People keep telling me to treasure this time. I know what they mean, but it is seriously infuriating. They are always older types, people whose babies grew up and left home. We were at a cookout, and the baby was being a bit fussy. She let out a cry, and a woman asked serenely, "Isn't that the most beautiful noise in the world?"
No. Not at all. You are a crazy person.
I hate to destroy the illusion for any non-parents, but taking care of a baby isn't always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it's poop and screaming. And if I'm having a particularly crappy, screamy day, someone telling me to treasure it really pisses me off. Are you telling me that when my child is old enough to use the toilet and communicate their problems in a reasonable manner, or heaven forfend, deal with their own problems, I'm going to look back at this moment and wish she was itty bitty again? No. I refuse to believe that. That sounds awful.
I even saw it on mom message boards, during those weeks when she was cluster feeding. I was googling, trying to figure out why my baby was constantly hungry, wondering if it would ever end. Half of the comments were saying, I'm sorry, honey, you just have to power through here. The other half were telling me to treasure it, they grow so fast.
No, really, I get what you mean. You mean that when my kid wants to hang out with their friends and not be seen in public with me, I will wish she was little and snuggly again. But right now, I want to cry because I hate this and now you're making me feel like that means I must hate my baby, too.
Can we just not say this anymore? Feel free to get together with all your empty nest friends and talk about how you wish your kids were babies again, where does the time go. Do not say this to new parents. New parents are tired and overwhelmed, and you're telling them to enjoy it because they will look back on these days with nostalgia. That may very well be true, but if I'm having a hard time, that makes the future sound terrible.
What I saw now in response is "the days are long, but the years are short." I am agreeing with these people, but they are forced to think back and remember why it is so hard to treasure some things. It seems to work really well. They snap out of their rose-tinted reverie of happily cooing infants and recall the more poop-tinted moments. I don't blame them for the selective remembering, but it's a little harder for me, as it was yesterday.
6.19.2015
6.16.2015
the big neck.
To announce my pregnancy, I sent out a family-wide email with the subject "Doctors found a mass." I attached the ultrasound, and while at that point the baby was vaguely crustacean in appearance, it was clearly a fetus. Most everyone responded with congratulations, but one of my brothers apparently did not look at the attached picture. So he just thought I had cancer that for whatever reason, the doctors weren't going to bother to remove for another seven months or so.
Jokes on me, because the doctors found a mass. At my postpartum followup visit with my midwife, she noticed that my thyroid was enlarged. I had a goiter, which is one of those things that sounds like something they got in Little House on the Prairie but that should be extinct by now. Actually, goiters are pretty common after pregnancy, when your body gets all confused. Or maybe it's not confused at all, it's just part of the recovery, but now we have doctors that can diagnose you with big neck and send you round for testing. The midwife took some blood to check my hormone levels. When the nurse entered this information into the medical records program, there was no option for a goiter. So on my chart, it says that I am suffering from an enlarged neck.
Lord have mercy, I got the big neck!
The hormone levels came back within the normal ranges, so the midwife recommended that I go in for an ultrasound to see what was going on in my big ole neck. They sent me to a nondescript office building which housed a diagnostic imaging center. A taciturn technician named Debbie put some goo on a wand and rubbed it on my neck, taking pictures.
"How's it look?" I asked, trying to make some conversation while not moving my neck too much. I wondered about her job, whether she only took pictures of thyroids or whether it was other stuff, too. Was it hard to learn to read the images? Did she have a favorite body part to look at?
"I'm not allowed to say," grunted Debbie. I didn't make any other attempts to engage.
I didn't hear back about the ultrasound for a couple of weeks. I took that to mean it wasn't too serious, i.e., not cancer. I'd done some research and found that something like 98% of goiters are benign. I was not particularly worried about any of it; in fact, I was mostly annoyed at the hassle of more appointments in drab buildings. However, I have met my healthcare deductible for the year, what with getting that baby out of my body, so I was willing to be safe rather than sorry at no expense to me.
When the midwife finally did give me a call, it was to let me know that I had a multi-nodular goiter with calcified areas. Therefore, they wanted me to see a surgeon for a biopsy. I did a little googling and found out that multi-nodular goiters with calcification were more likely to be cancer than other kinds, but still only 15% likely. I also found out that they can do a biopsy without cutting into you at all. It's called a fine needle aspiration, and they just take a needle and stick it in your goiter to remove some cells. Since I was being sent to a surgeon, it sounded like they wanted to cut into my neck. I was all prepared to go into the surgical consult and demand my fine needle aspiration. Because I am an American, and I have a right to have needles stuck into my big neck! I went in there and the surgeon told me she was sending me to someone else to get a fine needle aspiration.
That's right you are. Hrmph.
The surgeon reassured me that it was most likely benign, but also that thyroid cancer was hands down the best kind to get. Usually, just cutting out the goiter takes care of it. You might have to take replacement hormones if your thyroid is damaged. If your neck is particularly big, they will give you a pill of, wait for it, RADIOACTIVE IODINE. You will become RADIOACTIVE, such that for a week, you can't sleep in the same bed with anyone else or handle their food, lest they get contaminated by your RADIOACTIVE bodily fluids. You're not supposed to be near pregnant ladies or babies for a month, and you can't breastfeed your baby anymore because your milk will be RADIOACTIVE (though you could breastfeed future babies). And if you get bitten by a spider, you just might develop super powers. Or maybe it's the spider that gets super powers? Hrm.
And that's it. A little surgery and a super villain pill, cancer over. I think probably the being RADIOACTIVE part in practice is less cool than it sounds, but still: best cancer ever, right?
If it's not cancer, then they just keep an eye on the situation, and you don't get to be RADIOACTIVE. If at any point, the bigness of your neck interferes with things like breathing and swallowing, they will go in and cut the goiter out anyway. I had not even noticed that I was walking around with an apparently huge neck, but after finding out about it, I sometimes felt a catch in my throat. I would try to decide if that was because my esophagus was partially constricted, but when you start thinking too hard about something that is usually automatic, like swallowing, you really can't tell anymore.
The worst part of getting a needle stuck into your throat is the anesthetic, which is applied by a needle stuck into your throat. It burns and stings on the skin first and then it burns and stings under the skin. And then when they poke you with a different needle to get those goiter cells, you feel a little pressure, but no pain. Since they go in three times to get the cells, I have to assume that feeling a needle once is better than feeling it three times. The doctor did this on each side of my big neck, using an ultrasound machine to find one of the juicier nodules. When she was doing my right side, my head was facing the ultrasound screen, and I remarked how I expected to be able to see the needle (once I was given permission to talk again because there were nothing sticking into me). The doctor was kind enough to bounce the needle around a bit the next time so I would be sure to see it. That was the word she used: "bounce." I couldn't feel her doing this, but I could see her hand wiggling around in my peripheral vision and it was just sorta freaky to think about a needle bouncing around in my throat. But I was able to see it, and I figured that if I was going to maybe have cancer, I might as well be able to say that I saw them bounce a needle in my throat.
The doctor finished up and said I did very well. The nurse covered the punctures with what must be the biggest bandaids they make, just in case I was hoping to be able to go back to work and not have people ask what had happened. Since telling people you had a biopsy is all kinds of neon-sign scary, I decided I'd just say I cut myself shaving. That'll teach 'em to ask questions.
I go back in a week to discuss the results of the biopsy with the surgeon. Hopefully, I just have the big neck and not a cancerously big neck.
Jokes on me, because the doctors found a mass. At my postpartum followup visit with my midwife, she noticed that my thyroid was enlarged. I had a goiter, which is one of those things that sounds like something they got in Little House on the Prairie but that should be extinct by now. Actually, goiters are pretty common after pregnancy, when your body gets all confused. Or maybe it's not confused at all, it's just part of the recovery, but now we have doctors that can diagnose you with big neck and send you round for testing. The midwife took some blood to check my hormone levels. When the nurse entered this information into the medical records program, there was no option for a goiter. So on my chart, it says that I am suffering from an enlarged neck.
Lord have mercy, I got the big neck!
The hormone levels came back within the normal ranges, so the midwife recommended that I go in for an ultrasound to see what was going on in my big ole neck. They sent me to a nondescript office building which housed a diagnostic imaging center. A taciturn technician named Debbie put some goo on a wand and rubbed it on my neck, taking pictures.
"How's it look?" I asked, trying to make some conversation while not moving my neck too much. I wondered about her job, whether she only took pictures of thyroids or whether it was other stuff, too. Was it hard to learn to read the images? Did she have a favorite body part to look at?
"I'm not allowed to say," grunted Debbie. I didn't make any other attempts to engage.
I didn't hear back about the ultrasound for a couple of weeks. I took that to mean it wasn't too serious, i.e., not cancer. I'd done some research and found that something like 98% of goiters are benign. I was not particularly worried about any of it; in fact, I was mostly annoyed at the hassle of more appointments in drab buildings. However, I have met my healthcare deductible for the year, what with getting that baby out of my body, so I was willing to be safe rather than sorry at no expense to me.
When the midwife finally did give me a call, it was to let me know that I had a multi-nodular goiter with calcified areas. Therefore, they wanted me to see a surgeon for a biopsy. I did a little googling and found out that multi-nodular goiters with calcification were more likely to be cancer than other kinds, but still only 15% likely. I also found out that they can do a biopsy without cutting into you at all. It's called a fine needle aspiration, and they just take a needle and stick it in your goiter to remove some cells. Since I was being sent to a surgeon, it sounded like they wanted to cut into my neck. I was all prepared to go into the surgical consult and demand my fine needle aspiration. Because I am an American, and I have a right to have needles stuck into my big neck! I went in there and the surgeon told me she was sending me to someone else to get a fine needle aspiration.
That's right you are. Hrmph.
