In the last month, for one reason or another (teething, the changing cycle of the moon, our myriad of house guests) our daughter has stopped sleeping through the night. Although she is now eighteen months old, she has reverted back to those early days of waking every three to four hours and nothing but rocking seems to console her. (Hence my lack of blog entries for the last month.)
Round about the seventeenth time I re-enter her room, sometime past two o'clock in the morning when the pain of sleeplessness has become a throbbing ache behind my eyes and I stumble desperate and disoriented down the hall, pluck her out of the crib and plunk down into the rocking chair, two thoughts persistently strike me:
1.That the delicate features of her face snuggled into my side still fill me with an overwhelming sense of awe and love regardless of what time it is.
2.How much bloody work it takes to raise a human.
Because we are still fighting two wars and the terror level consistently waffles between orange and yellow; because more often than not it seems someone I know won't make it to wrestle the demon of sleeplessness in their own child, it is the second thought that plagues me, jarring me awake along side my daughter.
I can't get over the idea that some parent somewhere spent all these countless evenings, pacing the small space of a room for miles, wearing out the joints of a rocking chair, singing about a mocking bird until they wished the mocking bird's damn voice box would fall out, praying for a gift as simple as sleep, only to have that life cut short by a bullet, a bomb, someone else's bad choices.
I'm not supposed to say this. I am supposed to say that its complicated. I am supposed to say that there is a logical explanation for where we are in history. I am supposed to say that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am supposed to say that things are getting better and not worse. I am supposed to say whatever it is we've all been saying to help us sleep at night.
Only on this particular night, I can only think of a bib my daughter has already outgrown. It is hot pink and reads simply: War bad. And right now, with her body warm beside me, her chest finally rising and falling slowly enough that I know sleep will soon overtake her, it is the only thought that makes any sense.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The First Good Bye
Like most of us, I don’t conceive of myself as someone particularly good at goodbyes. In fact, I’m pretty abysmal at them. I mourn the loss long before it happens and I often end up ruining the last few months (or even year) I have with a person.
Each time we hang out, I can’t escape the barrage of morbid thoughts. For example: This is the last time I’ll be riding in their car and I wonder if the next person will know how the vent on the passenger side has a dent in it so you have to tweak the fan to get it to blow hot or if they’ll just sit there shivering in the cold. I obsess about the fact that I’d better do laundry soon so I can be sure to give back that t-shirt I borrowed. I troll my computer for photos, only to find that we never did carry a camera around with us often enough and the one I do have of us together is out of focus with a neon sign in the background looking like its growing out of both of our heads.
Afterwards, like an Aborigine, I avoid saying the person’s name completely and I hide those few scraps of photos in a file so that they won’t accidentally popup on my screen saver. I do my best to wall myself off from memory, until one day even when I want to, I can’t.
Each time I say goodbye (it is, after all, one of life’s few certainties), I hope (pray) that someday I’ll learn to be better at it. Yet, each one is somehow more painful than the last.
So you can imagine how awful I thought the experience would be for my daughter Sophie when this past month we had to say her first goodbye ever to her daytime caregiver, Annie.
For nearly the first year and a half of her life, Sophie had spent three days a week with Annie. Together, they had shared a countless number of firsts -- Annie had taught her to sign “please” and “more” and how to blow kisses; Annie put her hair in pigtails for the first-time; Annie was the first adult (outside of my husband and myself) to show Sophie love and kindness on a near daily basis. With a kind of cruel symmetry, Annie would, of course, be her first goodbye.
Just as aptly, I dreaded it.
As is my habit, leading up to the moment, I spent untold hours talking (and crying) over the pending loss with my husband and with my friends who’d listen. I wanted it to be a good goodbye for Sophie. I didn’t want to color it with my own fear and negativity. Only I didn’t know how to make it one.
Should I put up photos of Annie? Of course, we didn’t have hardly any of the two of them together so I rushed to take them and put them up only to worry and obsess that I should take them down. Should I ask her for some scrap of clothing that would have the scent of her? Should I make sure we didn’t use the same shampoo, just in case the smell would make Sophie suddenly sad? Should I change my driving patterns to avoid the North West side of town, especially City Park where they played almost every afternoon? (The only experience I had with Sophie saying goodbye were the ones of me crying my own head off out front of Annie’s apartment in the early days of dropping Sophie off.)
The consensus of these conversations was that Sophie would hardly notice. Everyone said without a doubt that it would be more painful for me than it would be for her. Great, I thought, this was supposed to be a comfort?
Yet, a child has a way of being so wrapped in a moment that it forces you to be there with them, so I didn’t have the chance to dwell on my usual this is the last time I’ll be climbing down these steps leading from Annie’s apartment. I was too focused on helping Sophie toddle unevenly down them and too overjoyed by the smile of pride on Sophie’s face when she finally took the last two independently.
When the real last day came, Annie and I cried together on my living room floor while Sophie crawled over both our legs asking for crackers.
But then, maybe a week or so later, we were driving on a country road flanked on either side by the burnt gold of cut wheat and just as clear as day Sophie shouted out Annie’s name followed by “Yeah!” and held her hands up high above her head with a giant smile. There was no one walking in the field, just a few birds gathered and pecking at the ground.
I can’t say what it was that reminded Sophie of Annie in that moment. She wasn’t calling out either in that pained and desperate way a child calls for something because they have no idea yet that life doesn’t always deliver exactly in the way they want it to. Just “Annie, Annie!” followed by a pearl of a giggle.
My breath caught in my throat as I waited for the call to turn desperate. I gripped the steering wheel hard and wondered if I’d have to pull over to sooth her if she started to bawl. I cursed myself for taking this back way home on a road without a good enough shoulder.
To my surprise, Sophie continued laughing and babbling with Annie’s name interspersed. Finally, glancing furtively in the rearview mirror for the telltale collapse of her face before she breaks into breathless hysterics, I asked, “Are you thinking about Annie? Are you thinking about feeding the ducks? That was fun wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she answered and continued smiling and looking out the window. Although, I can’t really say if either of us really understood what the other was talking or thinking about. I’m not going to claim my seventeen-month-old as a genius just yet.
Yet, it went on like this for the next couple of weeks. We’d be driving somewhere or at the park or the library or in her room at night getting ready for bed, and she’d just start talking about Annie. Maybe it was a place she’d been to with Annie and maybe not. Regardless, Sophie would just start saying her name.
So, we’d talk a while about a possible memory or imagine what Annie might be doing now in her graduate program halfway across the country. Sophie would smile and babble back her answers.
What is amazing to me is that these conversations never turn sad. Sophie points to the photo of Annie we decided after all to leave up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. She mimics the face they are both making, a surprised “oh,” which of course forces me to mimic the “oh” until we are both laughing.
After all this time, my daughter has finally taught me what it takes to say a good goodbye, to find joy in the face of a loss, laughter in a memory -- a first, for both of us.
Each time we hang out, I can’t escape the barrage of morbid thoughts. For example: This is the last time I’ll be riding in their car and I wonder if the next person will know how the vent on the passenger side has a dent in it so you have to tweak the fan to get it to blow hot or if they’ll just sit there shivering in the cold. I obsess about the fact that I’d better do laundry soon so I can be sure to give back that t-shirt I borrowed. I troll my computer for photos, only to find that we never did carry a camera around with us often enough and the one I do have of us together is out of focus with a neon sign in the background looking like its growing out of both of our heads.
Afterwards, like an Aborigine, I avoid saying the person’s name completely and I hide those few scraps of photos in a file so that they won’t accidentally popup on my screen saver. I do my best to wall myself off from memory, until one day even when I want to, I can’t.
Each time I say goodbye (it is, after all, one of life’s few certainties), I hope (pray) that someday I’ll learn to be better at it. Yet, each one is somehow more painful than the last.
So you can imagine how awful I thought the experience would be for my daughter Sophie when this past month we had to say her first goodbye ever to her daytime caregiver, Annie.
For nearly the first year and a half of her life, Sophie had spent three days a week with Annie. Together, they had shared a countless number of firsts -- Annie had taught her to sign “please” and “more” and how to blow kisses; Annie put her hair in pigtails for the first-time; Annie was the first adult (outside of my husband and myself) to show Sophie love and kindness on a near daily basis. With a kind of cruel symmetry, Annie would, of course, be her first goodbye.
Just as aptly, I dreaded it.
As is my habit, leading up to the moment, I spent untold hours talking (and crying) over the pending loss with my husband and with my friends who’d listen. I wanted it to be a good goodbye for Sophie. I didn’t want to color it with my own fear and negativity. Only I didn’t know how to make it one.
Should I put up photos of Annie? Of course, we didn’t have hardly any of the two of them together so I rushed to take them and put them up only to worry and obsess that I should take them down. Should I ask her for some scrap of clothing that would have the scent of her? Should I make sure we didn’t use the same shampoo, just in case the smell would make Sophie suddenly sad? Should I change my driving patterns to avoid the North West side of town, especially City Park where they played almost every afternoon? (The only experience I had with Sophie saying goodbye were the ones of me crying my own head off out front of Annie’s apartment in the early days of dropping Sophie off.)
The consensus of these conversations was that Sophie would hardly notice. Everyone said without a doubt that it would be more painful for me than it would be for her. Great, I thought, this was supposed to be a comfort?
Yet, a child has a way of being so wrapped in a moment that it forces you to be there with them, so I didn’t have the chance to dwell on my usual this is the last time I’ll be climbing down these steps leading from Annie’s apartment. I was too focused on helping Sophie toddle unevenly down them and too overjoyed by the smile of pride on Sophie’s face when she finally took the last two independently.
When the real last day came, Annie and I cried together on my living room floor while Sophie crawled over both our legs asking for crackers.
But then, maybe a week or so later, we were driving on a country road flanked on either side by the burnt gold of cut wheat and just as clear as day Sophie shouted out Annie’s name followed by “Yeah!” and held her hands up high above her head with a giant smile. There was no one walking in the field, just a few birds gathered and pecking at the ground.
I can’t say what it was that reminded Sophie of Annie in that moment. She wasn’t calling out either in that pained and desperate way a child calls for something because they have no idea yet that life doesn’t always deliver exactly in the way they want it to. Just “Annie, Annie!” followed by a pearl of a giggle.
My breath caught in my throat as I waited for the call to turn desperate. I gripped the steering wheel hard and wondered if I’d have to pull over to sooth her if she started to bawl. I cursed myself for taking this back way home on a road without a good enough shoulder.
To my surprise, Sophie continued laughing and babbling with Annie’s name interspersed. Finally, glancing furtively in the rearview mirror for the telltale collapse of her face before she breaks into breathless hysterics, I asked, “Are you thinking about Annie? Are you thinking about feeding the ducks? That was fun wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she answered and continued smiling and looking out the window. Although, I can’t really say if either of us really understood what the other was talking or thinking about. I’m not going to claim my seventeen-month-old as a genius just yet.
Yet, it went on like this for the next couple of weeks. We’d be driving somewhere or at the park or the library or in her room at night getting ready for bed, and she’d just start talking about Annie. Maybe it was a place she’d been to with Annie and maybe not. Regardless, Sophie would just start saying her name.
So, we’d talk a while about a possible memory or imagine what Annie might be doing now in her graduate program halfway across the country. Sophie would smile and babble back her answers.
What is amazing to me is that these conversations never turn sad. Sophie points to the photo of Annie we decided after all to leave up on the bulletin board in the kitchen. She mimics the face they are both making, a surprised “oh,” which of course forces me to mimic the “oh” until we are both laughing.
After all this time, my daughter has finally taught me what it takes to say a good goodbye, to find joy in the face of a loss, laughter in a memory -- a first, for both of us.
Monday, July 19, 2010
As Seen From Above
This past weekend, after a several year hiatus, mainly attributed to the pregnancy/birth of our first child, my husband decided to go downhill mountain biking.
For those of you formerly familiar with the sport (as I thought I was), mountain biking has evolved. In the last few years, it has gone from a quiet trip through the woods on a barely maintained gravel path requiring merely a set of thicker tires to an extreme sport that demands full body armor, a helmet with face mask and a piece of equipment that more accurately resembles a Flinstone-powered monster truck (think 28 inch studded tires, full shocks, and disk brakes). The activity is also accomplished on trails with man-made high bank turns, rollers, jumps, and rock and log “features” all aimed at maximizing the aerial potential of the experience.
The plan was to make this a family outing during which our fifteen-month-old daughter and I would hike to the top of the chairlift and meet Joe after one of his many downhill runs. This was also part of my not-so-secret plan to check that he and the bike (which we had rented without damage protection even after it had been offered to us by two separate sales associates) were still in one piece.
After a few pictures and hugging goodbye in a mock scene from the Titanic's departure, we parted ways. Joe riding up the chairlift while Sophie (dangling contentedly from a backpack) and I headed up the hiking trail.
Two things surprised me in the first fifteen minutes of our venture. First, we were the only duo hiking up (everyone else came bouncing down the steep gravel trail with a walking stick in hand to slow their decent and a lift ticket dangling from their necks). Second, we were directly under the chairlift and so immediately subject to an inordinate amount of easily audible heckling erupting from above.
Seeing as an important part of extreme sports involves being watched in the act (think of the TV network and vast number of DVDs and online content spawned by the action sports industry) I wondered why the bikers themselves had been spared this particular (in) dignity (depending on your point of view).
Instead, by some trick of trail (in) design (again depending on your view point), it was my daughter and I on display as chair after chair of onlookers ogled at our relatively slow, uphill ascent.
Their comments ranged from cheers and impressed encouragement (one fully packed lift of twenty-something males decked out in extreme-ride regalia shouted down, “Best time on the mountain,” when they realized that my daughter was comfortably sacked out for our upward journey) to outright jeers (another similarly loaded lift yelled simply, “That has got to suck”).
Our presence also sparked sweet reminisces that were not necessarily intended for our ears. One father began to narrate a tale to his teenage daughter and son about when they were young enough to be carried in packs. (Because it was only the three of them, I couldn't help but wonder about what else this man might have been missing in watching us, although maybe his spouse was somewhere off on her bike as was my own.)
Perhaps because I was hefting an thirty extra pounds, the exact weight I gained during the first forty weeks of carrying our daughter, it struck me that this experience was amazingly like pregnancy. Almost everyone who passed (this time from above) had something to say about our presence. I couldn't help but be transported back to walking the halls at work amidst such innumerable comments, some welcomed (Oh, this is the best time of your life) to others from whom I wanted to turn and run yet could only slowly waddle (Wow, you're as big as a house. Are you past due?). It brought back that same mix of joyful anxiety of the highly anticipated unknown combined with just plain anxiety and a deep desire to hide from the tide of judgment that seemed to reign at every turn.
