son makes me feel rootless, shiftless, rudderless? (I almost wrote "udderless" - a Freudian slip? A Jungian one? Signs of an impending psychotic break? Nonsense?) Or is that simply the way one feels when one's life seems to be slipping out of the reigns a bit too much? Does one's life always seem to be slipping out of the reigns a bit too much? In any case, I know nothing of reigns or horses, and I suspect that that is not a properly constructed appropriate metaphor.

Here's what I am getting at, though, so listen. Was one ever happy? And is one actually unhappy right now? I mean, I think I was happy. I remember being happy. My husband would come home, and he would say, This is the happiest I have ever seen you. Maybe the baby would be asleep and I would be reading a book. Or maybe he would be awake looking at the toys dangling from the baby gym. And I would be happy, so much so that my husband would say that thing about me being happy, and I would agree. But I wasn't always happy, not even then. Not that I think that a person should be always happy; I'm just acknowledging that even that time that I am looking back upon as the happiest time of my life wasn't always really happy. And the unhappy was pretty badly unhappy, because I am me, and one of the things about being me is that being unhappy usually means being really, really, really unhappy. It's a good thing that I am not a drinker, because otherwise I would be a drunk. If drinking could make me forget about my feelings, or at least make me not care about them, I would do it a lot, all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.

But that is beside the point. The point is, Was I happy? And why? Could it be just because I wasn't working? Could it possibly be that simple? I had a new baby, yes, and my body and mind were reeling from the effect, yes, but I was not working - like, at a job, I mean. Could it be that the simple cessation of work was responsible for, say, 30-80% of my feelings of contentment? (With the continuing caveat that, yes, I know, I was not always content. But we can agree, can't we, that I was really noticeably happy? I mean, my husband noticed. Right?) And if that is the case, what does it mean for the old saw that you need to find yourself in your work or whatever? And what does it mean for the fervently-held (by me, maybe?) conviction that a woman must do something "outside of the home" if she is to keep herself truly fulfilled and happy? And what does it mean for me and my own continuous buying-in to the idea that I am really better off working?

Because look at me! Here I am: I have switched careers with gusto, with at least 50% of the motivation being the desire to work less and be home more. And am I home more? Am I working less? NO. I AM NOT. I AM BUSY AS FUCK. And I am not sure that I see any more of my son than I would if I had a normal fucking job with a normal fucking salary and some goddamn benefits. Please, sister. Please. Tell me what it means.

Listen, work gets you, and I don't just mean the money. There you are, meandering along, and you try doing a little something, because it seems convenient or wise or fun or something. And you are smart and you like to learn and to be successful, so you do learn, you learn quickly, and you are successful, and then, suddenly, you are enmeshed. So, just a hot moment ago, you were just a person dabbling in something, and now that something is forming the parameters of your life. You are committed, and you feel like you owe things to people, and like there is so much more success right around the corner, and it would really be a shame to drop things right now. And this happens really fast, and it happens with everything that you happen to stick your nose into, and then there are a million things, and you are juggling them all.

Is this what I wanted? Is this where I meant to be? Am I happy now? Was I ever happy before? Should I work less? Should I work more? Would anything change my feelings? Has anything ever changed my feelings? What are my feelings? Does it even matter? There is no clarity here except the clarity of the confusion, and it is perhaps a bad sign that I actually feel halfway content with just that.

*I can't quite remember why, but this phrase was, at one time, very funny indeed. It was a long time ago, like my second or third year of teaching, I think, and one of my colleagues had found this stupid article, like in Cosmo or Glamour or similar, that said something to the effect that men often don't know what they are feeling. Of course, this is standard Cosmo/Glamour fare, but there was SOMETHING that made this particular statement in this particular article REALLY FUNNY, although I cannot for the life of me remember what - a drawing? an infelicitous turn of phrase? - and we were just ROARING over it. And I went home and told my husband about it, and he was roaring too, and since then, he sometimes turns to me and says, "What are my feelings?" in a particularly sensitive, whiny, helpless voice, and this was funny to us for a long, long, time, although it is now just something we say out of habit, something that has lodged itself in our mutual discourse, despite having entirely shed its original meaning and impact.

Birthday, part 32

2010-05-10T04:14:00.002-04:00

It is, inevitably, my birthday again. I am 32 today. It is, also inevitably, 4AM. I am eating leftover miso soup (on the principle that getting warm helps one fall asleep), and I am wearing orange pants, red socks, a pink sweater, and a coral-colored scarf (articles of clothing corresponding to ditto principle, color of clothing corresponding to Crazy). And for the first time in many, many years, I am not especially excited about it being my birthday.

Two years ago, I sat in this very same place at the kitchen counter, typing on this very same computer on this very same day, and I wrote to you to tell you that I am always, in spite of myself, excited on my birthday*. That was, anyway, a particularly special year. I was turning 30, I had just had just become a mother**, I had just begun to awe myself by writing this beautiful blog***, my dear college friend KG had sent me a fragrant bouquet of organic white roses and lilies in the mail, and everything seemed vital and dreamlike and on the brink of happening.

Now? I'm not sure what to say about now. My parents sent me a cake and 100 bucks, and my husband bought me a massage at Bliss and arranged for a friend to drive me home from Ikea tomorrow with some new furniture****. These things are all wonderful, and my husband is wonderful, and so is my son, and I am doing work that actually makes me happy. However, I cannot at this very moment seem to muster the wild surmise with which I have, on May 10s past, star'd at the Pacific (so to speak). I am 32, which is not nearly so exciting as 30, especially considering the fact that I keep thinking I am 33, perhaps a more piquant number, and my husband has to keep reminding me that I am not. My son is almost 2 and a half, and he walks and talks and cuddles and kisses and has horrifying, seizure-like tantrums. His care still rests entirely in my command, and will do so for years to come, but his life is now his own. He is a person in his own right, and his story is no longer mine. Coming home from Whole Foods today, he waved bye-bye to the taxi and ran up the sidewalk to our building. At the bottom of the stairs, I called his name, and he turned to me, and I asked him, "Will you remember today? Will you think about today when you're old?" And he looked into my eyes for a moment with a gaze either wise or uncomprehending, and then turned, giggling, to climb the stairs.

*At one time, I would have combed through my entries and linked to the one in question. But not right now. It is too late at night, and I am too ashamed of my recent non-productivity to confront myself with my past hyper-productivity.

**At the time, 5 months in, I already felt as though I had been a mother for ages, but I am stunned now, looking back, at how very NEW it was - 5 months! I had only been a mother for 5 months! - and I know with certainty that one day I will look back at this time and be stunned at the thought of only having been a mother for 2 and a half years.

***I feel as though I can say this with no compunction because, my dear, darling, long-suffering readers, I know that it is no longer such a beautiful blog. I don't write as much, as well, as poignantly as I did then - life intervenes - maybe I will start again soon - maybe next week - maybe tomorrow - maybe today?

****This is, like, the ultimate present to give a car-less New Yorker; while Ikea is easy enough to get to, getting the furniture home is quite an issue. You could rent a truck or have them deliver, but either of these options costs about 100 bucks, which is not the end of the world, but does make you feel as though you should wait until you have enough money to buy ALL of the furniture that you need instead of just purchasing in drips and drabs, with each drip and each drab occasioning an additional 100-buck get-it-home cost. And of course, you never have enough money for ALL of the furniture that you need, so you never go to Ikea except when you have been very, very, very good about making credit card payments for months on end, or when your parents have decided to be far more generous than they can actually afford to be. So it seems like the most amazing luxury to be able to go to Ikea and buy only A LITTLE furniture - just what I can afford and need most at this very moment - and bring it home the very same day FOR FREE.

Cod Liver Oil

2010-04-16T09:59:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, I feel as though there is nothing good at all. I feel this way even when it is demonstrably untrue. Like now, some things are great. To wit: I just bought an iPad! I just took a childbirth educator certification workshop! It is warm outside! Despite such good things, though, I feel overwhelmed by complaints. I have no time. I have no money. I'm a month behind in all household bills. I want to send my son to nursery school, but I don't think we can afford it. I don't have time to go to yoga. I don't have a computer with which to sync my iPad and am desperately anxious that I will lose all of my data. I never write anymore. I'm exhausted. I'm reading a truly horrible trashy mystery novel that appears to be solely about how terribly unsatisfying and depressing it is to be a mother, and I refuse to stop reading it.

This morning, though, everything came to a head with the yogurt incident. First, allow me to explain that my son's teeth are rotting. Horrifyingly, this is a really common phenomenon these days: everyone's infants have brown spots, cavities, visible decay, and I don't know what. And as much as your local pediatric dentist would like you to believe it, this is not about too much juice and not enough brushing. Because if it were, then everyone in my generation - shit, am I old enough to have a generation? - would also have had brown spots, multiple cavities, and visible decay in our infancy, and we didn't. The thing is, baby tooth enamel is formed in utero, so something is going REALLY WRONG in our food or our environment or somewhere that is adversely affecting the fetal development of baby tooth enamel and WHO KNOWS WHAT ELSE. Oh my God.

Anyway, so, my son has rotting teeth. One thing I am doing about this, in addition to brushing like crazy as the Beach Boys instruct, is cod liver oil. For reasons that are too complicated for me to understand, let alone explain, it appears that increasing the consumption of certain vitamins and fats (like the ones in cod liver oil) can potentially effect the remineralization of decaying teeth - like, the teeth re-grow healthy from the inside out. Unbelievable, I know, but some moms out there are swearing by it, and if it will prevent my child having to be put under general anesthesia in order to have his little baby teeth yanked out of his little baby head, I'm all for it. So I've been trying to get the kid to take cod liver oil. First, I had an unflavored kind, and I hid it in juice or smoothies. But, understandably, his willingness to consume fishy juice and smoothies was not reliable, so I bought the lemon-flavored kind. I thought this would be an end to my problems, because it really does taste like lemon, and he generally loves lemon, but no such luck. He refuses to take it on a spoon, and, bizarrely, he is no more reliable about consuming lemony juice and smoothies than he was about consuming fishy juice and smoothies. I just do my best to sneak it into anything I can and hope he doesn't notice.

So, anyway, this morning, when he finished a bowl of yogurt with freeze-dried strawberries and then asked for more, I had a brainwave. Why not give him lemon-flavored yogurt with freeze-dried strawberries. So I mixed up a bowl and tasted it, and it tasted great, and I gave it to him, and he spat it out and refused to have anything more to do with it. This was, in itself, a blow. The tiny little flask-shaped bottle of lemon-flavored cod liver oil cost me $22, and I hate to even waste the bit of oil that coats a spoon or the inside of a sippy cup, plus there was the whole bowl of yogurt and strawberries all gone to waste. But there was nothing to be done for it, and anyway I still needed to give my son a bowl of yogurt that he would eat. So I used a different - non-lemony - bowl and a different - non-lemony - spoon, and made him up another bowl of yogurt and strawberries and brought it to him, and HE REFUSED TO EAT IT. Maybe it was too tainted with lemony memories, maybe he just wasn't interested anymore - whatever the reason, he categorically refused to have anything to do with it.

Now, you might think that this does not sound like such a big deal, and you might be right. But I am here to tell you that this morning, holding out a spoon of yogurt and strawberries to my son and having him shout a joyful "NOOOOOOOO!!!!" in its direction made me want to DIE. Because I had all the other complaints anyway: the time, the money, the bills, the nursery school, the yoga, the computer, the writing, the exhaustion, the trashy novel. And then, on top of that, to have wasted two bowls of yogurt, to have possibly permanently ruined my son's willingness to consider yogurt to be a viable foodstuff, to have wasted a valuable spoonful of cod liver oil, to be thwarted in my remineralization attempts - suddenly life seemed tragic. I wilted and began to cry.

"Um," said my husband carefully, emerging from the shower to find me sitting on the couch, leaking tears, surrounded by two bowls of yogurt and a toddler shouting "NOOOOOOOO!!!" "You could send him to daycare today if you need a little rest." I shook my head and sniffled. "No," I whispered, "I'm fine." And, while this was an observably false statement, it was true that I did not particularly want to send my son to daycare. The truth is that I feel just as decentered and unstable if I spend too much time away from my son as I do if I spend too much time with him. I had been looking forward to our day together, and I did not want to give it up. At the same time, I knew that I was not quite okay. It was a very bad sign indeed to already, at 9:00AM, have been reduced to tears by a fit of toddler whimsy. Perhaps it would be best to send him to daycare after all. And thus I sat on the couch in tears, in a quandary, my poor toddler looking at me with increased concern. (My husband had, by this time left for work.) Should I go ahead and pack the kid off to daycare? That would give me the whole day to myself to get work done, and if I don't do it today, my next working day isn't until Tuesday. Or, on the other hand, should I spend the day with him? If I don't do it today, my next kiddo bonding day isn't until Monday. Either choice seemed final and terrible.

Happily, my son solved the problem. He climbed into my lap and asked to nurse, and within minutes of latching on, had fallen fast asleep. It looked, in the moment, like an infinitely generous gesture on his part: by taking his nap early, he was granting me a little more time to myself before I began my day with him. I carried him to the bedroom, tucked him gently into the bed, and scurried back to the living room. I have not written to you about my life in ages. There is so much to tell. I don't even care that this is an undigested mess. I am just happy to give it to you.

Sick

2010-03-15T13:44:00.005-04:00

I am not sure if this six-days-and-counting bout of dripping nose/stuffed head is allergies or a cold. I have been telling myself and everyone else that it is allergies, because both of my jobs - doula and babywearing expert (har!) - basically consist of me putting my hands and breath all over people with not-impeccably-operational immune systems. So if I really thought I were sick, it would perhaps be ethically correct for me to stop putting my hands and breath all over the aforementioned people, and instead stay home, confining my germs to my immediate family. However, a pernicious side effect of not working is not getting paid. Thus, it behooves me to remain confident that I could not possibly be sick and have no possible reason to not work.

It it is a bit of a quandary, though, because I have a great deal to do right now - write a birth story, schedule a postnatal meeting, continue working on certification paperwork, write copy for my website, complete the several blog entries that I started but never finished in the past few weeks - and I do not want to do any of it. Instead, I want to lie on the couch and read the New Yorker. (Although lately I am sliding into one of my recurring periods of New Yorker fatigue, where everything in the magazine seems like trite, tiresome, arrogant babble. So maybe I don't want to lie on the couch and read the New Yorker as much as I want to lie on the couch and watch bad TV on Hulu.) If I were sick, such lassitude would be perfectly normal, even healthy. In fact, even as I write these words, I am feeling heavier of body and achier of limb, and it is dawning on me that this is obviously not allergies, but rather a cold, and a pretty bad cold at that. I can't quite believe that I have spent well-nigh a week proclaiming to all and sundry that I cannot possibly be sick because I feel perfectly fine. This is clearly rubbish; I am sick, and I feel sick, and I can't possibly expect myself to do any work, and now I am going to go lie down on the couch and watch bad TV on Hulu.

Valentine's Gray

2010-02-14T17:18:00.005-05:00

Today - Valentine's Day - around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, I found myself trudging up Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard, walking straight into the wind, wrestling the stroller over the gray floes of slush encrusting the sidewalk, and feeling very dark indeed.

Last night, I was up late, for hours and hours after the baby fell asleep. At first, I was pleasantly awake, eating English toffee and semi-obsessively window-shopping online for things - lambskins, wools, fitted diapers - that I might want for a theoretical second baby. After awhile, though, I turned a corner of some sort, and I was suddenly uncomfortably awake - too anxious, irritable, and jumpy to eat or shop for anything, theoretical or not. My husband was out with friends, and I began to worry over how long he had been gone and be upset that he was not yet home, and then I began to call him to demand that he come home, but he did not answer, either because he didn't hear his phone or because he suspected that I would be unpleasant if he did answer, or maybe some of both. Finally, though, he came home, and finally, around 4AM, I fell asleep.

All of this would have been fine but for the fact that the baby jumped out of bed around 7AM, refreshed and well-rested and ready to play, and I had to drag my sorry no-sleep ass into the living room to keep him company. Then, at noon, I went to a prenatal meeting, which was essentially uncomplicated, yet horribly stressful because the couple in question are Japanese and my Japanese has been steadily crumbling away over the past ten years or so, to the point that even being in the same room as a Japanese person brings me hot flashes of shame and guilt and makes me want to sew my lips together and never talk again. And after this, my husband and the baby and I all went to Community Food and Juice for a family Valentine's Day brunch. This was a nice idea, of course, and brunch was delicious, but it was not an especially relaxing exercise, given the fact that my son is two, and that the high points of restaurant-going for him are: going to the bathroom as many times as possible, clinking glasses together, drinking other people's beverages, sprinkling salt and pepper on everything, throwing sugar packets, and leaving.

After we got home from brunch, I was certain that the baby would nap, but it does not pay to be certain. Instead of going to sleep, he ran around the bedroom bonking things and then demanded that I read him a Japanese alphabet book over and over and over again. As I read, my eyes began to fall shut of their own volition, and my throat, which had had a hint of soreness when I got up in the morning, got scratchier and scratchier. It was torture - I wanted to sleep but I could not - my throat hurt - the baby was prodding me to open the book yet again - I could not. I shut the book. "We're going for a walk in the stroller," I announced, and out we went.

I had hoped that the baby would fall asleep the moment the wheels hit the pavement, but this was not the case. He was very quiet, but he peered out alertly from under his fleece hat, and it seemed that he had always been awake and would always be so. So we walked. We walked the mile or so to 125th Street, and I went into H&M with the plan of buying myself something pretty to help lift my biliously miserable mood. But there was nothing pretty, nothing mood-lifting, nothing cheap enough to be tempting, and so out we went again, across the cold, windswept square in front of the State Office Building. At a loss for anywhere else to go, I turned back home, even though I had resolved not to go home until the baby was sound asleep.

Just before 135th Street, I saw a striking figure walking towards me, a pretty, thin, young woman smoking a cigarette, wearing a military-style parka with the hood thrown luxuriously back and a beautiful golden-tan patterned scarf and tall boots. As we got closer to each other, I saw that her boots were the knee-high, shearling-lined clog boots that Sven Clogs custom-makes for No. 6 Store on Centre Market Place - the very boots that I bought for myself last fall and that are the single most expensive item in my entire wardrobe. Her boots, though, were this year's model, so the clog base was solid wood instead of being broken up with a segment of rubber, and the heel was higher. And, while mine are dark brown with the shearling dyed to match, hers were a slightly lighter brown with natural shearling.

As she passed by, willowy and urban and insouciant and smoky, a wave of bitterness washed over me. In that moment, I liked her boots better than mine - they seemed cooler, more modern, less outdoor necessity and more fashion statement. I wondered - will my every single, precious, carefully-thought-out purchase end up this way, looking slightly dingy compared to the next year's model? I wondered - why do I even care, why do I even go to H&M to look for something pretty when now and for the rest of my life, I am bound to be passed on the street by ever-younger, ever-prettier girls who will always be wearing this year's model while I hunch under my dingy red nylon coat and push my dingy red stroller, wearing a pair of tiresomely boot-cut corduroys that my mother bought for me at Ann Taylor Loft for $9.99.

And I thought - how can I even think about a theoretical second baby? How could I ever cobble together the strength to do this all over again, or do rather do it double-wide, double-time? I thought - I have no more to give, no more in me. I am giving everything I have right now, just to push the damn stroller over the damn slush when I am tired and unhappy on a gray Valentine's Sunday, and what will I do when I get home and he is still awake and needing me to read the book or change the record or push the truck? How could I even dream of doing this again, more?

I looked up from this miserable reverie to see a short, youngish Latino woman standing in front of Sea to Sea Fish Market, gesticulating towards the stroller as we walked towards her. People in my neighborhood are unaccountably nosy and bossy in regards to babies, and I am always being told to watch my baby more closely or dress him more warmly, so I steeled myself for what I was sure would be a comment about his bare, unmittened hands. "Hey mami," she said as we drew abreast, "your baby is leaning over." Startled, I bent to look into the stroller, and I almost sobbed with hysterical relief to find that my baby had finally fallen fast asleep, his head slumped out of the stroller to the right, his right hand almost trailing on the ground. I felt as though someone had suddenly released a vise that had been gripping my lungs, and I drew a deep breath of fresh, cold air as I straightened and turned to thank the lady and tell her that it was OK, because we were almost home.

Two Mysteries and a Mistake

2010-02-08T11:04:00.004-05:00

Two mysteries awaited me when I woke up on Sunday morning.

First, there was the issue of the baby in the bed. I awoke to find myself sleeping on the left side of the bed - my husband's side. This was not mysterious. My husband had been out very late the night before playing music, and I had gone to sleep before he got home. The baby had been occupying most of my side of the bed, and instead of pushing him into the center as I would have done if my husband had been there, I just flopped down on the other side, turned my back to the baby, and went to sleep. So it was not weird that that is where I woke up. The weird thing was that the baby was no longer on my side of the bed. Instead he was curled up very tightly, spooned into my tummy, sharing my husband's side with me. In other words, when I had gone to sleep, the baby had been behind me, on my side of the bed, and now he was in front of me, on my husband's side of the bed. Now, the baby - like most people - certainly moves around a fair amount in the night, but he does not go so far as to climb over people while in a deep sleep. He would need to have been at least a little awake to climb over me, and if he were awake enough to do that, he would have been awake enough to want to nurse, and if he had wanted to nurse, he would have woken me up. But I was sure that (for once) I had not been woken up at all in the night, and also, my nursing bra was securely latched, which is usually not the case when a great deal of night nursing has been going on.

I mulled this problem over in my barely-awake brain for a few moments before deciding that my husband must have moved the baby in order to make room for himself on my side of the bed. It was, of course, strange that, rather than simply shoving the baby over, he had elected to actually pick him up and put him somewhere else. Also, it seemed unlikely that the baby would have borne this without waking up - and again, I was sure he didn't wake up because I was sure he hadn't nursed. But still, I reasoned foggily, it was a hypothesis that fit the facts. After a few more moments, I decided that I ought to test my hypothesis, and that perhaps the best way to do so would be to check if my husband was, indeed, asleep on my side of the bed. So I reached a tentative hand out to explore the space behind me, only to find that my husband was not there. A blow to my brilliant hypothesis.

Feeling around a bit more, though, I came across a wet, soggy spot - the telltale sign of a toddler bed-pee. This suggested a possible alternate hypothesis. Perhaps my husband had come into the bedroom, attempted to push the baby aside to lie down on my side of the bed, found that side to be peed upon, placed the baby on the other side of me away from the wet spot, and went off to sleep on the (dry) couch in the living room. Again, very odd that the baby hadn't woken up during this operation. Very odd, too, that my husband didn't follow our usual, simpler bed-pee procedure of just covering the wet spot with a blanket and going to back to sleep. Ruminating, I turned back towards my still-sleeping baby and gave him an absent-minded cuddle, only to realize that he still had his wet PJ pants on. Would my husband really have just left him wet? Usually, the very first thing we do in a bed-pee situation is to drag the wet pants off and throw them on the floor. Why, if my husband had been so very concerned about taking the baby away from the wet spot altogether, had he not been concerned about the baby sleeping in wet clothes? It didn't make sense.

Indeed, the more I thought about things, the less any explanation made any sense. I was, by this time, fully awake, and also really annoyed because I could not figure out what the hell had happened in the night. This may seem like a minor issue to you, and you're right in the sense that, given that no one was hurt and everyone seemed to have slept well, it didn't actually matter what had happened in the night. However, it is not too often that, first thing in the morning, one finds oneself in a situation that has no immediately obvious, logical explanation. (At least, I hope it's not too often for you. That is, if you're over 23. If you are under 23 and can report that you often, or sometimes, wake up in a situation that has no logical explanation, that is OK. Enjoy.) So it was with a distinctly sour mood and a confused sense of having been wronged that I got myself out of bed and traipsed into the living room. (The baby, in the meantime, remained asleep, which, in hindsight, is also bizarre, as he usually wakes up when I do.)

In the living room, I found my husband asleep on the couch under a blanket. This was normal enough. I passed into the kitchen (which is basically in the living room) to get myself a glass of water and to encounter the second mystery. On the kitchen counter stood a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jam, and an empty bag that had once held the last few slices from a loaf of sourdough bread. This also was normal - my husband's favorite late-night snack is a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, so I often encounter this sort of detritus on the counter in the morning. There were also other things on the counter - a few spoons and a fork, a toy airplane, a pot of Japanese hand cream, some bills, some empty CD cases, a glass of stale water. None of this was unusual - we are cluttery people, and that is what surfaces look like in our household. Sitting at the counter and drinking my glass of water, though, I suddenly realized that there was something strange about the picture in front of my eyes. I looked closer - could it be? Yes. THE WINGS OF THE TOY AIRPLANE WERE COVERED WITH PEANUT BUTTER.

Now, this particular toy airplane is a little wooden biplane with a little wooden propeller. A few weeks ago, in a fit of being two, my son dashed the plane to the ground, breaking the top wings off. Since then, because I keep forgetting to purchase wood glue, the top wings have been held on - fairly securely - with a couple of green rubber bands. Now, however, the top wings were detached again, and the bottom wings were smeared with peanut butter. This was no accident - like, oops, dropped the plane into the peanut butter jar, or oops, dropped the sandwich onto the plane. No, someone had clearly removed the top wings and neatly spread dollops of peanut butter on the bottom wings. But WHY?

"HEY!" I yelled at my sleeping husband. He jolted awake. "WHAT HAPPENED HERE?"

"What? Where?"

"WHY DID YOU PUT PEANUT BUTTER ON THE PLANE?"

"WHAT?! I didn't put peanut butter on the plane."

"YES, YOU DID. GET UP AND LOOK AT THIS."

He dragged himself off the couch and squinted sleepily at the kitchen counter. I pointed.

"THERE IS PEANUT BUTTER ON THE PLANE. WHY DID YOU DO THAT?"

"I didn't put peanut butter on the plane." He looked at it again. "What? No, I didn't do that. Did I do that? What?"

And we both gazed at the counter. Closer examination revealed other, smaller bizarrities. For example, the three spoons and one fork lying on the counter were ALL smeared with peanut butter. Also, a dollop peanut butter was floating in the water glass.

"Hey," I said, after a little thought, "did you come into the bedroom and move the baby?"

"No," my husband said, "I didn't."

And there was, really, nothing more to say.

In an (I think) unrelated occurrence, I found this morning that the cup of coffee for which I have - for months - been blithely putting a dollar bill on the counter at the bodega actually costs a dollar twenty-five.

Snow Night

2010-01-30T20:56:00.003-05:00

Written some time in late December, 2009.

I am a horrible, horrible mother, and I need to have my mothering license revoked. The first piece of foolishness was going out at all tonight. Who takes a toddler to an adult holiday party at 8:30PM in the middle of an ever-worsening snowstorm? Me. (Or rather I?) I did that. And I stayed until 11, drinking wine and playing Apples to Apples while my son wandered around eating pretzels and cookies and rolled Christmas tree ornaments across on the floor and then absentmindedly twisted himself into my lap to nurse while the other partygoers tried to pretend not to notice. And then he walked to the door and asked to go home, at which point I should have called a car service. But instead, I bundled us both up, borrowed some money from a friend (because why be responsible enough to make sure I have round trip cab fare before leaving the house?), and blithely walked out on the street with my toddler in the middle of a blizzard. I was on Manhattan and 108^th, and I walked up to 110^th on the principal that it would be easier to get a cab there. But really, there were no cabs anywhere, and the wind was biting and the snow blowing sideways. By the time we got to the circle at the corner of 110^th and Frederick Douglass, my little son, not quite two, still a baby really, on my back in a wrap, had begun to cry. There were still no cabs, so I kept walking, and he began to cry even harder, and I wanted to cry myself, because it was snowy and windy and I did not know how we were going to get home. Should I go back to the party? Should I call my friend who was still at the party and ask her to come pick us up and let us stay at her apartment just a block away until the snow quieted? My son had begun to arch and struggle away from me on my back, and afraid that he would struggle free entirely, I untied the wrap, which was already wet, and tried to lower him gently to his feet, but he was wiggling and kicking too much and he fell back in the snow instead and opened his mouth and screamed. I lifted him to me, and he continued to scream furiously and arch away from me. I looked around me – was anyone watching me? Was anyone seeing what a horrible, horrible mother I was to take a not-quite two-year-old out at 11PM in a blizzard, and then to drop him in the snow while waiting for a non-existent cab?

Finally, finally, a white livery cab pulled to a slow stop across the street from me. The snow and slush seemed, suddenly, to be as loud as a cage full of roaring lions, and we yelled at each other as though across a great distance.