The surgeon reassured me that it was most likely benign, but also that thyroid cancer was hands down the best kind to get. Usually, just cutting out the goiter takes care of it. You might have to take replacement hormones if your thyroid is damaged. If your neck is particularly big, they will give you a pill of, wait for it, RADIOACTIVE IODINE. You will become RADIOACTIVE, such that for a week, you can't sleep in the same bed with anyone else or handle their food, lest they get contaminated by your RADIOACTIVE bodily fluids. You're not supposed to be near pregnant ladies or babies for a month, and you can't breastfeed your baby anymore because your milk will be RADIOACTIVE (though you could breastfeed future babies). And if you get bitten by a spider, you just might develop super powers. Or maybe it's the spider that gets super powers? Hrm.
And that's it. A little surgery and a super villain pill, cancer over. I think probably the being RADIOACTIVE part in practice is less cool than it sounds, but still: best cancer ever, right?
If it's not cancer, then they just keep an eye on the situation, and you don't get to be RADIOACTIVE. If at any point, the bigness of your neck interferes with things like breathing and swallowing, they will go in and cut the goiter out anyway. I had not even noticed that I was walking around with an apparently huge neck, but after finding out about it, I sometimes felt a catch in my throat. I would try to decide if that was because my esophagus was partially constricted, but when you start thinking too hard about something that is usually automatic, like swallowing, you really can't tell anymore.
The worst part of getting a needle stuck into your throat is the anesthetic, which is applied by a needle stuck into your throat. It burns and stings on the skin first and then it burns and stings under the skin. And then when they poke you with a different needle to get those goiter cells, you feel a little pressure, but no pain. Since they go in three times to get the cells, I have to assume that feeling a needle once is better than feeling it three times. The doctor did this on each side of my big neck, using an ultrasound machine to find one of the juicier nodules. When she was doing my right side, my head was facing the ultrasound screen, and I remarked how I expected to be able to see the needle (once I was given permission to talk again because there were nothing sticking into me). The doctor was kind enough to bounce the needle around a bit the next time so I would be sure to see it. That was the word she used: "bounce." I couldn't feel her doing this, but I could see her hand wiggling around in my peripheral vision and it was just sorta freaky to think about a needle bouncing around in my throat. But I was able to see it, and I figured that if I was going to maybe have cancer, I might as well be able to say that I saw them bounce a needle in my throat.
The doctor finished up and said I did very well. The nurse covered the punctures with what must be the biggest bandaids they make, just in case I was hoping to be able to go back to work and not have people ask what had happened. Since telling people you had a biopsy is all kinds of neon-sign scary, I decided I'd just say I cut myself shaving. That'll teach 'em to ask questions.
I go back in a week to discuss the results of the biopsy with the surgeon. Hopefully, I just have the big neck and not a cancerously big neck.
6.13.2015
sleep sheep.
Having a baby is a racket. For some reason, all kinds of people were really excited about us reproducing, and they gave us stuff. Sometimes people would include a gift receipt, which is possibly the best invention in the history of retail. It's like a blessing to return a gift. Otherwise, I feel a little bad about preferring the $15 in Target money over one more blanket that is too small to swaddle my chunk muffin baby. A gift receipt is the indication that the giver understands that I might have already received enough blankets or maybe this just isn't my style of blanket and I'd rather have those nice muslin ones with the robots. But even without the implied permission of a gift receipt, I've returned a lot of things. You can usually just google the product and find where it's sold. I do feel a little guilty this way, often because it seems the gift giver got ripped off. Baby stuff is big business, y'all.
We were given this thing called a Sleep Sheep, and I was pretty skeptical about it. It's a stuffed sheep that has a noise box that plays nature sounds to soothe the baby to sleep. I guess it's a sheep because of the whole counting sheep association, and because if you try to sell a noise box that just looks like a box, then you can't charge $25 for it.
Like I said, I was not impressed with the Sleep Sheep, and I would've happily returned it, except the packaging was kinda damaged, and I doubted they'd take it back. We meant to get a CD player for the baby to play brain-building Mozart or something, but it turns out that it is hard to find a CD player these days. I looked at Wal-Mart, just to see how expensive it would be, and whether it was expensive enough that I'd rather wait and find one used. But they didn't even have any. They had plenty of speakers that you could hook up wirelessly to a variety of multimedia devices, but if you just wanted to stick a disc in a machine and push play, you were out of luck. Go back to the 90s, you Luddite.
So one day, when the baby was not happy about being put down for a nap, I dug out the Sleep Sheep. Since I wasn't going to return it, I might as well see how it went. It had four sounds: a trickling stream, the ocean, light rain, and whale calls. One of these things is not like the other, and of course, that is the button I pressed. Susanna immediately went quiet. I hung the sleep sheep on the rail of the crib with the convenient velcro handle and walked away quickly. For the next twenty minutes, I heard the plaintive lowing of humpback whales, but I did not hear a fussing baby. As a bonus, the dog was super confused.
I'm sorry I doubted you, Sleep Sheep.
I'm sure this is going to cause all kinds of problems later in life. Perhaps Susanna will be embarrassed one day at school when the teacher asks what sound a sheep makes, and she goes, "OOOOOHOHOOOOOOOO." Or maybe on a visit to Sea World, at the sound of the whales, she'll just pass out in the middle of the aquarium due to conditioning. Even without these disastrous consequences, it's pretty much guaranteed her favorite Star Trek movie will be the one with the whales.
Except she'll call it "the one with the sheep."
We were given this thing called a Sleep Sheep, and I was pretty skeptical about it. It's a stuffed sheep that has a noise box that plays nature sounds to soothe the baby to sleep. I guess it's a sheep because of the whole counting sheep association, and because if you try to sell a noise box that just looks like a box, then you can't charge $25 for it.
Like I said, I was not impressed with the Sleep Sheep, and I would've happily returned it, except the packaging was kinda damaged, and I doubted they'd take it back. We meant to get a CD player for the baby to play brain-building Mozart or something, but it turns out that it is hard to find a CD player these days. I looked at Wal-Mart, just to see how expensive it would be, and whether it was expensive enough that I'd rather wait and find one used. But they didn't even have any. They had plenty of speakers that you could hook up wirelessly to a variety of multimedia devices, but if you just wanted to stick a disc in a machine and push play, you were out of luck. Go back to the 90s, you Luddite.
So one day, when the baby was not happy about being put down for a nap, I dug out the Sleep Sheep. Since I wasn't going to return it, I might as well see how it went. It had four sounds: a trickling stream, the ocean, light rain, and whale calls. One of these things is not like the other, and of course, that is the button I pressed. Susanna immediately went quiet. I hung the sleep sheep on the rail of the crib with the convenient velcro handle and walked away quickly. For the next twenty minutes, I heard the plaintive lowing of humpback whales, but I did not hear a fussing baby. As a bonus, the dog was super confused.
I'm sorry I doubted you, Sleep Sheep.
I'm sure this is going to cause all kinds of problems later in life. Perhaps Susanna will be embarrassed one day at school when the teacher asks what sound a sheep makes, and she goes, "OOOOOHOHOOOOOOOO." Or maybe on a visit to Sea World, at the sound of the whales, she'll just pass out in the middle of the aquarium due to conditioning. Even without these disastrous consequences, it's pretty much guaranteed her favorite Star Trek movie will be the one with the whales.
Except she'll call it "the one with the sheep."
6.12.2015
pbbbbbt
I had no idea how little babies could do. We used to talk about what we would do in case of apocalypse. We would advise the dog to go next door to join up with the neighbor dogs. I have found that the apocalypse game is not as fun when you consider your prospects with a baby.
Not that I expected her to do cartwheels or file my taxes at a month old. I knew that she would basically sleep, eat, and poop. I knew that she wouldn't be able to sit up or even hold up her head. For the overachieving parent, they give you exercises to do with your kid to further their development from useless baby to only mostly useless. For neck strength, they encourage tummy time. As you can imagine, it means putting your baby on her tummy for a few minutes a day to let her do baby push-ups. The push-ups are really pathetic at first, consisting of shakily raising her head a centimeter or so. But they get better. At the one-month check-up, Susanna performed an epic tummy time, and I swear I may have clapped with pride. Because my child lifted her head a whole three inches. Parenthood turns people into morons.
But there were so many things that I did not know babies couldn't do. I did not know that she wouldn't be able to see. It's not like we need her to be our designated driver, so it's not an issue. However, she couldn't focus or eyes or look at us for weeks. Josh was all ready to diagnose her with autism, because she was avoiding eye contact. No, dear, she just can't see your eyes. Even knowing it was normal, it was still disheartening. I'm doing everything for this kid, and she won't even look at me.
The thing that really got me was that she didn't know how to poop. Despite it being one of the three things that babies do, she only managed it by accident. Periodically, she would suddenly start screaming and crying, with her little legs stuck straight out. Then after a minute, we'd hear a pbbbbbt from her bottom, and everything would be fine. Apparently, when a baby gets that need-to-go feeling, it's painful and confusing, which makes her clench up. As people old enough to read, you know that this is not the right solution for the problem. We read that pumping her legs like she was riding a bicycle would help, but more often I would just nurse her, which would make her relax and let things work themselves out. I was pondering this once, that all people everywhere, once were little babies that did not know how to poop. You, me, Cher, Stalin, we all had to learn to poop.
After a few weeks, she figured it out. There was no more sudden screaming, but instead sudden brow-furrowing. And then, pbbbbbt. At which point we praise her for being such a smart baby, because parenthood turns people into morons.
Not that I expected her to do cartwheels or file my taxes at a month old. I knew that she would basically sleep, eat, and poop. I knew that she wouldn't be able to sit up or even hold up her head. For the overachieving parent, they give you exercises to do with your kid to further their development from useless baby to only mostly useless. For neck strength, they encourage tummy time. As you can imagine, it means putting your baby on her tummy for a few minutes a day to let her do baby push-ups. The push-ups are really pathetic at first, consisting of shakily raising her head a centimeter or so. But they get better. At the one-month check-up, Susanna performed an epic tummy time, and I swear I may have clapped with pride. Because my child lifted her head a whole three inches. Parenthood turns people into morons.
But there were so many things that I did not know babies couldn't do. I did not know that she wouldn't be able to see. It's not like we need her to be our designated driver, so it's not an issue. However, she couldn't focus or eyes or look at us for weeks. Josh was all ready to diagnose her with autism, because she was avoiding eye contact. No, dear, she just can't see your eyes. Even knowing it was normal, it was still disheartening. I'm doing everything for this kid, and she won't even look at me.