When a man and his son stopped to ask how far I intended to “make it,” it was all I could do to grit my teeth and smile politely as I had so many times before. (He had after all stopped to take our picture.) Yet, when he went on to tell me that he had five kids now grown whom he expected would someday carry him, I had little trouble picturing them as his pallbearers. What is it exactly about the act of being with child that seems to grant everyone cart blanch to comment on your life and its eminent trajectory?
While I was immensely enjoying our hike (as I had our pregnancy), I was relieved when the trail finally dropped into the woods after about an hour. In many ways, this hike, like pregnancy, was an invitation for me to finally and appropriately love my body for what it could do for us in this world: carry us to new heights (literally in this case) and afford us an experience we could not have had otherwise.
I found this a welcome interruption to the lifetime I've spent bemoaning myself for an unsightly stretch mark or a stubborn piece of flesh that does not hang the way I want it to in a bikini. Or in a less superficial way (infinitely truer and more important), a lifetime of having to constantly prove myself because I am a woman (and somehow lesser than the guys).
It is only in becoming a mother that I've been able to escape some of that constant self worth questioning, that general hatred of my too fat, too awkward, too womanly body, which (as trivial as it sounds) becomes hard to separate from self. I love the strength motherhood has given me to call back at those hecklers (oh boys, too bad you'll never know what you are missing).
Yet, the truth of the mater is the realization comes easier in private than in public, and its relatively easy to fall back into my old way of thinking, especially when surrounded by judgment so easily sprouting from other's lips.
When we finally came into view of the chairlift again, this time (thankfully) it was my husband calling to us as he got off the lift. Somehow, without the assistance of our cell phones, we had arrived on top of the mountain at the very same time (although neither of us questioned who had had the harder journey). We joked together about how must be training to enter the family version of the Amazing Race, the show that guarantees any couple the thrill of a lifetime in circumscribing the globe (although they may no longer be speaking to one another at the end of it.)
While something tells me that these scenes would indeed make for good TV(especially when it comes to finding a suitable spot above 10,000 feet for a diaper change), I don't think I would take Bruckhiemer's call. Too much simply gets missed as a spectator sport.
For those of you formerly familiar with the sport (as I thought I was), mountain biking has evolved. In the last few years, it has gone from a quiet trip through the woods on a barely maintained gravel path requiring merely a set of thicker tires to an extreme sport that demands full body armor, a helmet with face mask and a piece of equipment that more accurately resembles a Flinstone-powered monster truck (think 28 inch studded tires, full shocks, and disk brakes). The activity is also accomplished on trails with man-made high bank turns, rollers, jumps, and rock and log “features” all aimed at maximizing the aerial potential of the experience.
The plan was to make this a family outing during which our fifteen-month-old daughter and I would hike to the top of the chairlift and meet Joe after one of his many downhill runs. This was also part of my not-so-secret plan to check that he and the bike (which we had rented without damage protection even after it had been offered to us by two separate sales associates) were still in one piece.
After a few pictures and hugging goodbye in a mock scene from the Titanic's departure, we parted ways. Joe riding up the chairlift while Sophie (dangling contentedly from a backpack) and I headed up the hiking trail.
Two things surprised me in the first fifteen minutes of our venture. First, we were the only duo hiking up (everyone else came bouncing down the steep gravel trail with a walking stick in hand to slow their decent and a lift ticket dangling from their necks). Second, we were directly under the chairlift and so immediately subject to an inordinate amount of easily audible heckling erupting from above.
Seeing as an important part of extreme sports involves being watched in the act (think of the TV network and vast number of DVDs and online content spawned by the action sports industry) I wondered why the bikers themselves had been spared this particular (in) dignity (depending on your point of view).
Instead, by some trick of trail (in) design (again depending on your view point), it was my daughter and I on display as chair after chair of onlookers ogled at our relatively slow, uphill ascent.
Their comments ranged from cheers and impressed encouragement (one fully packed lift of twenty-something males decked out in extreme-ride regalia shouted down, “Best time on the mountain,” when they realized that my daughter was comfortably sacked out for our upward journey) to outright jeers (another similarly loaded lift yelled simply, “That has got to suck”).
Our presence also sparked sweet reminisces that were not necessarily intended for our ears. One father began to narrate a tale to his teenage daughter and son about when they were young enough to be carried in packs. (Because it was only the three of them, I couldn't help but wonder about what else this man might have been missing in watching us, although maybe his spouse was somewhere off on her bike as was my own.)
Perhaps because I was hefting an thirty extra pounds, the exact weight I gained during the first forty weeks of carrying our daughter, it struck me that this experience was amazingly like pregnancy. Almost everyone who passed (this time from above) had something to say about our presence. I couldn't help but be transported back to walking the halls at work amidst such innumerable comments, some welcomed (Oh, this is the best time of your life) to others from whom I wanted to turn and run yet could only slowly waddle (Wow, you're as big as a house. Are you past due?). It brought back that same mix of joyful anxiety of the highly anticipated unknown combined with just plain anxiety and a deep desire to hide from the tide of judgment that seemed to reign at every turn.
When a man and his son stopped to ask how far I intended to “make it,” it was all I could do to grit my teeth and smile politely as I had so many times before. (He had after all stopped to take our picture.) Yet, when he went on to tell me that he had five kids now grown whom he expected would someday carry him, I had little trouble picturing them as his pallbearers. What is it exactly about the act of being with child that seems to grant everyone cart blanch to comment on your life and its eminent trajectory?
While I was immensely enjoying our hike (as I had our pregnancy), I was relieved when the trail finally dropped into the woods after about an hour. In many ways, this hike, like pregnancy, was an invitation for me to finally and appropriately love my body for what it could do for us in this world: carry us to new heights (literally in this case) and afford us an experience we could not have had otherwise.
I found this a welcome interruption to the lifetime I've spent bemoaning myself for an unsightly stretch mark or a stubborn piece of flesh that does not hang the way I want it to in a bikini. Or in a less superficial way (infinitely truer and more important), a lifetime of having to constantly prove myself because I am a woman (and somehow lesser than the guys).
It is only in becoming a mother that I've been able to escape some of that constant self worth questioning, that general hatred of my too fat, too awkward, too womanly body, which (as trivial as it sounds) becomes hard to separate from self. I love the strength motherhood has given me to call back at those hecklers (oh boys, too bad you'll never know what you are missing).
Yet, the truth of the mater is the realization comes easier in private than in public, and its relatively easy to fall back into my old way of thinking, especially when surrounded by judgment so easily sprouting from other's lips.
When we finally came into view of the chairlift again, this time (thankfully) it was my husband calling to us as he got off the lift. Somehow, without the assistance of our cell phones, we had arrived on top of the mountain at the very same time (although neither of us questioned who had had the harder journey). We joked together about how must be training to enter the family version of the Amazing Race, the show that guarantees any couple the thrill of a lifetime in circumscribing the globe (although they may no longer be speaking to one another at the end of it.)
While something tells me that these scenes would indeed make for good TV(especially when it comes to finding a suitable spot above 10,000 feet for a diaper change), I don't think I would take Bruckhiemer's call. Too much simply gets missed as a spectator sport.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Performance Artist
Curtain opens. The murmuring of the crowd dims. (Although the teenagers along the front row continue to send text messages, their feet up on the railing.)
The juggler appears center stage. Ball one (self). Ball two (marriage). The juggler completes her task with (as is appropriately conceived) one hand tied behind her back, smiling.
When Ball Three (baby) is introduced, maybe a few in the crowd sit up, but nobody sucks in their breath. The juggler knows her job too well: Make it look easy. Lull the crowd into believing that nothing here is precarious. Perhaps they should get up and join her or start their own side act. (Although fewer are attempting to manage this feat, at least statistically speaking.)
Her act looks ordinary, usual, proper (quaint? kitsch?). Barely enough to hold anyone's interest. Even the juggler starts to look away and wonder where the woman in the third row gets her highlights done or what the man sitting next to her looks like in swim trunks before the juggler's fingers slip on a ball spinning midair and she steps uneasily to the side to catch it. (Three, it turns out, is enough to hold the juggler's own attention.)
She continues to smile out at the crowd (she is, after all, enjoying herself) even as she watches the couple in the back row vacate their seats and the teenagers tap restlessly on the keys of their cell phones.
She begins to wonder how many balls it will take, four (a promotion) five (another child), ten (her spouse's promotion, another degree or certification, after-school activities, winning a Pulitzer/Grammy/mention in the local paper/coffee mug with her name on it, getting her children into Harvard/Princeton/Vassar/community college) before anyone will be captivated by her performance.
What if she lights the balls on fire? Is that what it takes to have someone (anyone) sit up and take notice? When is it that the crowd will realize the balls (regardless of their number or chemical state) will drop the minute she turns away?
Newton: Didn't you ever notice it was your mother who stood in the way of gravity?
The juggler appears center stage. Ball one (self). Ball two (marriage). The juggler completes her task with (as is appropriately conceived) one hand tied behind her back, smiling.
When Ball Three (baby) is introduced, maybe a few in the crowd sit up, but nobody sucks in their breath. The juggler knows her job too well: Make it look easy. Lull the crowd into believing that nothing here is precarious. Perhaps they should get up and join her or start their own side act. (Although fewer are attempting to manage this feat, at least statistically speaking.)
Her act looks ordinary, usual, proper (quaint? kitsch?). Barely enough to hold anyone's interest. Even the juggler starts to look away and wonder where the woman in the third row gets her highlights done or what the man sitting next to her looks like in swim trunks before the juggler's fingers slip on a ball spinning midair and she steps uneasily to the side to catch it. (Three, it turns out, is enough to hold the juggler's own attention.)
She continues to smile out at the crowd (she is, after all, enjoying herself) even as she watches the couple in the back row vacate their seats and the teenagers tap restlessly on the keys of their cell phones.
She begins to wonder how many balls it will take, four (a promotion) five (another child), ten (her spouse's promotion, another degree or certification, after-school activities, winning a Pulitzer/Grammy/mention in the local paper/coffee mug with her name on it, getting her children into Harvard/Princeton/Vassar/community college) before anyone will be captivated by her performance.
What if she lights the balls on fire? Is that what it takes to have someone (anyone) sit up and take notice? When is it that the crowd will realize the balls (regardless of their number or chemical state) will drop the minute she turns away?
Newton: Didn't you ever notice it was your mother who stood in the way of gravity?
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Modern Inconvenience
After twelve months, two weeks, and roughly 3,528 ounces, I coil the tubes of my breast pump and cram them along with several collection bottles, two breast shields (the clear plastic forms that resemble miniature bullhorns and literally suck half your flesh into the opening), and a few stray pre-sterilized zip-lock baggies into a black, nylon impostor of a designer purse (aka the Medela Pump in Style Advanced with 2-Phase Expression, “the ideal electric breast pump for active or working mothers to support a long breastfeeding period,” which the WHO now recommends as two years).
I unplug the cord from the wall, making sure to place the small, plastic safety cap snuggly over the outlet. (My husband has almost always had to reminded me to do this a half hour later when he comes down the stairs to present me with our fully-dressed daughter so that the two of us can struggle into the car laden with diaper bag, pump bag, laptop, lunch sack, cell phone, ear bud, pacifier, blanket, teddy bear, rattle, or other musical toy with buttons to push, and begin our morning commute.)
I fold the cord deliberately, taking the time to press it smooth and avoid making knots in the wire. I wedge it carefully up against the small square motor to be sure I am doing no damage to this expensive and irreplaceable part, the soul of the machine that made it thump like a heart beat—suck-release, suck-release—which played as a voice in my head chanting “in a hurry, in a hurry” for some forty-odd cycles per minute for twenty minutes, two to three times each and every day. Then, slowly, I zip the front pocket for the last time. I whisk the bag off my kitchen table, and instead of lugging it into my car, I tramp it down the stairs for storage in my basement.
Today, I am giving up the pump.
As with several first-time aspects of new motherhood, I have experienced a love-hate relationship with my pump. I loved that pumping forced me to sit still twice a day for twenty minutes (a simple sounding pleasure that quickly takes on the dignity of the sublime for anyone with an infant).
I hated that once I started back to work, I often spent those twenty minutes sitting at my desk, checking email. (I've also pumped while driving, although I do not recommend this.)
I loved that pumping enabled us to donate 739 ounces to the Mother's Milk Bank at St. Luke's in Denver to nourish other infants, suffering from digestive problems and whose mothers could not sustain their own supply. (I say “us” because without my daughter, this gift would not have been possible.)
I hated that pumping led me to discover (with increasing disappointment) that bathrooms are designed with outlets only in the most visible of places—always in front of large mirrors at the entrance and never behind the safe seclusion of stall doors—so that more than half of the female student body at the university where I work has probably seen my breasts at one time or another. (This repeated event, of course, prompted me to ask one gawking undergraduate if this was cautioning her to rethink the feminist movement.)
I loved the release, even if it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.
I hated that it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.
First patented back in 1854, the pump is essentially a miniaturized version of that which is used in commercial dairy operations. It has seen little improvement in engineering since Einar Egnell's groundbreaking 1956 work “Viewpoints on what happens mechanically in the female breast during various methods of milk collection.” The fact that this research was conducted at the height of the era of the Feminine Mystique renders our history of that time a bit suspect. While cultural mythology tells me that my own mother was learning the trade of changing her brother's diapers under her own mother's careful tutelage, Egnell was simultaneously laying the groundwork for her to be the breastfeeding working mother she was in the 1980s when I was born.
I hated them both when I finally admitted to the fact that I would indeed be returning to work at the end of my too-short, twelve-week maternity leave and so sat down one night to read the fat, impossible instruction book, complete with threatening chart for when and how your milk would go bad if not properly stored. I also read several online advice columns of a long list of things I would need in order to successfully produce while pumping: a photo of my daughter, a relaxing quiet space, an eight ounce glass of water for consumption before and after pumping. I was also instructed to spread my arms up over my head and flap them several times as well as to message both breasts. Mood music was also recommended, although I never figured out exactly what kind of music was supposed to get me in the mood. (Brahms lullaby perhaps? “Milk” by Garbage or Sons of Leon? “Safe as Milk” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band? The multi-album recordings by Neutral Milk Hotel?) Because the machine came with a $400 price tag, I was more afraid of breaking it than it breaking me.
Thankfully, I am proud to report that both the machine and my breasts have survived this experience in tact and I did not need to find a breast pumping symphony in order to successfully "produce." My daughter made it through her infancy without a drop of IQ-draining formula (even if no one from the prenatal classes where I first heard this claim could ever actually produce the study that renders this suspect "fact" as truth.)