“WHERE YOU GOING?!”

“ONE HUNDRED FORTY FIRST STREET!”

“HOW MUCH YOU PAY?!”

“I ONLY HAVE NINE DOLLARS!”

He looked at me disbelievingly. Usually, the fare from that spot to my apartment would be seven dollars, but I realized, too late, that in this snow, and considering the fact that he would have to turn around and drive opposite the direction he meant to go, nine dollars was nowhere near the right fare. But I had nothing more. “NEVER MIND!” I yelled, feeling spiteful and forlorn, and turned to trudge back towards the party, my sobbing son on my hip, when the driver took pity. “OKAY! COME ON!” And before he could change his mind, I stumbled over the snow banked at the curb and rushed across one lane of traffic to hurl myself and my son into the car, spraying snow and ice and water all over the back seat.

The car windows were crusted over with snow, and I could barely see where we were going as we part-slid, part-drove up Frederick Douglass at about two miles an hour. My son alternately clutched at me and pushed me away, sobbing and sobbing in an agony of – what? Cold? Fear? Exhaustion? Confusion? As we passed the neon signs at 125^th, though, he began to quiet, and I opened my coat and he nursed, his wet jacket cold against my bare skin.

At home, I peeled our wet things off as quickly as possible and took my baby straight to bed, where he nursed to sleep almost immediately. His memory, once nonexistent, is certainly getting better, but I do not know if he will remember, tomorrow morning, sobbing and screaming at the corner of 110^th and Frederick Douglass, begging an impassive universe for mercy. And if he does remember, I do not know what he will think of the memory; I can only hope that it will not dampen his enthusiasm for going to the park tomorrow and enjoying the first real snow of his boyhood.

Bus Stop

2010-01-30T20:54:00.003-05:00

Written some time in mid-December 2009.

New York City can be a tragic place to be when it is cold and raining. Today, it is dark and cold and wet, and I had to wait for the bus. First, I thought I was having good luck, as the bus came right when I got to the stop. But when I swiped my MetroCard, the little screen said INSUFFICIENT FARE, and the same thing happened with the other three MetroCards I scrounged out of the bottom of my bag, so I had to get off at the next stop two blocks down and walk back home to get quarters out of the washcloth drawer in the kitchen bureau. The quarters heavy in my pocket, I set out for the bus stop again, but my luck had run out. The bus did not come. It did not come, and did not come, and did not come, and the blonde in lace-up wellies gave up and hailed a cab, and then the round-faced African man in a brown jacket gave up and hailed a cab, and I stayed, reading 2666, and the bus did not come. My cell phone had told me that it would be 52 degrees, so I had not dressed warmly, and the wind stung my body. I wished I had gloves, a hat, a heavier sweater, a longer scarf, legwarmers, or at least a pack of tissues, but I did not dare run back across the street and upstairs to my apartment to get any of these things, for fear that the bus would come, sneakily, behind my back.

About halfway through my wait, a mother and toddler joined me at the bus stop. The mother collapsed the stroller in preparation for getting on the bus, and I wanted to warn her that the prospects for that were not so good, but I also did not want to open a conversation, so I didn't say anything. The cold was biting, and the bus still did not come, and I clutched 2666 desperately in my frozen hands, trying to pretend that it was occupying my attention. I had begun to want to cry, and the mother and toddler made me feel even worse. I watched her pull a hat down over his head, and it made me wish: 1) that I had a hat for my own head; 2) that I had my toddler with me so that I, too, could make those comforting and normalizing gestures that would keep my from feeling as though I was about to fall into a cold, gray, lonely abyss; and 3) that my toddler would submit to being hatted as peacefully as this one. The toddler whimpered and raised his arms, and his mother lifted him to her hip, and I wished even more that my toddler were with me, warm and reassuring and heavy on my hip, making me feel like a reasonable adult, rather than a weak, damp, sniveling creature curled against the wind.

And then, finally, the bus came, and I folded 2666 under my arm and climbed aboard and carefully tipped my quarters into the sinkhole, suddenly worried that I may have miscounted. But the little screen said I had the correct fare, and I walked to the middle of the bus and bumped myself into a forward-facing seat. The mother, toddler and stroller climbed on after me and settled into the side-facing handicapped seats right behind the driver.

I opened 2666 again, but found that I could not focus on the wandering sentences, and instead I took out my notebook to write this lament. When I looked up from my writing, the mother and child were no longer on the bus and we were just turning left on Central Park North and wet rocks glared at me blackly through the almost-bare trees.

Sneaker Lady

2009-12-09T15:24:00.003-05:00

*my internet at home is not working - perhaps one day I will spill all the fabulous details - so this was written on Monday, November 30*

I am back, now, at the Starbucks on 125th – the one at 125th and Adam Clayton, not the one at 125th and Malcolm X – and the sneaker lady is here again. In fact, this is the third time I have seen her here in the past couple of weeks. From the very beginning, I had suspected that she might be some flavor of homeless/destitute/troubled. Her raft of bags is the most telling detail: three large, fully stuffed bags of that woven plastic material, the kind that you can buy for a buck or two at the supermarket in order to save the earth. Indeed, one of the bags bears the Pathmark logo, as well as the slogan “There’s only one earth.” Another of the bags is black, printed with fanciful, pink, vaguely Asian flowers, and the third is a super-hip Jolinda bag from Montgomery, bright blue with red straps, printed boldly with blackface Kewpie dolls. Besides these bags, there is her purse, a small canvas-and-leather hobo with a panda on it.

The first time I saw her, the day my son peed on the floor, she was sitting over by the napkin-and-sugar table, but this time and last time, she has been sitting on a stool at the counter in the window. Today, she is wearing the same brilliant sneakers, denim leggings with yellow jeans stitching, and a striped hooded sweater. Draped over the back of her chair is another striped hooded sweater as well as the chunky-rib turtleneck from the first time I saw her, and spilling out of the Pathmark bag is an imitation (I assume) Missoni cardigan that is cut just like the cardigan that I happen to be wearing right now as I write: an oblong shape with sleeves set in, so you can wrap the tails about yourself and tie them in back to look like a ballerina or instead let them hang down and look luxuriously slouchy though not, perhaps, as warm. I know how the cardigan looks, because I saw it on her last time I was here. In fact, last time I was here, she was in the middle of an elaborate sweater procession, in which certain sweaters were coming out of her bags and onto her body while other sweaters were coming off her body and going into her bags. There seemed, at the time, no rhyme or reason to the activity, other than to showcase the unbelievable number of layers that she was wearing – four T-shirts and three sweaters at the very least - but she did end up looking just as hip as she had when she started – just as hip as she seems to always look. Every time I have seen her, she has been wearing a black knee brace on her right knee, and even this somehow looks effortlessly stylish and cool.

Last time I was here, another woman walked in the door and greeted her, and though it was clear that the meeting wasn’t planned, they also didn’t seem to be particularly surprised to see each other. I assumed, at first, that the other woman might also be homeless/destitute/troubled, both because of her acquaintance with my lady and because her hair was odd, in an unkempt wedge-shaped Afro. Upon closer examination, however, I decided that she was some sort of social worker. As a former public school teacher, I know from social workers, and this woman’s burgundy mock turtleneck, black chinos, and black clogs – and, indeed, her unfortunate hairdo – were a dead giveaway. After purchasing her coffee, the social worker sat down next to her and they chatted for awhile. I listened as closely as I could, desperate to learn more.

I picked up from the conversation that sneaker lady was having some sort of difficulty with identification. She apparently did not have identification for some reason, and this was making all kinds of trouble, and she had been in and out of various offices, having very little luck straightening things out. “It’s so crazy,” she kept saying, “because I was born right here in New York! And they say I can’t prove who I am. I was born here!” Then, a little later, the social worker, glancing at the bag flotilla, said something like, “So do you have to carry your food with you now?” And the sneaker lady answered something like, “No, but I’m carrying my clothes.” And then, a little later, the sneaker lady’s phone rang (I had noticed that her phone was an elaborate Blackberry-iPhone-type affair), and it was apparently someone in a car coming to pick her up. She gave the person instructions, and a few minutes later, her phone rang again, she answered with, “I’m coming across the street now,” and she gathered her things and left.

Today, she is sitting at the counter in the window, crocheting something beautiful and green and – again – Missoni-like, and she does not have her phone with her. I know that she does not have her phone with her, because she told me so. The man sitting next to me asked me, rather loudly, if it was going to rain today (this is a chatty Starbucks), and I told him that I thought it might, and she turned and said, “Oh, is it really? I didn’t know. I left my phone at home, and my phone is also my internet and my watch, too, so I’m out here today without compass or rudder.” Emboldened by her chattiness, I offered that I thought her crocheting was beautiful. “Thank you,” she said, “It’s going to be a scarf. And if I really get ambitious, a matching sweater too.” And then she began to get ready to leave. First, she put her crocheting in a Ziploc baggie, and then she lifted the bottom of her striped hooded sweater and began to straighten the three or four T-shirts underneath. After the T-shirts were straightened, she zipped her second striped hooded sweater on over the first, tucked the first hood into the second, and put both hoods up. Next, she took the Missoni-style cardigan out of the Pathmark bag and put the chunky-rib turtleneck into the Pathmark bag, along with her crocheting. After putting on the Missoni-style cardigan, she pulled a gold lame sash and a black mesh sash out of the Jolinda bag. She tied the gold lame sash around her waist, belting the cardigan closed, and she wrapped the black mesh sash around her neck as a scarf. Thus outfitted, she slung her panda purse over her shoulder, grabbed her three mismatched shopping bags, and walked out the door, still looking, against all reason, fabulous.

Accident

2009-11-20T14:06:00.006-05:00

Sometimes, things turn out as they should, and sometimes less so.

Last Friday, I took the baby out on one of our frequent jaunts down to 125th Street, and he wasn’t wearing anything under his jeans. This was intentional. I usually put him in training pants when we go out, but sometimes I just skip it. The reason is that the less he is wearing, the more motivated I am to offer him the potty. (You probably think this is crazy. Guess what? I don’t care.) The thing is, I usually only have him go commando when we are going to the playground, or running to the bank or to Duane Reade; this was pretty much the first time we embarked on a more involved outing with no protection, so to speak.

First, we stopped by Old Navy, where I returned two shoddily-made shirts and bought two other shoddily-made shirts (the two I bought, of course, cost more than the two I returned). I offered him the potty at Old Navy, but he resisted with some vigor, probably for aesthetic and sanitary reasons: the Old Navy lady’s room is seriously gross. Next, we went to Starbucks. I got a coffee and he got a packet of cashews and a banana. I considered taking him to the bathroom, but there were three people in line, and waiting in line is not exactly a twenty-two-and-a-half-month-old’s favorite activity, so I decided to skip it. We sat down at a table together, and he munched quietly and adorably on cashews and banana while I drank coffee. On the whole, I was feeling pretty smug; whose baby was as cute and grown-up and well-behaved as mine? After a little while, I thought it might be about time to wrap things up and noodle on back home, but there was one thing bothering me, or rather two.

Those two things were the sneakers belonging to a slightly crazy-looking lady in her fifties sitting over by the cream-and-sugar-and-napkins station. Her sneakers had caught my eye the moment I walked in the door. They were bronze and high-topped and velcroed, and they were possibly the most brilliant sneakers I have ever seen in my life. I wanted, more than anything, to ask the woman where she got those sneakers, because I was pretty sure that I really, really needed a pair. I held back, though, for a couple of reasons. First, the woman did look a little crazy. She was dressed rather unbelievably fashionably in black zipper-bottom leggings and a grey turtleneck sweater with a chunky rib and of course those incredible sneakers, but there were some hints of something a little off, like the flyaway grey hair and the three large plastic tote bags stuffed full of who-knows-what and the purse with a panda printed on it. I was worried that she might be truly crazy and did not want to involve myself in a conversation with her if that was the case. Also, people are always watching each other at Starbucks even when they appear not to be, and there is no better way to call attention to yourself than marching up to people at other tables and asking them where they bought their footwear. So I was feeling sort of hesitant.

However, in the end, I realized that I absolutely had to do it, because these sneakers were truly brilliant and I would truly regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t find out where I, too, might obtain such brilliance for my very own feet. While I was still in the throes of this decision-making process, my son had climbed from his chair into his stroller and then down to the floor, where he was chasing cashews. Having decided to approach the sneaker issue head-on, I scooped him up from the floor and immediately felt that his bottom was wet. He had obviously peed in his pants, but I was not too concerned, as the accident was a minor one, and we were about to head home. Anyway, my focus was on the sneakers, so I hoisted his wet butt to my hip and headed towards the maybe-crazy lady. The lady, happily, turned out to be perfectly lucid and pleasant to boot: the sneakers had come from the skate-punk-chic shoe store right next door, she said, and they were skateboarding sneakers, and they were really comfortable. I should get some too, she said.

Flushed with success and proud of myself for going a little out of my comfort zone, I headed back to my table to gather our things to go. Just as I reached the table, though, the light coming through the window changed a little bit, and I happened to glance down. Hmm, I thought, the floor seems to be a little wet. And then, Hmm, the floor is actually quite wet. And then, Wait, these are PUDDLES. And then, Shit, these are PEE PUDDLES. I kept moving as these thoughts occurred to me, and by the time I was fully awake to the fact that, rather than chasing cashews as I had thought, my baby had been squatting and peeing lakes on the floor at Starbucks, I had put on our coats and buckled the baby into the stroller. I was in a surreptitious panic. What should I do? Should I tell someone to mop it up? Should I just leave? I should just leave. Leave. Leave. LEAVE. No one noticed anything. JUST LEAVE.

And so I left. As I backed out of the door with the stroller, I saw an aproned barista come out from behind the counter with a mop and head straight towards the lakes of pee. It then came upon me that of course people had noticed what had happened - people are always watching each other at Starbucks, even when they appear not to be. The baristas had noticed, the folks sitting at the tables next to me had noticed, everyone except me had noticed. I had been too busy thinking about footwear to see what everyone else saw. They saw my baby squat and pee, and they saw me subsequently scoop him up and go ask some crazy-looking old white lady where she got her sneakers, and they saw me walk back through the pee, calmly buckle my baby's wet butt into his stroller, wheel the stroller through the pee, and go out the door, leaving wet pee tracks behind me. The entire scene was mortifying, but it was far too late to do anything about it. I was already out the door and on the corner of 125th and Adam Clayton, shaking a little bit with caffeine and shame. It had suddenly turned cold and very, very windy. It was so windy, in fact, that the stroller kept blowing into the street, and I gave up after a block and took a cab home. After we got upstairs and I changed the baby’s wet pants, I realized that our half-eaten banana had fallen out of the stroller basket into the trunk of the cab. I hope the driver found it before it was too late.

Miracle

2009-11-12T19:16:00.003-05:00

My son is in the bedroom. He is sitting on the bed with his sketch pad and four crayons. I just went in to check on him, and I said, "I'm going to the kitchen to eat some noodles." He looked at me and nodded. Then I said, "Do you want to come with me?" He looked at me and shook his head. Then I said, "OK then, I'm going to the kitchen. Call me if you need me." Now, I am in the kitchen eating noodles, and my son is in the bedroom drawing quietly. Now and then, he calls out, "Mommy!" And I answer "Hi!" And then he keeps drawing quietly and I keep eating noodles. This feels like the most miraculous thing that has ever, ever, ever happened to me in my whole entire life.

Milestones

2009-11-06T11:29:00.006-05:00

Here are three things my toddler did for the first time yesterday:

He took his sketch pad and crayons to the bedroom and drew a picture by himself, pointing at it and explaining as he went*.

He sat on the couch with his animals book and read it to himself, pointing at each animal and naming it**.

Gazing at his own poop in the toilet, he said "Ew."

*"Explaining" in the sense of "making sounds that seemed explanatory"; he still doesn't really talk.

**"Naming" in the sense of "saying a nonsense syllable for each animal, unless it looked vaguely like a dog or cat, in which case saying 'JOE' or 'MEOW'"; he STILL doesn't really talk.

Missions Impossibles

2009-10-26T19:50:00.004-04:00

Here are the things that I absolutely must accomplish tomorrow:

1) Write the birth stories for the two back-to-back births I attended last week. I am really sorry to say this, but I HATE writing birth stories. Well, no, not quite, it's more that I'm of two minds. In one mind, I love writing birth stories, because they make my clients so happy, and because I know that the stories will be family treasures, and because I enjoy looking back upon and honoring the many beautiful moments that make up each woman's birthing experience. In my other mind, I HATE writing birth stories, because they are writing assignments, and, despite the fact that they showcase one of my few strengths, I HATE writing assignments.

2) Edit at least a little text for my new website, which is meant to be a surefire way to bring me so much business that I am positively choking on money, but really I am not so sure - mightn't it just be a waste of energy? I don't know how much time you, dear reader, have spent looking at doulas' websites, but let me clue you in on something: they are ALL THE SAME. Like, exhaustively so. And mine will be no different. So, like, who cares?

3) Vacuum, do the dishes, do the clothes laundry, do the diaper laundry, do the pee-pee sheets laundry. I would just like to note here that I recently discovered that vacuuming under the couch and bed, as well as vacuuming the flokati rug in the bedroom, is not only possible, but also immensely satisfying. Now I want to do it all the time. Really.

4) Make a paper sheriff's star to pin onto my son's plaid Wrangler shirt so he can be a cowboy for Halloween, and spend time feeling ashamed for being a bad mother, because this is a shitty Halloween costume, not the least because my son does not know what a cowboy is.

5) Possibly go to American Apparel and/or Ricky's in order to purchase things that will enhance my poor child's shitty Halloween costume. Use credit card to make these purchases, because we spent ALL of our money this past weekend on records at the WFMU record fair, mascara and tweezers at Sephora, a couple of board books at Lucky Wang, some beer, and some taxis.

6) Take care of email correspondance.

7) Call former client who I have owed a call since EARLY SUMMER. (I will probably not actually do this, because I am too ashamed.)

8) Cobble together some sort of dinner from the odds and ends in the fridge. To wit: yogurt, romesco, kale, brassica greens, potatoes, pears, hot pepper. Actually, that sounds like a pretty good meal, though clearly involving a great deal of chopping. Maybe take the credit card to the grocery store, too, and get some cheese and bread to go with this chopped mess.

9) Write a blog posting about the non-Borgesian, but still Borgesian, television-related occurrence from last week.

10) Scrub the tub.

11) Take out the recycling.

Edited to Add:
12) Oh, crud. Work on my doula certification. Crud, crud, crud.

Edited further to Add:
13) Shower.

Happy Ending, or How Blogging Saved Me $134.99

2009-10-20T13:57:00.004-04:00

If you are an regular reader of my blog, you will know that A) disappointingly, I hardly ever post anymore because I have a toddler and a job, which together occupy six days of my week; and B) happily, I posted about three hours ago after yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad encounter with Dell Tech Support. The funny thing is, I didn't realize quite how wrong the encounter had gone until I wrote about it and then read what I wrote. "Wow," I thought, reading my own post, "Dell Tech Support broke that poor woman's computer and then tried to sell her some software that they should have given her for free. That's too bad." And then it dawned on me: Dell Tech Support broke my computer! And then tried to make me buy Microsoft Office 2007, which they should have given me for free! What the fuck!?

So, duly fired up, I called Dell Tech Support again, this time fully armed with my Quick Service code. "You broke my computer and then tried to make me buy Microsoft Office 2007, which you should have given me for free," I said. The Tech Support man apologized and understood my frustration and explained about how a technician would be calling me in 3-5 business days to arrange an appointment to come to my house to replace the motherboard. I pointed out how that's how this whole thing started in the first place. He understood my frustration some more and explained that there was nothing more he was authorized to do. I pointed out that it was awfully convenient that there was nothing more he was authorized to do, seeing as doing something to make up for the whole mess would cost Dell money, and seeing as it is actually impossible for a Dell customer to actually reach anyone who is actually authorized to do anything. He understood my frustration some more, and we went around and around in this manner for about half an hour. Finally, in the middle of my talking about how distressing I found the whole situation and how upset I felt that no one could help me, and how unhappy I was with the Dell experience, he cut me off and said he would send me Microsoft Office 2007 for free, and what was my mailing address please.

And thus blogging saved me $134.99, which was the super-special today-only sale price that Dell was trying to make me pay for Microsoft Office 2007.

I considered going to Make My Cake for a red velvet cupcake in celebration, but then realized I did not have the necessary four bucks, so I contented myself with my new favorite snack, the deliciousness of which I discovered accidentally: Raisinets with coarsely ground Celtic Sea Salt. And that, my friends, is my modern life.

Tech Support, Part MCXIV*

2009-10-20T10:37:00.005-04:00

(*That's a big number, right? I'm not so good with Roman numerals. It's supposed to be a comically large number.)

My romance with Dell Tech Support is a fairly long-standing one, dating at least from April 2008, but I have to say that the charm is beginning to go out of the relationship. Today, for example, I called them about two laptop issues, to wit:

After a Dell technician replaced my laptop's hard drive and motherboard almost a year ago, Microsoft Office magically disappeared from the computer, leaving me to compose things pathetically in WordPad, the sorriest excuse for a word processing program ever, and also leaving me without the capability of opening any Excel attachments, which, as I am now in retail, is something I have to do with some frequency, since wholesale catalogues and price lists are often in Excel.**
Also after said technician replaced said motherboard, the power button was sort of wigglier and looser than it had been before, but I ignored the issue, as it seemed to not be especially important. Recently, however, the computer has become more and more difficult to turn on, requiring up to half an hour or so of repeated mashings of the loose, wiggly power button.

So these problems had been fairly long-standing, but calling Tech Support is so very exhausting and invariably costs me so very much time and money that I have been stalling for literally months. But I finally worked up the steam to call today, and after waiting in the queue for twenty minutes because I always forget the Quick Service code that I got with the service warranty they conned me into purchasing a year ago, I was on the line with the inevitable polite, patient, and patronizing Indian gentleman who politely, patiently, and patronizingly promised that he would make everything better. Here is how he went about making everything better:

As to Microsoft Office, he said, I did not purchase it with my computer, so I cannot get it from Dell for free, even though it was the fault of the Dell hardware that it got wiped from the computer in the first place. I could, though, PURCHASE Microsoft Office 2007 from Dell at a special, special discount price ONLY AVAILABLE TODAY. Now, back in April 2008, I would have jumped at this offer, but my older, wiser self is not so excited. Because, really? There's just coincidentally a special offer on the product that I need on the very day that I happened to call about it? And that offer will never ever ever ever exist ever again? And also, I know nothing about computer programs, but it seems to me that Microsoft Office 2007 might not be the newest version available? Or if it is now, it won't be in just a couple of months. In fact, in just a couple of months, it will be THREE YEARS OLD, which is like THREE THOUSAND YEARS OLD in computer years. So maybe it's not in my best interest to lay down the hundred fifty bucks or whatever to purchase a THREE THOUSAND YEAR OLD computer program, no? Even if it is on super special sale?
As to the power button issue, the guy had me turn the computer off, which I never do anymore because it is so hard to turn back on, and then he had me screw around with the hinge cover and then the motherboard itself to see if he could figure out what the problem was. Turns out - OF COURSE! - the issue is the motherboard itself, which now needs to be replaced AGAIN, which means a technician will call me in 3-5 business days and schedule an appointment in 3-5 business days from then, and then he will come to my house and upset my dog and baby and replace the motherboard again. But here's the thing. Before I called Tech Support today and was guided to screw around with the hinge cover and motherboard, the computer was EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to turn on. After I called Tech Support and was guided to screw around with the hinge cover and motherboard, my computer now WON'T TURN ON AT ALL. Not even with the power toggle on the motherboard itself. So before I called Tech Support, my computer worked, and after I called Tech Support, my computer was broken. This seems to me like a pretty big problem, like maybe the opposite of what is supposed to happen when you call Tech Support.

So the upshot is that not only did I not manage to get Microsoft Office, but also I managed to end up with a broken laptop. I am not sure how things came to this pass. I am carefully reviewing every step I took in this process, from the purchasing of the computer through each and every Tech Support call I have ever made, and I do not think I have done anything wrong or stupid. And yet somehow, everything has turned out all wrong and stupid. In certain moods, like the one I'm in right now, it's really hard not to see this as an allegory of modern life.

**Not that I do any significant buying for the store per se. It's more that I do significant buying for myself. That is, whenever we are placing a wholesale order, my boss sends me the wholesale catalogue and price lists and asks me if I want to add anything to the order for myself, which I always do, which means that I always owe the store large amounts of money. It might occur to you that this is obviously stupid behavior, as working at the store is meant to MAKE me money, rather than COST me money, but I would like to raise two points that might not have occurred to you in your rush to call me stupid: 1) I am always buying things, so I would be buying things even if I weren't working at the store, and in that case I would be paying retail rather than wholesale, so maybe I am coming out ahead here; and 2) Could you resist these things? Or these things? How about these things? Or these things? Could you resist? Especially if they were at wholesale price? No, you could not resist. And neither can I. So you see, we're really not so different, you and I.

Leavetaking

2009-09-23T09:24:00.006-04:00

This morning, something went wrong when I dropped the baby off at his daycare, which is in an apartment in the high-rise around the corner. Usually, there is no fuss at all. I unbuckle the stroller, and he jumps down and runs off to consult with his little friends (or rather underlings - he's the oldest one there, and he runs the show) or eat some Cheerios or sprawl comfortably on the floor to watch The Backyardigans on Noggin. He often does not even look at me when I tell him goodbye. This morning, however, something went tragically wrong. We (his babysitters and I) cannot quite reconstruct what happened, but we think his finger got a bad pinch in some stroller part. In any case, he was holding onto his stroller, and as I lifted him for a hug, I felt some resistance as though something might be caught, and then he suddenly began crying violently as though in pain - the red-faced variety of scream-sob with long, open-mouthed silences in between each effusion. He turned away angrily from all gentle ministrations on the babysitters' part, clutching at me and burying his head in my shoulders. After a long time, he accepted a cracker and his bottle, and it seemed as though things were wrapping up, but when I tried to put him down, he clung to me like a monkey, spouted a new torrent of tears, and began pulling at my shirt, which is his not-particularly-sophisticated signal for breastmilk. I did not, however, want to nurse him. At that point, I had already been at the daycare for ten minutes or so, and nursing would mean at the very least ten to fifteen minutes more. Plus, I had just nursed him before leaving the house, so I knew he was not in desperate physical need. Plus, and I am ashamed to say that this might have been the most important reason in my mind at the moment, I was not wearing a nursing-friendly shirt, so I would have had to more or less strip from the waist up in order to nurse. In any case, it did not seem like the right time to get on that particular train, so I kissed him and hugged him a few more times and gently handed him over to the babysitter. He threw his head back and screamed; I heard him sobbing all the way down the hall as I made my way to the elevator.

When I tell people about moments like this, they often say things along the lines of, "Well, you had to do it," or "It's good for him" (meaning the baby), or "It's good for both of you" (meaning me and the baby). For example, I have an acquaintance who has been a daycare worker for many years, and when I told her about the play and the toppings, thinking only that it was a funny story about the changeablility of childhood desires, she said, "You shouldn't have gone back to him. You have to just go sometimes. Just let him cry, and it's better in the long run for both of you."

Now, basically, I agree. I agree that, regardless of the tears it may cause, one has to leave one's baby from time to time, whether to go to work or go grocery shopping or do yoga or take a walk or see a movie or do nothing at all. I also agree that it is a good idea to get a baby used to being cared for by a few people who are not Mama. I also agree that dithering in the doorway while your child cries for you to come back can be pointless, painful, and annoying, and that coming back after leaving can make it even worse. But, as Clara Littledale put it and Jill Lepore reiterated, there's danger in overplaying the role. A die-hard you-have-to-do-it-and-it's-good-for-him stance turns a blind eye to the complexity of the situation at hand, and, more specifically, the fundamental cruelty of the moment of leavetaking.

This morning, my baby's finger hurt and he wanted to cuddle and nurse more than anything else, and I left him for reasons that were unimportant - I didn't feel like staying at the daycare for any longer, and I didn't feel like lifting up my shirt. Whether or not this was "okay" is beside the point - okay or not in the big picture, it was, fundamentally, a mean action taken against someone with no defenses. To ignore this essential truth about such moments is to ignore your child's basic humanity, as well as the fact that your relationship with your child is like any other human relationship, not one-way and black-and-white, but reciprocal and full of vagaries and subtleties that do not always respond well to hard-and-fast principles. In the case of the play and the toppings, for instance, my gut instinct was that something had gone horribly wrong, and that I had to go back and fix it, regardless of what I generally think about extended leavetakings. This instinct turned out to be more or less correct: there was a far better way to handle the situation - a way that would not result in short-lived but complete heartbreak on everyone's part - and my going back allowed us to find it.