The thing that really got me was that she didn't know how to poop. Despite it being one of the three things that babies do, she only managed it by accident. Periodically, she would suddenly start screaming and crying, with her little legs stuck straight out. Then after a minute, we'd hear a pbbbbbt from her bottom, and everything would be fine. Apparently, when a baby gets that need-to-go feeling, it's painful and confusing, which makes her clench up. As people old enough to read, you know that this is not the right solution for the problem. We read that pumping her legs like she was riding a bicycle would help, but more often I would just nurse her, which would make her relax and let things work themselves out. I was pondering this once, that all people everywhere, once were little babies that did not know how to poop. You, me, Cher, Stalin, we all had to learn to poop.
After a few weeks, she figured it out. There was no more sudden screaming, but instead sudden brow-furrowing. And then, pbbbbbt. At which point we praise her for being such a smart baby, because parenthood turns people into morons.
6.01.2015
cluster fed.
Before the baby was born, we received a free sample of baby formula in the mail. I put them in the pantry in case we ended up needing them. I intended to breastfeed, but you never know. I knew that some women struggled with breastfeeding and that most women had trouble, particularly at the start. I knew there would be sore breasts and chapped nipples.
I did not know there would be cluster feeding.
Cluster feeding is when the baby wants to nurse pretty much constantly. Breast milk works on supply and demand. If the baby drinks all your milk, your body produces more next time. When the baby cluster feeds, she is driving up your supply by repeatedly emptying you out.
However, if you don't know this, you will think your baby is starving to death. Babies cannot talk, but they have signals they give. The newborn hungry sign is called rooting, where the baby wiggles and bounces her head around with an open mouth, looking for a nipple. So the baby would root, I would put her on the breast, where she would eat and then sorta pass out. I would pick her up oh-so-gently and tip-toe over to the bouncer to set her down. Sometimes she would awaken during the transfer. Other times she would wake up within the hour. Whenever she woke up, she would cry. I'd pick her up and hold her to my chest, only for her to stop crying and root furiously. This went on every evening from about 6 to 10. And it was all on me. Josh might pick her up when she started crying, but soon he'd come tell me, "She's rooting." Ain't nothin' sadder than a baby looking for a nipple on her father's chest.
Milk production is highest in the morning, so by the time you get to the end of the day, things are getting kinda dry. I sat there with a crying baby rubbing her mouth all over my shoulder, and one time on my chin, knowing that she had already emptied me out half an hour ago. I thought about the cans of formula in the pantry. I thought that my baby was starving, because my body had failed to provide with her.
I'm not sure I can explain the emotional entanglement that comes with breastfeeding. Any kind of failure or difficulty feels like a failure at womanhood itself. It makes you wonder what you would have done in the days before Similac sent samples to your door. Would you have to find another woman to take your baby to her breast? Would your baby just have died? Why did my body go through the trouble of making a baby that it couldn't even keep alive?
New parenthood is never feeling quite on solid footing. Add to that this nightly routine of nursing a tiny, screaming, insatiable mouth, demanding that you do what you swore you just did. Give, give, give, root, root, root, over and over. Also, there are hormones involved. What I'm saying is, I went a little crazy. I could feel my sanity leaking out until that well had also run dry. Oh look, the baby is rooting.
Those hours on the couch with the baby on my lap meant I had a lot of time to google all kinds of ridiculous new parenting queries, such as "baby nurses constantly" or "baby always hungry" or "why did I have a baby." In my googling, I read about cluster feeding. The internet reassured me that as long as the baby was filling diapers, then she was getting enough to eat, which made sense in an input/output kind of way. I could confirm diaper fillage, and so the ever-shrinking remnant of my logical brain was able to hold on. Barely.
I did not break out the formula. A lot of women will reach for the can, and it will be the beginning of the end of breastfeeding. The cluster feeding is necessary to get supply up. The baby is actually hungry, though not in danger. If you give her formula, she will fall asleep, happy and satisfied, and your breasts will not know to make more milk. However, you will avoid this nightly horror show and might therefore fall asleep happy and satisfied yourself. Whichever you choose, I won't judge.
They say breastfeeding creates bonding with your baby, and it's true, but I don't picture soft-lit moments looking at her lovingly while she peacefully sucks. I think that happened once, and then she threw up on me. It's more like the bond you have after a battle. We got through this, it sure was tough, but we did it together.
I did not know there would be cluster feeding.
Cluster feeding is when the baby wants to nurse pretty much constantly. Breast milk works on supply and demand. If the baby drinks all your milk, your body produces more next time. When the baby cluster feeds, she is driving up your supply by repeatedly emptying you out.
However, if you don't know this, you will think your baby is starving to death. Babies cannot talk, but they have signals they give. The newborn hungry sign is called rooting, where the baby wiggles and bounces her head around with an open mouth, looking for a nipple. So the baby would root, I would put her on the breast, where she would eat and then sorta pass out. I would pick her up oh-so-gently and tip-toe over to the bouncer to set her down. Sometimes she would awaken during the transfer. Other times she would wake up within the hour. Whenever she woke up, she would cry. I'd pick her up and hold her to my chest, only for her to stop crying and root furiously. This went on every evening from about 6 to 10. And it was all on me. Josh might pick her up when she started crying, but soon he'd come tell me, "She's rooting." Ain't nothin' sadder than a baby looking for a nipple on her father's chest.
Milk production is highest in the morning, so by the time you get to the end of the day, things are getting kinda dry. I sat there with a crying baby rubbing her mouth all over my shoulder, and one time on my chin, knowing that she had already emptied me out half an hour ago. I thought about the cans of formula in the pantry. I thought that my baby was starving, because my body had failed to provide with her.
I'm not sure I can explain the emotional entanglement that comes with breastfeeding. Any kind of failure or difficulty feels like a failure at womanhood itself. It makes you wonder what you would have done in the days before Similac sent samples to your door. Would you have to find another woman to take your baby to her breast? Would your baby just have died? Why did my body go through the trouble of making a baby that it couldn't even keep alive?
New parenthood is never feeling quite on solid footing. Add to that this nightly routine of nursing a tiny, screaming, insatiable mouth, demanding that you do what you swore you just did. Give, give, give, root, root, root, over and over. Also, there are hormones involved. What I'm saying is, I went a little crazy. I could feel my sanity leaking out until that well had also run dry. Oh look, the baby is rooting.
Those hours on the couch with the baby on my lap meant I had a lot of time to google all kinds of ridiculous new parenting queries, such as "baby nurses constantly" or "baby always hungry" or "why did I have a baby." In my googling, I read about cluster feeding. The internet reassured me that as long as the baby was filling diapers, then she was getting enough to eat, which made sense in an input/output kind of way. I could confirm diaper fillage, and so the ever-shrinking remnant of my logical brain was able to hold on. Barely.
I did not break out the formula. A lot of women will reach for the can, and it will be the beginning of the end of breastfeeding. The cluster feeding is necessary to get supply up. The baby is actually hungry, though not in danger. If you give her formula, she will fall asleep, happy and satisfied, and your breasts will not know to make more milk. However, you will avoid this nightly horror show and might therefore fall asleep happy and satisfied yourself. Whichever you choose, I won't judge.
They say breastfeeding creates bonding with your baby, and it's true, but I don't picture soft-lit moments looking at her lovingly while she peacefully sucks. I think that happened once, and then she threw up on me. It's more like the bond you have after a battle. We got through this, it sure was tough, but we did it together.
5.31.2015
march 2015 books.
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
In the past month or so, I've had trouble focusing. When I picked up the next book, I wanted something short and simple. This was it.
This was my first Wells book. He is credited with popularizing the concept of a time machine, where a traveller can control the when of his travels, rather than just randomly hopping about forward and backward. As common as this notion now is, it seems weird that it's only 120 years old.
In the story, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller builds a time machine and goes to the year 802,701. He finds himself in a temperate climate, where there are huge, impressive statues and buildings which are sinking into decay. He encounters small human-like beings who are simple and childlike. They spend their days eating fruit and playing, having no ambition and little curiosity. He speculates that man has evolved into these creatures after having conquered the dangers of nature. With survival being a matter of just sitting around and eating fruit, there is no need for intellect.
Later, he encounters another species, who are nocturnal and live underground. He first speculates that humanity evolved by class, and so the ruling elite were the happy and stupid fruit-eaters above, while the lower classes did the work below. Regardless of how the situation came about, he soon discovers that the current relationship is like the rancher to the cattle. The underground beings eat the helpless vegetarians above.
He finally hops back on his time machine and continues forward into the future to watch the earth die. The sun starts to burn out and signs of life decrease. He returns to England where none of his friends believe his story.
I think that we like to assume that man will only continue to become smarter and more advanced. The Time Traveller makes this assumption, not bothering to bring any supplies with him at all, as he assumes that whatever they have in the future will be way better. Wells seems to think that we may very well become so accomplished that our comfortable lives eliminate the need for education or culture. I don't necessarily ascribe to this vision, as it seems like our solutions to current problems create different problems. Fear not! We will probably not degenerate into helpless fruit-eaters. We may just drive ourselves to extinction instead.
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
My second Graham Greene book, which I probably bought because I liked the first one. That was a good move on my part, because this was also really good. The thing I like about Greene is that he's incredibly perceptive. He's moving along, describing the action and the character's thoughts, and then BAM! Something really poignant and true about human nature.
The story itself is about an English policeman working in West Africa during World War II. He's a straight-laced, upstanding guy, devout Catholic, but he gets himself embroiled in an affair and some diamond smuggling. How? One little step at a time, which is just the way it goes, innit? The book goes on to describe his increasingly terrible crimes and his building guilt and shame. He ascribes all his failures to pity - everything he does is out of responsibility to others, whereas he would like to just be left alone. I did not buy that. Sorry, dude, you cheated on your wife because you wanted to, not because you felt sorry for the poor young thing you cheated with.