However, before I go on to bash my pump as a hellish invention, a modern inconvenience that keeps job-protected maternity leave down to a mere twelve weeks (but only for the lucky ones who work for companies that employ 50 or more people, which is less than half of the companies in today's marketplace); my pump did exactly what it was supposed to: enabled me to continue to be the breastfeeding, on-call, ever-present, calm-my-daughter-by-walking-in-the-room mother I wanted to be and be the hard-driving, energetic, I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-better, accomplished career woman I was pre-pregnancy/pre-birth.
Or did it?
The truth is I weep in the privacy of my car nearly every day I drop my daughter off with her nanny, even though she learns sign language or comes home with her wispy thin hair in tiny pigtails I'd never have the patience to put in. She is as eager to see me when I pick her up as she is when I come into her room in the mornings to retrieve her from the crib. She goes swimming and visits the new born foals just down the street from her nanny's house who are growing like she is with every passing day. I cry, not for her loss of happiness (she is actually, delightedly happy), but instead because I am missing it.
The truth is every time I successfully lead a project to conclusion, hear my boss or colleagues impressed with an idea I have at work, make a difference in the way we are doing things, delivering a better experience for our constituency, I am no less thrilled than I was before.
What I hated the most about my pump was the fact that it made it possible for me to step away from my daughter in those early moments when she needed me the most.
What I loved? For those few minutes a day, it upheld the illusion. It made the impossible seem easy, convenient, sane.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
June, 1946 (A Poem for My Mother)
Slick and sweet-smelling, you came into this world, into your mother's arms.
And, she took you with joy, relieved and slightly surprised by the length of your ten tiny fingers topped with those long perfect nails: miniature replicas of the one's she always wanted, but could never quite master.
Your father leaned in, looked down, awe caught up in the back of his throat with the dewy bit of wetness escaping from his eyes.
And even though it will be nine or so months before you say your first words, issue your first declaration of intention, three years before you run away from home for the first time to sit under an oak tree with paper cut outs of food your only source of sustenance, eighteen before you move out for good, thirty some odd before you marry a man, get an education, build a career, have a child of your own (not necessarily in that order or packaged with such neatness) -- you, with that small mewling cry, changed their lives forever.
And, she took you with joy, relieved and slightly surprised by the length of your ten tiny fingers topped with those long perfect nails: miniature replicas of the one's she always wanted, but could never quite master.
Your father leaned in, looked down, awe caught up in the back of his throat with the dewy bit of wetness escaping from his eyes.
And even though it will be nine or so months before you say your first words, issue your first declaration of intention, three years before you run away from home for the first time to sit under an oak tree with paper cut outs of food your only source of sustenance, eighteen before you move out for good, thirty some odd before you marry a man, get an education, build a career, have a child of your own (not necessarily in that order or packaged with such neatness) -- you, with that small mewling cry, changed their lives forever.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
In the Shadow of the Giving Tree
I've been thinking a great deal lately about Shel Silverstein's 1964 children's classic The Giving Tree. On the surface, it is a story about a boy and a tree who loves him. She gives him everything he could possibly desire – shade, sustenance, enjoyment, laughter. At first, this giving gives them both a sense of happiness. Yet ultimately, the tree is consumed by the boy's desires and ends up as nothing but a roting stump on which the boy, now an old man, can rest.
I remember this book as one of my childhood favorites. (I loved all Silverstein works for their variable “life lessons,” which children are especially good at detecting if only, at first pass, on the literal level.) Yet, I also remember feeling a profound disappointment when arriving at the end and learning that there was nothing left of the tree but a stump. I flipped back and forth between the last page and the back cover, desperate to discover that a few pages had indeed been removed.
How could the story end this way? Wasn't love supposed to do more than eat us up and render us near useless? As an avid consumer of fairy-tales, I always expected that somehow through the magic of love (and perhaps water and fairy dust), the tree would re-grow its branches when the boy returned, and instead of remaining an old and weary man, he too would be rendered young again to play in the tree's branches. (Doesn't this sound more like the Disney classics our generation was raised on?)
Of course, this story is also a fable about motherhood. In fact, in Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, she suggests that The Giving Tree has become the prevailing metaphor for motherhood. Not only the motherhood of the 1950s and 60s when Silverstein was writing this work and women were being drawn in helplessly by the feminine mystique like moths to a porch light (especially those new fangled ones from the Sears and Roebuck catalog), but that this tale, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and is the writer's most famous work, still captivates us as the way we experience motherhood today, more than fifty years later.
Warner gives many examples to build her case from her interviews with hundreds of women and from stories in popular media in which uber self-sacrificing moms are rendered the great heroines of our time (as perhaps they should be?).
I can't say that Warner is wrong exactly. (When I mused about this with my mother-in-law, she agreed that sometimes, you are consumed by your children. And when I recently discussed the decision of when to wean with one of my best friends, she said simply that I would know, that there would come a day when I would feel as though my child was sucking the calcium right out of my bones.)
I also can't say that my childhood distaste for the ending of The Giving Tree was because of some intrinsic sense that I would be a mother someday and I feared the self-sacrificing love it would require of me.
What I can say is that at a gut level, I found (and still find) the story simply dissatisfying. While I loved the moments when the tree provided shade, shelter, even the fruit of its own labor, (an apt metaphor for breastfeeding, planting a garden, and/or bringing home a paycheck and groceries, all things that have been required of me in the past year) I could never understand why exactly the tree didn't tell the boy to build his house out of dirt or go buy some fiberglass when he wants to build a boat and sail away.
Yet, stories are things that get into your bones, especially if we grow up in their constant presence. And, in many ways, I did grow up in the shadow of The Giving Tree. I grew up fearing that without fighting against it, motherhood, by its very nature, would render me small, frightened and cloistered like my mother was always portraying her mother to me. (I also grew up hearing my father say that he'd be a very rich man if it wasn't for us kids.)
However, in my one year, one month and a few hours, my experience of motherhood has been not a selfless act, but a profoundly selfish one. I've not been emptied, cut down or diminished, but enriched – and tangibly so – by having a child. Maybe I am naive, but I want to believe that mothers, like trees, are magical beings and can give in ways that do not come at the expense of ourselves, but that enriches both tree and child. (Even in real life, where there seems an unfortunate dearth of fairy dust.)
What I can also say is that I think we need a new story. (I do, at least. Maybe this one will work for you, too. Or even better, write your own and leave it in the comments!) Here's mine:
Once upon a time, there was a tree and there was a child.
When the child was a baby, the tree let down her leaves to make a soft bed and the wind through her branches was a lullaby. The child slept and dreamed and both the tree and child were happy.
When the child was hungry, the tree would grow fruit and the child would eat the fruit and enjoy its taste. As the juice dripped down the child's chin, the tree would laugh, the child would smile. They both were happy.
As the child grew, the tree grew and there were new branches and new leaves. The tree showed the child how to climb up into the branches and look out at the big, wide world and imagine its possibilities. And instead of making a soft bed for sleeping, the leaves were a soft place to land when the child lost balance and fell out of the tree. So the child learned to climb higher and higher and see farther and farther in the world, and they both were happy.
And although they were happy, there came a time when they were also lonely for the child was not a tree and the tree was not a child. The child also grew tired of looking out at the big, wide world and wanted to adventure in it. So, after many long nights, the tree told the child to go out and adventure.
Even though the child was scared (and the tree was also scared, but didn't want to show it), the tree helped the child pack and extra bag of fruit so that the child would not be alone in the big, wide world, but carry a piece of the tree on the journey. So, the child set out to experience the big, wide world and not just look at it. (They both, at this moment, weren't exactly sure if they'd be happy, but they wore brave faces for each other.)
While the child was off adventuring, the tree continued to grow and make fruit and the fruit fell to the ground and new trees sprung up around the first tree and the new trees brought more children.
While the child was off adventuring, the child saw and experienced many beautiful things. The child found new trees and climbed them and met other children and learned their ways. The child was indeed happy that it had been set lose upon the world by the tree.
When the child returned, the tree had grown and around it was an orchard full of trees and other children. The child too had grown into an adult and told the tree of all that was seen in the big, wide world. The child also brought back fruit from far away places and the tree and child decided to plant them in the orchard to grow new and different trees.
The child and tree leaned into each other and they looked out upon the orchard, at the children swinging from the branches of young trees. They saw that the world was made better because they both were in it, and they both were happy.
I remember this book as one of my childhood favorites. (I loved all Silverstein works for their variable “life lessons,” which children are especially good at detecting if only, at first pass, on the literal level.) Yet, I also remember feeling a profound disappointment when arriving at the end and learning that there was nothing left of the tree but a stump. I flipped back and forth between the last page and the back cover, desperate to discover that a few pages had indeed been removed.
How could the story end this way? Wasn't love supposed to do more than eat us up and render us near useless? As an avid consumer of fairy-tales, I always expected that somehow through the magic of love (and perhaps water and fairy dust), the tree would re-grow its branches when the boy returned, and instead of remaining an old and weary man, he too would be rendered young again to play in the tree's branches. (Doesn't this sound more like the Disney classics our generation was raised on?)
Of course, this story is also a fable about motherhood. In fact, in Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, she suggests that The Giving Tree has become the prevailing metaphor for motherhood. Not only the motherhood of the 1950s and 60s when Silverstein was writing this work and women were being drawn in helplessly by the feminine mystique like moths to a porch light (especially those new fangled ones from the Sears and Roebuck catalog), but that this tale, which has been translated into more than 30 languages and is the writer's most famous work, still captivates us as the way we experience motherhood today, more than fifty years later.
Warner gives many examples to build her case from her interviews with hundreds of women and from stories in popular media in which uber self-sacrificing moms are rendered the great heroines of our time (as perhaps they should be?).
I can't say that Warner is wrong exactly. (When I mused about this with my mother-in-law, she agreed that sometimes, you are consumed by your children. And when I recently discussed the decision of when to wean with one of my best friends, she said simply that I would know, that there would come a day when I would feel as though my child was sucking the calcium right out of my bones.)
I also can't say that my childhood distaste for the ending of The Giving Tree was because of some intrinsic sense that I would be a mother someday and I feared the self-sacrificing love it would require of me.
What I can say is that at a gut level, I found (and still find) the story simply dissatisfying. While I loved the moments when the tree provided shade, shelter, even the fruit of its own labor, (an apt metaphor for breastfeeding, planting a garden, and/or bringing home a paycheck and groceries, all things that have been required of me in the past year) I could never understand why exactly the tree didn't tell the boy to build his house out of dirt or go buy some fiberglass when he wants to build a boat and sail away.
Yet, stories are things that get into your bones, especially if we grow up in their constant presence. And, in many ways, I did grow up in the shadow of The Giving Tree. I grew up fearing that without fighting against it, motherhood, by its very nature, would render me small, frightened and cloistered like my mother was always portraying her mother to me. (I also grew up hearing my father say that he'd be a very rich man if it wasn't for us kids.)
However, in my one year, one month and a few hours, my experience of motherhood has been not a selfless act, but a profoundly selfish one. I've not been emptied, cut down or diminished, but enriched – and tangibly so – by having a child. Maybe I am naive, but I want to believe that mothers, like trees, are magical beings and can give in ways that do not come at the expense of ourselves, but that enriches both tree and child. (Even in real life, where there seems an unfortunate dearth of fairy dust.)
What I can also say is that I think we need a new story. (I do, at least. Maybe this one will work for you, too. Or even better, write your own and leave it in the comments!) Here's mine:
Once upon a time, there was a tree and there was a child.
When the child was a baby, the tree let down her leaves to make a soft bed and the wind through her branches was a lullaby. The child slept and dreamed and both the tree and child were happy.
When the child was hungry, the tree would grow fruit and the child would eat the fruit and enjoy its taste. As the juice dripped down the child's chin, the tree would laugh, the child would smile. They both were happy.
As the child grew, the tree grew and there were new branches and new leaves. The tree showed the child how to climb up into the branches and look out at the big, wide world and imagine its possibilities. And instead of making a soft bed for sleeping, the leaves were a soft place to land when the child lost balance and fell out of the tree. So the child learned to climb higher and higher and see farther and farther in the world, and they both were happy.
And although they were happy, there came a time when they were also lonely for the child was not a tree and the tree was not a child. The child also grew tired of looking out at the big, wide world and wanted to adventure in it. So, after many long nights, the tree told the child to go out and adventure.
Even though the child was scared (and the tree was also scared, but didn't want to show it), the tree helped the child pack and extra bag of fruit so that the child would not be alone in the big, wide world, but carry a piece of the tree on the journey. So, the child set out to experience the big, wide world and not just look at it. (They both, at this moment, weren't exactly sure if they'd be happy, but they wore brave faces for each other.)
While the child was off adventuring, the tree continued to grow and make fruit and the fruit fell to the ground and new trees sprung up around the first tree and the new trees brought more children.
While the child was off adventuring, the child saw and experienced many beautiful things. The child found new trees and climbed them and met other children and learned their ways. The child was indeed happy that it had been set lose upon the world by the tree.
When the child returned, the tree had grown and around it was an orchard full of trees and other children. The child too had grown into an adult and told the tree of all that was seen in the big, wide world. The child also brought back fruit from far away places and the tree and child decided to plant them in the orchard to grow new and different trees.
The child and tree leaned into each other and they looked out upon the orchard, at the children swinging from the branches of young trees. They saw that the world was made better because they both were in it, and they both were happy.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Ordinary Holiday
Being a Virgo, I am admittedly a perfectionist. Because of this, I tend to ruin holidays. I over plan, so the days I am most supposed to enjoy end up being an anxiety ridden mess.
My year long adventure into motherhood has been a great undoing of sorts in this aspect of my personality. I've been forced to recognize that I am not really in the least bit of control and that life is a daily set of negotiations, namely now with a being whose will I have come to discover is no less yielding than my own.
For the most part, there has been a great comfort and relief in this aspect of motherhood, namely because it has expedited a great life lesson I should have known all along. I've enjoyed being coerced into new life rhythms, dictated by time for naps and nursing, not to mention the way in which the world simply ceases to spin (if you'll let it) the instant that your child holds her hand up to your own in pure fascination with the size difference.
Yet, at the start of my second ever Mother's Day, I found my old habits ruling as I tried to plan the perfect holiday, a mix of family time and me time that would represent a near flawless 24 hours. The day, of course, would not go according to plan.
First, I wanted to finish reading a book, so I sneaked off early to bed on the night before Mother's Day only to be interrupted by a late-night package delivery that sent our dog into an uproar, despite the large sign outside our front door that begs people not to ring the door bell. Of course, this woke up our daughter and restarted our bedtime routine (the novel remains unread).
Next on my list, I wanted to sleep in. Instead, our daughter woke up at 2 am and then again at 4:30 am, flopping around in our bed like a fish between us and then, using the headboard, scooted herself into standing position and dropped down onto our shoulders or sides repeatedly in a WWE move that I can't imagine where she's learned seeing as she doesn't watch TV, until my husband finally got up and brought her downstairs to play. (Yes! Sleep!)