It is not my contention that any one of these moments is a "big deal" on its own, or that any single decision of this sort will have a lasting impact on your relationship with your child. Indeed, while I am happy that I went back that one time, I know that things would have been just fine if I hadn't. But the aggregate of such decisions doesn't just affect the relationship - it is the relationship. To routinely refuse to acknowledge - even if only in your thoughts - the validity of your feelings and your child's at these moments, and to continuously harden your heart to the very notion that such moments might be legitimately painful, is to work purposefully towards emptying your relationship of emotional responsiveness. I am perfectly aware that this statement has a rather hysterical ring to it, but I think that, in the end, it is nothing more than plain logic.

All of this thinking, though, all of this rhapsodizing about emotional responsiveness et ceterblah, does not find me in a different place from most other days. I dropped off my kid this morning - left him howling at daycare - and came home by myself to do what I want to do. Or rather, what I don't want to do. My DONA training and certification binder is hulking on the counter next to me; today, after twelve births and as many months of procrastination, I intend to finally get to work on certification.

Toppings

2009-09-15T12:51:00.008-04:00

Last night, one of my coworkers was in a play, so I had to go see it. Generally speaking, I'm not a big playgoer, which is sort of funny given that I wanted to be an actress when I was in high school. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure what is was that so attracted me to the stage - the charm of public expression, perhaps, or the potential for public admiration? Whatever it was, it is surely gone now: I generally stay as far away from the stage as possible, either as a participant or an observer. It's just that, unless it is very, very professional indeed, theater can't help but REEK of amateurism; as my husband puts it, "It's just a bunch of people yelling." On top of that incontrovertible fact is the problem that the vast majority of plays truly suck. Even the very best plays, the ones that belong to the lucky tiny fraction that actually gets produced by anyone anywhere, are often just so bad. Characters are in situations that cause them to emote, and there's some sort of gesture towards commentary on modern life, and then there's a heartwarming ending where characters change and discover things, sometimes about themselves and sometimes about modern life and sometimes about both. Really. Go to that theater-person bookstore in Hell's Kitchen and pick any play aside from the obvious, English major fodder, and you will see what I mean. So I was not especially excited to be going to this play, but I went, and it was fine. It was totally not horrible, and I was happy to see my coworker do her thing and be good at it.

None of that, though, is what I meant to talk about here. What I wanted to tell you about was what happened before the play. The theater was in the East Village, so I arranged to meet my husband on St. Mark's Place to hand off the kid. The kid was not enthusiastic about being handed off, but I was in a hurry, so I wrestled him out of the ringsling, and my husband wrestled him into the stroller, and I was off. There are times when a moment like this - getting to walk away from the baby - feels wonderful, as though I have suddenly shed a layer of old, crusty skin. There are other times, though, when it feels awful, and this was one of those times. Walking east on St. Mark's, I could hear my baby sobbing. His cries had gone beyond the normal tantrum range and slid into true desperation. A quarter of a block away, I looked back, and he was still looking at me through the crowd, holding his arms out in supplication. Looking at his little face, creased and red, I imagined what he was seeing - his mother, with whom he had been cuddling happily only a moment ago, suddenly disappearing into a throng of strangers - and it felt like an unbearable heartbreak. My stomach lurched, and without stopping to think, I ran back up the block and snatched the baby into my arms.

It took a moment for us both to regain our equilibrium, but when we did, I realized that I was standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk with toddler, husband, and stroller, and only five minutes to get to the theater. "Well," sighed my husband, who at this point barely even bothers to get annoyed by my child-related histrionics, "I guess let's go to Pinkberry." Inside Pinkberry, the baby continued to clutch at my arms, snuffling tragically into my shoulder. Until, that is, he caught a glimpse of the candies and berries piled on the toppings counter where my husband was standing. Suddenly, he leaned away from me and reached his arms out: "Papa! PaPAA!" My husband took him from me, and the two of them were immediately engrossed in discussing what they would have on their frozen yogurt. The baby didn't even notice when I slipped away; I ran all the way to the theater and made it just in time for curtain.

Note from the Editor

2009-09-01T19:00:00.009-04:00

Looking at what I wrote earlier today, I'm feeling a little embarrassed by the grandiose sort of TAH-DAAAAAAH! flourish at the end. I don't mean to imply that me managing to type some crap into the Blogger interface and then clicking Publish Post is any kind of grand Rocky-style* victory-against-the-odds. I guess that is exactly what I do imply, though, both in that post and at least one other that I can think of. Look, I know that there are real troubles in the world, and real triumphs, too, and that whether or not I succeed in keeping this blog going is such a infinitesimally tiny matter as to not rank anywhere at all.

But here's the thing, guys. (Or perhaps "folks," which is a word that a former colleague of mine used ENDLESSLY, and totally drove me bonkers at the time, but that I now use with noticeable frequency myself.) This is really not easy. By which I don't so much mean this stupid blog, but everything in general. It is so not easy. It's not easy to junk a reasonable, and reasonably lucrative, profession in order to pursue a bunch of shit that no one knows anything about and is not certain to be lucrative at all, let alone reasonably so. It's not easy to do all this stuff on the principle that you want to be with your kid and to find that you don't really have so much time to be with your kid. And it's weird, guys/folks, it's really weird to have a toddler - a BIG KID - and not a baby. Because a toddler is a whirlwind - a hurricane - quicksand. As much of your attention as you thought your little tiny baby occupied, a toddler occupies like fifty times that. And you know, even if you could be home with your toddler all day every day, I'm not sure if you would want to be - it doesn't seem quite right for the stage of development, just like you wouldn't spend all day every day home with an 8-year-old. (Unless you were home-schooling him/her, and let's just leave that topic for another day.) And it's hard, because I have to wonder all the time if that Baby Days state of ecstasy, of creativity, of pure happiness with my life is over forever, and if things are just going to degenerate from this point forward until I'm back where I started - overworked and unsatisfied. So it's really hard, and it's really scary, too, because sometimes it just feels like I've failed, or am about to fail, really spectacularly, though I'm not sure at what. And in the midst of this, to suddenly find myself able to sit down with a feeling of strength and happiness and to finally - FINALLY - write something after a full month of silence - it does feel like a Rocky* sort of thing, OK? So TAH-DAAAAAAH, OK? Fucking TAH-DAAAAAAH.

*I have actually never seen any of the Rocky movies, but I think this reference is appropriate, right?

Yoga

2009-09-01T12:40:00.006-04:00

Six weeks after the baby was born, I went to a real (not postnatal/mommy-and-me) yoga class, and I had vagina farts. I had never had this particular problem at yoga before, but giving birth had obviously made some serious rearrangements in my pelvic region, because with the very first downward facing dog, air began to squish out of me, accompanied by exceedingly rude sounds. I couldn't stop the air and I couldn't stop the sounds, and I knew that my only choices were to leave or to brazen it out. So brazen it out I did, and the horrendous PPBBBBBTHHHHTBBBBB noises emanating from between my legs began, after forty-five minutes or so, to quiet down, and had disappeared entirely by the last plow pose. To their great credit, not a single person in the room giggled, commented, moved away from me, or did anything at all to indicate their awareness of the REALLY GROSS SHIT going on with that lady in the corner, and I left the class feeling oddly at peace, refreshed and realigned and ready to move forward.

I am telling this story not so much to utterly humiliate myself with the memory, but more to demonstrate how profoundly (and bizarrely) motherhood changes one's body, and how difficult it is to even know these changes have occurred. It is a commonplace that The Modern Lifestyle leaves us sadly disconnected from our bodies. Between sedentary pastimes and overloaded social/professional schedules, as popular wisdom would have it, we simply do not have the opportunity or motivation or context to properly interact with and nurture our bodily selves. True as this may be, I am here to tell you that The Modern Lifestyle has nothing on motherhood. Beginning with pregnancy, your body's function is entirely hijacked. It is no longer simply a tool for your own pleasure and pain, no longer simply your personal interface with the world at large. Instead, it gives itself over to developing and feeding a being that is not you. And all of this happens WITHOUT YOUR KNOWING IT. That is, your very own body gets busy building loosening your pelvic ligaments and building a placenta and an umbilical cord and a nose and fingers and so on without ANY of your conscious input. I know that this may seem incredibly obvious to you, but I want you to take a moment to really think about it. A pregnant woman's body is entirely devoted to something OTHER THAN itself, and once the ball gets rolling, she has absolutely no concrete, specific knowledge or control of what it is doing. And that, my friends, is disconnection. (And that is how you end up carrying stale air around in your pelvis for six weeks without even knowing it.)

This phenomenon, however, does not end when the baby is born. A mother's body remains a tool for the survival of her child. All of her bodily resources - the water she drinks, the food she eats, her muscles, her bones, and her flesh - are devoted to her child, just as sure as if her child were still inside her. I squat to the floor, I lift my child to my hip, I hold him to my breast to nurse. At night, my sleep is not like it used to be. I curl around my child, and when he wakes and cries, I roll to my side and offer him milk. Of course, my husband, too, squats to the floor and lifts our child and sometimes wakes in the night with his cries. He is an attentive father who works hard to care for his son. But it is not the same thing. Partly, it's not the same because I am a small, light person with a horrifically, maladaptively fast metabolism who can hardly stay fully hydrated and nourished in the best of circumstances. But mostly, it's not the same because I am the mother, and my bodily ties to my baby are all-encompassing. The mother's body builds the baby, the mother's body births the baby, and the mother's body sustains the baby. My body has become a strange, crabbed thing - a locked left hip, a tingling spot between my shoulders, a frequently-aching head, and skinny, skinny, skinny - and, just as when I was pregnant, I barely know what it is doing or what it is for.*

I used to go to one or two yoga classes a week, but in the twenty months since my baby was born, I have gone to maybe six classes all together. The obstacles seem insurmountable - find a good class at a good time, have enough money to pay for it, be sure that husband and/or babysitter are available and willing, don't feel cripplingly guilty for going even though I may be inconveniencing other people, don't get immobilized by sheer inertia and end up sitting on the couch watching CSI: NY. This morning, however, for the first time in months, I managed to jump through all of these hoops and get myself to a class in a sun-warmed studio on 105th St.

The thing about yoga is that it makes you do things with your body that you wouldn't necessarily do in the course of everyday life, and thus helps you think thoughts about your body that you wouldn't necessarily think in everyday life. (Or helps your body think about itself, as in "Wow, there's a lot of old air in here. I better just squeeze it out the nearest hole.") As I moved through the asanas this morning, I felt more and more conscious, more and more inhabited by my own self. I found a small sore spot on the right side of my sacrum; I found that my left hip was not quite as intractable as I had thought; I found that my neck has become too weak to allow me to look up comfortably in a side bend. In headstand, my head felt unusually heavy, my brain pressing downwards on my eyes, and the sensation was too unpleasant to allow me to stay in the pose for more than a few seconds. In plow pose, my back began to warm, as though under a heat lamp, and continued to get warmer and warmer until I rolled out of the pose to finally rest on my back in savasana.

By the end of the class, I felt as though I had come up from under water for the first time in a long time. My eyes felt keener, my gaze stronger, my body more tightly knit. On the way home from class, I ate a raisin-walnut bun from the Silver Moon bakery; when I got home, I sat down and wrote this.

*If you are thinking I should just wean and sleep train my kid, go on ahead and think that, but I don't want to hear A WORD about it, because I AM NOT GOING TO DISCUSS THOSE THINGS WITH YOU. Come to think of it, though, I would like to discuss those things with my mom friend HA. Those things and many other things. HA, call me. No, wait. I'll call you, as that is far more civilized than hailing you via blog.

Opinions

2009-07-31T12:41:00.004-04:00

What slays me most now is when the baby wants something. By this I don't so much mean the times when he is begging to be given yet another popsicle or to be allowed to push the start/stop button on the record player for the fifth time in ten minutes, but rather the times when he manages to communicate a specific viewpoint about what is going on around him.

For example, the other day he took my hand and led me to the clean laundry pile in the living room (Where else would I keep my clean laundry? Drawers? Bosh!) and began to point at it and fuss. At first I ignored him, as I thought he wanted to climb onto the pile and push the start/stop button on the record player again. But then I realized that he was pointing at a small grey T-shirt at the top of the pile. I held the shirt up, and he stopped fussing and raised his arms. I popped the shirt over his head, and he went happily back to playing alone in the corner with his own record player (old and unplugged).

On another day, he pulled me by the hand to the door and began his "Let's go outside" fuss, which occurs about nineteen times daily. I had intended to take him to the park anyway, so was happy to comply, but I first wanted to address the fact that he wasn't wearing any pants. So I brought him a diaper, and he began to scream. "Look," I said, "you want to go out, right? So let's just put this on, and then we can go out." His screams intensified. "OK," I said, "what about training pants instead?" More screaming. I was mystified. Finally, in a moment of inspiration, I brought him a pair of pants. "Do you want to wear pants with nothing underneath?" There was an abrupt cessation of screaming, and he sat down calmly in my lap to get pantsed. We spent the rest of the day outside with no diaper, and he had not a single accident.

It is no surprise, of course, when a little baby communicates in a big way about the big things, like "HOLY SHIT I'M HUNGRY FEED ME NOOOOOOOWWWW" or "I'M AWAKE DAMMIT WHERE ARE YOOOOOOUUUUU" or "OOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUCH!" But the thought that my baby has somehow become capable of formulating his own opinion about the small, inconsequential details of life (T-shirt/no T-shirt, diaper/no diaper) is borderline incomprehensible to me and simultaneously darling beyond all reason. Of course, this newfound knack of discovering and expressing opinions is rather a mixed blessing: our previously easy-going baby has been replaced by a highly demanding kid. The last couple of nights witnessed his longest, most intense tantrums yet, the baby throwing himself to the floor to weep, kicking his feet and pounding his fists in agony and grief because we would not allow him to go outside at ten thirty at night. There is no doubt in my mind that in the coming weeks, such scenes will become more frequent rather than less, but I am trying not to worry about it. With a baby (and with adults too, if you really think about it), everything is a phase, and as soon as you have made a positive decision as to how to deal with it, the phase is over and you are facing something entirely new. My hope, then, is to make it through this phase without thinking too much about the exhausting hour-to-hour grind of coping with the baby's endless parade of illogical demands. Instead, I much prefer to think about the crazy sweetness of his own little self, and how his newly independent little mind makes its own decisions now, and how once he has decided, he still turns to me with the utter faith that I will make it so.

Bananas

2009-07-15T11:57:00.003-04:00

Last Wednesday, the baby and I were on our way home from the 2/3 train when I heard someone say behind me, "Hey, why didn't you get no bananas?" While the statement itself seemed to be essentially gibberish and I had no reason to believe it was directed at me, something told me to turn around. There was a woman standing behind us with two large bunches of bananas in plastic Dole wrapping, and sure enough, she was looking straight at me. "Hey," she repeated, "why didn't you get no bananas?" And she gestured towards the baby as though to say, Can't you see your baby wants bananas?

"Bananas?" I asked politely.

"Yeah, bananas. They're giving out free bananas over there. You should get some. For your baby, you know?" And she gestured towards the baby again. I saw that the bunch of bananas in her right arm were still green, the bunch in her left already ripe.

I looked past her down the street. On the sidewalk in front of the Salvation Army community center was parked a large City Harvest truck, emblazoned with the motto "RESCUING FOOD FOR NEW YORK'S HUNGRY," and I could see from where I stood that the folding tables next to the truck were indeed piled high with bananas. Looking around me, I saw that at least a third of the people on the sidewalk had one or two bunches of bananas in their arms, poking out of their bags, or in their wire shopping carts.

I realized that the woman was still looking at me encouragingly. "They're free!" She said.

"Um," I said, thinking, This woman couldn't possibly believe that I am in a free-banana sort of situation. "OK. Wow, yeah. Thanks. My baby likes bananas. Um, I have to run home now. I think maybe we'll get some on our way back out."

The woman nodded, satisfied, and set out across Lenox with her arms full of banana. I turned away, took a few steps, and stopped. The baby does like bananas, I thought, and we don't have any money. Really, we are in a free-banana sort of situation right now. I started tentatively back towards the City Harvest truck, took a few steps, and stopped. RESCUING FOOD FOR NEW YORK'S HUNGRY, the truck said to me, and I watched as my neighbors stood in front of the tables, selecting bananas, helped by the smiling cargo-shorted volunteers. I suddenly, desperately wanted free bananas for my baby. I would do the same as the woman had done - take one ripe bunch to eat right away and one green bunch for later in the week. I would slice bananas in the baby's cereal and maybe freeze one or two to eat as pretend popsicles. Or maybe blend them with yogurt and honey for smoothies - or put the smoothie in the popsicle mold for real popsicles.

RESCUING FOOD FOR NEW YORK'S HUNGRY - well, I was hungry, and poor too. It so happened that I had been near-desperate with money anxiety for the previous few days. The bills were barely paid, and there was no money left after, and I had been wondering what we would do about groceries. Despite this, though, I knew in my heart that I did not count as NEW YORK'S HUNGRY. Even though things looked dire on that very day, they were mostly OK before that, and would undoubtedly be mostly OK again soon. I looked across at the City Harvest tables again. Were all of those people really NEW YORK'S HUNGRY, or were they just neighborhood ladies like me rejoicing in free bananas? Could I do it too?

In a fit of indecision and desire, at least five times I started towards the free bananas, then stopped, turned, took a few steps towards home, then stopped, turned, and took a few steps back towards the bananas.

The feeling was a familiar one - to obtain, or not to obtain? I have wrestled with the same thing countless times in rather different circumstances. Do I want it? Do I deserve it? Is it really a good idea? I remember in particular, two winters ago, a cream-colored cropped boiled-wool jacket at Club Monaco. I had waited patiently for it to go on sale, and when it was finally marked down to half price, I took it from the rack and bore it triumphantly towards the register. Halfway there, though, something made me stop. Should I really get it? I mightn't wear it very much - it was really a rather awkward weight - too warm inside and not warm enough outside - and it would get so very dirty right away. No, no, not a good purchase. I took it back to the rack. And yet - it was so beautiful, and I had waited so long for it, and I could wear it with a red skirt and black tights and look like a Godard girl. Back towards the register. I did this dance several times, finally ended up leaving the store and boarding the subway minus jacket, and then getting off the subway after a few stops, going back to the store, and buying the thing.

I knew that now, though, I couldn't do the same thing. If I went home and put away the stroller and washed my hands and washed the baby's hands and took off the baby's shoes and pants and diaper and offered him the potty and fed the dog and THEN decided that I wanted free bananas, it would be too late. The truck would be gone, and the free bananas with it. DECIDE NOW, I told myself. I took another step towards the City Harvest tables, and then turned and trudged home banana-free. I could not, in the final bargain, bring myself to approach those tables and ask for free bananas - not wearing my good linen pants, holding my baby on my hip in a handwoven Belgian sling, and pushing my boutique-brand stroller. I am sure no one would have minded - everyone in this neighborhood knows that hard times can wear all kinds of clothes and push all kinds of strollers - but I could not do it.

When I got home, there was a long-overdue paycheck in the mailbox that would cover the rest of our bills and leave a little to spare for the next week or so. That evening, when I went to pick up our farm share vegetables, the couple we split our share with said we could pay our portion in installments and not to worry. The next day, my mother said she would help us with our daycare bill for the next couple of weeks. I went to the grocery store and bought blueberries and yogurt and salmon and bread. But no bananas - the sight of them made me a little queasy.

As for the boiled wool jacket, I had been right. It was utterly impractical, and I never wore it, not even once. Soon enough, I packed it off to Buffalo Exchange, where I traded it for very little money indeed.

Night Train

2009-06-30T21:36:00.002-04:00

I am, once again, on the Amtrak headed home to the city. It is night, and the baby is asleep against me, his head lolling, his mouth hanging open, his hands splayed helplessly, his hair spiked with sleep-sweat. His skin glows pale in the ever-so-slightly lurid flourescent light, his cheeks and lips cherry-pink. He is 18 months old today and still a nursling; despite his regular consumption of people-food, his staple is still breastmilk and he still breathes milk-breath - a peculiar sweet yogurty smell that I am sure any mother could recognize at twenty paces.

He sighs and shifts in my arms. He has no idea that we are hurtling through the night at some unconscionable number of miles per hour, no idea that when he wakes up, he will be somewhere else altogether, somewhere nothing like the place where he was when he fell asleep. Looking down into face, I am momentarily befuddled by the magnitude of my responsibility - I am the one responsible for safely conveying this small, clammy, yogurt-breathing being from place to place and for being sure that he is properly fed, cleaned, and clothed on the way. It seems almost bizarre that the universe would leave this to chance, that something somewhere in the inner workings of time and space thought that this was a pretty good idea: "Yeah, an' we're gonna make each an' ev'ry one of 'em helpless so it can't do nuthin' for a really lowwng time so this one lady she gotta be sure it's OK an' alive an' so on an' so fort'." (Why do the inner workings of time and space speak with a New York accent, you ask? Listen, I don't have all the answers. I'm just a conduit here, OK?)

The days move faster now, nothing like those early baby days when an afternoon could stretch for years. There seems to be (perhaps fortunately for my long-suffering readers) a great deal less time to moon about and think maudlin thoughts about my baby. It is a blessing, then, to have time, on the quiet night train, to gaze into his flushed sleeping face and to feel the full force of motherhood.

Email from the Deep

2009-06-24T14:55:00.005-04:00

Dear [fellow-mommy friend who I have not seen since May despite the fact that we live only 20 minutes apart by city bus, or "municipal chariot" as she once put it],

Argh. I just came back from 5 days in Arizona with the in-laws and am now off for 5-6 days to Virginia with the parents, after which I will be going to M's house in Connecticut for the holiday weekend. Holy shit. There's a wedding in VA, and then I tacked the AZ trip on right before so as to not have to take too much time off doula-ing, and then the there's the holiday weekend right after, and if I don't run to CT then, I won't be able to go ever ever again because I'm on call for the rest of the summer and that means the baby wouldn't be able to go swimming in the Lake with M's niece so you see I'm insane.

On the up side, today is the last day for me at school. A total anticlimax, but I don't even have the time to think about it. And forget writing about it. What is that you say? That I used to be a writer? Horseshit. I don't believe you. Couldn't be.

I am dying to get together. After the holiday weekend, OK? My schedule is still crazy after that with the store and doula crap, but at least school is out of the mix...

I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Seems like every decision I make is completely foolhardy and ruinous. Oh god, did I really say that? ARGH!!!

Anyhoo, baby much bigger but not much more talkative. Says "JEWWWWW!" meaning Joe the dog. Insists that I clip Joe's leash on and takes Joe for walks around the house. For whatever bizarro reason, I couldn't organize myself to put trainer OR diaper on him last night, and he peed the bed twice. Once on himself, once on his papa. But not on me! Ha, it's the small victories, right?

Did you see the New Yorker piece on people writing about parenting? Hardly flattering to a (former?) mommy blogger such as myself, but true enough.

I have begun to get really into wrapping and am afraid that I have a wrap collection coming on. Just what our household needs. More redundant crap. Please borrow one some time so I can feel useful.

God I miss you!

Love, [increasingly befuddled Traveller]

Eating and Speaking

2009-05-26T16:21:00.020-04:00

My son is sitting on the couch, listening to the Bee Gees. He is eating cheerios and raspberries, and I am mesmerized by his perfectly erect toddler posture; his head balanced quizzically atop his fragile, curved neck; the simultaneously intensely focused and utterly absentminded movement of hand to mouth. There is something special about young children eating - it reminds you of their essential humanity, their selfhood. I wonder if I magnified this effect with my decision not give the kid "baby food," not to spoonfeed him rice cereal or purees or mush - he has always eaten "people food" with his own hands. Maybe this is why his eating has always seemed to me to mark him out as his own person, rather than my baby, a signal of his membership in the human race vis a vis himself, unmediated by me.

He asks for cheerios in the morning by pointing at the box on the counter, and he eats them from the box or a dish or my hand like he's hungry, like he's a little boy who just woke up and now wants breakfast. Sometimes he goes into the one cupboard that he's allowed to open, takes out a bag of freeze-dried strawberries, and carries it with him around the house, reaching into it and eating crumbling handfuls as he plays with his broken record player or alphabet blocks or books. When we eat a meal, he eats with us, sometimes in earnest, choosing each morsel carefully, and sometimes for pretend, clanking a fork against our plates and aiming it, empty, towards his mouth. The dog has taken to following him around slavishly, watching intently for any dropped morsels and pouncing on them triumphantly.

When the baby and my husband are home alone together, they do a lot of eating; when I come home, there are often strange combinations of bowls in the sink and unidentifiable crusts on the counter by the baby's clip-on seat. My husband says eating is how they bond. "Yesterday," he tells me, "we ate a big bowl of spicy noodles together. He couldn't get enough of them. He would eat a mouthful, and then cough a little bit because it was really spicy, and then ask for more, and more, and more. And afterwards," my husband adds, looking satisfied, "he took a HUGE SHIT."

Back to now - the baby is sitting on the couch, listening to the Bee Gees, eating raspberries and cheerios. I marvel at his composure, his self-possession. Now he chooses a cheerio, now a raspberry, another raspberry, and now a cheerio. He picks the raspberries out of the plastic clamshell balanced on the back of the sofa, holding them gently so they only squeeze a little pink juice onto his fingers. He pushes them into his mouth one by one, chews thoughtfully. Every so often, he makes a sour face - is it a bad raspberry? - and either ejects the berry entirely or continues to chew with a dissatisfied air.

What is he thinking? I don't know, because he won't tell me. He says "paPA!!" a lot and "mama" sometimes, and "DAH!!" for dogs (and cats, birds, young children, strollers, and nothing) and "mimi" for Limi, the nickname of the other little boy at daycare, but nothing else. We want him to speak to us so much, but he seems essentially uninterested. "Tell me what you're thinking! Talk to me!" I command as he babbles incomprehensibly. My husband implores: "Habla, hijo! Habla espanol, o por lo menos, habla ingles. Habla!"

Perhaps in response to our requests, he did add one more word to his vocabulary this weekend: "NO!" It was "NO!" when he didn't want something we were offering, "NO!" when he did want something we weren't offering, "NO!" as a general comment on any given situation at large. At a Memorial Day picnic in Central Park yesterday, he ran barefoot circles in the grass chanting "nonononononononononnnnNONOooooooo!" While I imagine that I may get tired of the no-ing pretty quickly, I am momentarily charmed by it, and relieved that my son has chosen to very slightly widen the channel of communication between us.

Now, though, on the couch, eating and listening to the Bee Gees, he is silent but for an occasional satisfied "hmph" betweeen bites. I could watch him do this forever, but I can tell that he is about to get bored and move on, as toddlers always do, and I remind myself to put the food away before the dog gets to it.

Mr. Gilmore

2009-05-04T16:02:00.011-04:00

One thing that I do not really do is keep up with the modern literary scene. With occasional exceptions, I tend to not know anything about new or even semi-new writers of literature, and it is only rarely that I read a novel written after about 1968; indeed, if I were to discount mysteries and hard-boileds and Wodehouse and Mitford(s), that date might be more like 1908. (Nonfiction is, of course, a separate matter.) This exclusivity derives not so much from snobbery as from terror of the wide-open territory that is the current and future literary scene. That is, it seems to me that if I am to delve into current books, there will be no end to it - I will have to be reading everything out there all the time, discovering and evaluating and following new authors and their unceasing parade of new productions. Mining the past, on the other hand, seems much more manageable - all I have to do is go into any old used bookstore now and then, pick out a handful of Penguin or Oxford classics, and stay happy (if somewhat musty) until I have finished reading them.

It is by this procedure that I have ended up reading a truly random selection of 19th century novels. Among these are three by Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone, The Woman in White, and Poor Miss Finch, the last of which is truly spectacular, involving as it does a beautiful blind woman and a pair of handsome twins, one of whom is literally the color purple - can you guess the contours of that plot? (Also filed under "Collins, Wilkie" in my memory are Lady Audley's Secret and Cousin Henry, neither of which are actually by Collins but might as well be, right?) My friend M, a fellow book-devourer, recently got herself onto a Collins kick, apparently feeling shamed by a Facebook list of books that people ought to have read or something of that nature. (This list also included the Harry Potter books and, I think, The Clan of the Cave Bear, so I don't really think it's something to get oneself ashamed over, but there we have it.) After she finished The Woman in White, she lent it to me to re-read, as I had forgotten the shocking and dastardly secrets revealed therein.