This is also a very Catholic book - a lot of the language is religious, and the man's fall is seen as a sort of battle with God. Since he sees his sins as motivated by concern for fellow humans, he views it as a conflict between loving God vs loving His creatures. Again, this seems to be sort of a convenient glaze to put on his actual motivations and a way of avoiding doing the hard thing and 'fessing up. The Catholicism is sort of snobbish, in that he (and his devout wife) seem to feel that the only people who can feel guilt or understand the concept of good and evil at all are Catholics. The rest of us are just sort of pagan beasts. I don't know enough Catholics to know if this is a common attitude.
What struck me about this book is how alone everyone in it is. People have intimate relationships without really knowing each other at all. People do things, thinking they will be understood, but of course others interpret situations based on their own contexts. People hide other things, assuming they know how others will react, when in fact, everyone already knows about what was being hidden. I find this aloneness profoundly sad, but probably true. We can never know each other. Maybe if we did, nothing would ever get done because we'd be frozen by indecision or just plain bummed out all the time.
A note: The copy of the book that I had was heavily marked up by a previous reader. Seriously, half the lines on every page were underlined, with stars and double underlines to mark the really important stuff. Every once in a while, I would find the word "Pinkie" written in the margins, which I found mystifying. Turns out, that is a character in another Greene novel, Brighton Rock. Maybe I'll pick that up sometime.
***
I have not read a book since March. I had gobs of time to read while sitting on my fanny with a baby on my lap, but nothing I picked up held my attention. I think now I'm just out of the habit. Here's hoping that I get back to it.
H.G. Wells
In the past month or so, I've had trouble focusing. When I picked up the next book, I wanted something short and simple. This was it.
This was my first Wells book. He is credited with popularizing the concept of a time machine, where a traveller can control the when of his travels, rather than just randomly hopping about forward and backward. As common as this notion now is, it seems weird that it's only 120 years old.
In the story, a scientist known only as the Time Traveller builds a time machine and goes to the year 802,701. He finds himself in a temperate climate, where there are huge, impressive statues and buildings which are sinking into decay. He encounters small human-like beings who are simple and childlike. They spend their days eating fruit and playing, having no ambition and little curiosity. He speculates that man has evolved into these creatures after having conquered the dangers of nature. With survival being a matter of just sitting around and eating fruit, there is no need for intellect.
Later, he encounters another species, who are nocturnal and live underground. He first speculates that humanity evolved by class, and so the ruling elite were the happy and stupid fruit-eaters above, while the lower classes did the work below. Regardless of how the situation came about, he soon discovers that the current relationship is like the rancher to the cattle. The underground beings eat the helpless vegetarians above.
He finally hops back on his time machine and continues forward into the future to watch the earth die. The sun starts to burn out and signs of life decrease. He returns to England where none of his friends believe his story.
I think that we like to assume that man will only continue to become smarter and more advanced. The Time Traveller makes this assumption, not bothering to bring any supplies with him at all, as he assumes that whatever they have in the future will be way better. Wells seems to think that we may very well become so accomplished that our comfortable lives eliminate the need for education or culture. I don't necessarily ascribe to this vision, as it seems like our solutions to current problems create different problems. Fear not! We will probably not degenerate into helpless fruit-eaters. We may just drive ourselves to extinction instead.
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
My second Graham Greene book, which I probably bought because I liked the first one. That was a good move on my part, because this was also really good. The thing I like about Greene is that he's incredibly perceptive. He's moving along, describing the action and the character's thoughts, and then BAM! Something really poignant and true about human nature.
The story itself is about an English policeman working in West Africa during World War II. He's a straight-laced, upstanding guy, devout Catholic, but he gets himself embroiled in an affair and some diamond smuggling. How? One little step at a time, which is just the way it goes, innit? The book goes on to describe his increasingly terrible crimes and his building guilt and shame. He ascribes all his failures to pity - everything he does is out of responsibility to others, whereas he would like to just be left alone. I did not buy that. Sorry, dude, you cheated on your wife because you wanted to, not because you felt sorry for the poor young thing you cheated with.
This is also a very Catholic book - a lot of the language is religious, and the man's fall is seen as a sort of battle with God. Since he sees his sins as motivated by concern for fellow humans, he views it as a conflict between loving God vs loving His creatures. Again, this seems to be sort of a convenient glaze to put on his actual motivations and a way of avoiding doing the hard thing and 'fessing up. The Catholicism is sort of snobbish, in that he (and his devout wife) seem to feel that the only people who can feel guilt or understand the concept of good and evil at all are Catholics. The rest of us are just sort of pagan beasts. I don't know enough Catholics to know if this is a common attitude.
What struck me about this book is how alone everyone in it is. People have intimate relationships without really knowing each other at all. People do things, thinking they will be understood, but of course others interpret situations based on their own contexts. People hide other things, assuming they know how others will react, when in fact, everyone already knows about what was being hidden. I find this aloneness profoundly sad, but probably true. We can never know each other. Maybe if we did, nothing would ever get done because we'd be frozen by indecision or just plain bummed out all the time.
A note: The copy of the book that I had was heavily marked up by a previous reader. Seriously, half the lines on every page were underlined, with stars and double underlines to mark the really important stuff. Every once in a while, I would find the word "Pinkie" written in the margins, which I found mystifying. Turns out, that is a character in another Greene novel, Brighton Rock. Maybe I'll pick that up sometime.
***
I have not read a book since March. I had gobs of time to read while sitting on my fanny with a baby on my lap, but nothing I picked up held my attention. I think now I'm just out of the habit. Here's hoping that I get back to it.
5.29.2015
pink and pinker pink.
A question that everyone asks when you are pregnant is whether it's a boy or a girl. The smart-aleck answer is "yes." We decided not to find out. Most people were really supportive of this idea, particularly older folks who had kids before finding out the sex was an option. A few people said they couldn't do it that way, and one cashier looked at me like I was nuts. Only one person asked why.
"So we don't get a bunch of pink crap if it's a girl," I answered without thinking. It was like one of those word association tests where the truth comes out. Previously, I had thought of this as just a bonus to not knowing, but honestly, it was my main reason. Instead of an avalanche of pink, people gave us a lot of neutral stuff. It was heavy on the yellows and green, most of it pastel. It seems like things fall in three categories - girl (pink, purple, frilly and delicate), neutral (yellow, green, or gray, generally animal themed and cutesie), and boy (everything else). So if you want bold colors with fun themes, look in the boy section. Maybe grumble about outdated gender norms while you're there, just for me.
A friend of mine took her step-daughter shopping for my baby shower and picked out some onesies that were gray and green and featured triceratops and apatosauruses (apatosauri?). Her step-daughter protested that those were for boys. Excuse me? This is why we need feminism - because eight-year-old girls think that liking dinosaurs is only for boys. Dinosaurs are for everybody.
Most of our clothes came from a friend of a friend, who passed along two giant bags of clothes used by her sons, so "boy" clothes. They had bold, bright colors and fun themes like sports or dump trucks or monsters. There was one item that had a treehouse that said "no girls allowed," and I threw that out on principle. The rest I happily put on my little girl.
Some people waited until after the baby was born to give us gifts, and that was when the pink started flowing. At that point, I discovered that I enjoyed dressing my daughter in the little girly things, too. I liked the flowers and the frills and the tiny bows. And the dresses! With the TINY BLOOMERS! I didn't even mind the things that said "princess" on them, because that makes me the queen. In fact, I liked the little girly things so much that I began to wonder if it wouldn't have been so bad to know ahead of time that we were having a daughter. It wasn't all pink stuff.
And then we went to a shower being thrown for Josh's cousin, who knows she is having a girl. She gave me a bag of stuff that people had given her; she said she wanted to spread the pink around and lamented that she had not yet received any camo babywear. There were some hats with giant bows and a set of footed pajamas with ladybugs. Finally, there was a hot pink onesie with a big gold crown on it and "Princess" in gold script. Attached was a tutu in zebra print of pink and pinker pink. It was awful. It went straight into the Goodwill pile with the no girls allowed onesie.
Now I think we did the right thing by not finding out. We avoided an onslaught of pink animal-print, and a little girl learned that dinosaurs are for everyone. I call that a win.
"So we don't get a bunch of pink crap if it's a girl," I answered without thinking. It was like one of those word association tests where the truth comes out. Previously, I had thought of this as just a bonus to not knowing, but honestly, it was my main reason. Instead of an avalanche of pink, people gave us a lot of neutral stuff. It was heavy on the yellows and green, most of it pastel. It seems like things fall in three categories - girl (pink, purple, frilly and delicate), neutral (yellow, green, or gray, generally animal themed and cutesie), and boy (everything else). So if you want bold colors with fun themes, look in the boy section. Maybe grumble about outdated gender norms while you're there, just for me.
A friend of mine took her step-daughter shopping for my baby shower and picked out some onesies that were gray and green and featured triceratops and apatosauruses (apatosauri?). Her step-daughter protested that those were for boys. Excuse me? This is why we need feminism - because eight-year-old girls think that liking dinosaurs is only for boys. Dinosaurs are for everybody.
Most of our clothes came from a friend of a friend, who passed along two giant bags of clothes used by her sons, so "boy" clothes. They had bold, bright colors and fun themes like sports or dump trucks or monsters. There was one item that had a treehouse that said "no girls allowed," and I threw that out on principle. The rest I happily put on my little girl.
Some people waited until after the baby was born to give us gifts, and that was when the pink started flowing. At that point, I discovered that I enjoyed dressing my daughter in the little girly things, too. I liked the flowers and the frills and the tiny bows. And the dresses! With the TINY BLOOMERS! I didn't even mind the things that said "princess" on them, because that makes me the queen. In fact, I liked the little girly things so much that I began to wonder if it wouldn't have been so bad to know ahead of time that we were having a daughter. It wasn't all pink stuff.
And then we went to a shower being thrown for Josh's cousin, who knows she is having a girl. She gave me a bag of stuff that people had given her; she said she wanted to spread the pink around and lamented that she had not yet received any camo babywear. There were some hats with giant bows and a set of footed pajamas with ladybugs. Finally, there was a hot pink onesie with a big gold crown on it and "Princess" in gold script. Attached was a tutu in zebra print of pink and pinker pink. It was awful. It went straight into the Goodwill pile with the no girls allowed onesie.