I did not want to do my own laundry. I ran out of clean bras and consequently suffered uncomfortably for most of the day in an old, ill-fitting one.
I wanted to go out to eat for breakfast. We ended up waiting outside the restaurant for nearly two hours while we chased our daughter up and down the sidewalk not only because Mother's Day is the most popular day to dine out according to the National Restaurant Association, but also because our restaurant was located mere blocks from the finish line for the Colorado Marathon.
As we navigated through a sea of runners in various colors of spandex, looking increasingly tired, sore and miserable, which was no doubt how I was beginning to feel, it did not help that my husband began to muse on the stupidity of those who willingly choose to do things they clearly hate.
This made me wonder about the purpose of Mother's Day to begin with and what it is we mother's really want. As I'd polled my other mother friends leading up to the holiday about how they would be spending “their special day,” most reported that they'd be spending time by themselves, going to a movie, getting a facial, sneaking off to read a book. My own list of wants was looking increasingly similar to theirs -- one single day off. Yet, isn't it virtually impossible to be simultaneously celebrated by your family and not be in the same room with them? It's no wonder that Anna Jarvis ended up arrested during a protest against the very holiday she spent her life trying to create.
Finally, midway through the day, I stopped searching for something extraordinary, and instead went for having just our plain ordinary Sunday.
After the afternoon nap, we went grocery shopping, and I watched my daughter push her miniature cart down the aisle with unfettered delight. I even cooked dinner and was relieved not to spend another meal trying to keep her from throwing food onto the floor, but instead allowing our four-legged vacuum cleaner to earn his keep. My husband and I even did dishes together and teased each other over who was spilling more water outside the sink.
The day ended in our own backyard as we tumbled in the grass and my husband and I attempted to have a handstand contest that ended in a draw because we couldn't keep our daughter at safe distance from our flailing legs as she tried to emulate our handstands, her tiny diaper-widened bottom waving in the air.
Of course, it hit me, our ordinary life brings the kind of extraordinary pleasure I'd spent the whole day looking for and isn't that after all what Mother's Day, motherhood, is really about.
My year long adventure into motherhood has been a great undoing of sorts in this aspect of my personality. I've been forced to recognize that I am not really in the least bit of control and that life is a daily set of negotiations, namely now with a being whose will I have come to discover is no less yielding than my own.
For the most part, there has been a great comfort and relief in this aspect of motherhood, namely because it has expedited a great life lesson I should have known all along. I've enjoyed being coerced into new life rhythms, dictated by time for naps and nursing, not to mention the way in which the world simply ceases to spin (if you'll let it) the instant that your child holds her hand up to your own in pure fascination with the size difference.
Yet, at the start of my second ever Mother's Day, I found my old habits ruling as I tried to plan the perfect holiday, a mix of family time and me time that would represent a near flawless 24 hours. The day, of course, would not go according to plan.
First, I wanted to finish reading a book, so I sneaked off early to bed on the night before Mother's Day only to be interrupted by a late-night package delivery that sent our dog into an uproar, despite the large sign outside our front door that begs people not to ring the door bell. Of course, this woke up our daughter and restarted our bedtime routine (the novel remains unread).
Next on my list, I wanted to sleep in. Instead, our daughter woke up at 2 am and then again at 4:30 am, flopping around in our bed like a fish between us and then, using the headboard, scooted herself into standing position and dropped down onto our shoulders or sides repeatedly in a WWE move that I can't imagine where she's learned seeing as she doesn't watch TV, until my husband finally got up and brought her downstairs to play. (Yes! Sleep!)
I did not want to do my own laundry. I ran out of clean bras and consequently suffered uncomfortably for most of the day in an old, ill-fitting one.
I wanted to go out to eat for breakfast. We ended up waiting outside the restaurant for nearly two hours while we chased our daughter up and down the sidewalk not only because Mother's Day is the most popular day to dine out according to the National Restaurant Association, but also because our restaurant was located mere blocks from the finish line for the Colorado Marathon.
As we navigated through a sea of runners in various colors of spandex, looking increasingly tired, sore and miserable, which was no doubt how I was beginning to feel, it did not help that my husband began to muse on the stupidity of those who willingly choose to do things they clearly hate.
This made me wonder about the purpose of Mother's Day to begin with and what it is we mother's really want. As I'd polled my other mother friends leading up to the holiday about how they would be spending “their special day,” most reported that they'd be spending time by themselves, going to a movie, getting a facial, sneaking off to read a book. My own list of wants was looking increasingly similar to theirs -- one single day off. Yet, isn't it virtually impossible to be simultaneously celebrated by your family and not be in the same room with them? It's no wonder that Anna Jarvis ended up arrested during a protest against the very holiday she spent her life trying to create.
Finally, midway through the day, I stopped searching for something extraordinary, and instead went for having just our plain ordinary Sunday.
After the afternoon nap, we went grocery shopping, and I watched my daughter push her miniature cart down the aisle with unfettered delight. I even cooked dinner and was relieved not to spend another meal trying to keep her from throwing food onto the floor, but instead allowing our four-legged vacuum cleaner to earn his keep. My husband and I even did dishes together and teased each other over who was spilling more water outside the sink.
The day ended in our own backyard as we tumbled in the grass and my husband and I attempted to have a handstand contest that ended in a draw because we couldn't keep our daughter at safe distance from our flailing legs as she tried to emulate our handstands, her tiny diaper-widened bottom waving in the air.
Of course, it hit me, our ordinary life brings the kind of extraordinary pleasure I'd spent the whole day looking for and isn't that after all what Mother's Day, motherhood, is really about.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Financial Insecurity
A few days ago, like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, my husband and I walked into a bank and slipped a note across the counter to the teller.
Give me all my money, it read.
The clerk, a girl in her twenties who will compliment me on my wallet during our transaction before she learns with disappointment that it was purchased at a thrift store, barely raised her eyebrows. Instead, with a friendly smile, she turned from us to consult her manager and seek approval on the cashier’s check we had, in actuality, requested.
Like many of our fellow Americans, my husband and I are refinancing our home. We’re “taking advantage of the incredible interest rates" that we've been told won’t be around much longer. After we lock our rate, I watch several news reports noting that the interest rate has indeed “reached an all-time, 30-month high.” Because it is a point above the rate I’ve cleverly secured, these reports make me grin with pleasure.
The current “mortgage crisis” that has triggered “the great recession” seems chock-full of these double entendres, a mastery of language with the soul purpose of reducing meaning so that the rest of us can’t figure out what the hell is really going on.
Maybe it’s because too many talented writers have gone into the marketing industry and credit is now extended to us with dazzling phrases like “Chase Freedom,” which, by the way, is now trademarked.
I can’t help but notice that these same catch-phrases being tossed around today are the very same ones first used on us in 2006, the height of the sub-prime mortgage craze, when my husband and I first set out to purchase our home.
At the time, we had been married for two years and were rapidly outgrowing our small rental. Like everyone else, we wanted to buy a home. Also like everyone else, we had no idea what we were doing.
Despite this fact, everyone seemed to support us from our parents to our friends to our co-workers. Perhaps it was because they all held mortgages and wanted us to join them in their sinking ship. Regardless, there was no shortage of encouraging advice. Rent is like flushing money down the toilet, they said. The housing market is only going to go up, you might as well get in now. You can write the interest off your income taxes.
Even in the supermarket, I remember circling the aisles and hearing the manager on the intercom beaconing us to stop at the branch bank at the front of the store to find out more about the historic interest rate lows.
Only our landlord was sad to hear that we would be leaving our cottage, which we’d completely renovated in trade for a few months of free rent. She even offered us their five bedroom farmhouse that they were having to re-list because a deal to develop the land had been blocked by the town. Yet, we thumbed our nose at the offer in trade for the coveted dream of ownership.
The first mortgage officer we visited was the epitome of the crooked brokers that have been recently cartooned. (It should be noted that his office was located in the Merrill Lynch Building.) He tried to offer us a loan nearly 5 times that of our annual income and, even though our credit scores were well into the 700s, he also claimed that we’d never qualify for a fixed 30-year rate and would have to go with a 7-year ARM for 80% of our loan and the remaining 10% would be a fifteen-year balloon (we had figured out how to get 10% down out of our retirement vehicles, which ended up costing us a bundle in taxes, but that's for another essay).
It is only in retrospect that I am now well-versed enough to understand why exactly he was selling us a load of goods. Fortunately for us, we simply got a bad vibe at his insistence that we should buy a house for much more than we felt we could comfortably afford. (Also, for any of you marketers reading this, I would avoid pairing the word “balloon” with anything having to do with finances. While attractive to young children, it is far too accurate an image of something that will eventually explode.)
When we left his office, it was with a rancid taste in our mouths that has only gotten worse as we’ve watched houses on our block foreclose, and I can only surmise that these losses were because of his loans or from others like him.
I’m going to spare you the details. Our story is not the tragedy that it could have been. We ended up with a decent sized house priced at a little less than 2.5 times our annual salaries and a 30-year fixed rate from a broker who sends us birthday and Christmas cards and who I feel bonded with enough to call a friend though I think he thinks I’m a little weird and all too eager to talk interest rates and amortization tables. Although we’ve watched our house drop in value over the last eighteen months, we are not underwater with our loan (despite the fact that today 24% of residential home owners are.)
So, this time around, I can’t really understand exactly how it is that we are again being offered something for a seeming nothing, a new loan with a lower interest rate. And perhaps, the reason why I feel a bit like a robber standing at the bank asking for my own money to make this transaction.
If anything, anyone who has turned on the news knows that there is no such thing as a free lunch, you can be hurt by what you don’t know, and easy credit is simply too good to be true.
I’ve done the math many times over (there is a great website for amortization calculations if you’d like to do your own ) and the bank is loosing money on this deal (and pressumably the millions of others like it).
Even with $4,000 in incentives for servicers backed by the government’s HASP program (which I can count as coming out of this taxpayer’s pocket), I’m not a borrower anywhere near default. I suppose they risk losing me to another bank that will beat their price and there is a miniscule amount they collect in service fees (which I immediately recoup because my first payment on my new mortgage isn’t due for 60 days.) Even though it will take me four more years to pay off this loan if I make every scheduled payment as I’m starting over at 30 years, at the end of the day what I pay will be lower than staying in my current loan.
As of the end of January, 1.3 million borrowers were taking advantage of loan modifications available through HASP, the Homeowners Affordability and Sustainability Program (yet another ACONYM that is supposed to suggest "free money"). This doesn’t include countless borrowers like me who just want to refinance to follow the trends on the 30-year bond.
With the dominant narrative circulating -- the Wall Street bankers armed with their clever language and incompetent ratings agencies that made sub-prime deals sound like a song (even the term sub-prime seems to suggest you are getting a better deal that is lower than prime even when it is actually far above) -- I am eager to be seemingly on the “right,” money-saving side of this transaction. Yet, I think it’s all too Pollyanna to believe that the banks (and the bankers who’ve all continued to make millions thanks to the fact that their companies are publicly held and therefore all the risk is assumed by their stockholders) are actually taking a hit.
Perhaps it should be noted that HASP only applies to the safest, most likely to repay their debts homeowners, those whose loans are gaurenteed by Uncle Sam's cousin's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and not the borrowers who were sold these complicated language and reality defying products that opened up the doors to this whole mess. Maybe that is a piece of the grand irony here. We are using our tax dollars to sure up loans that would in all likelihood be repaid. We're making the safest of bets and everyone seems happy about it.
As we walk out of the bank, my husband and I feel light and airy. We joke to each other about the soreness in our wrists from signing the pile of mortgage papers and wonder if anyone has ever made a successful personal injury claim. Yet, somehow I can’t escape the feeling that the alarm has indeed been triggered. It’s just that we can’t hear it yet.
Give me all my money, it read.
The clerk, a girl in her twenties who will compliment me on my wallet during our transaction before she learns with disappointment that it was purchased at a thrift store, barely raised her eyebrows. Instead, with a friendly smile, she turned from us to consult her manager and seek approval on the cashier’s check we had, in actuality, requested.
Like many of our fellow Americans, my husband and I are refinancing our home. We’re “taking advantage of the incredible interest rates" that we've been told won’t be around much longer. After we lock our rate, I watch several news reports noting that the interest rate has indeed “reached an all-time, 30-month high.” Because it is a point above the rate I’ve cleverly secured, these reports make me grin with pleasure.
The current “mortgage crisis” that has triggered “the great recession” seems chock-full of these double entendres, a mastery of language with the soul purpose of reducing meaning so that the rest of us can’t figure out what the hell is really going on.
Maybe it’s because too many talented writers have gone into the marketing industry and credit is now extended to us with dazzling phrases like “Chase Freedom,” which, by the way, is now trademarked.
I can’t help but notice that these same catch-phrases being tossed around today are the very same ones first used on us in 2006, the height of the sub-prime mortgage craze, when my husband and I first set out to purchase our home.
At the time, we had been married for two years and were rapidly outgrowing our small rental. Like everyone else, we wanted to buy a home. Also like everyone else, we had no idea what we were doing.
Despite this fact, everyone seemed to support us from our parents to our friends to our co-workers. Perhaps it was because they all held mortgages and wanted us to join them in their sinking ship. Regardless, there was no shortage of encouraging advice. Rent is like flushing money down the toilet, they said. The housing market is only going to go up, you might as well get in now. You can write the interest off your income taxes.
Even in the supermarket, I remember circling the aisles and hearing the manager on the intercom beaconing us to stop at the branch bank at the front of the store to find out more about the historic interest rate lows.
Only our landlord was sad to hear that we would be leaving our cottage, which we’d completely renovated in trade for a few months of free rent. She even offered us their five bedroom farmhouse that they were having to re-list because a deal to develop the land had been blocked by the town. Yet, we thumbed our nose at the offer in trade for the coveted dream of ownership.
The first mortgage officer we visited was the epitome of the crooked brokers that have been recently cartooned. (It should be noted that his office was located in the Merrill Lynch Building.) He tried to offer us a loan nearly 5 times that of our annual income and, even though our credit scores were well into the 700s, he also claimed that we’d never qualify for a fixed 30-year rate and would have to go with a 7-year ARM for 80% of our loan and the remaining 10% would be a fifteen-year balloon (we had figured out how to get 10% down out of our retirement vehicles, which ended up costing us a bundle in taxes, but that's for another essay).
It is only in retrospect that I am now well-versed enough to understand why exactly he was selling us a load of goods. Fortunately for us, we simply got a bad vibe at his insistence that we should buy a house for much more than we felt we could comfortably afford. (Also, for any of you marketers reading this, I would avoid pairing the word “balloon” with anything having to do with finances. While attractive to young children, it is far too accurate an image of something that will eventually explode.)