So I am now re-reading The Woman in White. It was not especially easy to get back into right away; the cosmic levels of improbability at which Collins operates are rather daunting at first, and the kind, quivering, sentimentalities of "Walter Hartright, of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing" rather tiresome. After awhile, though, the story does get going enough to keep you roped in, and the narration switches over to "Vincent Gilmore, of Chancery Lane, Solicitor," a far superior narrator. Indeed, I think Mr. Gilmore is my favorite narrator of the book. He is perhaps the closest thing in the book to a real person, and in any case the closest to Collins in education and position and perhaps temperament - possibly even more so because Collins himself read for the bar - and Collins grants him a good-humored voice full of shrewd observations of a type that other, more verklempt, characters haven't the time or sense to make.

To wit, here are some of the Mr. Gilmore gems that I enjoyed today:

I had [unlike the writer of this blog] been favourably impressed by Mr. Hartright, on our first introduction to one another; but I soon discovered that he was not free from the social failings incidental to his age. There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do. They can't sit over their wine; they can't play at whist; and they can't pay a lady a compliment.

It is the great beauty of the Law that it can dispute any human statement, made under any circumstances, and reduced to any form.

I liked to feel her hearty indignation flash out on me that way. We see so much malice and so little indignatioin in my profession.

I'm not entirely sure what is happening to me, but there is no denying that these days, my consciousness feels more and more fragmented, and any concept of self more questionable. Often, I feel as though I can barely locate myself in the crumbling pieces of the body and mind that I seem to have once inhabited. Some days, it is only in reading a story, or in watching one on television, that I can escape this incoherence and locate some sort of sense in my own mind and in the world around me. Today, during my free periods at school, I neglected my grading and test-writing in order to enjoy Mr. Gilmore and to allow his clear thinking to, at least temporarily, stand in for my own.

Knock Wood

2009-05-01T12:13:00.009-04:00

In the last couple of weeks, I've been told twice that I should knock on wood. Once was when I said that I don't think my husband will get laid off, and once was when I said that I am reasonably sure that I don't need more than one backup doula for the two births that I am scheduled to attend in early May, because the only possible reason I'd need two backups is if I got run over by a bus. On each occasion, my interlocutor (a different person each time) said, with a sharp intake of breath and a strongly disapproving tone, "You BETTER knock on wood after saying THAT." The way they spoke suggested that I had been exceedingly, unwisely brash and that I had better make immediate restitution for my stupidity.

I guess the controlling idea with knocking on wood is that by naming and scoffing at a worst-case scenario, one is inviting that specific scenario to actually occur - whether by the machinations of Fate or fate or God or the gods or some other sentient aspect of the inner workings of the universe. It's similar to hubris, where the most surefire way for a hotpants-clad Greek muscleman to guarantee that he will be devoured by a monster is to proclaim that there is no way in Hades that he could ever, ever be bested by such a puny, pathetic little monster. Once he's said those words, there's no need to continue reading the story - you know what's coming.*

The sharp chastisement I received on both of the knock-on-wood occasions described above made me feel as though I had been very, very imprudent. (I did not, however, actually knock on wood either time, feeling that doing so would somehow undo the last vestige of my dignity.) However, in hindsight, I don't see anything wrong with what I said. The thing is, while I am certainly an anxious person with an overactive imagination, I am not at all superstitious. When I was a child, my parents neither practiced nor preached any superstitions or any other culturally-approved irrationalities. Thus it was that I never truly believed in God or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, I never truly believed in rabbits' feet or lucky pennies or 13, I never worried about hats on beds or umbrellas opened in houses, I never prayed, and I never knocked on wood.

All that is to say that, while I recognize that it was distasteful of me to name the particular possibilities I named, and that I will feel foolish (also broke or dead) if either of them does occur, I absolutely cannot believe that my naming them actually made them any more likely to occur. The corollary, of course, is also true - I cannot believe that not naming unpleasant possibilities makes them any less likely to occur. Indeed, it seems to me that this is the real nub of superstition - not that certain actions result in ill luck, but that refraining from these actions results in good luck. So if you don't break a mirror, you are preventing misfortune for seven years; if you don't put your hat on the bed, you are warding off death; if you don't number the thirteenth floor of a building, you are permitting prosperity to enter. Superstitions, then, allow you to experience a higher degree of control over your circumstances than you actually have.

I'm not sure what it means that I reject the illusion of control that comes with superstition. It may be because I simply can't accept that kind of responsibility on top of all the other responsibilities that life has brought me. I can do my best to be informed, judicious, thoughtful, data-driven, kind, generous, flexible, reasonable, organized, well-groomed, and clean (though those last three areas are admittedly not my strengths), but I do not have the psychological energy to take responsibility, via arcane behavioral guidelines, for the quality of my fate on the grand scale. I'm not saying that I take this approach because I'm a great person - it's probably due more to sheer laziness as well as my aggressively rational upbringing than to any personal strength - but I do sometimes wish that more people would share it. I wish that more people would pay more attention to living rational, responsible, and compassionate lives and less attention to outlandish and irrelevant rules of conduct meant to somehow simulate the likely result of living rationally, responsibly, and compassionately. So I will, in the future, bring more consideration and restraint to my discussions of what-ifs, but even if I fail in this goal, I refuse to knock on wood, because I know it won't make a difference.

*Not to make light of the Greco-Roman mythological tradition, which was the very bread-and-butter of much of my childhood, and which I am seriously considering getting back into. For whatever reason, The New York Review of Books has had a long run in the past months of classical-scholarship-related articles and reviews, which have made me want to dive with ferocity back into Aeschylus or Virgil, for example, the only problem being that I am considerably hampered by my four jobs and toddler.

Empathy

2009-04-17T14:22:00.010-04:00

Some times are dark times for me. I don't know if my darkness is more or more frequent than others' - there's no way for me to measure such things. I have certainly been on and off antidepressants and therapy for all of my adult life, but I suspect that this is pretty common these days and is more an index of how a person deals with his or her feelings than the quality of the feelings themselves. During my dark times, I cry a lot (often while lying on the floor), I believe that nothing means anything, I feel deathly bored with myself and my life, I think that I am ugly and uninteresting and fucked-up and worthless, and I think a lot about killing myself. (In the interest of you not calling the psych ward on me right this very moment, dear reader, it is probably important to note here that I have NEVER EVER EVER taken any steps towards actually killing myself, as that would require a certain vim and verve and self-regard that I could not possibly muster when I am feeling this way. I just think about it, and sometimes talk about it to the slightly alarmed irritation of those who have heard it all from me before.)

Now, in many ways, my life these days is exactly right. As I have documented ad nauseam here, I love being a mother - and besides that, I am pursuing the work that interests me most. (To review: I'm a novice doula with four births and counting; I am training as a childbirth educator; I am working at a "natural" baby-goods boutique, teaching parents about all manner of sustainable/responsive parenting approaches [this is new]; and I am writing this blog [less and less, I know, but I'm doing my best, OK?! I'm kind of busy, OK?! God.].) The problem is that much of what I am doing is just getting off the ground and not bringing in much money yet and must be carefully squeezed in around my "real" work schedule. So, while things might appear to be working out perfectly, the truth is that most of the time, I am too tired, too hungry, and too busy to be truly healthy and happy. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that I have had a few very, very dark days in the past couple of weeks.

This past Monday was perhaps the worst in recent memory. I couldn't stop crying; my heart felt hollow and black, my body and spirit sucked inexorably inwards. I thought about calling a friend, but could not bear the idea of anyone I know listening to me weeping into the telephone for no identifiable reason. I considered calling some sort of mental health hotline or maybe even my old therapist, but what would I say? I knew that "I'm tired" or "I don't feel so good" or "I want to die" were not particularly helpful descriptions of my feelings, but there was nothing more in my mind.

On days like that, the baby's needs are a cross that I can only just bear. Smiling and playing and responding feel very nearly impossible, but I pull together every bit of energy I have in order to do it, terrified of what my college Developmental Psychology classes taught me about the damage that an unresponsive, depressed mother can do to her child. Unhappily, the great effort this costs me often makes me feel much, much worse as the day wears on; happily, the baby never seems to notice the difference. This past Monday, though, it felt to me as though the baby - now 15-and-a-half months old - did notice something. He had seen my face wet with tears in the morning, and while he did not seem at all upset or afraid or cowed, his behavior seemed somehow adjusted. He played quietly by himself in his corner of the living room for most of the morning, turning to me and smiling engagingly when something was especially fun, like a particularly rhythmic song on the radio or a particularly good bounce of his red bouncy ball. Each time he turned his face towards me, his smiles were so sweet and genuine that it was no effort at all for me to smile back and say an encouraging word or two, after which he happily returned to what he had been doing. Later in the morning, he began to roam around the apartment and ask for a little more of my attention. However, rather than shouting his standard, insistent "eh-eh-EH!" to be carried here and there or to be given something he shouldn't have (my cell phone, a bottle of vitamins, a felt-tip pen), he simply came to stand by my chair every ten minutes or so. I would crouch down and look him in the face, and he would laugh delightedly and put his arms around my neck. After a hug and a kiss, he would go off again to explore. In short, the baby's behavior towards me was so singularly undemanding, so gentle and loving, that it was impossible for me to not think that he was feeling some baby-version of empathy, that he was responding to my hurt with the best balm he could manage - smiling at me, hugging and kissing me, and leaving me alone.

Now, I know that it is not considered to be a Good Thing for a child to be forced to "take care of" his or her parents. It seems to me, though, that the baby's actions on Monday were less in the neighborhood of Trying to Keep Your Junkie Mother from Drowning While She Pukes in the Tub, and more in the neighborhood of common human kindness. (You may, of course, think that I am deluded in this matter. If so, kindly keep it to yourself, as I am enjoying this particular delusion.) In any case, there is no doubt that, instead of spiralling downward over the course of the day as it often does, my mood gradually began to brighten, buoyed by the baby's calm sweetness and his clear desire for my happiness and affection. By the late afternoon, I had stopped crying altogether and was even feeling sanguine enough to agree to go to a birthday party/concert where my husband would be playing music that evening. While it is true that I didn't quite manage to change out of my two-day-old depression clothes, I surprised myself by managing to get to the downtown loft space on time. The baby cautiously explored the loft while I chatted with tight-pantsed hipsters and ate Ghanaian curry and cheese-and-crackers. Later, the baby nursed to sleep, and I tucked him securely into the couch and went to the next room to watch my husband perform. It had been months since I had seen him play music in public - months since I had seen anyone play music in public - and I felt almost like my old self again, sitting on an air mattress in a grungy loft, drinking my second Tsing Tao, watching someone be absurd with a microphone and a sampler.

When the show was over, I went back into the other room to find my baby still sleeping angelically on the old couch. I folded him carefully into a carrier, and we splurged on a taxi ride home. It was around ten o'clock at night, and I found myself thinking that it had been a pretty good day.

College

2009-03-28T06:55:00.010-04:00

Last week, my mom friend HA and I had grand plans to go to Mommy and Me Yoga together (also known as Try to be Zen and Flexible as Your Children Steal Toys from Each Other and Have Tantrums). This is a goal we had reached successfully the week before, and we ought to have known better than to think it could actually happen two weeks in a row. I woke to find that my toddler was fussy and clingy and suffer-ish (teething?), and just as I emailed her to say that yoga might be in jeopardy, she emailed me to say that yoga was entirely out of the question, as she had been up all night with her insistently wakeful toddler and furthermore had pulled a muscle in her back while dumping out the tub water. I emailed her back with the comforting reminder that one day, both toddlers will leave for college, and then we can go to yoga whenever we want.

I had, of course, been joking when I wrote this, and I am not by any means counting the days until I don't have to take care of my baby anymore. On the whole, however, college holds a significant place in my thinking about the baby. Indeed, immediately after he was born, when my midwife placed him on my chest, still damp and umbilical, I gazed at him through dazed tears and said, "I'm paying for you to go to college, you know." I'm not sure precisely what I meant; after being in labor for three days, I was not really sure of anything anymore, and I flopped helplessly as the Labor and Delivery nurse tsked at me kindly, putting a hospital gown on me (I had torn it off hours before), wiping my armpits with wet wipes, and tying me and the baby securely into a wheelchair to ship me off to the neonatal floor. Thinking about it later, though, I realized that in invoking college, I had my finger on a core truth, which is that until the baby leaves our home to go to college (ideal) or to become a junkie hobo (less ideal but possibly cool), my days - my ability to get to yoga - will be, to one degree or another, dictated by his needs, his health, and his moods.

Many, many women in this country report feelings of having somehow lost their true selves through the processes of pregnancy, birthing, and new motherhood. I know that I am very lucky to feel the opposite way most of the time: I feel as though these experiences have led me to find my true self, and I have truly never felt more comfortable or happier in my own skin. There is no doubt, though, that I also experience regret, frustration, and sadness that I will never - never, ever, never, never - be the same person I was before. While in some ways my world has been opened immeasurably, it has also been closed. My range of choices in everything - when will I go to yoga? what shoes shall I wear? what will I do on Saturday night? - is no longer dependent on my own convenience or desires. Indeed, said convenience and desires are entirely meaningless. It is meaningless that I might want to wear my linen-and-leather peep-toe pumps because they are so Spring-y; it is meaningless that I might want to stay out all night with my husband at some dirty "venue" in Brooklyn, getting drunk on Pabst and not focusing properly on the show; it is meaningless that my back and hips are tight and I need to yoga NOW. It's not that I can never do these things, period. It's just that I can never do them without measured forethought and planning and the cooperation of other people, and I can never do them without careful regard for the consequences, and that's very nearly the same as not being able to do them at all.

People* often try to comfort me by reminding me that things will change as the baby gets older; one day, he will even be able to go places - or stay home - all by himself. The thing is, I have a feeling that by the time the baby is 15, I will no longer want to stay out all night getting drunk in Brooklyn. While I never quite intended it to be so, my time for such things is irrevocably in the past, never to be revisited. More to the point, though, while it is true that the specific details of what I can and can't do will change as the baby gets older, the fundamental mechanics of the situation will not. I am beholden to him, and to any other children we may have; my convenience, my needs, and my goals must necessarily be shaped by theirs. Seen from this point of view, motherhood is a delicately balanced tightrope walk - you must allow your life to be entirely taken over by your children while still maintaining the sense of identity and agency that make it your life. I can barely imagine the person I will be and the life I will have lived by the time my baby - my babies - leave my home; I cannot imagine what it will feel like to start again, one more time, from scratch.

*My husband.

Phantom Toddler

2009-03-25T17:48:00.003-04:00

"Phantom limb" is a well-known phenomenon wherein an amputee experiences sensation (often pain) that seems to emanate from the amputated limb. I have a similar symptom, and I propose that it be called "phantom toddler." When I am alone in the house, I always hear periodic cries of distress emanating from the bedroom - the exact sounds my toddler makes when he wakes from a nap and feels disoriented/cranky/lonely/pee-ish. Hearing this cry while I am home alone is like being awoken abruptly from a pleasant dream by an alarm clock; adrenaline rushes through my system, my body tenses, and I am confusedly dismayed to be so inexplicably, unexpectedly interrupted. The feeling only lasts a split-second, just long enough for me to realize that my baby is not in the house and thus cannot possibly be crying for my attention in the bedroom. My heartbeat slows, and I return to what I had been doing before, but it takes some time for me to feel entirely at peace again. As evening-pickup-time nears, the phantom toddler becomes more and more insistent, and the cries come relentlessly, every five to ten minutes, entirely disrupting my chains of thought and action. When the phantom toddler becomes entirely unbearable, and my tension is ratcheted up as far as it will go, I put on my shoes and coat and go to the babysitter's to pick up my real toddler, who is always waiting eagerly to be brought home.

Lotion

2009-03-10T15:50:00.006-04:00

Some time very, very early this morning, my husband and I found ourselves awake, our eyes meeting confusedly across the pillow. The baby was scratching. Apparently still asleep, he was clawing determinedly at his upper arm, his fingernails making a gentle papery rustle agains his skin. This was the sound that had woken us up.

My brain was working at half-time, and my body too, my breath moving in a strange, labored, sleep rhythm. I reached out and put my hand over the baby's arm. I stroked his skin gently - there didn't seem to be anything wrong - I took my hand away. I almost drifted back into sleep, but then the sound started again, my eyes drifted open again and again met my husband's. The baby was still scratching. I put my hand on the baby's arm again, stroked gently again, took my hand away again. Again, he began scratching. I wanted to ask my husband what we should do, but I was too sleepy to form the words. "He needs lotion," my husband whispered. "Lotion. Where's the lotion?"

I knew exactly where the baby's lotion was - it was under the right side of couch where the baby had been playing with it before we went to sleep. But from under my heavy haze of sleep, this seemed far, far too complicated a thought to even think about communicating. It was a great effort to lift my head and say, "I'll go get it," and even as I spoke, I was unsure as to how I would ever become vertical and make my way to the living room and get myself down on the floor and under the couch and then back again. "No," my husband said, "it's OK. I can find it."

It seemed like hours later when my husband returned, lotion bottle in hand. "This is all I could find," he whispered. It was not the gentle unscented lotion I use for the baby, but instead the lotion I keep at the kitchen sink - thick, rich, and heavily infused with juniper and lavender and lemon balm. But I was too sleepy to protest, and too relieved that the lotion-getting mission had not fallen to me. I took the bottle from my husband, pumped the lotion into my hand, and gently spread it over the baby's skin - his arms, his legs, under his shirt on his little belly. We watched him, barely daring to breathe. He stirred this way and that, but he did not awaken, and he did not scratch again. After a little while, my husband and I drifted back into sleep too, breathing in the scent of lemon balm heavy in the sheets.

Stop

2009-03-06T12:20:00.000-05:00

Glass

2009-03-06T12:18:00.001-05:00

The Up Side

2009-03-06T10:47:00.007-05:00

On the down side:

My living room is apocaplyptic. The baby has taken to developing sudden, frantic desires for random, unrelated objects, so strewn about on the floor are the shredded last issue of the New York Review of Books (desperately thrown to him to stop him from shredding the current issue), two nonworking cell phones, various remote controls, one empty bottle of my husband's cologne, one full bottle of my perfume, and a volume of Patricia Highsmith short stories. There are also toys and board books littered everywhere - a squeaky giraffe, Los colores de los animales, a bumpy ball, a dinosaur mask, a rolling ladybug, Good Night New York City. A(nother) new snack container hosts one forlorn, browning chunk of avocado and a spoon stolen from Japan Airlines. The little potty is filled with blocks rather than pee, while the rug is dotted with cloth diapers sopping up pee puddles. (The baby, dead set against being put on the potty, has been squatting here and there all morning, leaking pee while thinking about perhaps a poop. Don't worry: I caught the poop itself in the potty, slick mommy that I am, HA! And look, sneer away while the sneering's good, because when you have a child, you will talk about poop all the time too, becoming yourself a sneering target for any childless person within earshot.) Dead center on the rug is an especially large wet spot, the result of my bizarre notion earlier this morning that the baby was somehow mature enough to handle a mug full of water. The mug itself is now lying on its side in the corner, stuffed with a jingletoy. This scene of insanity is enhanced by a soundtrack of scrofulous top-40 songs; for some reason, our television has a radio setting that is permanently fixed to a scrofulous top-40 station, and the baby loves to turn it on, bobbing his head happily to the scrofulous sounds.

I only wrote two blog postings in February.

I have a lot of tests to grade.

The baby is nearing a quarter of my weight, and I am finding it almost impossible to carry him in a front carry for any extended period of time, and the mechanics of coats makes it nearly impossible to put him in a back carry. Are my babywearing days over? Forever? Or only until Spring, when I can resume with back carries? Or am I too small and is he too heavy for that, too? Does this mean that, from now until the baby can locomote reliably, every single outing will be an exhausting slog, whether with carrier or stroller?
I want to buy a new skirt and a new pair of jeans and a few copies of Good Night New York City to give to my clients at our postnatal meetings, but I don't have enough money for any of these things.

On the up side:

I am wearing jeans, having taken off my stretch pants in a panic after realizing that I WAS WEARING STRETCH PANTS.

Guest Speakers

2009-02-26T12:24:00.007-05:00

My third grade teacher liked to invite guest speakers to the classroom. Frequently, the guest speakers were students' parents, who would talk about their jobs and their lives. Sometimes this worked out well, as when Mike's mom came in with his developmentally disabled little sister and talked to us about developmental disabilities; this was a sobering antidote to the retard jokes that formed the backbone of much of our third-grade humor. Sometimes it did not work out so well, as when Lindsay's mom, a Mary Kay rep, came in to talk about Mary Kay cosmetics and handed out samples of a Mary Kay perfume called Risque. Why anyone thought this would be appropriate is beyond me, but at the time, I was delighted. As a little girl, I hungered after grown-up, feminine glamour, and I treasured the small vial of perfume, which came housed in a small cardboard card like this, except that instead of being stark and tasteful, it was black and hot-pink and featured an illustration of a disembodied fishnet-and-stiletto clad leg. I kept it in one of the several small dishes and baskets of clutter that used to sit on the long side table in my parent's foyer, and one day, it disappeared, apparently thrown out by my father, who didn't realize that it was a precious object. (Or perhaps he did realize it was a precious object and decided that his seven-year-old daughter should not have as a precious object a vial of cheap perfume called Risque.) My mother, panicked as always by my distress, said that we could call Lindsay's mom and see if she could give me another sample, but this never happened. I missed my Risque, on and off, for a fairly long time, but I eventually forgot about it. (I did not know, by the way, what "risque" meant, but I didn't worry about it too much. As a young child, one encounters many words and many things that one doesn't understand; I recall simply ignoring these things or, alternately, creating strange, tenuous explanations out of the knowledge I did possess, and not being particularly bothered by the strangeness or tenuousness. In terms of "risque," I associated it with the word "wrist" - they sounded rather the same, and one does put perfume on one's wrist after all - and I left it at that.)

Another guest speaker of questionable educational value was a mom who was a Color-Me-Beautiful-type consultant, and she did sample season analyses for a couple of the volunteers (girls, of course). I was not one of the volunteers, but I inferred from what she told them that I would be considered a Winter and thus ought to wear cool colors like turquoise and hot pink and avoid warm colors like orange. It was the eighties, and I loved Jem and the Holograms, so this information would have been just fine with me had I not been wearing orange that very day. Most of the clothes I wore as a child were from Japan, Laura Ashley, or the consignment store, so I was frequently slightly out of step with how the other children looked - more prim, usually, and with fewer brand-name logos. This particular outfit, though, was one that I really loved, because it was trendy and from a department store and very much like what the other girls wore. It featured cotton clamdigger pants in a sunset-colored plaid with flowers and a T-shirt printed with a matching plaid/floral graphic on the front. It did not say "OP" or "ESPIRIT" on it, but it was in that vein, and I was proud of it. That day, though, I was horrified, and I shrank as small as I could in my chair, hoping the season lady did not see me, an obvious Winter, looking ugly in my Autumn outfit. How, I thought, could I have been so dreadfully stupid? How could I have chosen these wrong colors? I burned with shame for having looked so ugly all this time when I thought I looked cool, and for having made such an awful, misguided choice. The pleasure of the outfit was utterly ruined. I castigated myself for weeks for wearing it in the first place, and I don't think I ever wore it again. I averted my eyes whenever I saw it staring at me from the depths of my dresser drawer.

Some of the guest speakers were not parents, but simply people that my teacher had unearthed somewhere. A French man, for example, came in to tell us about France and what our names would be in French. What a different time and place that was! Now, I can barely imagine a classroom in which the majority of the students have standard Anglo/European names - James, Michael, Judith - with French counterparts. My Japanese name, of course, has no French counterpart, so the guest speaker, prompted by my teacher, told me the French word for part of its meaning, neige. The word sounded squat and ugly to me, and distinctly unfeminine, and I was dismayed and embarrassed for days, and also enraged that my teacher hadn't thought to tell him my other name, a standard European one that could be rendered prettily in French.

The very worst guest-speaker incident, though, was when the textile lady came in. I don't know where (or why) my teacher got her, but she worked for Vera, and she talked to us about scarves and so on. I was very excited about her presentation, partly because the lady was pretty, partly because it was about glamorous fashion, partly because my parents collected quilts and lace, and partly because we had some Vera items in our household - some placemats, I think, and maybe a scarf or two. I raised my hand insistently - I wanted to tell this pretty Vera lady about all these things I knew and had. My hand had been up for some time when the guest speaker, walking past my desk, took my wrist in her hand and forcibly lowered my arm. I sat, my hand on the desk where she had placed it, frozen with shock and humiliation. I thought I might cry or throw up as I saw myself through the scarf lady's grownup eyes, a pushy little kid who wanted to say all sorts of stupid know-it-all things. I was mortified at this horrendous picture of myself, mortified that the scarf lady had shown everyone exactly what she thought of me and the things I had to say, mortified that my teacher and my entire class had witnessed this shame, which continued to burn for months, however much I tried to forget it.

I'm not entirely sure why I have told you about these things; I'm not sure what I meant to tell you when I began writing this post. With my little baby closer to being a kid every day, I have been thinking a lot about what it was like to be a kid myself. While I do not generally remember myself as an unhappy child, it is clear that, seen in a certain light, my childhood was wracked with emotional distress. I was almost constantly in the grips of serious anxiety, most of which I kept secret. I never told anyone about the problem with my orange clothes or how mean the scarf lady was to me - or about the time when my preschool teacher made a disapproving face when I banged the toilet lid down too hard by mistake, or about the time when my first-grade teacher said I was rude when I yawned loudly without covering my mouth. I could not see these events in perspective, as tiny, meaningless incidents, or as mild failures of adult judgement; also, I could not laugh them off. All I could think of was my own shame and humiliation - how horribly wrong I had gotten things, how badly I had done. I don't know if this is what childhood is like for everyone, and, whether it is or not, I don't know what sort of intervention could have alleviated my grinding, ongoing stress. I would do anything, though, to protect my own baby from such feelings. My most dearly-held hope is that he will be able to move through the world with more humor, more aplomb, and more true happiness than I did as a child, and that he will not have to wait until full adulthood to gain the balance necessary to safely negotiate all that is pleasant and unpleasant in life.

Lunch

2009-02-12T16:36:00.005-05:00

Seeing me start to move around the kitchen in a purposeful sort of way, my husband, home sick from work, took his cell phone away from his ear for a moment. "What shall we have for lunch?" He asked.

I had just returned from Whole Foods, and the fridge was full. I was thinking of sauteing some pretty little tak choi leaves with ginger and garlic and chili oil and serving them with leftover spaghetti tossed with sesame oil. In fact, the dish had occurred to me while I was shopping, and I was feeling smug about it, happily anticipating the aroma of sesame and ginger that would fill the kitchen.

My husband made a sad puppy-eyes face. "Can we have frozen pizza?" He asked. "Please? I feel so sick. I want frozen pizza."

The last time he went to Whole Foods by himself, my husband discovered the smallish, relatively inexpensive 365 brand frozen pizzas. I am not, in a general sort of way, a frozen-pizza type gal, but I have no particular objections to a frozen pizza every now and then, particularly if it is not too expensive and does not have very many mysterious compounds in its list of ingredients. I couldn't help but feel annoyed, though, at my husband's request. I was annoyed that my husband thought he would enjoy frozen pizza more than my cooking; I was annoyed that he wanted to use up what was ostensibly an emergency meal supply on a day when there was plenty of food in the house and a free hand to cook it; I was annoyed that my own little lunch project was about to be hijacked by his; I was annoyed, in that way that minor irritations cause flareups of long-smoldering complaints, at what in the moment seemed to be the relentless mediocrity of my husband's taste in food. Mounds of extra salt on lunch and dinner,* mounds of extra sugar on breakfast and dessert, potato chips and diet soda every day, McDonald's, takeout Chinese, and pizza pizza pizzapizzapizza! And NOW to demand frozen pizza over a beautiful, flavorful hot lunch - and to blame it on being sick, when that's all he ever wants anyway-

Possibly seeing the murderous look on my face, my husband backpedalled. "We could have pizza AND sauteed greens with noodles?" He suggested tentatively. This, of course, made me even madder, particularly as we had been over this ground last week, when I had to explain to him that it would be a waste to eat both frozen pizza AND pasta for dinner, as that would use up the ingredients for two meals on one day. If he really wanted frozen pizza, I had explained carefully, it would be best to fill the meal out with a nice big salad and save the pasta for the next evening, when it would make a full meal by itself. To have him make the very same suggestion now, just a few days later, made my eyes cross with pique.