Now I think we did the right thing by not finding out. We avoided an onslaught of pink animal-print, and a little girl learned that dinosaurs are for everyone. I call that a win.
5.20.2015
or i'll know.
It was 10 AM, and I was taking my discreet black shoulder bag into the conference room when I realized that there were certain key pump parts sitting on the drying rack at home. Ugh. I knew this was going to happen at some point. I hopped in the car and drove home to get the parts, vowing to start keeping my spare set at the office.
As I came into the house, Josh was folding laundry. "I forgot my pump parts," I explained.
"Oh. I thought you were mad."
"Mad? You thought I came home from work to yell at you about something? That you had done something and I would know?" See, this is a joke at our house. Whenever we leave, we tell the dog "Be good. Or we'll know," with ominous emphasis on that last word. We imagine that from her perspective, we are magicians because we always know when she has not been good. But really, when the dog is bad, it's pretty obvious. Like, shreds of trash all around the trash can obvious.
We laughed at the thought of me knowing about what he did, ha ha, but then-
"Wait. What did you do?"
He looked sheepish. "I gave the baby a drop of grapefruit juice," he confessed.
"Did you take a picture?" I mean, the damage was done here, but hopefully he made it worth it by immortalizing her expression.
"Yes!" He got out his camera and showed me a Facebook post of our baby making the kind of face you might make if your world had just opened up to the existence of sour citrus. I giggled.
"Okay, that's cute, but don't do that anymore."
"She liked it!"
"Her face says otherwise."
"So that's mean?"
"No, it's not mean. I look forward to giving her sour things and laughing at her expression. She's just too little right now." I have fond memories of being at K&S Cafeteria, watching my brother squeeze lemon slices over a spoon and then giving it to his son. My nephew would make a face each time and then ask "More soup?". My brother had done it the first time as a joke to see the baby make a face, but now he was obliged to continue until all the lemon slices at the table had been exhausted. Kids can turn things around on you like that.
"Alright, fine."
"I have to go back to work. Be good. Or I'll know."
As I came into the house, Josh was folding laundry. "I forgot my pump parts," I explained.
"Oh. I thought you were mad."
"Mad? You thought I came home from work to yell at you about something? That you had done something and I would know?" See, this is a joke at our house. Whenever we leave, we tell the dog "Be good. Or we'll know," with ominous emphasis on that last word. We imagine that from her perspective, we are magicians because we always know when she has not been good. But really, when the dog is bad, it's pretty obvious. Like, shreds of trash all around the trash can obvious.
We laughed at the thought of me knowing about what he did, ha ha, but then-
"Wait. What did you do?"
He looked sheepish. "I gave the baby a drop of grapefruit juice," he confessed.
"Did you take a picture?" I mean, the damage was done here, but hopefully he made it worth it by immortalizing her expression.
"Yes!" He got out his camera and showed me a Facebook post of our baby making the kind of face you might make if your world had just opened up to the existence of sour citrus. I giggled.
"Okay, that's cute, but don't do that anymore."
"She liked it!"
"Her face says otherwise."
"So that's mean?"
"No, it's not mean. I look forward to giving her sour things and laughing at her expression. She's just too little right now." I have fond memories of being at K&S Cafeteria, watching my brother squeeze lemon slices over a spoon and then giving it to his son. My nephew would make a face each time and then ask "More soup?". My brother had done it the first time as a joke to see the baby make a face, but now he was obliged to continue until all the lemon slices at the table had been exhausted. Kids can turn things around on you like that.
"Alright, fine."
"I have to go back to work. Be good. Or I'll know."
5.18.2015
glowbaby.
The first day of my daughter's life, I waited for someone to tell me to feed her. I'd read a dizzying amount of advice, much of it conflicting, but one thing that had stuck was that it was best to feed the baby within an hour of birth. So as the nurses were doing this and that around me with their friendly yet ruthless efficiency, I asked, "Should I feed her?" What I was really asking was "Can someone show me how to feed her?"
I'd signed up for a breastfeeding class a few weeks before my due date. Then I didn't go, because a blizzard came in. My non-attendance was out of character for me. I spent the afternoon trying to figure out if the class was cancelled in the face of winter weather warnings. I checked websites and called what turned out to be a doctor's office that was completely unrelated to the classes, where a friendly receptionist went above and beyond trying to find someone else to call. The class started at 6:30 and ran until 8:00, which is when the weather advisory started. And then I got a dinner invitation, so I decided to just assume the class was cancelled.
Sitting in the maternity ward with a baby who was probably hungry from her long journey out the birth canal, I wished I had gone to the class. Finally, a nurse took a few minutes to show me how to hold my baby and put her on the breast. I found this to be comical and a little bit barbaric. You rub the baby's lip with your nipple, which makes her reflexively open her mouth wide. You immediately stuff as much boob as will fit into her mouth. Imagine someone shoving a water balloon in your mouth every time you yawned. The nurse warned me that the baby would not eat very much, as her tummy was about the size of a marble. I was delighted to feel what must have been the baby latching on to my nipple. The feeling almost immediately ended, but I figured that was how it was supposed to go.
Had I attended the class, I might have known that the baby needs to stay latched on to get any milk, even enough for a marble-sized tummy. The result was that the baby did not get really anything to eat that first day. On the morning of the second day, I woke up feeling refreshed and rested, though a bit sore in some areas. I was hopeful that we would be released that day, and the midwife seemed to think I was good to go. They even started the checkout process by having me fill out the postpartum depression screening. I checked the boxes that said I was able to feel cheerful as much as I had before, that I was not crying for no reason or blaming myself for bad things that might happen.
The nurse came in and asked me how the baby had eaten the night before. Pardon? That was when I found out that I was supposed to be feeding the baby through the night. In fact, I was apparently supposed to wake her up to do so. Having not attended the class, I can't say whether those particular topics were covered. I just thought I had one of those good babies that sleeps through the night right away. All these parents complaining about the baby not sleeping, when they're the ones waking them up to stuff boobs in their boob-holes. Susanna continued to be very sleepy, to the point where she didn't wake up much even for me to ineffectively feed her.
It didn't seem like a problem to me, but the pediatrician was concerned about my very sleepy baby. She was so concerned that she had someone come and poke my baby's foot to draw blood (baby woke up for that). The blood test came back positive for jaundice, and so my dreams of being released were dashed. I was more annoyed than worried, as I knew jaundice was pretty common in babies. Josh had had it and look at him now, a big strapping man, a father even.
Jaundice in babies happens when their bodies are unable to break down bilirubin. When a red blood cell gets old, it breaks open and all kinds of stuff spills out, which is broken down by the body into other stuff, including bilirubin. The liver then breaks down the bilirubin and then its passed on out in either solid or liquid waste. Babies, with their brand new livers, take a little time getting started. Plus, the blood that a fetus has has different characteristics than the blood of a tiny person living out in the world, so the body is breaking down more red blood cells than usual. Because the bilirubin is flushed out the digestive tract, it is important that the baby get enough to eat for the digestive system to be flushing.
My not feeding the baby had caused her to have jaundice. I mean, I didn't know, no one told me how to feed the dang baby. I guess I could've informed myself, by like, taking a class or some...oh. Skipping out on that breastfeeding class a month ago gave my baby jaundice. Fantastic.
Jaundice is treated with light. This treatment was discovered accidentally, when sick babies taken out in the sunlight did better than babies that stayed inside. Now, they use a light board. This was a small surfboard type thing hooked up to a car vacuum cleaner type thing that created blue light. You put a mask on the baby to protect her eyes, then put her on the board and swaddle baby and board all up together. It looked like she was in a tanning bed. I was still not worried. Sure, my baby was sick with my incompetence, but she had a super-common condition that they treat with the power of the sun.
But then I was lying in the hospital bed, holding a baby strapped to a glowing surfboard. Josh had gone home to feed the dog. I couldn't snuggle my baby, I could only hold the board she was strapped to. I couldn't see her face, as it was covered by the mask. I sat and looked at my baby in her terrible Hannibal mask, sleeping on her eerie glowboard. All because I blew off a breastfeeding class to go have dinner with my friends.
Could I have that postpartum depression form back? I need to change some answers.
Then Josh came back, and Susanna devoured some milk I pumped for her, and her bilirubin went down, and it was all fine. We were cleared to take her off the light therapy so we could snuggle properly while they worked on our discharge papers. At last, they let us take our little glowbaby home.
I'd signed up for a breastfeeding class a few weeks before my due date. Then I didn't go, because a blizzard came in. My non-attendance was out of character for me. I spent the afternoon trying to figure out if the class was cancelled in the face of winter weather warnings. I checked websites and called what turned out to be a doctor's office that was completely unrelated to the classes, where a friendly receptionist went above and beyond trying to find someone else to call. The class started at 6:30 and ran until 8:00, which is when the weather advisory started. And then I got a dinner invitation, so I decided to just assume the class was cancelled.
Sitting in the maternity ward with a baby who was probably hungry from her long journey out the birth canal, I wished I had gone to the class. Finally, a nurse took a few minutes to show me how to hold my baby and put her on the breast. I found this to be comical and a little bit barbaric. You rub the baby's lip with your nipple, which makes her reflexively open her mouth wide. You immediately stuff as much boob as will fit into her mouth. Imagine someone shoving a water balloon in your mouth every time you yawned. The nurse warned me that the baby would not eat very much, as her tummy was about the size of a marble. I was delighted to feel what must have been the baby latching on to my nipple. The feeling almost immediately ended, but I figured that was how it was supposed to go.
Had I attended the class, I might have known that the baby needs to stay latched on to get any milk, even enough for a marble-sized tummy. The result was that the baby did not get really anything to eat that first day. On the morning of the second day, I woke up feeling refreshed and rested, though a bit sore in some areas. I was hopeful that we would be released that day, and the midwife seemed to think I was good to go. They even started the checkout process by having me fill out the postpartum depression screening. I checked the boxes that said I was able to feel cheerful as much as I had before, that I was not crying for no reason or blaming myself for bad things that might happen.