When we left his office, it was with a rancid taste in our mouths that has only gotten worse as we’ve watched houses on our block foreclose, and I can only surmise that these losses were because of his loans or from others like him.
I’m going to spare you the details. Our story is not the tragedy that it could have been. We ended up with a decent sized house priced at a little less than 2.5 times our annual salaries and a 30-year fixed rate from a broker who sends us birthday and Christmas cards and who I feel bonded with enough to call a friend though I think he thinks I’m a little weird and all too eager to talk interest rates and amortization tables. Although we’ve watched our house drop in value over the last eighteen months, we are not underwater with our loan (despite the fact that today 24% of residential home owners are.)
So, this time around, I can’t really understand exactly how it is that we are again being offered something for a seeming nothing, a new loan with a lower interest rate. And perhaps, the reason why I feel a bit like a robber standing at the bank asking for my own money to make this transaction.
If anything, anyone who has turned on the news knows that there is no such thing as a free lunch, you can be hurt by what you don’t know, and easy credit is simply too good to be true.
I’ve done the math many times over (there is a great website for amortization calculations if you’d like to do your own ) and the bank is loosing money on this deal (and pressumably the millions of others like it).
Even with $4,000 in incentives for servicers backed by the government’s HASP program (which I can count as coming out of this taxpayer’s pocket), I’m not a borrower anywhere near default. I suppose they risk losing me to another bank that will beat their price and there is a miniscule amount they collect in service fees (which I immediately recoup because my first payment on my new mortgage isn’t due for 60 days.) Even though it will take me four more years to pay off this loan if I make every scheduled payment as I’m starting over at 30 years, at the end of the day what I pay will be lower than staying in my current loan.
As of the end of January, 1.3 million borrowers were taking advantage of loan modifications available through HASP, the Homeowners Affordability and Sustainability Program (yet another ACONYM that is supposed to suggest "free money"). This doesn’t include countless borrowers like me who just want to refinance to follow the trends on the 30-year bond.
With the dominant narrative circulating -- the Wall Street bankers armed with their clever language and incompetent ratings agencies that made sub-prime deals sound like a song (even the term sub-prime seems to suggest you are getting a better deal that is lower than prime even when it is actually far above) -- I am eager to be seemingly on the “right,” money-saving side of this transaction. Yet, I think it’s all too Pollyanna to believe that the banks (and the bankers who’ve all continued to make millions thanks to the fact that their companies are publicly held and therefore all the risk is assumed by their stockholders) are actually taking a hit.
Perhaps it should be noted that HASP only applies to the safest, most likely to repay their debts homeowners, those whose loans are gaurenteed by Uncle Sam's cousin's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and not the borrowers who were sold these complicated language and reality defying products that opened up the doors to this whole mess. Maybe that is a piece of the grand irony here. We are using our tax dollars to sure up loans that would in all likelihood be repaid. We're making the safest of bets and everyone seems happy about it.
As we walk out of the bank, my husband and I feel light and airy. We joke to each other about the soreness in our wrists from signing the pile of mortgage papers and wonder if anyone has ever made a successful personal injury claim. Yet, somehow I can’t escape the feeling that the alarm has indeed been triggered. It’s just that we can’t hear it yet.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
My Own Personal O-Story
This past weekend, while I chased my daughter down the rows of our public library, I happened to catch the title of a book turned outward on one of the display shelves, Living Oprah, a memoir by Robyn Okrant. A yoga teacher and MFA student, Okrant attempts to embrace every directive given by the queen of talk for an entire year. The book catches my eye because I've recently started watching and writing about the cultural phenom, although I've only ever made it through two entire episodes. One with guest Jenna Jameson (see previous post) and one with Dr. Laura Berman, the sexpert, whose advice to makeout daily with one's husband for at least ten seconds I've both followed and dispensed. (I guess the common denominator is sex. Sorry Oprah! Good thing you are on when my daughter naps! Or perhaps this is not happenstance. The magazine is, in fact, titled O...)
Anyway, after 1202 hours, $4,781.84, near exhaustion, and a reluctant embrace of leopard print flats, Okrant realizes that her life is simultaneously better and worse for having followed Oprah's advice. She is thinner, but more stressed. Her apartment is more organized, but her marriage has been pretty taxed. What impresses me most about the book is that Okrant actually finishes the project and that more than 100,000 people visit her blog site. Despite Okrant's immersion journalism, the popularity of all things O still cannot be exactly explained. For what ever reason, that woman just permeates and captivates our consciousness.
Which made me realize, every one has an Oprah story. Here's mine:
Before becoming sisters, my stepsister Amber and I were best friends. We thought this was so remarkable that almost the instant that it happened, roughly around age eight, we were convinced we'd be on Oprah. We even went as far as staging mock interviews on the blue and white striped couch that had been moved from the living room of the house she had been growing up in to the basement of the house that had been mine.
Ever since age five when we met at the YMCA Youth Camp on a lake in mid-coast Maine where the bathrooms smelled so bad you'd rather pee your pants than be caught dead actually using them, we were inseparable. We spent as many afternoons after school together as we could, which amounted to practically every afternoon because all four of our parents worked. Yet, Amber's dad was a school teacher and could meet us both coming off the bus in front of her house.
We spent those long afternoons exploring the woods behind it, sledding down Bran's hill in the winter, or developing various schemes to earn money, mostly to purchase our then favorite red skinned hot dogs at the corner store.
Once we held a bottle drive and collected more than 100 bottles from the various neighbors. Only because we didn't actually have a cause, other than ourselves, we were forced to return the bottles. We were so embarrassed at the prospect of having to explain our misconceived notion of a fund-raiser that we rang the doorbell of the closest neighbor and ran away, leaving the four giant trash bags sitting lopsided on their porch. This was also around the time when we were becoming health conscious and learned that hot dogs contained things like lips and intestine, so we didn't really miss our lost profits at the time.
In short, we pretended we were sisters.
Then, something miraculous happened. Her parents got divorced. I remember her announcing this to a group of us as we sat on the floor, drawing the outlines of school lockers on large reams of butcher paper that would become the backdrop for one of our school plays. At that time, we were always acting out scenes from our overly romantic visions of high school that resembled not so thinly veiled allusions to Saved By the Bell (Amber was always the Kelly character to my nerdier, cause-driven Jessica.)
Then, something even more remarkable happened. My parents divorced.Shortly after, our parents moved in with each other and we were sisters.
I should remember the exact day this happened. The funny thing is, I don't. The series of our afternoons together meld in my memory and there is nothing to mark the occasion, the difference between when we played together as friends pretending to be sisters and when we actually became them.
What I remember instead is believing that we should be on Oprah as the coming true of an impossible wish, the Parent Trap incarnate. It didn't mater that my sister and I had no control over what was happening in our lives -- getting our parents alone in a room together was the furthest possible thing from our exploits – we still thought our story was worth telling to a national audience. A sort of truth is stranger than fiction and in our youth, when everything is both remarkably and horribly self-referential, we waited for the call from Oprah's producers.
Instead, we grew up.
High school was harder on our friendship than we imagined. To this day, I am still thankful that we had our sisterhood of chance to help our friendship of choice survive how awful and agonizingly hormonal we were to each other.
Now, as adults, I am happy to say, we are still best friends. Only, something again remarkable has happened, our parents are separated.
We did not choose the blending of our families, despite how badly we wished for it -- without a sense of repercussion and what divorce might actually mean to our parents, our siblings, ourselves. Our sister fantasy had more to do with us both being adopted by a rich and benevolent benefactor that would let us ride horses all day and eat copious amounts of calorie-free chocolate. The former something we actually grew up doing. (Thanks, Dad!!) The latter we still dream about. The reality is we have no influence over the current state of our parents' relationship.
When we first learned that our parents would be living in separate homes, I spent a considerable amount of time worrying about what this would do to our family. We live thousands of miles apart, almost clear on opposite sides of this continent. My husband and I had most recently started our own family and I wanted more than anything to bring my daughter into the larger one we all shared. I couldn't help but wonder what this development might do to the holidays I imagined?
In the months and weeks that went by, nothing much happened. We got together for the Thanksgiving. My stepmother did what she always does--cook an elaborate meal that tastes amazing and takes too long to prepare. My daughter played with her cousins. My sister and I even spent some time briefly developing another of our get-rich-quick schemes, this one involving trucking a boatload of hay from Maine, where the grass grows three cuttings, to Florida, where the sandy soil yields nothing for the thousands of horses that congregate there each winter season to avoid the cold of the more northern eastern seaboard states. Yet, even though she's moving from Maine to Florida, her leg is broken and I don't think our eight-month-old will take too well to a 1,500 mile road trip. We take a pass, still believing that there is always next year.
Perhaps what has happened to us in the last year is more remarkable than what happened to us as kids. We are still best friends and we are still sisters. We are still each other's first phone call when we long for someone simply to understand and commiserate in the way that only a shared history affords.
Oprah's show will end this year and still my sister and I aren't scheduled to appear on it. Perhaps now, we really should.
Anyway, after 1202 hours, $4,781.84, near exhaustion, and a reluctant embrace of leopard print flats, Okrant realizes that her life is simultaneously better and worse for having followed Oprah's advice. She is thinner, but more stressed. Her apartment is more organized, but her marriage has been pretty taxed. What impresses me most about the book is that Okrant actually finishes the project and that more than 100,000 people visit her blog site. Despite Okrant's immersion journalism, the popularity of all things O still cannot be exactly explained. For what ever reason, that woman just permeates and captivates our consciousness.
Which made me realize, every one has an Oprah story. Here's mine:
Before becoming sisters, my stepsister Amber and I were best friends. We thought this was so remarkable that almost the instant that it happened, roughly around age eight, we were convinced we'd be on Oprah. We even went as far as staging mock interviews on the blue and white striped couch that had been moved from the living room of the house she had been growing up in to the basement of the house that had been mine.
Ever since age five when we met at the YMCA Youth Camp on a lake in mid-coast Maine where the bathrooms smelled so bad you'd rather pee your pants than be caught dead actually using them, we were inseparable. We spent as many afternoons after school together as we could, which amounted to practically every afternoon because all four of our parents worked. Yet, Amber's dad was a school teacher and could meet us both coming off the bus in front of her house.
We spent those long afternoons exploring the woods behind it, sledding down Bran's hill in the winter, or developing various schemes to earn money, mostly to purchase our then favorite red skinned hot dogs at the corner store.
Once we held a bottle drive and collected more than 100 bottles from the various neighbors. Only because we didn't actually have a cause, other than ourselves, we were forced to return the bottles. We were so embarrassed at the prospect of having to explain our misconceived notion of a fund-raiser that we rang the doorbell of the closest neighbor and ran away, leaving the four giant trash bags sitting lopsided on their porch. This was also around the time when we were becoming health conscious and learned that hot dogs contained things like lips and intestine, so we didn't really miss our lost profits at the time.
In short, we pretended we were sisters.
Then, something miraculous happened. Her parents got divorced. I remember her announcing this to a group of us as we sat on the floor, drawing the outlines of school lockers on large reams of butcher paper that would become the backdrop for one of our school plays. At that time, we were always acting out scenes from our overly romantic visions of high school that resembled not so thinly veiled allusions to Saved By the Bell (Amber was always the Kelly character to my nerdier, cause-driven Jessica.)
Then, something even more remarkable happened. My parents divorced.Shortly after, our parents moved in with each other and we were sisters.
I should remember the exact day this happened. The funny thing is, I don't. The series of our afternoons together meld in my memory and there is nothing to mark the occasion, the difference between when we played together as friends pretending to be sisters and when we actually became them.
What I remember instead is believing that we should be on Oprah as the coming true of an impossible wish, the Parent Trap incarnate. It didn't mater that my sister and I had no control over what was happening in our lives -- getting our parents alone in a room together was the furthest possible thing from our exploits – we still thought our story was worth telling to a national audience. A sort of truth is stranger than fiction and in our youth, when everything is both remarkably and horribly self-referential, we waited for the call from Oprah's producers.
Instead, we grew up.
High school was harder on our friendship than we imagined. To this day, I am still thankful that we had our sisterhood of chance to help our friendship of choice survive how awful and agonizingly hormonal we were to each other.
Now, as adults, I am happy to say, we are still best friends. Only, something again remarkable has happened, our parents are separated.
We did not choose the blending of our families, despite how badly we wished for it -- without a sense of repercussion and what divorce might actually mean to our parents, our siblings, ourselves. Our sister fantasy had more to do with us both being adopted by a rich and benevolent benefactor that would let us ride horses all day and eat copious amounts of calorie-free chocolate. The former something we actually grew up doing. (Thanks, Dad!!) The latter we still dream about. The reality is we have no influence over the current state of our parents' relationship.
When we first learned that our parents would be living in separate homes, I spent a considerable amount of time worrying about what this would do to our family. We live thousands of miles apart, almost clear on opposite sides of this continent. My husband and I had most recently started our own family and I wanted more than anything to bring my daughter into the larger one we all shared. I couldn't help but wonder what this development might do to the holidays I imagined?
In the months and weeks that went by, nothing much happened. We got together for the Thanksgiving. My stepmother did what she always does--cook an elaborate meal that tastes amazing and takes too long to prepare. My daughter played with her cousins. My sister and I even spent some time briefly developing another of our get-rich-quick schemes, this one involving trucking a boatload of hay from Maine, where the grass grows three cuttings, to Florida, where the sandy soil yields nothing for the thousands of horses that congregate there each winter season to avoid the cold of the more northern eastern seaboard states. Yet, even though she's moving from Maine to Florida, her leg is broken and I don't think our eight-month-old will take too well to a 1,500 mile road trip. We take a pass, still believing that there is always next year.
Perhaps what has happened to us in the last year is more remarkable than what happened to us as kids. We are still best friends and we are still sisters. We are still each other's first phone call when we long for someone simply to understand and commiserate in the way that only a shared history affords.
Oprah's show will end this year and still my sister and I aren't scheduled to appear on it. Perhaps now, we really should.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Becoming SAHM
There is this blog I've been following, the SAHM Project, a one woman countdown to getting out of the daily grind of her hated job and melting into what she imagines will be the slow rhythms of staying home with her kids. One is seven, the other is on the verge of being born. (For those who may have missed it, SAHM stands for stay-at-home mom.)
It's an escape fantasy really. She longs to trade the deadlines, awful people, the hurry up and go, do, complete for just being. As with many escape narratives, the focus is on the negative – what she is running away from instead of what she is running toward. (Although she does see herself staying in her pajamas for an inordinate about of time and mentions a preference for changing diapers as opposed to some of the crap she has to put up with.)