"NO!" I snapped. "If you want pizza, we'll have pizza and salad. It would be stupid to make two meals."

The kitchen is perhaps the most fraught of domestic spaces - more, I would argue, much more, than the bedroom. On the other hand, if you are not too tired, it can be almost impossible to hold onto resentment when you are really engaged by your kitchen work. I was seething as I put away my tak choi and my ginger, but, as I assembled the elements for Lunch Take Two, I felt myself soften. "Oh," I thought, in a fit of kitchen-induced sentimentality, "let the guy have his pizza."

We sprinkled crushed red pepper on our frozen pizza, and we ate it with wild arugula tossed with lemon and oil and plenty of salt and pepper, one sake cup-full of pine nuts and one sake cup-full of walnuts, and, for dessert, a teacup-full of blueberries with honey and yogurt. It was a perfect meal.

* I am a total believer in salt, don't get me wrong, but relenstless salting of everything just seems, when I am in an uncharitable mood, the heart of dull, insensate piggery.

Toddlerhood: Tantrum

2009-01-31T20:05:00.005-05:00

I don't know how he found out that this is what toddlers are supposed to do, but within the last week or so, the baby has begun to throw tantrums. When I take something really cool away from him, like my cell phone or the lip balm he dipped in the dog's water and now wants to suck on, he throws himself face down on the floor and wails. Luckily, he is only a very little toddler, so these are only very little tantrums. He bores of it after thirty or forty seconds - so quickly that I haven't yet been able to capture it on camera. Abandoning Tantrum Pose, he pushes himself up to his knees, turns his little tearstained face towards me, and lifts his arms to be picked up. Within a few minutes, the incident is forgotten, and he is back to throwing blocks over his shoulder or hitting the dog or pouring juice on the floor or banging the toilet lid down on his hand. As he comes to be a bigger toddler, I imagine that he will come to have bigger tantrums. For now, though, it's just cute, and I can laugh a little when it happens and hug him when it's over. Come to think of it, with some luck and some patience, that's how it will always be.

Exam

2009-01-29T09:15:00.017-05:00

On Wednesday, some juniors and seniors at the school where I teach had to take a standardized English exam. One of the tasks on this exam is to write an essay discussing how any two works of literature interact with a specific quote. The quote this year was from a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson (or, as Hyman Kaplan would have it, Relfvaldo Amerson, who is a poyet, not a wrider): "Fear always springs from ignorance." So the idea is to choose two pieces of ("serious") literature and write about how, in those texts, fear does or does not spring from ignorance.

Walking up and down the rows of silent test-takers, I pondered the essay and realized that it was not a particularly easy task. What in the world would I even write about if I were in the kids' Uggs*? After a few minutes of thought, I lit upon a couple of candidates: To Kill A Mockingbird and Northanger Abbey (or, for that manner, any of the Radcliffean Gothic novels that predate it, but those aren't usually read in high school). I know you can do this too, so sing it with me: Scout, Jem, and Dill are afraid of Boo Radley because they didn't know anything about him/The white townspeople are afraid of Tom Robinson because they don't look beyond his race/Catherine is afraid of General Tilney because she doesn't understand the truth of his motives and the family's past/Catherine, upon her enlightenment, is no longer afraid and feels "heartily ashamed of her ignorance." The problem is that there isn't much more to say. These texts' interaction with the ignorance/fear theme is so very straightforward that it would be quite a challenge to write more than a couple of paragraphs about that idea alone.

Starting to feel uneasy - as an Ivy League English major, I should probably not encounter difficulties with a task on a high school proficiency exam - I considered some other high school classics, only to find the picture getting cloudier. In Pride and Prejudice, the two most ignorant characters, Lydia and Mrs. Bennet, are the also least fearful; on the other hand, when Elizabeth is fearful of Mr. Collins introducing himself to Mr. Darcy, it is not because she's ignorant of what will happen, but rather because she knows the precise nature of the embarrassment that will ensue. In "The Waking," Roethke says he "cannot fear" his fate - but if he "learns by going," does that mean he's ignorant at each step, or not? Or how about Hamlet or Macbeth? Is Macbeth more or less ignorant after he has heard from the witches? Is Hamlet more or less frightened after learning the truth about his father's death? At what point would you say that Macbeth is fully enlightened - is it when he dies - is he unafraid then? Or how about Romeo and Juliet or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or A Tale of Two Cities? Fear and/or ignorance in and of themselves don't figure as major headlining themes there - you would have to pick them out painstakingly from the ideas surrounding them and then artificially inflate their importance.**

At around this point in my thought process, I was getting upset. The more I thought about it, the more glib the quote in question seemed, the more inappropriate for the task at hand. It's not Relfvaldo's fault; he made the statement about fear and ignorance in a lovely talk (Wordsworthian, yeah? Ha! I haven't lost it yet, suckas) about intellectual growth. He could not possibly have meant for that one sentence to be pulled out of context. On its own, it's a meaningless little truism that offers no clarification or deeper interest to any given situation. Because what is fear? What is ignorance? Does "ignorance" mean that deep, fundamental way in which humans are always ignorant, or is it the smaller, more specific lack of knowledge of this and that and the other? And is "fear" a generalized existential terror in the face of the abyss, or is it the negative feelings that we have about specific potential events? And don't we sometimes fear because we do know? And aren't we sometimes fearless because we don't? And, most importantly, how is anyone, let alone a nervous 17-year-old kid who may or may not have a solid grasp on thoughtful, analytical reading and writing processes in the first place, supposed to sort through all of these issues and write a coherent essay about them in the time allotted?

I have had discussions like this with other teachers before, and more often than not, they will tell me that I am "overthinking" the issues. Indeed, "overthinking" is a charge that I have levelled at me with some regularity, and it is one that I despise, because I've said it before and I'll say it again: I AM NOT OVERTHINKING. I am simply allowing myself to be conscious of the complexities inherent in this and other matters. I could, of course, shut down this consciousness and consider the ideas before me as superficially as possible. In terms of the exam, for example, I could pretend that the quote "Fear always springs from ignorance" has a clear enough meaning to be a useful premise for literary analysis; I could add enough unnecessary fluff to the To Kill a Mockingbird and Northanger Abbey stuff to fill out a full essay; I could also work with any other texts and make the fear/ignorance issues in them seem much more central and straightforward than they actually are. And, indeed, an industrious, clever high school student determined to ace this exam could do the same. But my question is, WHY? What is the purpose of ignoring obvious complexity and instead fluffing out the superficial to make it seem more meaningful? What is the purpose of being glib rather than thoughtful? Why, in short, would we choose (or encourage our students to choose) to underthink?

This is what really drives me mad about the whole concept of "overthinking." It is true, of course, that some things are not particularly useful subjects for thoroughgoing analysis - like "Did he really mean it when he told me he didn't mind watching the baby while I go to a meeting?" or "How can my doctor be absolutely sure that I don't have hidden sinus cancer?" But, on the whole, things that might reasonably merit our attention (a high school proficiency exam, childbirth, the Academy Awards, Uggs, Oscar Wilde, Brittney Spears, "South Park", pork, etc.) also merit our serious thought. I'm not saying that one must do this sort of thing with everything in the world (though that would, I imagine, be fun). I just think it's important to understand that questioning things thoughtfully and with purpose, holding them up to the light for close examination, winding them up to see if they go - this is not overthinking. It's thinking, and you should be doing it, too.

Returning to the exam room (had you forgotten?) - it was clear to me that the students were struggling with the question as much as I was. Some just stared blankly, unhappily at the exam booklet; some had begun, "Ralph Waldo Emerson once said," and then stalled out; some were writing doggedly, with earnest but desperate looks on their faces. Walking around the room, I could see that very few kids had been able to come up with texts fully appropriate to the prompt; no one had chosen To Kill A Mockingbird, even though it's taught by every English teacher at the school (and at any school anywhere, right?). Indeed, of the kids who were writing, nearly half were writing about the children's novel-turned-movie, Holes. I was infuriated. My school is supposedly a college-prep "academy," but it is still a high-needs school, a place where a large number of the junior and seniors are not unlikely to identify Holes as the last book they read that they understood well enough to actually write about. (And let's not ignore the possibility that many of them did not even read it, but watched the movie instead.) To demand that these students, for whom even basic comprehension is a challenge, play the game of responding to a poorly-constructed task as if it were a well-constructed one - to demand that they be glib rather than honestly thoughtful - to decide that this tells us something about how well they actually read and write and think - this seems nonsensical at best, actively harmful at worst.

"You're overthinking things," you scold, "That's just how standardized tests are. That's how the world works." Perhaps. But does it not occur to you that people make tests and people make the world? Such things, things made by people, do not have to be the way they are - ever. Everything is always subject to change, and anything that doesn't work, anything that's actively harmful, ought to be changed. You know that I'm not overthinking here. I'm just thinking, and you should be doing it, too.

*The uniform policy at the school does not permit boots, but those shearling-lined, slipper-like Ugg boots are all the rage right now, so the girls wear them to school, switch into ballet flats when they get yelled at, and switch back as soon as the yeller is out of sight. The school is awash in Uggs, on-brand and off-brand, pink, tan, grey, black, patchwork, with stitching, with rhinestones. "Kids and their fads," I think to myself superciliously as I don my shearling-lined clog boots, which are of course NOT AT ALL like Uggs. (And which, incidentally, were ALSO featured by Lucky magazine AFTER I BOUGHT THEM. Curses.)

**Smart cookies that you, my readers, are, I have no doubt that you are busy cooking up lots of ways in which I am wrong. You are coming up with lots of texts that are perfect for the task and would make for a meaty essay; you are finding clear fear/ignorance themes in the texts I pushed aside as not having any. Indeed, after three days of pondering, I have done the same. But that's not my point. My point is that this task is simply poorly-constructed. Its poor construction renders it harder than it ought to be, and it thus does not do a particularly good job of testing how well a student actually reads or writes. The same is true of the other task on the exam that day, one that I chose not to discuss here for brevity's sake (ha!). The fact that you, the brainy little readers of a semi-literary-memoir blog, could cope with this exam rather handily proves nothing about how accurately the exam tests the reading and writing skills of every high school student who takes it. So stop constructing artful responses now, OK? Or on second thought, don't stop. Construct artful responses and post them - I don't get enough comments up in this bitch.

Dinner

2009-01-25T19:27:00.007-05:00

"What," I asked, hungry and tired, "do you want for dinner?"

"I don't want you to have to cook," my husband offered.

"OK," I said, wary, " then what shall we have?"

"Oh, you know," said my husband, "stuff that's in the fridge. You know, leftovers."

"What's in the fridge?" My voice was sharpening - I knew he didn't know what we had. "What leftovers do we have?"

He thought a moment. "Black-eyed peas?" I knew there was only a teacup-full of these. "And noodles?" He meant the packaged Japanese noodles that my mother had brought us a few weeks before, the kind where you boil the noodles and add the seasoning packets. My husband could not have known this, but the week before, tired and alone with the baby, I had devoured package after package of these noodles, my lips burning from the salt and the chili oil, my conscience burning from feeding my baby such gross instant "food." The very thought of eating them again made me feel sick. "You know," my husband continued, oblivious, "just this and that. I'll have some black-eyed peas and noodles and maybe a sandwich or something. I don't want you to have to cook, hon. Sorry I haven't cooked recently. I'll cook again next week."

I felt my brain squeeze savagely and my breath get shallow and my ears start to tingle: NOT THIS AGAIN. "Don't you see?!" I wanted to scream at my husband. "You say you don't want me to cook, but you won't cook yourself, and there's nothing to eat in the house, and I'm hungrystarvedhungry and a nursing mom who needs to eat but ifIwantsomethingdecenttoeat I HAVE TO COOK IT MYSELF. And you're talking like cooking is something special you do once a week or so while I spend time writing out our dinner menus in my little notebook and scouring the farmer's market for things you and the baby like and working on making sure we're eating balanced meals so we all stay healthy and now I'm hungry OUUUWWWWWW! OOOOOUUUUUUUUUUWWWWWWWW!!!!" That last is me howling in misery, or rather wanting to howl in misery - because remember, I did not actually say any of these things. Instead, I just stood very still in the kitchen, trying to take deep breaths.
Glowering, my insides burning, I made myself dinner. I made spaghetti with mushrooms cooked in butter and sage with lots of salt and pepper and parmesan. "I'm not giving you any," I told my husband, who, realizing the gravity of the situation, had already apologized. "OK," he said, conciliatory, "Fine. That's OK." I felt better as I ate, though, full and forgiving, and I ended up offering him some. He refused, possibly scared that I had poisoned his portion? "Naw," he said, "I'll just eat some cereal." So my husband ate a big bowl of cereal with sugar for dinner. While he ate, he sat on the couch and played with the baby, so that I could have time to sit at the computer and write this complaint about him.

Toddlerhood: Goodbye, Baby Days

2009-01-16T17:25:00.006-05:00

Overwhelmed by all of their new skills, young toddlers sometimes regress. Their sleep may become more erratic; they may demand to be held and nursed more often. This is just where my baby is right now. Approaching walking and talking, he has reverted a little to the behaviors and patterns of his earlier babyhood. Today, rather than tearing around the house terrorizing the dog and laying waste to every CD he finds, he spends the morning wanting to be held. I put him on my hip and he rests his head in the crook of my neck. He won't let me put him down, so I tuck him into the wrap and meander around the house. We look in the mirror together, we look out the window, we dance to country music, and he doesn't notice that I'm crying over the lyrics. He pulls at my shirt, I nurse him, he falls asleep, I ease him down onto the bed. He sleeps for hours, like he did when he was a tiny baby, and I drink coffee, eat smoked salmon and cheese, start and abandon several blog postings, write my last client's birth story, put away toys, do the dishes, do the laundry, and try on an Ann Taylor jacket I bought over the Thanksgiving break but have never worn. It is almost like having a newborn in the house; except, of course, that when he wakes up, instead of wailing desperately to be rescued, he sits up on his own, finds my Elizabeth David essays under a pillow, and calls out to me while flipping through them in a leisurely manner.

My baby is one year old now, and he has hair and teeth, and he almost walks and almost talks. I know that our baby days - the long, vague days I spent falling in love with him and myself, his new mother - are over and will never come again. I know that the coming days and months and years of my life with this baby hold all manner of new joy, but it is impossible for me not to mourn the joy that is now irrevocably in the past. Being a parent, as I have noted before, means always having to say goodbye to what one loves most. I can't help but feel, though, that this particular transition - from baby to (small) person - is especially difficult, because it is so marked and so permanent. It feels, then, like the ultimate charity that nature is granting me one last glimpse back at the baby days before I must, inevitably, move forward. I know that this little regression will not last long; like everything else, it must be discarded in favor of what is to come. I will have a shakily-walking, sort-of-talking baby very soon, and I will love him with all of my being until he, too, must leave me and be replaced by a different version of himself, and so on, for the rest of our lives.

First Birthday, 12/31/08

2009-01-12T12:32:00.005-05:00

*I feel compelled to point out here that this T-shirt, complete with frat-boy style block lettering and thermal sleeves, was a gift; I did not choose it myself, and it is NOT MY STYLE. If you don't have a baby, you are probably thinking, "Hey, chill out, lady. Who cares what the baby's clothes look like? He's a baby." I know that's what you're thinking, because I used to think that before I had a baby. Confronted with any suggestion that baby clothes might cost money or have styles, I would think, "This is outrageous! Who cares what babies wear?" You know who cares? YOU DO. As soon as you have a baby, YOU CARE.

Toddlerhood: Busy

2009-01-11T18:30:00.008-05:00

The baby has found a cassette tape. After much work, he manages to take the tape out of the case. He opens the case, examines the little spindles that hold the tape in. Now he wants to close the case, but he's pressing the sides around the wrong way. He presses and presses, to no avail. He begins to grunt, and his arms are shaking with effort. I come over to see what's going on. He hands the tape case to me. I close it for him. He examines the closed case, opens it, and tries to close it the wrong way again. He hands it to me again; I close it for him again. He opens it again; struggles again.

I get the camera and try to take a picture of him struggling with the tape case. Before I can get a good shot, he drops the tape case and comes after the camera, covering the lens with his grasping hand. He takes the camera from me, stops to take off his diaper, then stands up, leaning against an armchair, to examine his prize. Thinking that the removed diaper was a pee-sign, I bring the potty to him and hold him over it. He squirms out of my grasp, irritated, and leans against the chair with the camera again, but he's unsteady, and he falls over. Surprised, though not, I suspect, especially hurt, he begins to cry.

I pick him up and comfort him. I bring out his new alphabet-block-wagon in its box. Immediately distracted from his tears, he helps me pull it out of the box, then takes it to the corner of the room. He sits in the corner, his back to me, taking blocks out of the wagon and throwing them over his shoulder. For some reason - has he hit himself with a block? - he begins whimpering as he does this, and in a few minutes, he is back to crying again, crying and throwing alphabet blocks over his shoulder.

I pick him up again and comfort him again and set him down again, and he is off to push buttons on the stereo. He turns the radio on, then off, on, off, on, off. This has been only a few minutes. This does not include the part of the day when he put his fingers inside the dog's ear; this does not include the part of the day (the many parts - this is a favorite activity) when he climbed onto the back of the couch to push the intercom button, thus broadcasting his yammering to the sidewalk; this does not include the part of the day when he hit himself in the head by pulling out a kitchen cabinet drawer; this does not include the part of the day when he dropped his bowl of yogurt on the dog; this does not include the part of the day when he flushed the toilet so many times in a row that it went on strike and wouldn't flush again for a good half an hour. This has been only a few minutes of toddlerhood; according to what I've read, we have two more years to go.

Thursday Fever

2009-01-08T13:35:00.010-05:00

On Wednesday, the babysitter called me at work to tell me that the baby had a fever.

"He's just not himself," she said. "He doesn't want to play. He's not talking. He just leans his head on my shoulder and closes his eyes."

I left work early to pick him up, and I found him red, hot, and limp, like a strip of roasted pepper straight out of the oven. He leaned against me, staring listlessly and silently, his forehead burning against my chest. I brought him home, gave him some baby acetaminophen, and nursed him down for a nap. When he awoke, he was cooler to the touch and ready to play a little, but as the evening wore on, his temperature slowly climbed again and he began to droop. Overnight, lying between us on the bed, he radiated sick heat and squirmed himself awake every couple of hours to be cuddled and nursed back to sleep. The next morning, we went to the doctor's office - we happened to already have an appointment for his one-year checkup - where we were instructed to replace the acetaminophen with ibuprofen and call on Monday morning if the fever wasn't gone.

Before the fever, I had been feeling somewhat harried and distracted. Our holiday season this year was wonderfully full but also impossibly hectic - we flew to see my husband's family, my parents stayed with us in the city for awhile, I had old friends in from out of town, and I attended a birth. So early January found me feeling like a cartoon character who has just fallen out of a tree: dazed, dizzy, and crosseyed, with little birdies tweeting in circles around my head. I've been distracted and irritated at work, but also not especially looking forward to my time at home. With the baby, I have felt annoyed at being prevented from writing or housework or miscellaneous catch-up; alone, I have felt too wired and/or wilted to even think about attempting any of these things.*

Over the past several weeks, I've been taking the baby to the babysitter's on Thursdays, when I don't work, so that I can have a day to myself to get things done. (Note to new/prospective parents: after your baby is born, you will begin to feel smug about how very much you can get done when you are home with the baby. I absolutely guarantee you that this house of straw will fall down on your head around eight or nine months, when you can suddenly get nothing done when you are home with the baby. It's still amazing and wonderful and fun, but what with the fewer naps and the mobility, YOU WILL GET NOTHING DONE. I'm not trying to stress you out or anything, but there we have it. ) These Thursdays, while mostly a brilliant thing, are also a source of anxiety for me. The anxiety happens for several reasons:

When I send the baby to the babysitter on a day that I'm not working, I'm spending money but not earning any.

This extra-cost factor makes me feel like I have to use the time really really well and be really really productive, which, to no one's surprise, I often fail to do.

I feel guilty sending the baby away on a day that I am not actually going to work. I have discussed this with my mom friend HA, and we cannot help but come back to the same feeling: it's one thing to be away from your baby and spend money on childcare when you are doing something that you MUST do, like work; it's another thing altogether when you are doing something that you WANT to do, something that might not result in the validation of an immediate paycheck. The trick, of course, is to take your own work and your own self seriously, seriously enough that the people around you take it seriously too. This is really hard to do, though, so you simply slink around feeling guilty about doing what you want to do, and feeling angry that no one is offering you any validation, even though the reason that no one is offering validation is that you are not demonstrating any conviction yourself. Ugh.

It's a choice, not a routine. Every week, the babysitter asks, "Will he be coming on Thursday, too?" And every week, I must either say "Yes" and feel guilty or "No" and secretly wish the answer were yes. The solution here would be to make it routine - just decide that the baby will go to the babysitter every Thursday. But this is a hard decision to make, as it requires, as noted above, that I pull together the conviction that it's OK to send the baby away, even when the immediate exigencies of a 9-to-5 don't demand it, OK to spend money on "extra" babysitting, OK to treat my writing and my fledgling doula-associated work and the household as though they deserve the same time and consideration as a 9-to-5. Just like no one is going to come around with a magic wand and say, "You are talented!", no one is going to just show up one day and say, "You know, we all take your work so seriously. Why don't you devote an extra day every single week to it? Don't feel guilty about sending your baby away or spending extra money. It's worth it! And after all, your writing and doula work will be bringing in plenty of money soon enough!" That sort of pre-emptive validation is just not going to happen. I just have to do what I want and act like it's normal, but that's really hard, OK? It doesn't seem hard to you? Well, then, you try it, OK? You just FUCKING TRY IT AND YOU'LL SEE. (Sorry about that. Just slipped out.)

In any case, this post-holiday week has seen me feeling particularly ambivalent about whether I should send the baby to the babysitter on Thursday. My thinking was wobbling along as follows: On the one hand, after all the holiday brouhaha, it would be nice to get a good, solid chunk of writing time. On the other hand, I might just waste the day and feel really guilty. Also, the baby didn't spend much time at the babysitter's over the holiday, so maybe it would be mean to dunk him back in right away with a four-day stint. Also, we have a doctor's appointment Thursday morning, so I would have to drop him off after the appointment, which would only give me half the day anyway. But then again, DEAR GOD I WANT TO LIE DOWN AND READ A BOOK. But then again, my husband has to work all week and he doesn't complain about not getting one full day just to lie down and read a book, so why should I? But then again, he's not the one who nurses the baby overnight. Or who's using up immense stores of energy to make all that milk in the first place. But, hold on, remember, I won't just be lying down and reading a book all day - even if I wanted to, my anxiety combined with my short attention span would most likely not let me, and I'd probably get a sizable chunk of something done, even if it were just housework and not writing or working on my DONA certification or whatever. But fuck it, what if I were just lying down and reading a book? Don't I deserve it? JEEZ. (Remember, dear reader, that all of the above mental gymnastics were performed just to decide if I should send the baby to the babysitter for an extra half day this week. You see how crazy I am? DO YOU SEE?)

All of this agonizing, though, was for naught. My poor sick baby in my arms, I saw right away that it was out of the question to send him to the babysitter on Thursday - he needed to stay home with me and get better. It was an amazing relief to have the decision made for me, and an amazing relief to be pulled up out of all of my circular, anxious pro-ing and con-ing with the reminder that I am a mom, and my baby needs me, and that is really what all of this is about.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not glad that my baby is sick, and I'm not implying that his sickness was somehow a punishment for me not wanting to spend time with him, and I'm not implying that I've been taught my lesson and will no longer use Thursdays for my own work. None of these things are true. I'm sad that the baby is sick, and I don't believe the universe arranges itself to punish us or teach us lessons, and I will continue to use Thursdays for my own work - in fact, writing this posting has - almost - convinced me to make it a weekly routine. I just mean that it feels good to be reminded that I want to spend time with my baby, and that being a mom is the foundation of my life, not a distraction from it.

*I'm talking, I know, like this has been going on for a century. But if you think carefully about what I'm saying here, you'll realize that I'm only talking about this week - the past four or five days. This is what it's like when you have a baby. Every little phase, either on your part or on the baby's, every little bump in the road, seems like it has lasted and is going to last FOREVER. For example, when the baby was a couple of months old, he went through a phase in which he was awake between midnight and 3AM EVERY NIGHT. I thought I was going to die of sleep-deprivation and anger-at-my-husband-for-not-also-being-awake, and I was frantically consulting every baby book I had and scouring the internet trying to figure out WHAT COULD BE WRONG WITH MY BABY. Looking back, I realize that this phase lasted less than a week, after which things went back to normal, inasmuch as "normal" even exists in a house with a newborn in it. At the time, though, it felt like eons, and it felt like my baby would never be normal, ever, ever again. I think, after all is said and done, that the hardest part of being a new parent is continuing to maintain proper perspective, continuing to be able to separate the serious from the insignificant, the short from the long, the extraordinary from the normal.

Impasse

2008-12-29T18:05:00.006-05:00

Here's what happens. There is something to do on a Friday or Saturday evening, something fun and grownup that will last late into the night. You and your husband both want to go, but you cannot both go. You cannot leave the baby with a babysitter for that long, that late at night - it would be a cruelty to both baby and babysitter. So one of you must stay home with the baby.

So now you must decide what is to be done. It is an absurdity for you to go and your husband to stay home, as these are invariably things that he has gone and found out about, things that involve his friends or his interests more than yours. It is similarly nonsensical for both of you to stay at home - why do that if one could go? But if he goes and you stay - and this always seems to make the most sense - you will feel miserable, lonely, and defeated. You will weep churlishly - why must it make the most sense for you to miss out? You will forget to enjoy your time with the baby, who, blissfully oblivious of your despair, grins and coos and babbles, making you feel even worse.

That's it. That's the big problem; indeed, that, along with its variations, is the only big problem. If you don't have a baby yet and think you have a modern, highly-evolved relationship, you probably find this to be really silly and imagine that there are many sensible, reasonable, and fair solutions to satisfy all parties. And I am telling you that it is not silly, and that there are no sensible, reasonable, and fair solutions to satisfy all parties.

If this posting seems ungenerous or spastic or whiny, that's because it is; I am writing in a fit of pique, and I have had entirely too much coffee today. I will probably regret posting this, but even if I do, I will not take it down, because it's the truth. This is what happens, and it will happen to you.

Differences in Opinion

2008-12-20T09:08:00.007-05:00

Things with which I am at odds:

A.P.C. in re: the sale. A.P.C. wants to tell me, via email and postcards, that they are having a sale. I do not wish to know this. In fact, I am working actively to split my brain so that the side of my brain that has a credit card does not find out that A.P.C. is having a sale.
The holidays in re: our budget. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I sat down together and set a very strict weekly budget for ourselves that includes a certain amount for groceries, a certain allowance for each of us to spend however we wish, and one meal out. The holidays are going to send this budget entirely to shit. The currently forseeable expenses (which will probably be half of the overall expenses in the end) are: A) Holiday dinner out with friend in town from Philadelphia. B) Holiday brunch out with parent-friends H and V. C) Stroller bag so stroller may be brought on airplane when we fly to see my husband's family. D) Cabs to and from airport. E) Holiday dinner out with friend in town from Atlanta. F) Presents for my husband's family. G) New pair of clogs for work - I know this doesn't actually relate to the holidays specifically, but it is something that must be dealt with, as I have entirely given up on "work shoes" that appear "professional."
My conscience in re: my job. I really, really, really don't wanna - I didn't wanna go back this year, and I don't wanna go back next year, and I won't if I can help it. The thing is, there are kids involved here, and it's not their fault that I don't wanna. So I still don't wanna, but now I feel guilty about it.
The last posting in re: making sense. It's a pretty scattered production, but going back this morning with a mind to clean it up, I couldn't figure out where to start, so I just let it stand. All I meant to tell you about was how beautiful the bedroom looked at that moment, and how much like home. I don't know if I actually communicated that - I don't know what I actually communicated - but, whatever, thus I wrote it, so thus it stands.