The nurse came in and asked me how the baby had eaten the night before. Pardon? That was when I found out that I was supposed to be feeding the baby through the night. In fact, I was apparently supposed to wake her up to do so. Having not attended the class, I can't say whether those particular topics were covered. I just thought I had one of those good babies that sleeps through the night right away. All these parents complaining about the baby not sleeping, when they're the ones waking them up to stuff boobs in their boob-holes. Susanna continued to be very sleepy, to the point where she didn't wake up much even for me to ineffectively feed her.
It didn't seem like a problem to me, but the pediatrician was concerned about my very sleepy baby. She was so concerned that she had someone come and poke my baby's foot to draw blood (baby woke up for that). The blood test came back positive for jaundice, and so my dreams of being released were dashed. I was more annoyed than worried, as I knew jaundice was pretty common in babies. Josh had had it and look at him now, a big strapping man, a father even.
Jaundice in babies happens when their bodies are unable to break down bilirubin. When a red blood cell gets old, it breaks open and all kinds of stuff spills out, which is broken down by the body into other stuff, including bilirubin. The liver then breaks down the bilirubin and then its passed on out in either solid or liquid waste. Babies, with their brand new livers, take a little time getting started. Plus, the blood that a fetus has has different characteristics than the blood of a tiny person living out in the world, so the body is breaking down more red blood cells than usual. Because the bilirubin is flushed out the digestive tract, it is important that the baby get enough to eat for the digestive system to be flushing.
My not feeding the baby had caused her to have jaundice. I mean, I didn't know, no one told me how to feed the dang baby. I guess I could've informed myself, by like, taking a class or some...oh. Skipping out on that breastfeeding class a month ago gave my baby jaundice. Fantastic.
Jaundice is treated with light. This treatment was discovered accidentally, when sick babies taken out in the sunlight did better than babies that stayed inside. Now, they use a light board. This was a small surfboard type thing hooked up to a car vacuum cleaner type thing that created blue light. You put a mask on the baby to protect her eyes, then put her on the board and swaddle baby and board all up together. It looked like she was in a tanning bed. I was still not worried. Sure, my baby was sick with my incompetence, but she had a super-common condition that they treat with the power of the sun.
But then I was lying in the hospital bed, holding a baby strapped to a glowing surfboard. Josh had gone home to feed the dog. I couldn't snuggle my baby, I could only hold the board she was strapped to. I couldn't see her face, as it was covered by the mask. I sat and looked at my baby in her terrible Hannibal mask, sleeping on her eerie glowboard. All because I blew off a breastfeeding class to go have dinner with my friends.
Then Josh came back, and Susanna devoured some milk I pumped for her, and her bilirubin went down, and it was all fine. We were cleared to take her off the light therapy so we could snuggle properly while they worked on our discharge papers. At last, they let us take our little glowbaby home.
5.17.2015
a bargain and an adventure.
Last week I happened to drive by my regular haircut place, Famous Hair. Just so you know, I am fully aware that Famous Hair is a ridiculous name. I guess hair can be famous, for instance, Donald Trump has famous hair. But that's hardly a selling point. In case you can't tell by the nonsensical name, Famous Hair is the kind of place where you just walk in and get a cheap haircut. I've been going to such places since I left my hometown, as I am unable to devote whatever time and resources is required to find an actual stylist. I like being able to decide that I need a haircut today, and I really like paying $14 for the service. My results have been mixed. I've gotten several bad haircuts, many serviceable haircuts, and a couple of really great haircuts. The last time I got a really great one was at Famous Hair, which is why I kept going back, even though I rarely got the stylist that gave me the great haircut, because he was often booked. Why couldn't I be bothered to book him myself? It's almost like I don't care that much about my hair, and that is why it will never be famous.
But Famous Hair is no more, because that location has been turned into a Great Clips. Or a Smart Cuts. Was it Super Snips? I don't know, but I really didn't want to go there. I look down on those places. I am too good for Super Snips; I demand Famous Hair. If only I had taken the time to book the great stylist who used to work at Famous Hair, I would probably have his new location and I could keep getting great haircuts somewhere else.
I am not sure when I had my last haircut - as you can tell, I'm pretty lax about all things hair. I stopped curling my hair every morning over a decade ago, and then I stopped blow-drying it, and now I can't even be bothered to wash it every day. But whatever haircut I'd gotten before (which had been deemed serviceable) had grown out, and it was looking neglected. And honestly, I'd been feeling a weird urge to do something crazy, like dye it hot pink. I've never dyed my hair a normal color, and so I blame the desire to go nuts on having a baby. Like a mid-life crisis. I'm too young to be a mom; I have young hair. I thought maybe a new haircut would whet my appetite for change before I did anything that would scare my infant.
So I took to the internet to find a new haircut place. Searching for "raleigh haircuts" only gets you barbers, because men want their hair cut, while women want their hair styled. I found lots of results for "raleigh salons," but they charge a lot more than $14. I cannot imagine that kind of haircut that $50 gets you. That haircut better do my dishes. Will this haircut soothe my baby and guarantee that I am victorious in all arguments with my husband? Then I'll pass, thanks. Some of the salons are also bars, which seems very convenient and hip, until you consider that maybe your hair only looks good until you sober up.
Then I happened upon the website for the Paul Mitchell School. I could have a cosmetology student cut my hair for $12. It sounded like a bargain and an adventure.
The Paul Mitchell School certainly looks like a real salon, with blaring hits of the 90s and a warehouse feel. The students were dressed in all black, and many of them had funky hair styles, so everyone looked a bit goth. I was introduced to Kelli, who would be taking care of me today. The first thing she did was have me sign a waiver, saying that I understood that she was a student and was therefore released from any damages. I wasn't sure if that included anything worse than a crappy haircut. I cut my husband's hair, and I did get his ear one time, so maybe there was that. Then we talked about what I wanted that day, and I had come prepared. Usually, I act dumb and surprised, as if I didn't know they were going to ask me that question, because the truth is, I don't ever know what I want. Sometimes I really do go in there and say something like "I want something that I can wash and do nothing else that will look good." Some stylists run with that, glad that finally someone recognizes that they are the expert here. But mostly they look scared that whatever they do, I'm not going to like it. While it would be an excellent learning experience for a student to encounter a customer such as me, I had previously googled "haircuts that look good air-dried." The internet said a layered bob was what I wanted, and so that's what I told Kelli.
She filled out a little sheet, then went off to fetch Barry, who is a teacher at the Paul Mitchell School. They discussed the plan (layered bob), felt my hair and talked about what products and the kind of layers to cut to help my hair look its best. I enjoyed the attention and felt like I was going to receive personalized service. We had a plan for my hair! Barry signed off on my hair plan, and Kelli outfitted me in a smock and took me back to the sinks.
The best part of a haircut is when they wash my hair. When I was growing up, my mom took me to a lady named Marilyn who cut hair in her basement salon. Marilyn had long fingernails, and when she washed your hair, she used them to give the most exquisite scalp massage. I've never encountered anyone else who used their nails, and I can only assume it's discouraged at places like the Paul Mitchell School for some hygienic or liability reason. But even without Marilyn's magic fingernails, having someone else wash my hair under warm water rates highly on the list of life's simple pleasures. They charge extra for it at the walk-in places, and I always pay for it, even as I skipped the dry and style option.
Kelli was just rinsing out the conditioner when a weird noise started ringing through the building. I thought it was part of the music, like maybe this was when everyone stopped what they were doing and did a dance featuring combing and clipping hand motions, but when I opened my eyes, Kelli was looking around, confused. Someone came by and told her it was a fire alarm, and that we needed to exit the building. Kelli wrapped up my hair in a towel and we walked outside to the far end of the parking lot. Of all the things I expected from getting my hair cut at a cosmetic arts school, a fire alarm was pretty low on the list, somewhere below synchronized dance breaks.
We stood outside for five minutes or so. It was a beautiful day. I looked like someone who, well, had been in the middle of a haircut. Kelli kept apologizing, but I kept grinning like a galoot, because it was just so funny. Whether I was going to receive a good haircut was still yet to be seen, but I was certainly having an adventure.
Finally we all filed back inside like schoolchildren, and I took my seat at Kelli's station. She proceeded to cut my hair. The only warning I would give someone who was considering having their hair cut at the Paul Mitchell School (besides the obvious one) is that it takes a long time. Some of that is inexperience, I'm sure, but I think the students are also going slow to make sure they do their best work. At every station, the stylist was hunched over and squinting, as if they were cutting hairs one by one. So carve out a couple hours rather than a half hour and you'll receive the most meticulous haircut of your life. But hey, they're up to code on their fire safety!
Generally, I prefer when the stylist does their job silently and I don't have to talk to them, as the conversation inevitably ends up being about my job, which is boring to talk about with people who aren't particularly interested in computers. However, I discovered that having a child means I have so much more that I can share with the average person. We talked about babies and birth and husbands and drastic postpartum dye jobs, and somehow I really bonded with my randomly-assigned cosmetology student.
After she was done with the scissors, Kelli swept my hair off the floor and gathered it in a ziplock bag, which is pretty creepy. I mean, we bonded, but it's a little soon to be collecting each other's hair. She said it was for dye tests. Otherwise, she would have to do tests on hair that came from a big box in the back, where it was all mixed and matted together. I agreed that sounded kinda gross and gave my blessing for her to practice dying on my discarded hair. I trust that she won't use it for voodoo dolls, but I did sign a waiver.
One of the other teachers came by to survey the job. She took the scissors and did some kind of trimming thing where they seem to cut a millimeter off every third hair. I don't know what this does, it's hair science. The teacher signed off on my new cut, and Kelli was beaming with pride over it. I don't know anything about hair, so the effect was that I felt good about it. It was shorter than I had planned on and is a total mom haircut. I fear I may end up back at the Paul Mitchell School to get pink streaks put in, as soon as I'm feeling ready for another adventure.