My favorite part of the site is the countdown clock on the side with eight figures: days, hours, minutes, seconds. It's reminiscent somehow of the blastoff clock that rolls back to send shuttles into space or the clock in Times Square that the whole world seems to watch to welcome in the new year. The hitting of the zeros is supposed to represent a great, anticipated, maybe even feared change. (Even though on the plain old New Year, this countdown is usually anticlimactic. January is still a long, cold, endless winter month.)
For the most part, I connect with the SAHM Project's journey. There are many days that my yearning for home has more to do with not wanting to be at the office. The fact that my child is waiting for me, wanting for me is one giant perk, but not the reason for the exit strategy. (Although really my personal SAHM fantasy didn't begin until after my daughter was born and because I was blindsided by this sudden desire, I am still trying to puzzle my way into a world I never thought I'd want.)
In Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, 2007), Pamela Stone investigates the forces in 54 professionally educated (MBA, MD, JD, etc), upper class women's lives that pushed them out of the workforce and pulled them home. The thematic message woven throughout these stories seems most consistently to be: It's simply too hard to combine the fast paced, stream of work with its infinite demands on our energy and brain power with the completely opposite rhythms of life with children, that is different, but no less demanding on our energies and brains (even if the time is less rigidly scheduled and tasks can be met in varying degrees of dress.)
Is it too far a leap to say: If we loved our jobs, we would stay in them?
Yet, the more complicated narrative being woven by Stone's book and others that have recently followed (Sylvia Ann Hewlett's On Ramps and Off Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success) is that the current forces within our working culture are such that it is impossible to actually love our jobs once we become mothers.
The workforce, as it is currently conceived, is simply not compatible with being a successful parent (there for our children in all the ways we want to be there for them) and a successful, fully achieving professional (there for our bosses in all the ways they want us to be there for them).
The more time I spend toggling between being a professional and a mother the more I tend to agree with this assessment. (And yes, I feel as though I toggle, not that I am both, or that I do either as well as I could if I was not trying to do both. I tend to think that this is less because I've absorbed the cultural dichotomy and more because I actually feel this is how my reality plays out.)
There are thirty some-odd followers on the SAHM project. The comments that begin to pile up are messages from other mothers, ones I can only presume are SAHMs themselves because of their responses. They congratulate her. They praise her courage. They offer her encouragement, mostly in the context of their own transitions into SAHM-ville. They are waiting, excitedly, for her to join them there. The music is playing. The gates are opening up. I find myself caught up in their excitement, even if I haven't figured my way to join them, despite that ticking clock.
Then, the last entry is a curious one. It is more about loss than I expect. She sites her very real accomplishments in her workplace. She worries about what will happen there once she leaves. She also leaves the door very obviously open to returning by telling her co-workers that she'll be back. This too has a firm date, twelve weeks (thankfully protected by law). Even on the verge of her exit, she talks about being torn.
What she doesn't say, what she doesn't talk about is the life she is moving toward. I wonder why this piece of the narrative remains so hidden. Why the pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated joy, stays so tight to the chest (save the few short comments below each post, but even those talk about what a hard decision becoming SAHM was to make).
Are we so afraid of the mother who is in love with her SAHM life that we have to lock her up in the closet and pretend she doesn't exist? Do we sell her out and characterize her instead as the locked up women we fear becoming in the pages of the Feminine Mystic?
Or do we fear that the breadwinner father will figure out that he's drawn the short-end of the stick and will likewise begin to opt out? Breathe, only 1% of fathers are currently SAHD. Which begs the question: Is the acronym more prophetic than it means to be because so many dads are missing out or does it mean that some day a whole generation of fathers will also contend to be tortured by their choice to stay home?
Or is it simply that life is complicated and whether real or imagined, our stories are still stuck, having grown from a generation of women who were pushed out into factories than stuffed back into homes, followed by another generation who pried back open the doors to universities and the professional workforce, even though having children sent many of them back home. (See previous post -- Oh Pioneers -- for more on this statistic).
That is, of course, the trouble with fantasy, the problem with happily-ever-after. The clock hits zero. I want to know what happens next.
It's an escape fantasy really. She longs to trade the deadlines, awful people, the hurry up and go, do, complete for just being. As with many escape narratives, the focus is on the negative – what she is running away from instead of what she is running toward. (Although she does see herself staying in her pajamas for an inordinate about of time and mentions a preference for changing diapers as opposed to some of the crap she has to put up with.)
My favorite part of the site is the countdown clock on the side with eight figures: days, hours, minutes, seconds. It's reminiscent somehow of the blastoff clock that rolls back to send shuttles into space or the clock in Times Square that the whole world seems to watch to welcome in the new year. The hitting of the zeros is supposed to represent a great, anticipated, maybe even feared change. (Even though on the plain old New Year, this countdown is usually anticlimactic. January is still a long, cold, endless winter month.)
For the most part, I connect with the SAHM Project's journey. There are many days that my yearning for home has more to do with not wanting to be at the office. The fact that my child is waiting for me, wanting for me is one giant perk, but not the reason for the exit strategy. (Although really my personal SAHM fantasy didn't begin until after my daughter was born and because I was blindsided by this sudden desire, I am still trying to puzzle my way into a world I never thought I'd want.)
In Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, 2007), Pamela Stone investigates the forces in 54 professionally educated (MBA, MD, JD, etc), upper class women's lives that pushed them out of the workforce and pulled them home. The thematic message woven throughout these stories seems most consistently to be: It's simply too hard to combine the fast paced, stream of work with its infinite demands on our energy and brain power with the completely opposite rhythms of life with children, that is different, but no less demanding on our energies and brains (even if the time is less rigidly scheduled and tasks can be met in varying degrees of dress.)
Is it too far a leap to say: If we loved our jobs, we would stay in them?
Yet, the more complicated narrative being woven by Stone's book and others that have recently followed (Sylvia Ann Hewlett's On Ramps and Off Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success) is that the current forces within our working culture are such that it is impossible to actually love our jobs once we become mothers.
The workforce, as it is currently conceived, is simply not compatible with being a successful parent (there for our children in all the ways we want to be there for them) and a successful, fully achieving professional (there for our bosses in all the ways they want us to be there for them).
The more time I spend toggling between being a professional and a mother the more I tend to agree with this assessment. (And yes, I feel as though I toggle, not that I am both, or that I do either as well as I could if I was not trying to do both. I tend to think that this is less because I've absorbed the cultural dichotomy and more because I actually feel this is how my reality plays out.)
There are thirty some-odd followers on the SAHM project. The comments that begin to pile up are messages from other mothers, ones I can only presume are SAHMs themselves because of their responses. They congratulate her. They praise her courage. They offer her encouragement, mostly in the context of their own transitions into SAHM-ville. They are waiting, excitedly, for her to join them there. The music is playing. The gates are opening up. I find myself caught up in their excitement, even if I haven't figured my way to join them, despite that ticking clock.
Then, the last entry is a curious one. It is more about loss than I expect. She sites her very real accomplishments in her workplace. She worries about what will happen there once she leaves. She also leaves the door very obviously open to returning by telling her co-workers that she'll be back. This too has a firm date, twelve weeks (thankfully protected by law). Even on the verge of her exit, she talks about being torn.
What she doesn't say, what she doesn't talk about is the life she is moving toward. I wonder why this piece of the narrative remains so hidden. Why the pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated joy, stays so tight to the chest (save the few short comments below each post, but even those talk about what a hard decision becoming SAHM was to make).
Are we so afraid of the mother who is in love with her SAHM life that we have to lock her up in the closet and pretend she doesn't exist? Do we sell her out and characterize her instead as the locked up women we fear becoming in the pages of the Feminine Mystic?
Or do we fear that the breadwinner father will figure out that he's drawn the short-end of the stick and will likewise begin to opt out? Breathe, only 1% of fathers are currently SAHD. Which begs the question: Is the acronym more prophetic than it means to be because so many dads are missing out or does it mean that some day a whole generation of fathers will also contend to be tortured by their choice to stay home?
Or is it simply that life is complicated and whether real or imagined, our stories are still stuck, having grown from a generation of women who were pushed out into factories than stuffed back into homes, followed by another generation who pried back open the doors to universities and the professional workforce, even though having children sent many of them back home. (See previous post -- Oh Pioneers -- for more on this statistic).
That is, of course, the trouble with fantasy, the problem with happily-ever-after. The clock hits zero. I want to know what happens next.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Ode to Joy
One afternoon while my daughter is sleeping, I sit my mother down and ask her to tell me the chronology of her life. I am curious about her choices – her relationship with her mother, her grandmother, and aunts, these women who've become almost mythical creatures in the way I've heard about the legends of their lives, even though they've barely intersected in real time with my own.
I am curious about the way her mother presses on her story in the same way I am trying to puzzle out how she is pressing on mine, in the same way I am not ready to face I will press upon my daughter's own.
What comes out of the afternoon?
Motivation, a fierce sense of ambition stemming mostly from rejection, fear, misunderstanding, a longing to be understood.
My mother's mother always said, I was a duck who had swans.
In this, my mother sees a forever disconnect, two separate species unlikely to share a nest let alone a lifetime.
She is still angry at her mother over some things – missing her doctoral graduation, offering no help while she struggled with a newborn – a list we have as daughters that we learn to bite back into our throats when we have our own. Yet, she will no more forgive her mother than her mother, long since passed, will cease to regret.
At the end of the afternoon, at the last possible second we can steal in conversation, already my daughter is shifting, crinkling the sheets in her crib, I beg my mother to remember in almost the same instant that I realize it, her mother named her Joy, and at least while she stirred inside the body they once shared, must have, indeed, felt it.
I am curious about the way her mother presses on her story in the same way I am trying to puzzle out how she is pressing on mine, in the same way I am not ready to face I will press upon my daughter's own.
What comes out of the afternoon?
Motivation, a fierce sense of ambition stemming mostly from rejection, fear, misunderstanding, a longing to be understood.
My mother's mother always said, I was a duck who had swans.
In this, my mother sees a forever disconnect, two separate species unlikely to share a nest let alone a lifetime.
She is still angry at her mother over some things – missing her doctoral graduation, offering no help while she struggled with a newborn – a list we have as daughters that we learn to bite back into our throats when we have our own. Yet, she will no more forgive her mother than her mother, long since passed, will cease to regret.
At the end of the afternoon, at the last possible second we can steal in conversation, already my daughter is shifting, crinkling the sheets in her crib, I beg my mother to remember in almost the same instant that I realize it, her mother named her Joy, and at least while she stirred inside the body they once shared, must have, indeed, felt it.
Monday, March 29, 2010
How to Change a Diaper Like a Porn Star
Because I like to keep in tune with popular culture and embrace my inner stereo-type, on the one afternoon a week that I spend completely unencumbered by work or anything else, blissfully at home with my daughter, I like to watch Oprah while my daughter takes her afternoon nap.
Like her or not, Oprah is still among the most popular household names, among the highest paid female professionals, and (for a more current reference of popularity) has the most people following her tweets (along with God and Lance Armstrong).
You can imagine my surprise last week to tune in and find Jenna Jameson, the “number one porn star in America,” as Oprah's invited guest. I don't know exactly what it takes to become a “number one porn star,” whether it means your name or other choice body parts are most commonly recognized by the masses. Oprah kept sighting that Jenna's films and popular spin off web site grossed billions and Jenna's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, had spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list at number 8.
I was amazed by many things during the interview, but what surprised me the most was the fact that in addition to her erotic notoriety, the focus of the interview was not Jenna's professional expertise, but rather the fact that Jenna was now a “retired stay-at-home mom.” Considerable time was spent with a video tour of Jenna's home that featured the kitchen (which revealed a star with more money than taste), the nursery, and shots of Jenna cuddling her two infant twin boys.
Let's pause a brief moment to appreciate the irony: me, an aspiring stay-at-home mom (that I would be if I had any guts and a bigger savings account, more on this later), watching the show of a woman who will never be a stay-at-home mom herself and yet has been made famous by them, interviewing a stay-at-home mom who has taken early retirement from a career that has no room in it for mothers.
Sure, we've come a long way from having to de-sexualize motherhood to the point where we are making up stories about virgins and miracles, yet this whole scene makes me wonder if there was a feminist revolution at all. Is there any question, after forty years of trying, as to why we still can't successfully combine work and family life?
Jenna's is the classic perception problem. She can't be both a porn star and a mother. Of course not, the thought offends our sensibilities. We all wish we could erase the unfortunate moment when our parents should have installed better locks on their bedroom doors; it makes me squirm to think her sons will one day find the DVD. So, on the surface, this statement makes perfect sense.
In the tearier parts of the interview, Jenna worries about what her now eight-month-old sons will think when they grow up. (She can't hide the internet from them forever.) I, too, wonder if Jenna will indeed be accepted into the PTA at her son's middle school, and I would love it if ten years from now Oprah was still around to have her on again and find out.
Yet, if we scratch the surface of what Jenna is going through, is it really all that different from the rest of us, trying to force together the disparate pieces of our lives that refuse to fit? The forever private, intimate, protected, and innocent moments between mother and child spent in the nursery or running around the house without clothes on because that's what you do when you are first in the world and trying to air a bottom out from diaper rash or feel the niceness of breeze on places that don't get enough air normally (Christ, the unabashed nudity required of the birthing suite) versus the former, more public, hardly recognizable, pre-mom, independent selves? (I fully recognize the ironic mixe of images here, too.) So it begs the question: Is the difference only in the details?
I need only to rewind the interview to find out:
Oprah: Now that you are a stay-at-home mom, do you miss it (your career)?
Jenna: No (uttered emphatically).
My answer would be the same of my career if I could give it up, as that would mean that I could spend the next few fleeting years helping my daughter explore the world without being so tired and frazzled and pulled in so many other directions (at least until she is old enough to require less time-intensive assistance from me); and if I could do so without the fear that my resume gap will render me completely un-hireable, save by Wal-mart.
Oprah: Do you have any regrets?
Jenna: No.
Me: Only that I didn't know enough before I became a mother to know that I'd want to spend every waking moment with my daughter and wish I could have chosen a career that would have more space in it for being both a mom and professional.
Oprah: Was it really something you wanted to be when you grew up?
Jenna: No, Oprah, I wanted to be you. (Uttered with such honesty and sadness that it makes me catch my breath at how there is still such little room in the world for women that make a living with their minds, instead of with their bodies.)
Me: No, Oprah, I had no idea that it would be this beautiful, this hard, this singularly important.
Like her or not, Oprah is still among the most popular household names, among the highest paid female professionals, and (for a more current reference of popularity) has the most people following her tweets (along with God and Lance Armstrong).