Where I Live

2008-12-18T17:21:00.010-05:00

Yesterday, I had an important footwear-related errand to run, so, coming home from work, I was in an irritated rush to complete all of those just-got-home tasks - open important-looking mail, remove outerwear, discard junkmail, blow nose, put pumped breastmilk in fridge, hide scary-bill-mail, drink water, remove work clothes and replace with mommy clothes, pump more breastmilk, eat remainder of lunch PB&J, take frantically-whining dog for walk, check email, and pee, though not in that particular order - in fact, never in any particular order. (I know, Apartment Therapy, that I should have a "landing strip" and a logical order to how I conduct my just-got-home rituals, but I don't, OK? Now go away and stop making me feel guilty about not having a clever, wittily-colored or tastefully-neutral storage solution for everyfuckingthing I own. Holy pissing jesus, you know?*)

Somewhere in the midst of this whirlwind of mostly-nonsensical activity, I flung open the bedroom door, which we keep closed during the day to prevent the dog from thinking he owns the entire house, and was suddenly stopped in my tracks. As with many New York apartments, most of our apartment's windows look out on various airshafts, letting in little natural light. Shielded thus from street noise, always bathed in artificial light, our living/dining/kitchen space always looks more or less the same day or night, making it unsettlingly easy to forget that there is an outside world at all, that there is anything going on but one's own frantic activity. The bedroom, though, is different. It has two large windows that face 7th Avenue, which, this far uptown, is a broad, uncluttered thoroughfare with no high-rises to throw shadows.

Opening the bedroom door, then, I was arrested by the stillness of the room, the spill of natural light, the muted sounds of the street outside. The snarl of blankets because I now sleep on the floor with the baby, the pillows at the foot of the bed because my husband now sleeps backwards so his head can be close to us - these things sometimes distress me with their messiness, their haphazard, chaotic feel. At that moment, though, bathed in the gentle afternoon light, the scene felt quite different - peaceful, familiar, and most of all, ours. The blankets, the pillows, the little fortress of supplies - a small box of toys, a potty, a few clean cloth diapers - that I have set up at the head of the floor bed - all spoke mutely of our lives together, the way that we have all accommodated each other and grown together to become a little family.

Every day, everything I see looks different. Sometimes a certain scene like this

or this or this will drive me crazy with anxiety or shame, that horrible feeling that I have simply lost control of my setting. At other times, these things seem like nothing - an entirely unsurprising and undistressing consequence of the life that we are living, headlong, daily.

I am thirty-and-a-half; my husband just turned thirty-two. We are only just inventing ourselves as full-fledged, traditional adults, with baby, household, careers, and, each other, which last thing we always seem on the verge of forgetting. It is no miracle, then, that I re-see everything every day. I am in a constant state of deconstructing what I was/thought/felt before, in a constant state of reconstructing - or constructing, sui generis, anew - what I am/think/feel now. Looking at the disordered but deeply familiar bedroom scene, in the light and the sounds of 7th Avenue, I was pulled forcibly out of my mindless rush and set down in the middle of my life. "This is where I sleep," I thought. "This is where I live." And, counter to how it often works with such moments, I did not forget the feeling for the remainder of the day, and I still feel it now, sitting at my trainwreck of a desk, my baby asleep in the midst of the blankets on the bedroom floor.

*With apologies to my lovely Christian readers. Really, I am sorry that I am such an ass as to type things on the internets and think they are funny when I know well and good that they are actively offensive to a wide range of wonderful people out there. Although, tee hee. By the way, old friends with whom I discussed the issue, I bet you’re wondering what ever happened to me converting to Catholicism. And I will tell you: it didn’t work out. You know, I imagine that lots of people who really ought to be atheists temporarily charm themselves into converting from time to time. Like BOB DYLAN, for example, or ME.

Thinner

2008-12-14T12:33:00.008-05:00

From my mid-teens on, I have been a thin person; I am used to picking Size XS or 0 off the racks, and I am used to people referring to me as "little," or "skinny," or sometimes even "bony." (Size 0, by the way, makes no sense to me. What does it mean? That I don't exist at all?) That said, in the last couple of weeks, I have very suddenly become very, very skinny indeed. My iliac crests stand out like knives, rubbing palpably into the thick fabric of the high-waisted jeans that are my current mommy uniform; making love in the living room during the baby's nap, my sacrum digs insistently through my dwindling back-flesh into the floor. As I have noted elsewhere, I used to have a cute round ass, but the tiny bit that was left after pregnancy has now disappeared entirely, leaving me to shift uncomfortably from sitz bone to sitz bone whenever I am seated on unpadded surfaces. All in all, I have become unstylishly, Olive-Oylishly stickish from top to bottom, with the exception of my startlingly round, milk-filled breasts and the large, blue, Iggyesque chest vein that has popped up between them.

I assume that the reasons for this effacement of my flesh are the same reasons for everything else in my life right now (the mess, for example, and the exhaustion):
1) Back at work.
2) Busy. Three paying jobs plus doula and writing and family and household.
3) Broke. Not that I can't afford food - I can - but that it's stressful, you know?
4) Big damn baby to feed and haul around.

I am not exactly conscious of eating less than I did before, but it is inevitable that, snack machine notwithstanding, one eats less and less frequently when busy in the workplace than one does when ruminating at home. I am also not conscious of putting out more physical effort, but the truth is that my non-walking baby is upstream from 22 pounds now, while I'm downstream from 115, and this is not good news for my calorie retention.

I really hate the feeling of getting skinnier. There is a sense of cold, dry wasting away that I find to be intensely unpleasant, not to mention seriously anxiety-producing. I had a similar problem during my pregnancy when my midwife told me week after week that I wasn't gaining enough weight and that I was dehydrated and undernourished. Just being told this, just knowing that one is not in the robust, plumpy, red-cheeky condition one ought to be in - this knowledge in and of itself makes one feel less robust, less plump, more papery-sallow. I remember, in my last trimester, frantically packing little stashes of nuts and mini-cheeses into my pockets and bags, eating as much as I possibly could during each free period at school. Sometimes my midwife would weigh me to find I had gained half a pound, sometimes not. "Couldn't it be stress?" I asked her, thinking of my 150 clamoring eighth graders and my binder full of painstakingly documented disciplinary issues. "NO," she said, and I left it at that, because when I was pregnant, and when I was in labor, too, I just left everything at that, sometimes not even realizing that I had one more thought, one more question, one more feeling. I was in labor for 70 hours and I didn't think the entire time to tell anyone at all - not my husband, not my doula, not my midwife - that I was sometimes confused, that I was sometimes frightened, and towards the end, that I thought I was doing a really bad job. My transfer from an OB to a midwife around my 7th month used up all the stores of self-advocacy that I could muster - from that point forward, I fell silent, even though I secretly ached to, among other things, take one more step and secure myself a home birth.

It is the middle of December now; at this time last year, I was two weeks from my due date, and I had finally begun my maternity leave by walking out of the school abruptly in the middle of the day, racked by coughs from a cold that wouldn't give up, leaking pee and pulling my chest and back muscles with each spasm. I don't know if the people around me understood the intensity with which I had been suffering; I don't know what they could have done if they did. After I began my leave, my cough slowly eased, although it didn't disappear entirely until a month postpartum, when a doctor finally realized that it was a resurgence of my childhood asthma and treated it accordingly.

I don't know if most of these things I have said about last year are true - whether I really had those thoughts and feelings. It is simply impossible for me to tell anymore, not at this distance. It seems now that that is how things went; if I had recounted these events yesterday, in a different mood, I might have said something different, and I might say something different again if I were to speak of it tomorrow. I do know for sure, though, that around this time last year, I went on maternity leave. For the last two weeks of 2007, I shook my cold, I cleaned my apartment, I gained a little weight, and I got ready for my baby.

Now, as then, there is no magic to what I need to resurrect my health. I need to stay home, I need to rest more, and I need to eat a lot. However, deep as I may be into maternity and all things maternal, there is no more maternity leave in the offing for me. I will go to work this week and the week after that, and I will keep going to work until summer vacation, when I will need to find different work to go to. There is no real resolution to be had here; this is the way of our modern lives. Winter will pass, as it always does, and by Spring, I will probably have forgotten that I was distressed about my weight at all, either because I will have gained it back or because I will have become used to being this little bit skinnier than I was before. My baby will be walking, and maybe talking, and I will have other things to worry about.

Mess

2008-12-12T11:14:00.004-05:00

The apartment is a mess. We are living in masses of chaos, and sometimes, like now, I feel that the curtain separating us from the Great Cosmic Entropy out there is dangerously thin, and perhaps about to be pushed aside altogether. On the bureau in the kitchen (yes, we have a bureau in the kitchen, and we will until some generous patron out there coughs up the money for some Metro shelving), a stack of Z-guns sit under a Japanese rice cooker, which sits under a packet of Staples CD mailers. Next to that is the top of a tube of lip balm (the actual balm part being MIA), a bottle of butt spray, a lighter, a defunct smoke detector, a bulb of garlic, a guitar capo, and a riot of books and CDs, all hastily snatched from the baby just in time to prevent their utter destruction. On the kitchen counter, right next to the laptop on which I am now typing, there is a check book, the TV remote, two Christmas CDs to give as presents, a save-the-date card for a wedding in Alexandria this summer, a cable for some sort of audio equipment, a quickly dwindling stack of dark chocolate bars from Trader Joe's, a small baggie of pistachios, an empty cassette tape case, a pot of lip gloss, a Pocky packet with two Pockys left in it, the instructions that came with the replacement cartridge for the turntable, some dental floss, a stack of bills, my hairdresser's business card, one Sharpie, one highlighter, and two pens. My own "work area," down the hall towards the bedroom, is too obscured by papers to be graded, things to be drycleaned and/or mended, outerwear that ought to be hung up, and random pieces of jewelry to even be considered as a potential area in which to work. The bedroom, where I have taken to sleeping on the floor with the baby so as to not have to worry about him crawling out of the bed when he's wakey, is a bizarre (though cozy) nest of crumpled sheets and blankets, adult-sized and baby-sized, variously pee-, drool-, and breastmilk-stained.

I thought, when I began this posting, that I had more to say about this situation. Turns out I don't. Just that this is my life, and this is how I'm choosing to live it.

Criminal Mastermind

2008-12-01T23:44:00.003-05:00

As you may know, I spend a fair amount of energy saying bad things about Williamsburg and the people who frequent Williamsburg. (For readers who aren't familiar with New York City, let me clarify: I am talking about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where everyone is so hip that they don't even need no book on hip, yo, not Colonial Williamsburg in my home state, the Old Dominion. Though, come to think of it, the two places are equally likely to be populated by those wearing knee breeches and/or vintage petticoats.) The funny thing - the dirty secret, I guess - is that I actually really love going to Williamsburg. The buildings are low, so you can see the clouds move through the sky, and there are lots of little shops (lots and lots and lots of little shops) to wander in and out of, meditatively fingering a smartly-tailored ersatz army jacket here or a clever little photo-print pillow there. There are lots of cafes to duck into for a cup of tea or a beer, and there are mussels and overstuffed falafel sandwiches and unexpectedly delicious homemade chocolate chip cookies, and for special-er occasions, there's absolutely anything you eat here.

Over the last few months home with the baby, I have become addicted to slipping into Williamsburg every couple of weeks or so. In the early afternoon on a weekday, when there are not hordes upon hordes of youngsters traipsing back and forth wearing willfully ugly, ironically squalid 1980s-style clothing, Williamsburg can even feel like a quiet, slightly backwaterish neighborhood. Sometimes I bring a bag of clothes to sell at a great loss at Beacon's Closet or Buffalo Exchange - this furnishes the pretext for the 45-minute trip. After selling the clothes and once again feeling humiliated at the pittance I got for them after the hours of pained effort it took to decide to buy them in the first place, the baby and I meander through the streets around Bedford Avenue (sometimes avoiding Bedford itself, because even on a weekday it's a little de trop, mes amis). We eat lunch with the clothing money, and if it is not a desperately poor week, I buy a little something - a second-hand dress, a new pair of shoes, a toy for the baby - that I probably oughtn't but that always makes me unreasonably happy.

Usually, these jaunts are rambling, uneventful, picaresque (quixotic?), full of little pleasures and minor adventures, none of which I even remember for long enough to recount later. But a few weeks ago, when the baby and I made one of our little trips, I had a strange encounter that momentarily jolted me out of my usual Williamsburg reverie. It was an uncommonly slow day, and all of the stores were nearly empty. Exploring the various high-end kid boutiques, the baby and I considered a hand-crocheted taxicab with a bell inside and a little jointed pull-doggie for him, settling finally on a pair of brightly-painted maracas. Passing American Apparel, I suddenly remembered that I had a gift-card for that store with eighteen dollars on it, from a return that I had made months ago. Delighted - free money! - I slipped inside and made a bee-line for the kids' section. (Like Williamsburg, American Apparel is a place that I badmouth ruthlessly but actually rather enjoy. I can do without their trailer-park-slacker-chic pitch and joylessly "edgy" ads, but I do find myself relying on their T-shirty staples as well as their solidly-constructed, adult-looking baby clothes.) Halloween was a couple of days away, and I wanted a brown shirt to complete the baby's "costume" - really just his winter hat, which happens to have bear ears on it. (I am not a good-enough mother or a creative-enough person to conceive of, construct, or purchase anything more elaborate than that, though I must say that I always get really good ideas for Halloween costumes right on Halloween day when it's too late to do anything about it, and I always promptly forget them until the next Halloween day, when it is again too late.)

Like every other store we had been in that day, American Apparel was nearly empty - just one or two other browsers - but for a phalanx of employees. Unlike the blank-faced youngsters that gave me such a turn in the Harlem branch, though, all of these shopgirls and shopboys seemed calm and cheery and well into their twenties and thirties, and they left me alone to browse happily amongst the baby things. After considerable thought, I selected a shirt, had a long discussion with one of the shopboys as to which size I should get, and made my way to the register. It was at this point that things took a sudden turn for the absurd.

After swiping my store-credit gift-card, the shopgirl at the register - her nametag said MANAGER - gave me a quizzical look. "This doesn't have any money on it," she said. "In fact, it's been cancelled."

"Cancelled? But it should have eighteen dollars on it," I said, suddenly unsure. "I got it when I returned a T-shirt, and I'm pretty sure I haven't used it?"

She typed and clicked for a moment, gazing at her computer screen. "It says the balance was transferred to another card," she said. "And that card was used at..." type, click, type, click "the American Apparel branch on the Upper East Side."

I goggled at her, flabbergasted. "But...I've never been to the American Apparel branch on the Upper East Side," I said, frantically trying to remember if I have ever been to the American Apparel branch on the Upper East Side. "I don't think I have. No. I haven't. I'm sure I haven't."

"Well, it says here you transferred the balance of this card to another card and used it at the American Apparel branch on the Upper East Side."

I goggled at her some more, stalling for time, trying to remember if I had perhaps performed these actions while in a fugue state. "But I really don't think I did that."

Click, type, click, type. "It was a purchase of, like, over one hundred dollars."

"But I didn't do that. That didn't happen," I said uneasily. "I got this store credit when I returned a T-shirt at the Columbia branch. And I haven't touched it since then." I was beginning to panic - did I have an alter ego that buys T-shirts? "Really. I've never even been to the American Apparel on the Upper East Side."

"Well," she said, "that's what the computer says happened."

"No," I said, "it isn't what happened. That didn't happen. I didn't do that. Unless" - I decided to just come out with it - "maybe I have a boring alter ego who goes around buying T-shirts for me while I'm in a fugue state?"

She looked at me, her face blank and unamused. "Okay," she said, "let me make a phone call. Have a seat." She indicated one of the two mid-century-chic leather chairs a couple of yards from the register. I sat, baby in my lap and diaper bag at my feet, feeling as though I had been banished to the Naughty Chair. The baby, seeming to sense the gravity of the situation, nursed quietly while we listened to an endless inter-manager conversation that sounded like this times twenty: "...But she says she didn't use the card. She says she's never been to that branch. Yeah. Right. Eighteen dollars. I don't know. But she says...right. Mmmhm....yeah...mmmhm...okay."

Finally, she hung up and beckoned me back from my Naughty Chair. "Look," she said, firmly but not entirely unkindly, "you got this store credit, then you went to another store and lied and said you lost it, then you got it transferred to another card, then you used that card, and now you're back trying to use the original credit. That's what it looks like. There's no other explanation for what happened. That's it. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

The baby had fallen asleep in the carrier, and I gazed at the manager helplessly over his sweaty, lolling head. I wanted to cry, but I knew I couldn't - it would be too ridiculous, a mom with a baby crying over eighteen dollars at American Apparel. I wanted to say, "Okay, look, whatever, I don't care, forget the store credit, I'll just pay for the stupid T-shirt," but I couldn't bring myself to do that either. It was just too galling - the manager thought I was a petty grifter, and I couldn't stomach doing anything that might confirm her suspicion. I could just imagine her telling the story to the other employees later - "And then, would you believe this, she practically admitted to it! After telling me so many times that the credit was good! And she was there with her baby! Crazy, huh?!" My chest constricted. "But," I tried to control the choking whine in my voice, "what does that mean? Does it mean I just lose my money? I mean...that sucks." I tried to laugh a little. "I mean, don't you think?"

"Okay," she said, "okay." She picked up the little brown thermal-knit T-shirt - fifteen dollars -and began ringing it up. "Look, I can't give you the change on this card, because there isn't any money on the card in the first place. So, I'm gonna ring this up, and you can have it, and that's it, okay?"

"Okay," I mumbled, "whatever. That's fine." I took the bag from her hand, feeling ashamed the way I sometimes do when I finally get my way after making a scene, and feeling angry that I had been made to feel ashamed.

Outside, on the sidewalk, it took me a moment to catch my breath. What had just happened? And why did it have to happen to me? I gazed disconsolately down N. 6th Street towards the river. The day felt grey, turned on its ear, maybe ruined. "Let's go home," I murmured to my still-sleeping baby. On the way back to the train station, though, I came across and purchased a pair of little woolly winter baby boots on sale, and then I got two of my favorite chocolate chip cookies to eat on the trip home, and it was hard not to think that things were looking up after all.

My Popeye

2008-11-13T11:38:00.004-05:00

"I'm strong 'till the finish, 'cause I eat all my...pomegranate..."

Harlem, Election Day 2008

2008-11-13T10:43:00.005-05:00

6 Unimportant Things that Make Me Happy

2008-11-12T15:20:00.016-05:00

This topic is courtesy of Pretty Face, who has "tagged" me, as the kids say. When I sat down to think about it, I realized that it's actually a pretty difficult list to make. Because it's really easy for me to think of things that make me happy, such as I'll-say-PRESIDENT-you-say-OBAMA, mom-summit time with my mom-friend H, watching-silly-TV time with my friend M, my German baby wrap, my new lightweight stroller, How I Became Hettie Jones, Une Femme est Une Femme, my face cream, the playground at Central Park North, etc., etc., etc. All of these things, however, are important to me - that is, my life would be different if any one of them were to disappear. To think of things that make one happy but are not especially important to one's life is a real challenge, particularly when one is trying to avoid being cloying or twee. After some consideration, though, I believe that I have met the challenge successfully, as follows:

MY LIST OF 6 UNIMPORTANT THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY

1. My snack ball. At our last mom-summit, H and I discussed the carrying of snacks. If you are a breastfeeding mom who's sort of laissez-faire with the whole introduction-of-solids thing, you do not carry food around for your baby (except, of course, in your breasts) for a really long time. So, when you finally do begin to carry a little snacky-snack around, you feel very smug and special and mom-like. Of course, as soon as I began to carry the snacky-snack, I realized that I would need a snacky-snack carrier that is Good for Travelling. Enter the snack ball. It keeps the snacky-snack (right now, pomegranate seeds are the baby's favorite food) safe and uncrushed, and it opens with a satisfying little snick, and it is SO CUTE that it will make everyone within a three-yard radius madly jealous and wanting one, even if they don't have a baby who needs a snacky-snack. It makes me so happy.

2. My baby-stuff hampers. The baby stuff was giving me really bad anxiety. Toys and baby carriers were beginning to spill across the floor, totally unchecked by the woefully inadequate little baby-blue canvas bins that I so happily brought home from Babies R Us in the last weeks of my pregnancy. I began to troll the internets anxiously, searching for some sort of thing that would effectively control the baby-stuff onslaught without being A) expensive or B) really Ugly or C) aggressively Tasteful, which is actually the same as being really Ugly. Enter the baby-stuff hampers. They are so sturdy, and they are the perfect size for assorted baby stuffs - bigger than a bin, smaller than a laundry hamper. Best of all, while they are far from being insufferable eyesores, they also do not scream DESIGN CHOICE, which is, like, the worst thing that a storage container could ever scream. They make me so happy.

3. Fancy euro long johns for the baby. Last winter, the baby had only just been born. I carried him everywhere under my jacket, and he didn't move around on his own at all, so he didn't need much of a winter wardrobe - just a warm sweater and a warm hat. This winter, though, is different. I still carry the baby most of the time, but now I carry him to places, like the playground, where he gets out of the carrier to do things like sit in the swing or crawl around on the ground and eat leaves. He also goes out in his stroller, especially when he's at the babysitter's. So he now needs some serious winter gear. Some of the winter gear that I have purchased is non-negotiable - the thick wool coverall, for example, or the warm boots, or the wool diaper cover/pants combo. These are things that I'm pretty sure I couldn't do without. The long johns, though? The baby has two pairs of legwarmers (yes, you read that right) and plenty of T-shirts to layer, so the long johns were not strict necessities. But they are so cute. And they are from Germany, and you know how one feels about things from Europe, and they come in little plastic pouches with cardboard inserts with German writing. (Sort of like Petit Bateau T-shirts, although the writing on those is French, I know, but hey, French, German, it's all not-English, right Sarah P from Wasilla?) Despite their practical nature, they are the littlest bit luxurious, and I feel so good that I can wrap the baby in this little bit of luxury while still feeling very earthy and practical. They make me so happy.

4. My student who sits in the second row, 4th period Introductory Japanese. Whenever I look at this student, she is looking back at me seriously, nodding her head like she understands what I'm saying. She makes me feel like I am not insane, and like I am actually communicating clearly. (In contrast, many - sometimes most - students make one feel as though one is utterly insane and babbling in some sort of incomprehensible Cantonese-Esperanto-Swahili hybrid.) She makes me so happy.

5. My husband making me coffee. I am, by all accounts, a decent enough cook. I am comfortable in the kitchen and reasonably competent with various kitchen appliances. However, for reasons that are unclear, I have never been able to master the coffee maker. So when I make coffee for myself, I have to use the little filter thing that you put right over your mug and pour the hot water through. This method certainly makes coffee, it's true, but it does not result in a nice, satisfying pot of coffee, nor does it perfume the kitchen in the way that a pot of coffee does. So I love it when my husband makes coffee. When he makes coffee, I get to have the experience of there being a nice, satisfying pot of coffee on the kitchen counter, and I get to smell that pot-of-coffee smell, plus I get to have something made for me, which is always the best, don't you think? It makes me so happy.

6. Being asked to be a backup doula for my doula friend D. It's hard to break into the doula business, yo, especially if you are not already in some sort of birthy/healthy field, like yoga or acupuncture or massage therapy. I mean, why would anyone hire a doula with zilch experience, when it is so easy (at least in New York) to find doulas with plenty of experience, even at the same price point? D and I both attended the same DONA workshops back in June, and we've stayed in touch since then, commiserating over the struggle towards becoming "real" doulas - doulas who actually ply their trade on a regular basis and get paid for it. The other day, D called to tell me that she had just been hired for her first paying birth, and she asked me to be her backup and come meet with her clients for a prenatal meeting on Sunday. It's pretty clear to me that she doesn't really need a backup - she is unemployed and has no other births lined up, so it's highly unlikely that she will be somehow unavoidably detained. I was, though, immensely flattered - grateful, really - that she called on me, that she reached out to share her good luck in getting a birth, to make it our good luck, instead of just hers. Even though the chances that I will actually have to pinch-hit this birth for her are slim to none, we will be sitting across from the expecting couple together on Sunday, two new doulas, backing each other up. It makes me so happy.

So, that's my list of 6 Unimportant Things that Make Me Happy. Took me a little longer than I would have expected, but I'm pretty satisfied with it. Now, I think that I'm supposed to "tag" someone else with this "meme"? (Oh, the lingo! I feel drunk with it!) Midwife-to-Be, Librarian-to-Be - are you ready to give this one a try?

Tired

2008-11-10T16:24:00.013-05:00

Some days - today - I come home from work feeling run down like an old lady. Maybe it's the encroaching darkness of winter; maybe it's the cumulative effect of being back at work for two and a half months now; maybe it's just the natural consequence of having an increasingly active, communicative, heavy baby; maybe it's because my husband has had a two-week flu; maybe (probably) it's all of these things put together and more. Whatever the reason, the past few weeks have seen me growing more and more run down with each passing day, more and more rubbed out, like an old blotty oil stain.

It seems as though there is no end to the demands I must meet, emotionally, psychologically, and - perhaps hardest of all - physically. Even though I still love nursing the baby and still treasure his time at my breast, sometimes, late in the evening of a long day, I feel as though he is slowly draining every last pocket of nutrition in my body, every last ounce of flesh and bone. "I think he's taking my bone marrow now!" I call out to my husband, slumping back on the couch as the baby takes long, uncompromising draughts, his cheeks flushed hot and red as though he is drinking straight blood. I am empty, too, of money. There is nothing left, nothing at all, and this nothingness is as draining as the baby's constant nutritional demands. Considering the shambles that once were our finances, I alternate between ghastly, nihilistic cheer and sick bouts of weeping. "I'll go back to work full-time," I sob to my husband, "I will!" "Honey," he sighs, knowing I am not serious, "you don't have to do that. You'd be miserable anyway."

Apart from these occasional torrents, though, I am surprisingly not-sad. Tiredness is, of course, an inevitably sad, grey state, but on the whole, this spell of exhaustion finds me free of any deep, lasting sadness. I am no stranger to depression, and I know that this is not really depression that I am feeling. I am not so much depressed as reduced, strangely negated, un-present. Every moment is devoted to something that is not entirely mine; I am barely able to slip in time for basic self-care and hygiene. My skin is grey, my hair is lank and overgrown, my fingernails are dirty, I need some depilatory, I left my makeup at a friend's house a couple of weeks ago and have made no effort to get it back, and all of my clothing is wrinkled or stained or linty or stretched-out.

Eighth period today, I covered a class for a teacher who was out sick. I have already won the loyalty of my own classes; I could show up in a nightgown with a toothbrush in my mouth, and they would still be willing to listen to me and even tell me I look pretty. This class, though, this new group of kids...I stood in front of them with my oily unmade-up face, greasy bangs, unplucked eyebrows, and baggy-assed work trousers, and I felt tired and afraid. I am an eighth-year teacher now, so no classroom where I am standing is ever entirely out of control, but eighth period today was dangerously close. I walked sternly up and down the rows of desks, and the students stayed in their seats, but only just. "Flat-butt," I heard one kid say under her breath as I walked by. Another asked me, "Who did you vote for?" I looked in his face and realized that he thought I voted for McCain. Wherever your political sympathies lie, I am sure that you see how in this particular situation - a white (sic) teacher with a group of African-American teenagers in the middle of Harlem - the implication that one voted for McCain is a seriously negative character judgement. "Hey," said another student, "are you from Wisconsin?" Veteran that I am, I was able without even thinking to deflect these comments lightly, sweetly, with an airy wink, easing the tension and making everyone laugh. But I was shaken - as fleeting as the moment was, it was the only time I can remember in all of my years of teaching that the students actually challenged me for my race alone, putting me squarely among the "them" in the us-them war.

This morning, when I got to school, I found twenty bucks in an envelope in my mailbox. There was a note accompanying it, from a kind biology teacher at the school, explaining that he hadn't contributed to the whole-staff baby shower present because he thought it was too impersonal, and had meant to buy something special for the baby, but had never gotten around to it. He suggested that I use the money to go to the Kiku show at the New York Botanical Garden - he is in charge of the garden in the school courtyard, and I spent one hot afternoon in June 2007 helping him weed. I had had plans to help him plant a Japanese garden with hydrangea and shiso, but then I got pregnant, and all non-baby plans fell by the wayside. On the way home from work today, dead-broke, I used his twenty to buy myself rice and beans and cafe con leche at the Dominican place. The baby is still at daycare, and I'm at home alone now, eating my rice and beans. I feel warm and tenuously, temporarily protected from the demands of the world. I do not want to move, I do not want to leave the apartment. Right now, I don't even want to go pick up the baby.