But Famous Hair is no more, because that location has been turned into a Great Clips. Or a Smart Cuts. Was it Super Snips? I don't know, but I really didn't want to go there. I look down on those places. I am too good for Super Snips; I demand Famous Hair. If only I had taken the time to book the great stylist who used to work at Famous Hair, I would probably have his new location and I could keep getting great haircuts somewhere else.
I am not sure when I had my last haircut - as you can tell, I'm pretty lax about all things hair. I stopped curling my hair every morning over a decade ago, and then I stopped blow-drying it, and now I can't even be bothered to wash it every day. But whatever haircut I'd gotten before (which had been deemed serviceable) had grown out, and it was looking neglected. And honestly, I'd been feeling a weird urge to do something crazy, like dye it hot pink. I've never dyed my hair a normal color, and so I blame the desire to go nuts on having a baby. Like a mid-life crisis. I'm too young to be a mom; I have young hair. I thought maybe a new haircut would whet my appetite for change before I did anything that would scare my infant.
So I took to the internet to find a new haircut place. Searching for "raleigh haircuts" only gets you barbers, because men want their hair cut, while women want their hair styled. I found lots of results for "raleigh salons," but they charge a lot more than $14. I cannot imagine that kind of haircut that $50 gets you. That haircut better do my dishes. Will this haircut soothe my baby and guarantee that I am victorious in all arguments with my husband? Then I'll pass, thanks. Some of the salons are also bars, which seems very convenient and hip, until you consider that maybe your hair only looks good until you sober up.
Then I happened upon the website for the Paul Mitchell School. I could have a cosmetology student cut my hair for $12. It sounded like a bargain and an adventure.
The Paul Mitchell School certainly looks like a real salon, with blaring hits of the 90s and a warehouse feel. The students were dressed in all black, and many of them had funky hair styles, so everyone looked a bit goth. I was introduced to Kelli, who would be taking care of me today. The first thing she did was have me sign a waiver, saying that I understood that she was a student and was therefore released from any damages. I wasn't sure if that included anything worse than a crappy haircut. I cut my husband's hair, and I did get his ear one time, so maybe there was that. Then we talked about what I wanted that day, and I had come prepared. Usually, I act dumb and surprised, as if I didn't know they were going to ask me that question, because the truth is, I don't ever know what I want. Sometimes I really do go in there and say something like "I want something that I can wash and do nothing else that will look good." Some stylists run with that, glad that finally someone recognizes that they are the expert here. But mostly they look scared that whatever they do, I'm not going to like it. While it would be an excellent learning experience for a student to encounter a customer such as me, I had previously googled "haircuts that look good air-dried." The internet said a layered bob was what I wanted, and so that's what I told Kelli.
She filled out a little sheet, then went off to fetch Barry, who is a teacher at the Paul Mitchell School. They discussed the plan (layered bob), felt my hair and talked about what products and the kind of layers to cut to help my hair look its best. I enjoyed the attention and felt like I was going to receive personalized service. We had a plan for my hair! Barry signed off on my hair plan, and Kelli outfitted me in a smock and took me back to the sinks.
The best part of a haircut is when they wash my hair. When I was growing up, my mom took me to a lady named Marilyn who cut hair in her basement salon. Marilyn had long fingernails, and when she washed your hair, she used them to give the most exquisite scalp massage. I've never encountered anyone else who used their nails, and I can only assume it's discouraged at places like the Paul Mitchell School for some hygienic or liability reason. But even without Marilyn's magic fingernails, having someone else wash my hair under warm water rates highly on the list of life's simple pleasures. They charge extra for it at the walk-in places, and I always pay for it, even as I skipped the dry and style option.
Kelli was just rinsing out the conditioner when a weird noise started ringing through the building. I thought it was part of the music, like maybe this was when everyone stopped what they were doing and did a dance featuring combing and clipping hand motions, but when I opened my eyes, Kelli was looking around, confused. Someone came by and told her it was a fire alarm, and that we needed to exit the building. Kelli wrapped up my hair in a towel and we walked outside to the far end of the parking lot. Of all the things I expected from getting my hair cut at a cosmetic arts school, a fire alarm was pretty low on the list, somewhere below synchronized dance breaks.
We stood outside for five minutes or so. It was a beautiful day. I looked like someone who, well, had been in the middle of a haircut. Kelli kept apologizing, but I kept grinning like a galoot, because it was just so funny. Whether I was going to receive a good haircut was still yet to be seen, but I was certainly having an adventure.
Finally we all filed back inside like schoolchildren, and I took my seat at Kelli's station. She proceeded to cut my hair. The only warning I would give someone who was considering having their hair cut at the Paul Mitchell School (besides the obvious one) is that it takes a long time. Some of that is inexperience, I'm sure, but I think the students are also going slow to make sure they do their best work. At every station, the stylist was hunched over and squinting, as if they were cutting hairs one by one. So carve out a couple hours rather than a half hour and you'll receive the most meticulous haircut of your life. But hey, they're up to code on their fire safety!
Generally, I prefer when the stylist does their job silently and I don't have to talk to them, as the conversation inevitably ends up being about my job, which is boring to talk about with people who aren't particularly interested in computers. However, I discovered that having a child means I have so much more that I can share with the average person. We talked about babies and birth and husbands and drastic postpartum dye jobs, and somehow I really bonded with my randomly-assigned cosmetology student.
After she was done with the scissors, Kelli swept my hair off the floor and gathered it in a ziplock bag, which is pretty creepy. I mean, we bonded, but it's a little soon to be collecting each other's hair. She said it was for dye tests. Otherwise, she would have to do tests on hair that came from a big box in the back, where it was all mixed and matted together. I agreed that sounded kinda gross and gave my blessing for her to practice dying on my discarded hair. I trust that she won't use it for voodoo dolls, but I did sign a waiver.
One of the other teachers came by to survey the job. She took the scissors and did some kind of trimming thing where they seem to cut a millimeter off every third hair. I don't know what this does, it's hair science. The teacher signed off on my new cut, and Kelli was beaming with pride over it. I don't know anything about hair, so the effect was that I felt good about it. It was shorter than I had planned on and is a total mom haircut. I fear I may end up back at the Paul Mitchell School to get pink streaks put in, as soon as I'm feeling ready for another adventure.
5.15.2015
all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
One week past my due date, I was still pregnant. I had an appointment with the midwife, where we confirmed that I was still pregnant and that the baby was fine, just on its own schedule. She offered to do a membrane sweep, which is where she takes her finger and sweeps it around the cervix to separate the membranes around the baby from the cervix. This releases prostaglandins, which tell your body to get that other little body out. I wanted that little body out. To everything there is a season and all that, but Mama says it's time to be born now.
This is a birth story.
I wanted to induce labor for two reasons. One, if I did not have this baby within the next week, they were going to check me into the hospital to induce me with drugs. All I knew about being induced with drugs was that the contractions came hard and fast, and it would be unlikely that I'd be able to have a med-free birth. I have always known, nay, assumed that I would give birth without chemical pain relief. It was the way my sisters did it, the way my mother did it, the way her mother did it. People respond to this in two ways - by nodding and saying of course, that's the way to go, or by looking at me like I've lost my mind. Finally, someone asked me why. And the answer was pride: ours is a competitive family. Then I looked up some other reasons so I would have something to say (bottom line: use of drugs increases uses of interventions such as forceps or c-section, so you get a snowball effect of increased risk to mother and baby).
I took a childbirth class that spent a lot of time discussing natural pain management - not say pain relief, but management. The midwife teaching the class talked about pain versus suffering. Most of the time, when you go to the hospital in pain, it is because something is wrong. But when you're having a baby, it's supposed to hurt. It is productive pain, as it is your body preparing to do something momentous. Labor requires pain. It does not require suffering. Pain is a physical phenomenon, suffering is mental. I felt prepared to handle pain. Being induced meant letting go of my med-free childbirth plan. While that wouldn't be that terrible, it wasn't what I wanted.
The second reason I wanted to get that baby out was because of my grandmother. Ninety-four years old, her short-term memory was not great. The past couple of visits, she looked at me and apologized for not quite being able to place who I was. But she knew that her granddaughter, Sandra, was going to have a baby soon. She asked my mother every day if I'd had that baby yet. She always forgot that we didn't know the sex, and she had it in her head that it was a girl.
I read somewhere that there are three ways to enjoy something - in anticipation of it, experiencing it, and remembering it. When we are born, everything is anticipation. As we live, things move from anticipation to experience and finally to memory. For my grandmother, most of her enjoyment was in memory, and this was apparent as she fondly told us stories from decades past. But my baby was something she could enjoy in anticipation. I was never hurt when she momentarily forgot my face, but I was deeply moved that she remembered there was a baby coming.
Aside from her memory, my grandmother's esophagus was no longer working. She had been having problems with phlegm for a while, and it finally got to the point where she could no longer swallow any food. Her esophagus finally wore out. Of all the parts in the body that serve us tirelessly, I never thought about the esophagus giving out. The doctor said that they could put in a feeding tube to buy her some more time, or they could make her comfortable. My mom had to make a hard decision. She thought about pain and suffering and made a call to hospice.
This is a death story.
The morning hospice was setting up a bed at my parents' house was the same one where I was having my cervix swept. My siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles were coming from all over the world to my hometown. I was sitting at my house, four hours away, maybe going to have a baby. I knew that I would never see my grandmother again, and she would never get to meet the new baby. But I promised my mom to send a picture of the baby as soon as it arrived so that she could print it out for Grandmother. It was important to me that Grandmother get to experience what she'd been anticipating. I wanted the baby out.
The cervix sweep doesn't automatically start labor. To be honest, I'd had my cervix swept the week before on my due date. I'd felt some cramps for a few hours, but that was the end of it. This time, the cramps came sooner, and they never really went away. They went from a constant dull ache to having peaks and valleys. The midwife had told me to come to the hospital when I was having contractions lasting a minute, five minutes apart. I downloaded a contraction timer app to my phone and lay down on the couch to watch X-Files while Josh showered. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Josh put on a button-up shirt and a bow tie to look nice for the baby.
We left for the hospital at around 7. According to my timer app, the contractions were five minutes apart and one minute long. I called my mom to let her know it was go time. I texted my brother-in-law to ask him to look in on the dog. I was in pain for one minute out of five. I was not suffering.