You can imagine my surprise last week to tune in and find Jenna Jameson, the “number one porn star in America,” as Oprah's invited guest. I don't know exactly what it takes to become a “number one porn star,” whether it means your name or other choice body parts are most commonly recognized by the masses. Oprah kept sighting that Jenna's films and popular spin off web site grossed billions and Jenna's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, had spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list at number 8.
I was amazed by many things during the interview, but what surprised me the most was the fact that in addition to her erotic notoriety, the focus of the interview was not Jenna's professional expertise, but rather the fact that Jenna was now a “retired stay-at-home mom.” Considerable time was spent with a video tour of Jenna's home that featured the kitchen (which revealed a star with more money than taste), the nursery, and shots of Jenna cuddling her two infant twin boys.
Let's pause a brief moment to appreciate the irony: me, an aspiring stay-at-home mom (that I would be if I had any guts and a bigger savings account, more on this later), watching the show of a woman who will never be a stay-at-home mom herself and yet has been made famous by them, interviewing a stay-at-home mom who has taken early retirement from a career that has no room in it for mothers.
Sure, we've come a long way from having to de-sexualize motherhood to the point where we are making up stories about virgins and miracles, yet this whole scene makes me wonder if there was a feminist revolution at all. Is there any question, after forty years of trying, as to why we still can't successfully combine work and family life?
Jenna's is the classic perception problem. She can't be both a porn star and a mother. Of course not, the thought offends our sensibilities. We all wish we could erase the unfortunate moment when our parents should have installed better locks on their bedroom doors; it makes me squirm to think her sons will one day find the DVD. So, on the surface, this statement makes perfect sense.
In the tearier parts of the interview, Jenna worries about what her now eight-month-old sons will think when they grow up. (She can't hide the internet from them forever.) I, too, wonder if Jenna will indeed be accepted into the PTA at her son's middle school, and I would love it if ten years from now Oprah was still around to have her on again and find out.
Yet, if we scratch the surface of what Jenna is going through, is it really all that different from the rest of us, trying to force together the disparate pieces of our lives that refuse to fit? The forever private, intimate, protected, and innocent moments between mother and child spent in the nursery or running around the house without clothes on because that's what you do when you are first in the world and trying to air a bottom out from diaper rash or feel the niceness of breeze on places that don't get enough air normally (Christ, the unabashed nudity required of the birthing suite) versus the former, more public, hardly recognizable, pre-mom, independent selves? (I fully recognize the ironic mixe of images here, too.) So it begs the question: Is the difference only in the details?
I need only to rewind the interview to find out:
Oprah: Now that you are a stay-at-home mom, do you miss it (your career)?
Jenna: No (uttered emphatically).
My answer would be the same of my career if I could give it up, as that would mean that I could spend the next few fleeting years helping my daughter explore the world without being so tired and frazzled and pulled in so many other directions (at least until she is old enough to require less time-intensive assistance from me); and if I could do so without the fear that my resume gap will render me completely un-hireable, save by Wal-mart.
Oprah: Do you have any regrets?
Jenna: No.
Me: Only that I didn't know enough before I became a mother to know that I'd want to spend every waking moment with my daughter and wish I could have chosen a career that would have more space in it for being both a mom and professional.
Oprah: Was it really something you wanted to be when you grew up?
Jenna: No, Oprah, I wanted to be you. (Uttered with such honesty and sadness that it makes me catch my breath at how there is still such little room in the world for women that make a living with their minds, instead of with their bodies.)
Me: No, Oprah, I had no idea that it would be this beautiful, this hard, this singularly important.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Three Neighborhood Vignettes
1. It's a Sunday like any other in mid-spring. The afternoon has just begun to stretch and linger, and the heat of the day feels refreshing in the way it suddenly gathers on your skin. I'm in our front driveway playing a game of horse with two neighborhood kids. This is before we have a child of our own, and it will be a few months more until we know that life in my belly has taken root.
I've got letters “h” through “s” and I'm on my way to an “e”. I've not really been trying all that hard, caught up in watching the two kids instead. The boy, Justin, I know. Ever since we moved to the block, when my husband and I are out on our evening walk, he makes us stop so he can pat our dog. He's told us more than once that he'll even walk him for us, but that it will cost us a dollar. Since we have a fenced in yard and our evening walk is the few moments in the day that my husband and I get to enjoy each other's company, we've told him that for now we'll pass, but you never know. We've left the door open on account of the fact that no one can really say no to an eleven-year-old kid without looking like a jerk (except maybe if your their parents and even that's debatable).
The other is a girl I haven't seen before. She's about a year younger than Justin. In watching them, I am fascinated by two things. One, that Justin seems to like this girl despite the fact that she's a whole year younger and their at the age where kids are prone to telling each other to get lost if there is just one hair askew. He genuinely cheers when she makes a shot, even if its something silly like standing directly under the hoop and throwing the ball straight up through the basket, which is much harder than it looks ( that was my "r" thank you very much). Two, she's about as good at basketball as I am, but that doesn't seem to stop her from trying like hell.
So I've fallen way behind the count to the delight of both the kids. It's my turn again, an easy lay-up from the right side of our driveway. I am dribbling and taking my sweet time, palming the ball and pumping toward the basket to line up my shot. I'm the kind of player who still shoots like a second grader, hands on either side of the ball instead of the dominant hand underneath and one to the side to guide it in. A basket for me has more to do with a general understanding of high school physics and mostly pure luck.
“So,” I ask, pausing to look down at the girl for just a second. “I haven't seen you around before. Did you and your family just move here?”
“No,” she says. “My house got closed. So we're living at Justin's.” Just then, the ball rolls off the tip of my fingers and heads off into the other side of our yard without even hitting the rim. Lucky for me, my shooting has been pretty bad, so I don't have to admit that my heart is in my throat.
“You've got an E,” Justin says, laughing and chasing after the ball. “You lose.”
“It's a hard shot,” the girl defends.
“Yeah, that's hard.” Only I'm not talking about basketball and I think she might know it, so we both look at Justin who is now lining up for his shot to start the next game.
Because there is nothing else I can do for this kid but offer up my driveway and a basketball hoop, I let them keep playing until they are both sweaty and panting. The girl's hair is naturally curly like mine and it's winging like crazy out of her ponytail, even in the low humidity.
I lose every game, five straight. Eventually, both kids collapse onto the warm concrete, their hands swung lazy over their eyes to block out the sun.
Somehow, I want the simplicity of afternoon to last forever or at least give her and Justin's parents time to sort out the accommodations of two families living in one house.
“Do you want some Popsicles?” I blurt, standing over them and looking down.
They both nod, so we sit on my driveway and suck the last bit of sweetness that we can out of the afternoon until it is too dark to see the hoop and our Popsicle sticks have gone dry.
“Let's go home,” Justin finally says. He pulls her up off the concrete and they wheel their bikes off to Justin's house, which is only six doors down.
I find myself letting go of my breath. I am so very thankful that she doesn't tell him that she can't.
2: It's just shy of two years to the day and despite the promises that everyone keeps making, the slim evidence that this whole mess is turning around, suddenly Justin is missing from the end of his driveway. He's grown out of advertising his dog walking services, but up until a week or so ago, he still waved while attempting a kick flip on his skateboard and he still asked me to stop so that he could pat our dog. Since the birth of our daughter, a little less than a year ago, our walks have gotten more frequent, motion a trick for conjuring sleep us parents learn early if we hope to survive that precarious first year. I walk by and try not to look up at the yellow notice posted to his front door.
Soon after, a dumpster pulls up. It takes two days for the contents of the house to be piled in. The guys on the crew lift their hands to me. It probably has to do with the baby peeking out from my chest like I've got two heads and both of us are wearing sunglasses. I see the legs of a kitchen table, the upholstered foot of a living room chair. No one asks me to stop so that they can pat my dog.
3. This afternoon, from my bedroom window, I watch two budget rental trucks barrel down the street. I wonder if they will have children, a baby my daughter's age. Someone we can wander over to with a plate of cookies on a lazy Sunday afternoon, practice holding hands, looking both ways to cross the street. Like two conspirator's, my daughter and I press our noses to the glass. The back gate rattles up. The truck is empty. Even I am not naive enough to ask why no one seems to be moving in, but only moving out.
I've got letters “h” through “s” and I'm on my way to an “e”. I've not really been trying all that hard, caught up in watching the two kids instead. The boy, Justin, I know. Ever since we moved to the block, when my husband and I are out on our evening walk, he makes us stop so he can pat our dog. He's told us more than once that he'll even walk him for us, but that it will cost us a dollar. Since we have a fenced in yard and our evening walk is the few moments in the day that my husband and I get to enjoy each other's company, we've told him that for now we'll pass, but you never know. We've left the door open on account of the fact that no one can really say no to an eleven-year-old kid without looking like a jerk (except maybe if your their parents and even that's debatable).
The other is a girl I haven't seen before. She's about a year younger than Justin. In watching them, I am fascinated by two things. One, that Justin seems to like this girl despite the fact that she's a whole year younger and their at the age where kids are prone to telling each other to get lost if there is just one hair askew. He genuinely cheers when she makes a shot, even if its something silly like standing directly under the hoop and throwing the ball straight up through the basket, which is much harder than it looks ( that was my "r" thank you very much). Two, she's about as good at basketball as I am, but that doesn't seem to stop her from trying like hell.
So I've fallen way behind the count to the delight of both the kids. It's my turn again, an easy lay-up from the right side of our driveway. I am dribbling and taking my sweet time, palming the ball and pumping toward the basket to line up my shot. I'm the kind of player who still shoots like a second grader, hands on either side of the ball instead of the dominant hand underneath and one to the side to guide it in. A basket for me has more to do with a general understanding of high school physics and mostly pure luck.
“So,” I ask, pausing to look down at the girl for just a second. “I haven't seen you around before. Did you and your family just move here?”
“No,” she says. “My house got closed. So we're living at Justin's.” Just then, the ball rolls off the tip of my fingers and heads off into the other side of our yard without even hitting the rim. Lucky for me, my shooting has been pretty bad, so I don't have to admit that my heart is in my throat.
“You've got an E,” Justin says, laughing and chasing after the ball. “You lose.”
“It's a hard shot,” the girl defends.
“Yeah, that's hard.” Only I'm not talking about basketball and I think she might know it, so we both look at Justin who is now lining up for his shot to start the next game.
Because there is nothing else I can do for this kid but offer up my driveway and a basketball hoop, I let them keep playing until they are both sweaty and panting. The girl's hair is naturally curly like mine and it's winging like crazy out of her ponytail, even in the low humidity.
I lose every game, five straight. Eventually, both kids collapse onto the warm concrete, their hands swung lazy over their eyes to block out the sun.
Somehow, I want the simplicity of afternoon to last forever or at least give her and Justin's parents time to sort out the accommodations of two families living in one house.
“Do you want some Popsicles?” I blurt, standing over them and looking down.
They both nod, so we sit on my driveway and suck the last bit of sweetness that we can out of the afternoon until it is too dark to see the hoop and our Popsicle sticks have gone dry.
“Let's go home,” Justin finally says. He pulls her up off the concrete and they wheel their bikes off to Justin's house, which is only six doors down.
I find myself letting go of my breath. I am so very thankful that she doesn't tell him that she can't.
2: It's just shy of two years to the day and despite the promises that everyone keeps making, the slim evidence that this whole mess is turning around, suddenly Justin is missing from the end of his driveway. He's grown out of advertising his dog walking services, but up until a week or so ago, he still waved while attempting a kick flip on his skateboard and he still asked me to stop so that he could pat our dog. Since the birth of our daughter, a little less than a year ago, our walks have gotten more frequent, motion a trick for conjuring sleep us parents learn early if we hope to survive that precarious first year. I walk by and try not to look up at the yellow notice posted to his front door.
Soon after, a dumpster pulls up. It takes two days for the contents of the house to be piled in. The guys on the crew lift their hands to me. It probably has to do with the baby peeking out from my chest like I've got two heads and both of us are wearing sunglasses. I see the legs of a kitchen table, the upholstered foot of a living room chair. No one asks me to stop so that they can pat my dog.
3. This afternoon, from my bedroom window, I watch two budget rental trucks barrel down the street. I wonder if they will have children, a baby my daughter's age. Someone we can wander over to with a plate of cookies on a lazy Sunday afternoon, practice holding hands, looking both ways to cross the street. Like two conspirator's, my daughter and I press our noses to the glass. The back gate rattles up. The truck is empty. Even I am not naive enough to ask why no one seems to be moving in, but only moving out.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Object Permanence
Yesterday, in yet another incident that marks the oddity of our virtual ways of being, I visited my father's new home from the comfort of my own. He offered up the grand tour via Skype, moving from room to room with his laptop out in front like a sort of ill balanced waiter. Peekaboo being one of my daughter's favorite games of late, she giggled every time his face would bounce back onto the computer screen as he repeatedly leaned in to make sure the camera was angled correctly and asked over and over, “Are you seeing this?” in a kind of prediction of what will undoubtedly be Verizon's next advertising campaign.
He has moved a total of five times since I have been on the planet, for all the usual reasons both personal and financial -- career, divorce, remarriage, the dream of having property in the country with horses, a romance with the coast. Perhaps because my husband's parents still live in the same house and once a year, at least, we return to the scene of his childhood in our adult skin, or more pressingly now because we have our own child; each time my father moves, I have come to wonder what happens to the evidence of the life we lived together, and what proof of it will be left for me to show my daughter.
There is nothing like having a child of your own that makes you long for the bedroom you grew up in, if only to sit in it for just a moment and remember what the world smelled like when you were their age. (Of course, it should be said that all this nostalgia is hitting me at a time when it seems as though more American's are loosing their homes than will remain in them, so I should be thankful that there is even a tour for me to take.)
During each return visit to the house my husband grew up in, a story from his childhood inevitably slips out, a window of memory opens, and we leave feeling that much closer to each other, as if the story shared lessens the time we've spent on this earth without each other.
My father's new home is as nice as it is foreign. He catalogs the contents of each room with a kind of obsessive fervor -- the elegance of a hutch, a gold-plated tea set sitting artfully on a low table in the front entrance. He keeps asking me if I recognize this furniture, but they are pieces from his most recent house that I only ever visited twice. Yet, I nod and smile, even though the camera is facing the other way and he can't see me. Is parental acquiescence ever something we out grow?
When nearly seven minutes have passed, which on a virtual tour is like an eternity, and I'm struggling to keep my daughter from pressing buttons on the keyboard and likely disconnect our call, I want to ask him if he's showing off because he's been taking some interior design course I don't know about or if like an Egyptian prince, these objects have taken on such a supreme level of importance that he wishes to be mummified with them.