Shell

2008-11-02T17:10:00.002-05:00

Baby Days

2008-10-28T12:26:00.007-04:00

Last night, the baby and I sat on the floor eating pomegranate. For awhile, I fed him one little seed at a time, but then, suddenly, he became ravenous for it, and grabbed an entire hunk from my hand. Babbling and waving his arms, he dug his two teeth indiscriminately into seeds, pith, and skin, covering his face with juice and the floor with pomegranate bits. He fell asleep about half an hour after his pomegranate orgy, and I wiped the floor carefully, but it's still a little sticky today.

The baby is always on the move these days, so it's hard to get a non-blurry picture. He wreaks havoc wherever he goes, pulling records, CDs, and books off the shelves, emptying his toy bin, splashing in the dog's water bowl, drumming on the trash cans, thumping on the record player.

In a rambling, mostly-aimless trip to Willilamsburg yesterday, we shared a falafel sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie, got accused of gift-card fraud at American Apparel (true story), and bought new baby boots and a pair of small, wooden maracas. At home, after having the boots put on his feet, he promptly opened a kitchen cabinet, found and uncapped a bottle of canola oil, poured it on the floor, and put his feet in the puddle. As for the maracas, he hit himself in the head with one today and cried himself to sleep. He is still asleep now, and, miraculously, for the first time in two weeks or so, my head is not-spinning enough that I can sit down and write about it.

Late Bloomer

2008-10-16T12:44:00.003-04:00

I have just finished reading a Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker about late-blooming artists - painters, writers, etc. who take years and years to come into their own artistically. This, of course, is in contrast with the precocious genius, an archetype beloved by all and sundry and celebrated in such objectionable creations as Amadeus. (Egregious though that film is, it's really important to note that Elizabeth Berridge is adorable in it, and why was she never in any movies again?) Generally speaking, people tend to LOVE precocious geniuses - "And he was only sixteen!!!" they say in exaggeratedly awed tones, or "And all of that happened before she turned twenty-one!!!". I think there are two basic reasons for this adoration of artistic precocity:

It makes people feel better about themselves in that it reduces the value of the artistic accomplishment in question. If people like Mozart and Jonathan Safran Foer (EASY, TIGER! I am not equating their accomplishments! Those are just two examples from the article, OKAY? GOD!) can just pull complex artistic creations out of their asses every fifteen minutes or so, then those creations are clearly the result of magic, rather than intense application of willpower, energy, intellect, craft, and vision. I mean, if writing an opera comes as naturally to Mozart as burping comes to me, then really, the opera is of no more value than a burp, even though it sounds rather nicer, so I don't have to feel bad about the fact that I spend more time burping than writing operas.
(And this is related, but also sort of separate, which is why I am giving it its own number, which is 2.) It releases people from having to make any sort of judgement about the artistic creations in question. The guy is a GENIUS!!! The creation (novel, painting, whatever) is a BOLT FROM THE BLUE!!! It only took him TWO DAYS to create!!! And he's not even THIRTY YET!!! OH MY GOD!!! (Sound of heads exploding in appreciation.) Amid such hoopla, the actual thing itself disappears, as does any sober examination of its merits, its meanings, its causes, its effects. So we can just wallow in what are essentially factoids about the artist and the art without troubling ourselves to actually examine either, which effort would take a bit of application, knowledge, and, well, effort.

In contrast, the late-blooming artist, as described by Gladwell, is a somewhat more uncomfortable figure, because it is more recognizable - it hits closer to home. Late-blooming artists are often not noticeably extraordinary in their fields when they are six or sixteen or twenty-six or maybe even thirty-six. They simply work and work and work and work and rework and rework and rework and rework until things begin to come together in the right way. In this story, the strain that attends the creative process is visible. A "precocious genius" narrative allows us to see art and artist as entities foreign to our existence; a "late-blooming artist" narrative forces us to come to terms with the fact that the artist is a person and the art a human production. As Gladwell puts it, "sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table."

Personally, I find consolation in the late-blooming artist concept for obvious reasons. I am not comparing myself to Cezanne, Gladwell's prime example of late blooming, but I do find myself, at the age of thirty, only just approaching what I want to be when I grow up, and only just discovering where my true talents may or may not lie. It is a great comfort to think, then, that historical precedence shows that my time is still not past, that there is still ample opportunity to reach for greatness - or rather, for my heart's content.

Towards the end of his article, Gladwell points out that all late-blooming artists have one thing in common - patrons, who make the long gestation of their art possible. In Cezanne's case, it was two great artists, one art dealer, and a rich father. In writer Ben Fountain's case, it was his wife, willing to work full-time while he stayed home - for the eighteen years it took him to publish his first book. "Late bloomers' stories," Gladwell writes, "are invariably love stories." Reading this, I felt my heart swell for a moment and my eyes well with tears. My husband and I have no money right now, literally, and it is unlikely that we will be meaningfully out of the red any time soon. Despite this, my husband has not once asked that I return to work full time, either now or in the future. He has taken it on faith that what I am doing is what I need to be doing, and he has never questioned the choices I have made - to be with the baby, to write, to pursue work as a doula, to train as a childbirth educator. If I find success, it will be in a large part because of his willingness to believe in and value my personal goals above everything - above even the financial interest of the family. I can't really think why he would do this, why he would show me such generosity, such patience, and such devotion. The only possible explanation is that this is, as Gladwell writes, a love story.

Cape People 2

2008-10-10T17:10:00.003-04:00

Hey! Looks like Kate Moss went to school with Cape People, too! Ha! I knew we had something in common other than the fact that we are both coked-out, concert-puking, jump-suit-wearing ex-models.

Starbucks

2008-10-10T10:54:00.006-04:00

As I have mentioned before, I go to Starbucks rather frequently, because 1) my parents kindly keep a Starbucks gift card loaded up for me, and 2) what else is there to do? Usually, I just get a drink and a snack to go, but a couple of weeks ago, I decided to stay and sit for a few minutes. While I was drinking my coffee, the baby fell asleep unexpectedly. (All of the baby's naps these days are unexpected, as he staunchly refuses to follow any predictable schedule and, some days, staunchly refuses to nap at all. If you have a baby who is not yet nine months old, listen to me carefully: ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN. Not that this time is not enjoyable, it really, really is, but OH MY GOD.) Not knowing whether he would be out for five minutes or two hours and caught in a fit of indecision as to how to use the time best, I ended up just squandering it, gazing disconsolately at the previous day's Times, cursing myself for not having brought my laptop or a book or The New Yorker or being otherwise productive.

So yesterday, I decided to set off for Starbucks fully prepared to be one of those busy, productive people who sit at Starbucks being busy and productive. I brought my laptop and The New Yorker, though no book, as I have lost the book I was reading and stubbornly refuse to start another one until I find it. Carrying the baby in a sling and pushing the stroller with my bag in it (I know, backwards, I know), I walked to Starbucks, enjoying the brief return to warm weather that this week has brought us. When I got to Starbucks, I ordered a drink and a piece of pound cake, strapped the baby into the stroller with his jingletoy, and sat down at the counter, ready to be productive. It was at this point that I became aware of the gigantic hole in my brilliant plan: the baby had to be asleep for it to work. Which, needless to say, he was not.

So, instead of doing work, I just sat and chatted to the baby, feeding him pieces of banana and feeding myself pieces of pound cake. (I offered to share, but he didn't want any.) One of the reasons that I usually don't stay at Starbucks with the baby is because, when I do, I always feel like a character - the stay-at-home mom at Starbucks with her baby in the middle of the day. A character - as opposed to a person - is someone you can just discount, and sometimes I think that no character is more discountable than a mom with a baby and a stroller and some noisy toys and some smushed-up banana. I have ignored that character countless, countless times, my eyes sweeping right past her on the street, in the supermarket, in the subway. A stay-at-home-mom-with-kid was someone who was not me, someone completely unconnected to my life, and indeed to any life at all, someone who has turned entirely aside from life to devote herself to what is essentially a grubby pile of congealed applesauce and milk sitting in an even grubbier stroller. (I am shocked, writing the words, to realize that I really did think this, despite always saying I loved kids, despite always saying I couldn't wait to be a mom.

I had chosen a seat that was at a high counter, right in the center of the shop, and, sitting there feeding banana to the baby, I felt exposed and self-conscious of the figure I was cutting, the mom with the baby. I examined myself for a moment and realized, startled, that everything about me was shouting the story of my life right now. The baby, dressed in corduroy, sat in a mid-priced Italian stroller with a ring sling hanging off the back, the thick Guatemalan cotton creased and discolored with months of hard use. My giant mom-sized tote, its straps fraying at the edges, slouched on the counter, spilling out a computer cord, a cloth diaper, and a fuzzy black cardigan. My and the baby's ostensibly smart outfits of black and navy were revealed, in the bright mid-morning sun, to be covered with dog hair, flokati rug residue, and crusty banana bits. My new high-heeled clogs, purchased furtively at a boutique in Williamsburg, already showed wear at the heels. I wondered if anyone else was looking at me as closely as I was looking at myself, and if they were seeing the same things. I wondered, if I looked closely at anyone else sitting at the Starbucks, would I see the same dust, the same fraying, the same wear and tear?

The baby finished his banana and began to squirm in the stroller. I stuffed the computer cord, cloth diaper, and cardigan back into my bag, got as many pound cake and banana bits off myself as I could, and wrestled the stroller out the door. On the walk home, the baby fell asleep, but he woke up again when I took him out of the stroller at the door to our building, and he didn't sleep again until the early evening.

Day Off

2008-09-30T09:15:00.010-04:00

Normally, I work Mondays through Wednesdays, but not this week; there's no school today or tomorrow because of Rosh Hashanah. So I am home, and today, I'm home alone, because I sent the baby to daycare. The prospect of being at home by myself all day definitely feels exciting and a little luxurious, but mostly I am slightly panic-stricken. I am dead-set against wasting the day, and have set out a certain number of tasks for myself. To wit:

Vacuum.
Clean stovetop.
Throw out old carseat and clean toxic dust from new one.
Mop.
Complete all feedback for this week for online class I am TA'ing.

Of all these tasks, it is the fifth that is the most daunting, because, unlike vacuuming, it cannot be completed in a sudden, random burst of energy. Here's how feedback works. I have thirteen students. Every week, they have an online "discussion" about the week's readings. I then have to do the following for each student:

Tally his/her discussion contributions for the week. Be sure at least one was posted by last Wednesday, and the remainder by Sunday.
Read his/her discussion contributions for the week. Give grade out of ten points. Remember to take points off for late postings.
Compose feedback email that comments on his/her discussion work and explains his/her grade, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, noting areas of particular interest or futher exploration.

Needless to say, this takes years. Usually, I finish it over the course of three or four days, to the tune of one to three hours a day. Today, however, my intention is to finish ALL of it in ONE FELL SWOOP. It is a task that is beyond intimidating, because I am not really one to sit still and work at something for hours on end, and my powers of putting off tedious tasks (and then justifying the putting-off) are formidable. After my husband and the baby left this morning, I stood in the kitchen, terror rising in my gut, trying to decide what to do. Curling up with the Norman Mailer letters in this week's The New Yorker seemed really appealing, as did watching junky housewife TV, but I knew that that would be WRONG, but I could not bring myself to do what would be RIGHT, i.e. sitting down and starting the damn feedback. Finally, I decided that the best thing to do would be to feed myself. If I had a little plate of food, I reasoned, I could trick myself into bringing it over to my desk, and it would serve as just enough distraction to keep me from caving under the all-consuming weight of the feedback task.

So, despite the fact that I had already eaten breakfast, I fixed myself a bowl of rice with greens and pinto beans. (If you think 9AM is the wrong time to eat rice and beans, you have never truly lived.) And the plan worked. Bowl in hand, I managed to get myself over to my computer, and I even started working. The only problem is, I've been working on the wrong thing. I've been working on this.

Brother 2

2008-09-29T17:35:00.006-04:00

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: "Oh, that brother story was intriguing and poignant! I wonder what ever happened with that - did he call her back?"

And the answer is yes. Yes, my brother called me back that very evening, and I spoke with him for the first time in twelve years - for the first time since I was in high school. It was a conversation that I have been rehearsing for all of my meager adult life, but none of the things for which I rehearsed were actually said. There were no ebullient greetings or angry recriminations or labored explanations. My brother told me where he lives (back on the East coast) and what he does (computers), and he said he's 51, and he said a friend of his has a baby that's really cute but probably not as cute as mine, and he said he played Frisbee-golf the day before, and have I never heard of Frisbee-golf? He seemed to not understand that he had been lost to me, utterly lost for twelve whole years, and that the loss was a deeper, more painful grief than I have ever, ever been able to admit to anyone. He seemed to think that there was nothing important to say. After about twenty minutes, we hung up, and I came away feeling dazed and parched, as though I had just tried to drink from a mirage. Our conversation had been woefully incomplete, almost less satisfying than no conversation at all.

I would be happy to be wrong about this, but I am almost sure that if I want to talk to him more, if I want to try again to have that conversation, I will have to be the one to call him. I don't mean to be maudlin or melodramatic, but in this moment, I truly do not believe that my older brother will ever call me again for as long as we live.

Announcement

2008-09-29T17:25:00.002-04:00

Please excuse this interruption. You may, intrepid reader, have noticed that there have been no photos with my entries for awhile. This has not been my fault, but rather the joint faults of my bad computer and bad camera. I have finally managed to get the problem(s) fixed, sort of kind of. So I added some pictures here. Go look at them. Thank you for your attention.

Clean

2008-09-28T08:58:00.004-04:00

I wrote awhile ago about my penchant for not bathing the baby particularly often. The thing that I didn't say is that this attitude is not isolated laziness, but rather part of my overall program. That is to say, I also have a penchant for not bathing myself particularly often. This is a really horrifying thing to admit on the vast stage of the internets, because I know that people - or at least people in both of the countries from which I draw my immediate heritage - are really hung up on bathing every day. But it is the absolute truth. I bathe, at best, every other day, and sometimes stretch it out much longer, to the tune of maybe twice a week. With the baby in the picture, I have not been unknown to go an entire week unbathed. I know you think this is gross, and I am sorry, but it is true.

One problem with bathing is that it takes up such immense amounts of time. Just brushing my teeth (which I do every day) and washing my face (which I do most days) feel like years and years of lost time to me, so only think how screamingly tedious a task showering presents. Even if the shower itself is on the short side, which it seldom is for me, the afters - creams, lotions, hair stuff, etc. - are interminable. Viewed from the bottom of the hill, the climb seems absolutely insurmountable. (If this is how I feel about showering, you can imagine how bad WRITING PAPERS was for me. And I was an ENGLISH MAJOR. Oh my GOD.) Faced with the prospect of such a hard slog, I usually give up. It is so much more appealing, at night, to curl up and read or watch TV; it is so much more appealing, in the morning, to nestle in bed a bit longer with a book or, alternately, to get dressed and run out of the house to start the day.

Also, one is seldom actually dirty. I know it is the fashion to think of oneself as being dirty after a day of not showering, but that simply isn't the case. It is true that one is not squeaky clean, but why in heaven's name must one be squeaky clean? One is not a Tupperware. I wash my hands when I ought and rinse my feet in the tub when I've been walking in sandals and I do shower enough to keep myself clean by any measure except the one that you are using, you crazy damn Americans. Do you not know that people normally smell like people, not like Jergen's Cherry Almond or Victoria's Secret Honeysuckle Rose or even Bliss Spa Lemon Sage? What is WRONG with you?

I know that one hidden reason that many people shower every day is their belief they must wet and re-style their hair every day in order for it to continue to look as it should. I think that in some cases this is really true - a small number of people have just the sort of hair or just the sort of haircut that requires constant attention to prevent it from looking truly bad. However, in many cases, this is not the situation. Often, people are simply addicted to re-styling their hair every day, either out of pure superstition or out of a desire to make their hair look a way that it isn't built to look. To which I say GIVE IT UP. You are a PERSON, not a Vidal Sassoon model or a "reality" television character. Toss some appropriately formulated cream and/or powder through that mop, put on your jacket, and LET'S GO ALREADY. TIME'S A-WASTIN'. (If you don't have any appropriately formulated cream and/or powder, or if you have so many that it is the same as having none, then we need to talk. You are an adult, old enough to purchase and use a small number of high-quality products. Stop trolling the aisles of Rite-Aid. Go to Bigelow's or similar, talk to the shopgirls, and get one to three things that work just as they should. And pay good money for them, too. It's absolutely worth it - just think how much time you will save in showering.)

I realize that this is probably the most uncomfortable posting I have ever written. These days, one is used to thinking that nothing is taboo anymore, considering what is shown on even basic cable channels and what the average person sees fit to reveal on his or her Facebook page. But, tame as it may seem, the admission that I do not bathe myself every day feels truly taboo, more than anything else I could possibly think to write. "Are you really posting that?" My husband asked with some alarm. And dammit, I am.

Toxic Dust Invasion Vacation

2008-09-26T16:11:00.007-04:00

Today, the baby and I are in exile from our apartment. Last night, at around eight o'clock, I became uncomfortably aware of a horrendous chemical smell emanating from the apartment below us, which is under construction. Peeking out the door, I saw that the stairs and the hall were covered in a fine white dust. Further investigation revealed that a corner of our bedroom was covered in the same dust, and, presently, I realized that the inside of my mouth felt coated with something and my head was beginning to hurt. Thrown into a sudden panic, I hurriedly packed my monogrammed Vera Bradley overnighter for which I would tease myself mercilessly were I not me, and fled with it, the baby, and an air mattress to my friend M's apartment. We arrived just in time to make M cook me dinner, watch "The Daily Show," and then uncompanionably fall asleep in the middle of "The Colbert Report."

M left for work early this morning, and we have been alone in the apartment all day, wreaking havoc on her DVD collection (the baby) and eating everything in her refrigerator (me). It is dismal outside, gray and chilly, and I am half-grateful to the Terrifying Toxic Dust Invasion for giving us something to do other than stay in our house and sulk all day (namely, stay in M's house and sulk all day). It's sort of like I'm on vacation, and I am feeling strangely cheery about the whole thing - toxic dust, air mattress, Vera Bradley overnighter, etc. I am even, in celebration, allowing the baby to eat Post-It notes, though I probably oughtn't, seeing as they belong to M.

Birth Doula

2008-09-23T15:22:00.008-04:00

Last Friday night, in the middle of a friend's birthday party, I was summoned to attend my first birth as a birth doula. After a night of labor and about an hour on an epidural, my client delivered a baby girl on Saturday morning at 6AM at a quiet, shiny hospital on the Upper East Side. About an hour and a half after the birth, I stumbled out of the hospital into a cab, confused and sleepy.

In the days since the birth, my husband and the one or two friends who knew about it have asked me with some excitement, "So, how did it go?!" And mostly, I don't really know how it went. Nothing bad happened. My client delivered vaginally with the absolute minimum of complications. (I won't say "no complications," because unless your practitioner is as gentle as Gandhi and you are as unbending as the Hitler Youth, giving birth in a hospital entails complications, because it is the hospital's job to create complications. I say this with no bitterness. It's just true.) My client was in labor. I stayed with her until she gave birth. Then I left. Is that what a doula does?

During my doula training, the trainer - a rather famous doula in the New York area - said again and again, "Less is more, doulas! Less is more!" We even watched videos of (also very famous) doulas at work, and our trainer pointed out all of the things that she wouldn't have done. "That's too much! Too much! What is she doing? Why is she waving her hand in mom's face? Why is she standing there in that circle of love? [Meaning getting in the way of the mom-dad connection.] Less is more, doulas! Less is more!" At the time, it made perfect sense, and I was also feeling flattered to be addressed as "doula," and I wrote it down diligently: "less...is...more." I pictured myself sitting serenely next to my laboring client, my wise, angelic presence permeating the room.

As much as I thought I understood "less is more," though, I found myself rather shocked at how very little I did over the course of my client's labor. In early labor, I put a hot towel on her back. ("Oooh, that feels good," she said, but then the towel fell off her back and we forgot about it.) In the triage room, I rubbed her feet. ("That really helps," she said, but moments later I said something, and she said, disappointedly, "Now you broke the focus.") In the labor and delivery room, I put a tissue with peppermint oil on her pillow. ("That smells good," she said.) Really, honestly, these are the three distinct actions I remember myself taking. Other than that, I was mostly doing nothing.

Thinking back to my training ("Less is more, doulas! Less is more!") and also talking to E, the director of the doula service that I am working with, I am relatively sure that I did a relatively good job, and that all those times I was doing nothing, it was because there was nothing to be done. I know in my brain that just being there - "Occupying that emotional space," as E put it - is the most important function that a doula can serve. But it is REALLY counter to my nature to just lie around like lox when there is a person in the room who appears to need help. I'm not saying that I'm super-compassionate or anything, but I do have a highly-developed guilt mechanism that locks in really well with an abysmal inferiority complex, making me feel like I should always be DOING something to help people, because if I don't, they'll be mad at me, and I'm not worth anything anyway. I also have a touch of ADD (I'm being perfectly serious here), which means that just sitting in a serene manner is not really part of my psychological landscape. So it looks as though, for me, Doing Nothing With Conviction is going to be the hardest part of being a doula, rather than, say, Back Massage. Because if you can't Do Nothing With Conviction, you will end up dithering, and a dithering doula is, like, the pits, whereas a doula who is not so hot at Back Massage is totally live-with-able.

Oddly, while I felt dithery and anxious ("Ohmygod I'm not doing anything!! Ohmygod what should I do?! Ohmygod she's having another contraction!! Shitfuck!!") beyond all belief through a great deal of my client's labor, I appear to have not come off that way. The nurse, filling out the feedback form I need for certification, wrote, "She's a very calming presence," and E reports that my client said I was a big help throughout. The aforementioned inferiority complex keeps singsonging at me, "They're just saying that to be nice...they're just saying that to be nice..." In a more grownup part of my brain, though, I am just barely allowing myself to think that it might be true - I might have been a positive, calming presence for my client, and, all dithers aside, I might even have a special talent for being that way. I can't be sure that this is true, but I am working on thinking that it is, because I know that as much as I want to help my clients, I will only be able to do so inasmuch as I believe that I can.

Brother

2008-09-12T15:01:00.006-04:00

When I was eighteen years old, my half-brother X disappeared. I have two half-brothers, X and Y, my father's sons, both of whom are about twenty years older than I. Obviously, we were not raised together, and we never even lived in the same house together, although, come to think of it, I seem to remember X living in the spare bedroom in our house for a few months when I was little. For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, having their foundations in events that occurred before I was born, there have always been serious tensions in the relationship between my half-brothers and my family. Y categorically refused, for ten years or more, to have any contact at all; X was more present, but intermittently hostile. None of these things were directed at me. I was a pretty little girl upon whom everyone doted, X and Y included, and they tried their best to be brotherly. If anything, I was closer to X, as he came around more often. He was jokey and goofy and enjoyed making me laugh. Once, when I was little, he took me to the zoo, and I also remember him trying to teach me about right and left, and I also have a copy of The Hobbit and a Joanna Hurwitz book with birthday inscriptions from him. Inevitably, though, adult issues interceded, and overall I did not see much of my brothers. I always tell people that I am an only child.

When I was a senior in high school, X invited me to come visit him for a week in California. I did, and though I told everyone including myself that it was really fun, the visit was in fact somewhat harrowing. X, though essentially kind, was clearly not quite OK. He maintained an unsteady veneer of casual jokeyness, and his sense of humor was very much intact, but his overall behavior was random, manic, and overwrought. He talked at me incessantly, loading me with bitter diatribes about politics, economics, and various members of our family. Also, he had the alarming habit of falling into abrupt deep sleeps, sometimes almost mid-sentence. The entire experience destabilized me intensely, so much so that, some time towards the end of the week, I broke down and sobbed at a restaurant over mussels, in the middle of yet another furious spiel about I don't know what. At the time, I assured X and myself that I was just tired because we had done so much sightseeing that day.

About three months later, X disappeared. For awhile, we just couldn't reach him, and we thought maybe he was busy. Then his office - he held a high position in finance - said he was on sick leave for back trouble, which none of us had known he had. Then his home answering machine had a new outgoing message, a weird one of a jostling, muffled conversation, as though someone had inadvertently hit the record button with an elbow. Then his office said he was gone, and they had no further information. Then his home number was disconnected. That was twelve years ago, and I have not heard from him since.

Today, my father emailed me a phone number that he had gotten hold of somehow, saying he thought it might be X's number. I called right away, and the person on the other end gave me a cell phone number. I called the cell phone number, and my brother answered. His voice, as always, was jokey and goofy, and I could not tell what he was feeling, other than faint surprise.

"I can't talk right now, because I'm in a meeting!" He said, "No, I really am! Aren't I in a meeting?" And he must have held his phone up to the room, because I heard five or six voices - "He's in a meeting!" "He's in a meeting!"

I suddenly remembered that when I went to visit California, I had arrived at the airport only to find that he not there to pick me up. When I called him, he was jokey and goofy and apologetic. "Sorry, honey! I'm here with a friend, cleaning my apartment for you, and I didn't get done in time! Here, talk to her, she'll tell you!" And he handed the phone to a dead-voiced woman who said, "He's been cleaning his apartment." When I got to his apartment - by cab - she was still there, blond and scruffy and Courtney-Love-like in jeans and a fatigue jacket, to my eyes too young and too dirty to be the appropriate companion for a middle-aged executive. She left, and I did not see her again that week.

This morning, hearing "He's in a meeting!", I wondered who was in the room with my brother. Was he in a fancy office like the one where he used to work? Was he surrounded by people in khakis and button-downs, or more Courtney Loves? Was he tricking me? "This is your number, right?" He asked cheerily. "I'll call you back when I'm finished!"

I have not heard back from him yet.

UnLucky

2008-09-08T17:23:00.004-04:00

I have just opened the current issue of Lucky to find that it features not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE items that had been on my What I Want for Fall and Winter list. I am consumed with rage, because this means that I NOW CANNOT PURCHASE OR WEAR THOSE ITEMS, BECAUSE IF I DO, PEOPLE WILL THINK, "OH SHE GOT THAT BECAUSE SHE SAW IT IN LUCKY." Equally disturbing (or perhaps more so) is the unavoidable conclusion that I must have the same taste as the editors of Lucky. Fucking shit hell.

Cape People

2008-09-05T11:53:00.010-04:00

At my high school in Northern Virginia in the mid-nineties, we did not have Goths. Instead, we had the Cape People. (To my knowledge, I have only one regular reader who attended high school with me. RJT, you totally remember the Cape People, right?) The Cape People were a clique of what I would maybe call nerds or dorks, if it were not for the facts that A) That's not nice, and B) I attended Geek High, so, technically speaking, every single one of us was a nerd-dork of titanic proportions, even the coolest of the Cool lacrosse players, cheerleaders, etc. So instead I will say that the Cape People were a clique of students who were considered to be socially undesirable by most other students at the school.

The root cause of this undesirability is hard to locate. It is true that many, if not all, of the Cape People suffered variously from social awkwardness, zits, and a measure of poor fashion sense. However, it is also true that pretty much every high school student on the face of the earth, whether Cool or Cape Person or somewhere in between, suffers variously from social awkwardness, zits, and a measure of poor fashion sense. (I, myself, had two of those problems to varying degrees, and one, not at all.) So, while it made perfect sense at the time, I cannot now come up with a clear explanation regarding the unCoolness of the Cape People. I can only really resort to tautology - the Cape People were socially undesirable kids, and they were socially undesirable kids because they were Cape People.

In any case, unlike most other cliques in the school, which stuck to the fail-safe high school formula of T-shirt/jean/sneaker, the Cape People had a distinct look. While a fair number of the Cape People dressed fairly normally a fair amount of the time, a Cape Person in full-dress uniform, so to speak, would wear the following*:

Tight black jeans. (We call them "skinny jeans" now, but I think, back then, they were just tight.)
A washed-silk shirt in black, teal, or burgundy. A male Cape Person would wear one of those broad-shouldered ones favored at the time by Jerry Seinfeld or Garth Brooks; a female Cape Person would wear one of the ones with ruffles down the front that you could get from Express or the Victoria's Secret catalogue all through the nineties.
A large silver pendant and one or two large silver rings. Always with a magicky sort of flavor - a battle-axe maybe, or a dragon with a "ruby" eye. Also, for juniors and seniors, a class ring (everyone in my school had one) that was either one of the chunkiest or one of the most delicate designs available, but never in the standard size.

A belt-loop-to-wallet chain that (somewhat puzzlingly) often also held a large number of keys.

A black cape. Often homemade. Sometimes elaborate, with flourishes such as a large hood, a silky red lining, or frog closures at the neck.

Black Minnetonka Moccasin Knee-Hi Fringe Boots. These were the real must-have for all Cape People, and were often worn without the rest of the Cape Person getup.

Optional: Homemade chain mail tunic.

The majority of the Cape People were, oddly, in the color guard, meaning the people that run around after the marching band while throwing flags in the air. Now, running around after a marching band while throwing flags in the air is a patently ridiculous activity, so between that and the Renaissance Faire attire, the Cape People, poor kids, really did not do themselves any favors. (The ridiculosity here is such that you may think I am making it all up. I am not. Ask my high school friend RJT. You tell them, girlfriend. There were medieval flag-throwers at our high school, right?) So, unsurprisingly, Cape People were roundly abused by all and sundry, though, happily for them, not as badly as they would have been abused at schools that were not Geek High. We Geek High-ers were as tolerant a group of adolescents as you might find, which I guess is to say that we were not tolerant at all, but rather too weak and/or too goody-goody and/or too loaded down with AP Bio books to actually beat anyone up.

While I am sure I did some behind-the-back snickering, I mostly just stayed the heck away from the Cape People. They made me feel unbelievably uncomfortable, wearing like a badge the ugly awkwardness, the sense of strangeness and otherness, that I saw in my own self and took so much care to hide. I was deathly afraid that any accidental association would lead my peers to see the truth that, under my eyeliner, clogs, and veneer of aloof sophistication, I really was a Cape Person, ungainly and out of tune in a way that could only provoke laughter and ridicule.

I had not thought about the Cape People for a really long time, not until about a month ago, when the image of a Cape Person popped, unbidden, into my mind. And do you know what thought accompanied the image? Not, I wish I had been nicer to those people. Not, I wonder what they're doing now. But, Those are some hot boots. Yes. The black Minnetonka Moccasin Knee-Hi Fringe Boots. Now, in addition to serving as a symbol for the extreme social isolation, the sheer crazy dorkitude, of Cape Personhood, this flavor of footwear fits squarely into the current Williamsburg Hip Ugly Chic aesthetic that I so revile. Those two facts alone should make these boots anathema to me, not to mention the bare, unavoidable fact that they are knee-high suede moccasins with fringe. However, I am entirely immune to reason in this matter. Renaissance Faire? Nonsense! Bedford Avenue? Pishposh! These boots - soft, slim, and dark - are clearly the epitome of modern elegance. A woman wearing such boots must necessarily exude an air of sure-footed sexiness, and in my current state of fevered fashion myopia, I simply cannot understand why anyone would think otherwise.

When I explained all of this to my husband, making sweeping hand gestures to illustrate the glamour of the boot, he asked, "So, does that mean that the Cape People were right about things after all?" This sort of stopped me in my tracks, because it seemed to me fairly clear that the Cape People were right about nothing at all - not even the boots, really, because as lovely as they are to my eyes now, they were not that lovely in the mid-nineties on zitty fifteen-year-old suburbanites wearing capes. While it's a tempting conclusion for this author of gently touching blog posts to reach, I cannot finally say that the Cape People were deeply wise about anything, footwear-related or otherwise. They were just deeply silly, or more accurately, deeply adolescent. Perhaps the idea of discovering something beautiful in that morass of adolescent silliness is at the root of my sudden, mad desire for Natty Bumppo boots. It is true that I am finally at an age at which I can look back at my high school years with a measure of detachment, separating out the true from the false, the vision from the blindness.

In the end, I'm not really sure what my desperate boot-need means - a re-visioning of my teen years; a secret desire to be a young, drunk, and careless Hip Ugly Chic Brooklynite; a subconscious salute to my fascination with the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper; or merely a slightly delayed buying-in to a sartorial trend of dubious aesthetic value. It may be all of these things or none of them at all. Luckily, when this particular fever passes, though I may never discover its source, I will only be out $75.95 plus shipping and handling, which, when you think about it, is not a bad deal at all.

*This uniform is not what I was referring to when I mentioned poor fashion sense. The poor fashion sense came in when they were NOT in uniform. The uniform itself is rather brilliantly beyond fashion in its bizarre, but somehow internally consistent, rules.

September

2008-08-31T22:55:00.011-04:00

This morning, we loaded the following into two canvas totes -

1 large beach towel
1 small absorbent towel
2 sarongs
1 baby blanket
5 clean diapers
5 clean wipes
1 spare diaper cover
1 dirty diaper bag
1 bottle of water
1 bag of toys - teething ring, jingletoy, squeaky giraffe, plastic cups
5 books (two for baby, three for us)
1 magazine
1 sun hat
1 I-pod
1 baby bathing suit
1 coverup
1 change of clothing for each family member
2 bottles of sunblock (1 toxic but easy to use, 1 nontoxic but thick as toothpaste)
1 tube of sunblock lip balm
1 tube of hand lotion

- and got on the Long Island Rail Road to Long Beach to visit my husband's friend L and go to the beach. On the beach, we squinted in the bright, hot midday sun and wrestled with the sunblock while the baby lay on his tummy on a sarong eating sand. After a walk down to water's edge and a little more sand-eating, I nursed the baby for a long, long time, lying next to him on the sarong, shielding both of us from the sun with the baby blanket. I watched him as he nursed, his eyes shut, sweat beading along his brow. In the moment, I was hot and sandy and a little uncomfortable, lying on my side on the gritty sarong, trying to hold the blanket over us in a non-asphyxiating manner. Already, though, I have almost forgotten this discomfort, looking back on the moment as unending and sweet, remembering his little face working at my breast in the light shade of the fine muslin blanket that covered us, sealing us off from our surroundings, creating a little world of only baby, mama, and milk.

Later, after the baby had napped and awoken, my husband said that he wanted to take the baby into the water. I have taken the baby "swimming" a few times this summer without my husband - to Jones Beach, a pond near my friend M's family's house in Connecticut, and a splashy wading fountain near my parents' house in Virginia. Back while I was still pregnant, I had imagined walking into the ocean with the baby in my arms, laughing with him as the waves splashed around us. However, I had found that the baby didn't much like being carried into the water, instead preferring to be held by the hands and "walked" in; once the water got deeper, he liked being swished back and forth by his arms like a monkey. I told my husband this, but he was absolutely determined that he wanted to be in the ocean holding the baby against his chest. So in we went, all three of us, the baby looking a little alarmed as the cold water started to splash against his feet. We went in deeper, until the waves wet his back, and then my husband knelt in the water so they were both neck-deep. The baby's face was quiet and wary, but he did not cry, not even when a sudden, large wave took all of us by surprise. He clutched at my husband's shoulder and arm for dear life, blinking drops of seawater out of his eyes, and we kissed him and told him he was brave. He continued to hold tightly to my husband as we walked out of the water and back up the beach, and I wrapped the big beach towel around both of them to dry them off.

We went back to my husband's friend L's place, a little beach-shacky house that he shares with two surfer roommates. We sat, with a few other friends, on the wooden deck, which houses a hammock, an umbrella table with a lot of chairs, a propane grill, and one of the surfers' garden of lettuce and basil and baby watermelon and tomatoes. We listened to Lou Reed and Bob Dylan and Television and the Kinks, drinking beer and watching L cook us dinner on the grill. I danced with the baby to "Maggie's Farm," swung with him on the hammock, and put him down to chase his jingletoy and an empty Coke bottle around the deck, smearing the front of his shirt with deck dirt. Dinner began to come off the grill - shrimp, burgers, ribs, scallops, and corn. We ate as it got darker, and we listened to Caetano Veloso and Neil Young and talked about politics and teased each other and told dirty jokes. We took the umbrella down and sat at the table looking up at the stars.

As someone who has never been anything except a student or a teacher, I think it's hard not to feel melancholy on Labor Day weekend, the end of the summer, and I felt my eyes fill with tears as I held the baby against me and looked out into the night. September always changes everything, and this September will be no different. The baby will be going to daycare three days a week, and I will be returning to work two or three days a week - for real this time, not the slinking-around-under-the-radar act I did when I "returned to work" in May and June. I will be back in the classroom after a nine-month hiatus, after telling myself that I would never have to go back to the classroom again, at least not soon. I will also be beginning my doula work in earnest; on TuesdayI am meeting with my first two clients, both of whom will be giving birth in September, and I am meeting with more potential clients on Wednesday. On top of that, I am challenging myself to return with seriousness to my writing, which has fallen by the wayside somewhat, and to pursue the writing opportunities that I caught a glimpse of in June. I feel a little as though I have been in some sort of suspended animation since the baby was born, a strange postpartum gestation, and now September is forcing me to suddenly snap out of it and begin moving, to be born, like it or not, as a new self.

And even more terrifying (or less? the same? I don't know) are the gigantic developmental strides the baby seems to be taking every 17 seconds. He is swiftly leaving infancy behind. He moves around and pulls himself up to stand; he says "Mama"; he plays a game where you stick your tongue out at him and he sticks his tongue out at you. I have barely wrapped my mind (and my life) around his infancy, and September will see me having to put it aside altogether. I don't feel ready to do that, but my readiness is irrelevant; it will happen anyway.

"What's up?" My husband whispered, wrapping both me and the baby in a hug.

"Everything is changing so fast," I whispered back, feeling confused and inarticulate.

"I know it's changing," he said, "but that's OK."

When it was time to go, I packed everything back into our canvas totes, and we took the Long Island Rail Road back to the city, sleepy from the food and sun and ocean and beer. The baby fell asleep on the train, and we treated ourselves to a cab home from Penn Station. At home, we found that the dog had peed on the floor but not pooped, which is about all we could have hoped for, given the fact that we had left him alone for close to twelve hours. My husband took the dog out to walk as I eased the baby into bed, his shirt still streaked with dirt. Today, August 31st, was the baby's eighth-month birthday. Tomorrow, it will be September.

Baby Days: Daycare

2008-08-29T16:56:00.007-04:00

Today, I dropped the baby off at daycare for the second day. When I say "daycare," I'm talking about "group family daycare," which in English means "someone's apartment." Knowing I would be working two or three days a week this school year, I had been on the lookout for childcare when I saw a sign on a lamppost when I was out walking the dog. It gave an address around the corner from my apartment and said: GROUP FAMILY DAYCARE "You can trust us with your children." I ignored the sinister usage of quotation marks, called the number, and went to visit. About five minutes into the visit, I realized that one of the two daycare ladies was not just a daycare lady but also the mother of one of my former students. Trust and affordability established, I decided that I could call off the daycare search.

Though incredibly apprehensive and miserable and tortured by the thought of the baby weeping for hours on end while waiting for me to come rescue him, I have also, in a very small guilty part of my soul, been looking forward to daycare. I scheduled his daycare time for a little longer than my work day so I could come home and write (well-nigh impossible with him around these days) or get housework done or go shopping or go to yoga or read or etc for awhile all by myself. Yesterday, I couldn't quite bring myself to do it, and I picked him up as soon as work was over. Today, though, I told the daycare lady 6 o'clock, so here I am, at home, all alone, having finished work at 3. Mostly, I cannot get any writing done - I have been starting and abandoning drafts for the past three hours. Mostly, I am staring into space and wishing we had more food in the fridge. Mostly, I am peculiarly bored. Not quite enough is happening. I keep looking apprehensively towards the bedroom, expecting to hear the baby's "I'm awake now" wail. I keep looking reflexively down at the computer cord, expecting to see the baby chewing on it. I keep feeling a sudden sense of panic and hopping out of the chair - is there something I'm supposed to be doing? - before remembering that no, there isn't, and sitting back down uneasily. I feel confused, uncomfortable, unproductive, and a little unhappy. After weeks of energetically wishing that I could get some time to myself, I am finding that I don't really want it right now. It is 5:25, so really, I have about twenty-five more minutes before I'm due to pick the baby up. But I'm going to hit "Publish Post" and then go get my baby.

Baby Days

2008-08-25T11:09:00.005-04:00

Now, at eight months minus one week, the baby is fast. He can't crawl, but he has perfected a peculiar scuttle that involves a lot of arm and one knee. I'm really impressed, because I tried to do it last night, and I couldn't for the life of me. I mean, anyone can crawl, right? But this? This is truly unique.

Sometimes, when he is bored or frustrated or wanting attention, he lies on his tummy in the middle of the floor and lifts his head and legs and says, "Ehn! EHNNNN!" Like, "Someone come help me because I can't do anything for myself because I'm just a BABY!" But we are no longer fooled. We know that, as soon as he sees a clear path to something really exciting, like the dog or Dr. Sears' Baby Book or an electrical cord or a newspaper or his Baby Bjorn Little Potty with pee in it, he will be off like a shot, commenting as he goes: "WEEEN! WEEEEN! WEEEEEEN!" Or "BGAH! BGAH! BGAH!" Sometimes, he chases me down, scuttling down the hall from the living room to the bedroom, "MAM-MAM-MAM-MAM-MAH!!!" My friend M is convinced that he is calling me "Mama," but I'm not sure, because it seems like he's always saying "Mama." I am taking the stance that there is no way he is calling me "Mama," because I know the minute that I admit that he may indeed be calling me "Mama," he will turn to the dog or the Baby Bjorn Little Potty with a huge grin on his face and say "MAM-MAM-MAM-MAM-MAH!!!"

Generally speaking, a moving baby is a much different thing from a non-moving baby. Before, the baby's desires were large, inarticulate, and all-encompassing. Often, upon waking up, he would throw his head back and wail desperately, sending the message that he needed something, anything, not sure what, please please please. Now, upon waking, he often still cries, but it is more of a crying out - Here I am! Come get me! - and when I go into the bedroom, he will already have flipped himself over onto his belly and begun to scuttle towards the door. His desires now are directional, and the direction can be anything from the DVD player or my shoes to a tube of butt cream or one of my husband's really rare singles. Most often, though, his direction is me. He calls out when I leave the room and desperately scuttles after me. When he is tired or cranky, he will not rest until he is in my arms. When I leave him with my husband, he is okay until I return, when, upon seeing my face, he breaks down and cries until I take him from his father and hold him, at which point he rewards both of us with a large, delighted, tearful, two-tooth grin.

When we have a babysitter, I always go out to walk the dog after she gets here, both to give the baby a little bit of time to get acquainted and to let the dog burn off his OH MY GOD THERE IS SOME STRANGER IN THE HOUSE NOW energy. Usually, though he tends to cry throughout his babysitting time, the baby is fine during these few dog-walking minutes. Last time, though, he was already in full cry by the time I came back with the dog, his eyes red-rimmed and his nose running. He reached his arms out to me and buried his face in my neck as I held him, two heartbreakingly expressive gestures new to his repertoire. When I handed him back to the babysitter, he grasped at my shoulders with his little hands, and I felt his cool, soft skin slide along mine. He kept his arms out to me, his face a mask of misery and bewilderment as I waved goodbye and stepped out the door.

This megawattage adoration and dependence is, of course, immensely rewarding. It's an amazing experience to be so loved and so enjoyed and so wanted and so needed by another human being. It's an amazing experience to have the baby smile and coo delightedly just because he happens to be looking at my face. Also, though, it's kind of terrifying. I'm not as afraid of not being able to meet the baby's tremendous need as I am of not wanting to. I'm terrified of getting annoyed, of feeling overwhelmed, of pushing the baby away, of being glad to see him go. I know that this stage, like all others, will not last forever. Whether it lasts weeks or months, it will represent just a tiny, tiny fraction of my life with my child, and, just like everything else I have written about here, I will miss it when it's over.

Gluten, Bars, and Getting Old, Part II

2008-08-16T00:36:00.007-04:00

A little after writing that post about getting old, I went with the baby to run some errands, and somehow found myself straggling into the brand-spanking-new Harlem branch of American Apparel (also called the Now We Can All Look Like Skanks From L.A. Store). Outside, the store was topped by a gigantic billboard of a girl wearing high-waisted glittery hotpants and nothing else; inside, there were no customers, loud techno music, piles of boxes in front of the counter, and at least eight employees, all wearing at least three different bright colors apiece and all very clearly under the age of 22. I wandered around the store halfheartedly fingering T-shirts and sweatpants and being asked if I needed help every nine seconds. I thought I might buy the baby a new T-shirt, but the back of the store, where I found the racks of baby clothes, also housed the speakers. As the bass pulsed louder and louder, the baby started squirming in discomfort, so I abandoned the baby section, hands still empty. I stood in front of a wall of packaged T-shirts for at least four full minutes, debating whether I should buy another ill-fitting V-neck T-shirt for nursing, or if the two I currently have are enough, or even two too many. Finally, I decided to buy a white one, mostly because at that point I had been wandering around for such a long time that I was too embarassed to wander out without buying anything. (I am shocked to see how little sense that thought makes in writing; it made such perfect sense in my head at the time.)

At the register, as I was signing the receipt, I said to the cashier, "It looks like you're still setting things up here."

She looked at me, her wide young eyes ringed in heavy mascara, her upper lids full of clumsy mascara smudges.

"Well, if you're still moving stuff around, maybe you might think about moving the kids' section out of the back. It's right under the speaker, you know, and it's so loud, I sort of got worried about my baby's ears, so I couldn't spend a lot of time looking at things. So maybe that's not the best place for the kids' stuff."

The cashier's face betrayed no comprehension whatsoever. She didn't nod or make any "I see" sort of sounds. She remained entirely silent and affectless, her face slack, her eyes staring uncomprehendingly. Then I heard myself speaking, as if from a distance, and realized precisely what I would have thought of me if I were a 20-year-old salesgirl listening to an older woman complain about the kids' section. You stupid old boring housewife bitch, I would have thought, of course it's loud. If you don't like it, you shouldn't come in, and you definitely shouldn't bring your kid. What are you doing here anyway? This is not for people like you. You're not fooling anyone. Go away to Ann Taylor and buy some goddamn blouse or something. I suddenly felt about a hundred years old, a querulous old lady complaining to the youngsters about the gravy at the cafeteria. Horrified and unable to meet the cashier's silently scornful stare, I beat a panicky retreat out of the store, clutching my new T-shirt. I felt shaken and a little ashamed as I made my way, like the old boring housewife bitch that I am, to the organic grocery store to pick up some things for dinner.

Later that evening, I decided that I didn't want the shirt after all, but it was too late, as I had already worn it and stained it with tomato sauce.

Gluten, Bars, and Getting Old

2008-08-13T10:13:00.008-04:00

When she read my post about the Upper Breast Side, my college friend L emailed me: "a store called the upper breast side is exactly the type of store we would have made fun of in college. admit it. yet it sounds like a strangely intriguing place now. when i have a baby and come visit you in nyc for advice and time away from baby, you will have to take me there."

And yesterday, my mom friend H came over for a mom summit (in other words, "I'm bored out of my mind, so let's get together and complain about feeling tired and worry about our mothering and also possibly talk about clogs"). We sat on my living room floor, chasing after our babies as they desperately tried to find and chew on all available electrical cords in the room, and we discussed her new diet, which is called the No Wheat Or Gluten Or Anything That Even Looks Like It Or Has Touched It Or Has The Letters "W" Or "G" In It Diet. She has adopted this NWOGOATELLIOHTIOHTLWOGII Diet due to all sorts of intestinal and autoimmune stuff both in her and her baby, and goshdarn if it hasn't worked.

"It's so strange," she said, after telling me about how she has thrown out all her old cutting boards to avoid gluten cross-contamination, "because it's like I've turned into-"

I interrupted. "Someone we would have made fun of in college?"

"Yes! Or someone I would have made fun of last year - or last month even!"

And I totally agree with her. Until recently, an anti-gluten goose-stepper would definitely have made my To Be Scorned list, cross-referenced under Humorless, No Fun to Eat Out With, and Has Read Too Much Andrew Weil. But now, suddenly, it seems to make complete sense, and I am starting to view my own frantic, constant consumption of wheat products with growing alarm.

There are a lot of things, I am coming to realize, that I would have made fun of in college - or "when I was younger," or before I got married, or before I had a baby - that I see completely differently now. There was a time, for instance, when I was completely mystified by the idea that someone might not want to go out, or might not want to have a drink, or might not want to stay up late. There was a time when I would rather have died than not go to Smalls*, or Augie's**, or Night Cafe***, because what if I missed something fun? There was a time when I thought extended nursing was totally disgusting. There was a time when I thought that parents should just put their babies in their cribs and leave them till they fell asleep, because how else will they learn? There was a time when I would think nothing of going to a show in Williamsburg on a weekday night, even if it meant only getting a couple of hours of sleep and then teaching on a killer hangover the next day. Moreover, I would have scorned anyone who disagreed with me as being humorless and unhip.

Now, my feelings are more or less the opposite - in other words, I have become humorless and unhip. Of course, I don't really feel that way. Instead, on a good day, I feel sophisticated and wise, and look upon the youthful, partying masses of which I was once part as being callow and foolish. There is, obviously, no right answer here; or rather, the right answer seems to shift as we do. No matter how much we may pretend or try to appreciate other people's places and paths, I think it is very, very difficult not to secretly harbor the conviction that where we are in this moment - even if it is abject misery - is the best, most vital place to be. And I guess, at bottom, it would be useless to feel any differently, because as myopic and self-centered and amnesiac as it might be, if I am not going think the world of whatever I happen to be doing right this very moment, who is?****

*The cover used to be $10, you know, and it was BYOB, so ha ha on you if you missed the good old days.
**Smoke, by the way, is nothing like Augie's, in that it is clean and expensive and has strange, arty decor.
***Closed now, so you'll have to go play pool with creepy locals somewhere else.
****My husband says that all of my posts are structured this way, where I posit something, then meander down that path a little while, then say, "I guess" and come to some sort of touching/deep conclusion. I guess...he's right. Ha, see what I did there?

Bathtime

2008-08-08T23:20:00.004-04:00

When the baby was very new, I didn’t bathe him very often. We didn’t let them bathe him at the hospital, and he was at least a week old when he got his first bath at home, and for the first month or so, once a week was as good as it got. After awhile, though, I started to feel guilty about it, and he started to sort of stink of the warm baby-sweat/sour-milk cocktail that marks out our side of the bed, so I tried to get him in the bath every other day. When I say “bath,” I mean “sink” – I never got around to buying a baby tub, and someone gave me one of those big bath sponges as a baby shower gift, so I would just stick the sponge in the sink and stick the baby on the sponge. I actually really liked using the sink as a bath – it felt thrifty and minimalist and old-fashioned all at once, and it also helped to keep the sink clean. Before each bath, I would sprinkle the sink with baking soda and scrub it down with half a lemon; sometimes the baby waited patiently on the floor or in his chair, sometimes I had him in the sling or wrap, and sometimes I just held him and scrubbed one-handed. My mother calls this baka-chikara – stupid strength. It’s the kind of illogical strength that you muster out of sheer will-power to accomplish things that would seem absolutely ludicrous to an onlooker. Like scrubbing the sink one-handed while holding your baby. Or like setting off by yourself to get on Amtrak with your baby in a front carrier, your laptop and books in a backpack, and a full-sized suitcase that contains not only clothing and baby supplies but also a Cuisinart and an immersion blender, because they don’t have those things where you’re going. Baka-chikara.

Anyway, when the baby was really tiny, he would just lie in the sink and blink in a startled sort of way, and sometimes lick at the water around his mouth. Then, when he got a little older, he would clutch a little plastic stacking cup to his chest and occasionally gnaw on it. After awhile, he got to giggling sometimes when we used the spray attachment, and he would put his hands up to feel the spray. As bathtime got to be fun, it started to happen every day – and now, sometimes, on slow days, twice a day.

Suddenly, though, about two weeks ago, he exploded in growth and motion, and the sink days were over. Now the baby goes in the grownup tub. In the tub, the baby is transported with wonder. He turns over and around from front to back and side to side again and again. He splashes his arms up and down and he chases his stacking cups through the water. He listens to the water run and tries for minutes on end to grasp the trickle from the faucet, his hand passing through it every time. He talks, “Blum blum blum blum blum!” Each time our eyes meet, he breaks into a big, heartbreaking grin and laughs, “Eh-HA!” When I finally take him out of the tub, worried that he will prune, I wrap the towel around his wriggling body and he throws his arms around my neck, “Eh-HA!”

The biggest drawback of these new tub-bath days is that the tub – along with all of the other bathroom surfaces that the baby insists upon patting and licking – is much more work to clean than the kitchen sink is. By some strange alchemy, New York City tubs always look grungy, mysterious dust and grot layers itself onto the toilet bowl and sink minutes after they are wiped down, the inside rim of the toilet seat accumulates odd gray mildew at astonishing speed, and my pretty, bourgie, white Anthropologie bathmat is usually grayish-taupe and matted, like a stray cat. However, now that the baby bathes, it can’t be helped – I must daily summon my baka-chikara and devote myself to vacuuming, spraying, wiping, and scrubbing our (thankfully tiny) bathroom, all while using half of my mental and physical energy to keep the baby focused on his toys rather than the toilet bowl and remembering to avoid stepping on him or spraying him with vinegar, Dr. Bronner’s, or tea tree oil.

It’s hard, sometimes, to hold onto perspective. Grime in the tub or a dingy shower curtain or gross tissue sticking out of the trash can feel like a major tragedy; cleaning it up can feel like nothing short of mucking out the Augean stables; the idea of getting the kid in the bath and then out again can feel more daunting than a ten-mile run (or, for me, any run whatsoever). But really, these are merely little stepping stones of daily life that I will be traversing, predictably, again and again and again in my life as a mother, and I gain nothing from resenting or resisting. My baby is wondrous and joyous and beautiful, and it is a wondrous and joyous and beautiful thing to see him in the grownup tub, enraptured by the magic of water, ecstatic to be sharing his rapture with his mama. To squander these moments being exhausted or resentful is foolish, because one day, they will never come again.

Agenda

2008-08-07T22:25:00.005-04:00

Things I want to get done after the baby goes to sleep and before I go to sleep tonight:
1. Take a shower.
2. Finish "reading" the current issue of Lucky.
3. Finish reading the current issue of The New Yorker.
4. Put the laundry in the dryer; hang up non-dryer-ables.
5. Write two more blog posts.
6. Finish grading last week's work for the online class I am TA-ing.
7. Begin grading this week's work for the online class I am TA-ing.
8. Put the clean dishes away; put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
9. Have sex.
10. Watch "How Do I Look?"

Things I predict I will get done after the baby goes to sleep and before I go to sleep tonight:
1. Take off my pants.
2. Watch "How Do I Look?"
3. Possibly turn off the light.

Cafe Car

2008-08-07T01:17:00.002-04:00

On the Amtrak from Washington to New York, the baby, upon waking from his nap, was ready to play. He did not want to play with me, though, as much as he wanted to play with the lady sitting next to us, a woman in her fifties wearing lime green and reading a suspense novel. He leaned halfway out of the carrier towards her, bouncing and peering into her face. After awhile, the lady got tired of making “how cute” noises and tried to return to her book. The baby, though, refused to get the hint, instead single-mindedly dangling himself over her lap with a maniacal grin. Unable to distract him with his squeaky giraffe, his two teething rings, a washcloth, or even a water bottle (his current favorite toy), I finally got up in desperation and walked to the café car.

The café car was nearly empty, and I bought a bag of pretzels and a cup of coffee. (I didn’t really want the coffee, but I was making up for the fact that, on the trip down five days ago, I had wanted coffee but was too scared to venture into the then-packed café car, for fear that the baby would send sodas flying with his curious hands.) The baby and I sat at a café car table, and I drank the rain-check coffee and looked out the window while the baby sucked meditatively on a pretzel and looked at my necklaces. Across the aisle from us sat a mother and son pair; the mother with gray roots and a purple blouse, the son with basketball shorts and a changing voice. They sat in companionable silence, and she drank coffee while he ate a small, greasy cheese pizza from an Amtrak tray. I was impressed, watching them out of the corner of my eye, with the mother’s aura of calm. Rather than complain about the price or the grease, she simply watched her son eat, seeming contented and peaceful. I wondered if she felt satisfied, happy that she could provide him with the small things that he wanted – basketball shorts, cheese pizza.

As we pulled into Philadelphia, she said to her son, “Philadelphia is a beautiful city, you know.” He roused himself from his pizza to look out the window. “Hey mom,” he said, “remember when…” And they chatted comfortably for a few minutes, something about a bicycle that my eavesdropping ears could not quite pick up. After a little while, they fell silent again, and we all looked out the window and watched Philadelphia go by. A little while after that, they left the café car, and a man clutching two cans of Miller Lite took their place.