Then, he rounds a corner, and there it is, the painting of President Kennedy that used to hang on the wall in his study of the farm house in Maine, the most recent of the houses we shared as a family. My father is probably standing there smelling the brackish water moving off the bay he lives next to now in Panama City, Florida, but suddenly the sharp, dry smell of pine logs burning in a wood stove is just beyond the reach of my senses. My brother and I are sitting on the floor, listening to Eddie Vedder sing about seeing a woman he recognizes from his childhood behind the counter at a country store, only he can't remember her name and is too shy to ask her and thus share the memory. It is the last winter that we will live in the same house, before my brother is old enough to move out, and he is asking me if, at the ripe old age of thirteen, I know what this song means. Life times are catching up with me.
My father's tour has suddenly become more interesting and I lean forward on the edge of my seat, watching for familiar objects as they bob in and out from view -- the dining room table where my grandmother officiated my at-home bat mitzvah sits on a porch now overlooking the ocean, a prisma drawing by my stepmother winks from a wall in a bedroom when I remember it guiding a path up the stairs. There are even artifacts from my parent's original marriage, although they've been divorced now longer than they were ever married in the first place.
In another three years, I, too, will have lived on my own longer than I lived with my parents. And yet, there is relief in this unexpected brush with these relics. I know now, with a kind of certainty, that objects, even out of place, can afford a means to visit this history, even after its been long outgrown.
This is, after all, the reason for my daughter's delight when her grandfather finally reappears at the tour's inevitable conclusion. Peak-a-boo, a kind of proof that we seek objects-- for good reason -- long after they've disappeared from view.
He has moved a total of five times since I have been on the planet, for all the usual reasons both personal and financial -- career, divorce, remarriage, the dream of having property in the country with horses, a romance with the coast. Perhaps because my husband's parents still live in the same house and once a year, at least, we return to the scene of his childhood in our adult skin, or more pressingly now because we have our own child; each time my father moves, I have come to wonder what happens to the evidence of the life we lived together, and what proof of it will be left for me to show my daughter.
There is nothing like having a child of your own that makes you long for the bedroom you grew up in, if only to sit in it for just a moment and remember what the world smelled like when you were their age. (Of course, it should be said that all this nostalgia is hitting me at a time when it seems as though more American's are loosing their homes than will remain in them, so I should be thankful that there is even a tour for me to take.)
During each return visit to the house my husband grew up in, a story from his childhood inevitably slips out, a window of memory opens, and we leave feeling that much closer to each other, as if the story shared lessens the time we've spent on this earth without each other.
My father's new home is as nice as it is foreign. He catalogs the contents of each room with a kind of obsessive fervor -- the elegance of a hutch, a gold-plated tea set sitting artfully on a low table in the front entrance. He keeps asking me if I recognize this furniture, but they are pieces from his most recent house that I only ever visited twice. Yet, I nod and smile, even though the camera is facing the other way and he can't see me. Is parental acquiescence ever something we out grow?
When nearly seven minutes have passed, which on a virtual tour is like an eternity, and I'm struggling to keep my daughter from pressing buttons on the keyboard and likely disconnect our call, I want to ask him if he's showing off because he's been taking some interior design course I don't know about or if like an Egyptian prince, these objects have taken on such a supreme level of importance that he wishes to be mummified with them.
Then, he rounds a corner, and there it is, the painting of President Kennedy that used to hang on the wall in his study of the farm house in Maine, the most recent of the houses we shared as a family. My father is probably standing there smelling the brackish water moving off the bay he lives next to now in Panama City, Florida, but suddenly the sharp, dry smell of pine logs burning in a wood stove is just beyond the reach of my senses. My brother and I are sitting on the floor, listening to Eddie Vedder sing about seeing a woman he recognizes from his childhood behind the counter at a country store, only he can't remember her name and is too shy to ask her and thus share the memory. It is the last winter that we will live in the same house, before my brother is old enough to move out, and he is asking me if, at the ripe old age of thirteen, I know what this song means. Life times are catching up with me.
My father's tour has suddenly become more interesting and I lean forward on the edge of my seat, watching for familiar objects as they bob in and out from view -- the dining room table where my grandmother officiated my at-home bat mitzvah sits on a porch now overlooking the ocean, a prisma drawing by my stepmother winks from a wall in a bedroom when I remember it guiding a path up the stairs. There are even artifacts from my parent's original marriage, although they've been divorced now longer than they were ever married in the first place.
In another three years, I, too, will have lived on my own longer than I lived with my parents. And yet, there is relief in this unexpected brush with these relics. I know now, with a kind of certainty, that objects, even out of place, can afford a means to visit this history, even after its been long outgrown.
This is, after all, the reason for my daughter's delight when her grandfather finally reappears at the tour's inevitable conclusion. Peak-a-boo, a kind of proof that we seek objects-- for good reason -- long after they've disappeared from view.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Writing on the Wall
A few days ago, Joe –my husband of nearly six years -- and I were once again officially married. Rest assured family and friends, this was no elaborate black tie affair complete with five courses, a tiered cake, and a hundred or so people trying to manage the chicken dance on a ten by ten foot dance floor. This was not even a minor affair on a beach with sandals, sun dresses, and a mariachi band. In fact, our marriage happened in a series of seconds while Joe and I weren't even in the same room.
It all started when a curious message popped into my in box. It stated “Joe Wingate has updated his profile to indicate that you are married. Please click here to confirm or deny this status.”
First, I have to admit, I am somewhat of a Facebook neophyte. Gregarious and outgoing in person, I am rather socially awkward on the internet. My profile picture is still that generic shadow figure that is probably more fitting for a person in protective custody, and since setting up my Facebook account nearly eight months ago, I've not really been back. I have received the occasional email notice, mostly from people I'm in regular contact with anyhow, requesting friendship, but since I don't actively Facebook, I've felt that accepting these “friendships” would be doing so under false pretenses, setting up the kind of relationships I hate, where one party doesn't really participate.
My husband, in sharp contrast, while a self-proclaimed introvert, is an internet social butterfly. On more occasions than I can count, I've witnessed him running to his chirping cell phone to accept a new friend to his account. He's also been the first in our physical social group to figure out how to set up familial relationships and propose marriage to me, his wife. He has friended many more people than we are in regular contact with, including people who live halfway around the world and share his passion for snowboarding. To the surprise of those who know us, it can be said he has cast his social net far wider than I will ever cast mine. (What more did any of us expect from a world where the twitter account of God is owned by Richard Dawkins, the raving atheist?)
On the morning of my husband's proposal, (although this email paled in comparison to the first, which happened on the top of a mountain in the warmth of a late August afternoon) a small part of me worried that I'd hurt my husband's feelings if I didn't immediately accept.
So I clicked the link, and after nearly ten years in a committed relationship, during which have we proclaimed our undying love to one another in a very public ceremony (one that did not include the chicken dance but did feature me wearing a dress that could stand on its own reconnaissance), commingled our bank accounts, purchased a home and created a child, I “confirmed” our status as married.
This prompted the second curious email of the morning which read, “You are now in a relationship with Joe Wingate.” Immediately, I forwarded the message and asked him if we should change the date of our anniversary and if I should be packing for a second honeymoon.
To which he replied with a picture of Hawaii and asked if clothes were really required for this kind of trip. (Okay, he didn't really do this, but wouldn't it have been funny if he had?)
While lacking in romance, our marriage on Facebook is more public than the one six years ago. We are officially linked in a world far more accessible and far more connected than by the brief announcement in the Portsmouth Harold, which has yellowed in our wedding scrapbook, or that small square of paper that is gathering dust in a file drawer in the town of Greenland, NH, where the official record of our wedding is kept.
I find pleasure in the fact that people I don't even know now know that Joe and I are on this great adventure of building a life.
In addition to confirming my marriage, I found myself confronted by an entire page of people whom I could barely remember the sound of their voice. Proposed friendships, waiting for me to ignore or accept. It was both funny and sad to see their faces smiling out at me, the way they'd changed their hair or featured themselves with a spouse I hadn't met. However, instead of feeling like we are suddenly connected, as pictures of a child I didn't know they'd had flashed across my screen, it made me realize instead all the chapters of their lives I have missed.
Suddenly, there were so many questions I had to ask. Like, when did you marry that guy? And what was your pregnancy like? And, if they, like me, felt they'd seen the face of God when they first held their child or threw up during transition in the birthing suite.
Is it ironic that this “catching up” after all this time was happening while I sat alone in the pre-dawn dark, surrounded only by the eerie glow of a computer screen?
And what of all the social customs I've spent years trying to master that I will now have to learn in this new space? For instance, how much time is too much time after the birth of a child for you to send an e-card with an online gift card to Babies r us? Or, heaven forbid, what happens when someone dies? Does your family member log on to update your status? Do we need to leave passwords in our wills? Does it hurt more or less to sign a set of legal documents weighing roughly the same as a human heart than it does to click “confirmed” on the status of divorced?
Yet, these are things we do not post on each other's walls. These are intimacies forbidden to this medium, so they will remain untyped and caught up in my throat.
“I love you,” I write on my husband's wall when what I really mean to say is I want the heat of your touch, the stiff, tickling scrape of your stubble against my chin that I will find when I crawl back into bed, waiting for our alarm to go off.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Oh, Pioneers!
Growing up, my mother worked. In fact, from the very start, her full-time career as a psychologist framed my childhood.
Her water broke eight weeks early, and she spent the subsequent two weeks lying in a hospital bed, risking an infection that could kill us both and waiting for my lungs to develop. Yet, she returned to work six weeks after my birth, right on schedule. (Ironically, this was also right around the time I was just supposed to be making my way out of the safe cocoon of her belly.) To her employer and colleagues alike, it was as if she’d experienced nothing more than having her tonsils out or the inconvenience of an appendectomy.
For most of my life, even into adulthood, I believed that such feats were the mere realities of her time, her generation – the one history has described as the first cadre of women to aim to “have it all” and through sheer force of will have achieved it.
You can imagine my surprise to learn recently that of all the women to graduate college between 1966 and 1976, only 17% have actually made it to midlife with both children and a career in tact.
During the past year, my first as a mother, I have discovered two important truths: 1) My birthday should have been a celebration of my mother and the magic wonder of her ability to give me life. (This year, I did manage to call her and say “thanks” and apologize that it had taken me twenty-eight years to come to this realization.) 2) That I have never really given her enough credit for what she has achieved, as a feminist pioneer, sewing together the all too disparate pieces of work and family life with what I have only ever perceived as grace and acumen.
This is not to deny her the myriad of challenges. Yet, I’ve never thought of myself as a child who was parked in daycare, forty-plus hours a week. (An image that is strange in and of itself as it relies on the faulty notion that a toddler will stay put.) Interestingly, this is also the fate that mothers of my generation seem to fear the most for our children whenever we talk about what it means for mothers to work.
As a kid, having a mother who worked full-time meant:
- Extra opportunities to make friends: I attended full day kindergarten – public in the morning with every other kid on my block and private in the afternoon with a set of kids from the other side of town.
- Developing culinary prowess: I took over cooking dinner for us both in the forth grade so that my mother could work a few extra hours in the home office, while Total Eclipse of the Heart blared out from the living room stereo, the spatula in my hand a makeshift microphone.
- Privacy: Hopping off the bus with a key around my neck on a neon shoelace meant that I had a whole two hours every afternoon with which to curl up on a sun-soaked spot of carpet with a book.
Only in becoming a mother myself have I come to realize that her choices were so ringed by sacrifice – the moments of miraculous, unscheduled afternoons when I discovered for the first time that my body casts a shadow were the moments she was forced to miss.
At my core, I live in awe of what she has achieved through stubbornness and tenacity. Despite the odds, as one of the first women to graduate from her PhD program she has made good on both the promise she made on graduation day to the dean from whom she collected her diploma, walking across a stage amidst a sea of male faces, and the promises she made to me on the day of my birth.
As a mother, striving to follow in her footsteps, I have many advantages that my own mother did not – twelve weeks of federally mandated maternity leave, a 60% schedule with flex-time hours I get to work from home, a wonderfully supportive boss, colleagues who will bear a presentation with my daughter dangling from her front pack, an electronic breast pump.
Yet, I find each day a tremendous struggle that begins and ends with consoling myself with the fantasy that someday I will quit.
I cannot tell you what the future holds for me or for my generation of mothers. I can only hope that my daughter feels as happy and proud of the choices, the promises I have yet to make or break.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Catch and Release
Almost immediately after we bought our house in the spring of 2006, my husband instituted a catch and release program. While he was in the basement cleaning the cat box for the first time, he heard a rustling over in the corner. He discovered a frog there, trapped in the slim dirt of the window well, its translucent belly pressed firmly into the glass, its legs kicking wildly as it tried to scramble up to freedom. As he came to discover, the grates over the window wells of our new home were small enough to keep people and full-grown pets from falling through, but too large for frogs and the occasional rodent.
Slowly, my husband cracked the window and scooped the frog into his hand. (It immediately peed as frogs do, their only defense from children of a certain age that are always picking them up and placing them in makeshift terrariums.) Trudging up the steps, he walked over to me where I sat on the couch watching the evening news to show me the brown/green, panting body clamped between his hands. I was in the midst of watching yet another depressing story flash across the TV screen-- fallen soldiers in Iraq, civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another attempted airplane sabotage, a senseless school shooting. Thankfully, he pulled me away and we knelt down on the step outside our slider and let the frog hop into the twilight damp grass of our new backyard, the hum of its brethren just beginning in the distance. This began my husband's nightly routine of checking the window wells for the twelve or so weeks of summer and every so often releasing a panicked and grateful animal back into our backyard.
As we watched the world plunge further into what often feels like an unprecedented time of violence, I was always impressed by this small act of kindness, this nightly ritual of putting a life all but lost back into the world.
Shortly before our daughter was born last April, an acquaintance asked me how I felt about bringing a child into a world filled with such violence. (Not exactly an appropriate question for someone eight and a half months pregnant.) Yet, this person had no children and the question gave me pause. Perhaps because it was the eve of spring, my answer was this story of my husband and the frogs in our basement.
Where there is hate and violence in the world, there is also peace and love. There is also generosity.
This spring, we will celebrate our daughter's first year of life. It has been a year filled with wonder and joy, peace and love, unprecedented generosity. Yet, it is still a world that holds inexplicable violence. This week's headlines riddled with its evidence-- Man Shoots Officers Outside Pentagon, Death Toll Rising Again in Iraq, and the worst (at least for parents) just down the street from our home-- 2 Students Injured in Deer Creek Middle School Shooting.
It is not yet spring and so my husband has yet to wander down into the basement to rescue one of his frogs, but the season will be here soon. The first breaths of it already felt in the widening of the afternoon. When it comes, the three of us will kneel down by the back slider to watch as the frog slides out from his open hands into a dark night, together in our gratitude
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