Josh dropped me off at the emergency room entrance and parked the car. I went inside, declined the wheelchair, and walked over to admitting. Josh came in while they were asking me questions and checking my insurance. A nurse came down to escort us to the maternity ward. They showed us to Room 2, where I was told to undress and put on a gown to wait for the midwife. When she arrived, she checked my cervix.
I was dilated 3 cm, which was exactly what I had been that morning. They told me I was probably not in labor, that this was just cramping caused by the membrane sweep. I could wait a couple hours and they'd check again, but really, I ought to just go home, take a Tylenol, and go to bed. Dejected and embarrassed, I did. I felt like a moron, and I was still in pain. But I had been told that it was not productive pain, just pain.
Thus began my suffering.
I went home, changed into pajamas. Josh moved the TV from the living room into the bedroom so we could watch March Madness. I lay in bed but did not sleep. I threw up the PBJ and Tylenol. The pain sharpened. I paced, I rocked, I sat, I stood, but nothing helped. As the contractions worsened, I concluded that if this was not labor, then I was not going to be able to stand actual labor.
My wounded pride told me many lies. It told me that I was stupid for thinking I had been in labor before. It told me that I was still not in labor, and I should be able to handle this. It told me that if I went to the hospital now, they'd just give me a Tylenol and send me back here. Labor was causing me pain, and my ego was making me suffer. I cried out, shaking my head, "I can't do this I can't do this."
Finally, five hours after we'd left, I told Josh to take me back to the hospital. If this wasn't labor, well, I still needed medical attention, because something was happening to me.
The second trip to the hospital was remarkably different. Josh had changed out of his bow tie. I only changed out of pajamas into essentially different pajamas because there was vomit on the first set. I didn't call or text anyone on the way, but instead moaned. When he dropped me off at the door, I sat down immediately in a wheelchair that was parked outside and shivered in the cold until he got back. Being admitted was quicker this time because they still had my information, but I was much less helpful. When the nurse came to get us this time, I'm sure she thought, now that lady is about to have a baby.
When the midwife checked me this time, I was at 9 cm. I would have pumped my fist in the air and shouted "TOLD YOU SO" but I was busy shaking and moaning. She told me to moan in a lower register, to direct the sound down. I don't know if that is real science, but it helped. Or maybe finding out that my pain was productive helped. I was no longer suffering. Josh told them that I had said something about an epidural back at the house. The midwife said we could do that, or we could just go ahead and start pushing this baby out. The epidural would make things take longer. I said let's do this.
Somehow, in ten hours of birthing class, I never picked up that pushing a baby out takes hours. Birth videos and sitcoms alike edit that part down. In the movies, it takes three pushes tops. I'm here to tell you that it takes many, many pushes. It took me two hours of pushes. A contraction would come, I would PUUUUUUSH for a count of ten, let out my breath in a scream and then do it again, and again before finally collapsing as the contraction ebbed. In between, I lay there as if dead, out of my head with exhaustion and pain. I was there and yet not.
Two hours of pushing sounds like a lot, and it is, but pushing was a million times better than not. This was something I could do to fight back. In those seconds where I would get my breath back to start a new push, the pain was crushing. So I pushed back.
In the movies, they say, "I can see the head!" and then whoosh! the baby is out. No. That baby's head was just chilling out in my vagina for a half hour, easy. The midwife said I could put my hand down and touch it, which I did, and it was too weird. They wheeled a mirror over so I could see. I thanked them and asked them to take it away again.
Time goes strange in the delivery room. There was a clock on the wall, so I could do the subtraction and tell you how long it had been. But it felt like minutes, and it felt like years. I counted time by the signs that the midwife was preparing for the delivery. The nurse wheeled in a table of instruments. Part of the bed at my feet was removed. A ceiling panel was removed and a giant spotlight pulled down. A group of pediatricians arrived and began setting up in the anteroom in case of emergency. I could tell we were nearly there, but I had no concept of when it would be over.
So when at last, at last, there was a baby, it seemed oddly sudden. There was a little cry, and the pediatricians smiled, packed their things, and left. The midwife handed the tiny, wiggly, goo-covered person to me. The umbilical cord was blocking my view, so Josh had to tell me that I had a daughter. I had a Susanna.
I held my little girl while cleanup and damage control went on below my waist (so. much. blood). Josh took some pictures of the squinting new person, then emailed them to family. When the midwife and the nurses were done, they dimmed the lights and our new little family was left alone. Josh collapsed on the couch in the corner, but Susanna and I were wide awake. I held her to my chest, skin to skin. She made gentle snuffly noises and blinked in the light of her first day. I could've watched the expressions flicker across her tiny face all day. So it was you, I thought. It's been you in there all along.
I can imagine the scene at my parents' house when the email arrived. One of my mom's favorite things to do is tell people good news. I can hear her talking in excited not-really-whispers about her daughter's new daughter while my dad sings "Oh! Susanna." She told Grandmother and showed her the picture. Maybe she got to tell her a few times.
Someone sat with Grandmother all the time. She wasn't allowed to eat because of the danger of her aspirating it into her lungs, which would be traumatic. She couldn't even have water. My mom used q-tips to keep her mouth wet. Grandmother, forgetting, would say she was thirsty, and my mother, her daughter, would have to tell her she couldn't have a glass of water. Grandmother would ask if that was what the doctor had said to do, and then accept it calmly.
She was awake and lucid for a couple of days, as the parade of visitors came through. She'd tell the same stories over and over and then laugh at herself when she realized it. She got weaker. The hospice people gave her some morphine, so there was no pain, no suffering. She died early in the morning, three days after her 78th descendant was born.
I missed the funeral. I heard it was well-attended.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. For Susanna, a time to be born. For my grandmother, a time to die. For mother and I, a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. It's jarring to process it at once: my grief while I hold my new daughter, my mother's joy as she makes funeral arrangements. Birth and death are not opposites so much as complements; we all have to do both to experience any of the things in between, hopefully with as little suffering as possible.
This is a birth story.
I wanted to induce labor for two reasons. One, if I did not have this baby within the next week, they were going to check me into the hospital to induce me with drugs. All I knew about being induced with drugs was that the contractions came hard and fast, and it would be unlikely that I'd be able to have a med-free birth. I have always known, nay, assumed that I would give birth without chemical pain relief. It was the way my sisters did it, the way my mother did it, the way her mother did it. People respond to this in two ways - by nodding and saying of course, that's the way to go, or by looking at me like I've lost my mind. Finally, someone asked me why. And the answer was pride: ours is a competitive family. Then I looked up some other reasons so I would have something to say (bottom line: use of drugs increases uses of interventions such as forceps or c-section, so you get a snowball effect of increased risk to mother and baby).
I took a childbirth class that spent a lot of time discussing natural pain management - not say pain relief, but management. The midwife teaching the class talked about pain versus suffering. Most of the time, when you go to the hospital in pain, it is because something is wrong. But when you're having a baby, it's supposed to hurt. It is productive pain, as it is your body preparing to do something momentous. Labor requires pain. It does not require suffering. Pain is a physical phenomenon, suffering is mental. I felt prepared to handle pain. Being induced meant letting go of my med-free childbirth plan. While that wouldn't be that terrible, it wasn't what I wanted.
The second reason I wanted to get that baby out was because of my grandmother. Ninety-four years old, her short-term memory was not great. The past couple of visits, she looked at me and apologized for not quite being able to place who I was. But she knew that her granddaughter, Sandra, was going to have a baby soon. She asked my mother every day if I'd had that baby yet. She always forgot that we didn't know the sex, and she had it in her head that it was a girl.
I read somewhere that there are three ways to enjoy something - in anticipation of it, experiencing it, and remembering it. When we are born, everything is anticipation. As we live, things move from anticipation to experience and finally to memory. For my grandmother, most of her enjoyment was in memory, and this was apparent as she fondly told us stories from decades past. But my baby was something she could enjoy in anticipation. I was never hurt when she momentarily forgot my face, but I was deeply moved that she remembered there was a baby coming.
Aside from her memory, my grandmother's esophagus was no longer working. She had been having problems with phlegm for a while, and it finally got to the point where she could no longer swallow any food. Her esophagus finally wore out. Of all the parts in the body that serve us tirelessly, I never thought about the esophagus giving out. The doctor said that they could put in a feeding tube to buy her some more time, or they could make her comfortable. My mom had to make a hard decision. She thought about pain and suffering and made a call to hospice.
This is a death story.
The morning hospice was setting up a bed at my parents' house was the same one where I was having my cervix swept. My siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles were coming from all over the world to my hometown. I was sitting at my house, four hours away, maybe going to have a baby. I knew that I would never see my grandmother again, and she would never get to meet the new baby. But I promised my mom to send a picture of the baby as soon as it arrived so that she could print it out for Grandmother. It was important to me that Grandmother get to experience what she'd been anticipating. I wanted the baby out.
The cervix sweep doesn't automatically start labor. To be honest, I'd had my cervix swept the week before on my due date. I'd felt some cramps for a few hours, but that was the end of it. This time, the cramps came sooner, and they never really went away. They went from a constant dull ache to having peaks and valleys. The midwife had told me to come to the hospital when I was having contractions lasting a minute, five minutes apart. I downloaded a contraction timer app to my phone and lay down on the couch to watch X-Files while Josh showered. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Josh put on a button-up shirt and a bow tie to look nice for the baby.
We left for the hospital at around 7. According to my timer app, the contractions were five minutes apart and one minute long. I called my mom to let her know it was go time. I texted my brother-in-law to ask him to look in on the dog. I was in pain for one minute out of five. I was not suffering.
Josh dropped me off at the emergency room entrance and parked the car. I went inside, declined the wheelchair, and walked over to admitting. Josh came in while they were asking me questions and checking my insurance. A nurse came down to escort us to the maternity ward. They showed us to Room 2, where I was told to undress and put on a gown to wait for the midwife. When she arrived, she checked my cervix.
I was dilated 3 cm, which was exactly what I had been that morning. They told me I was probably not in labor, that this was just cramping caused by the membrane sweep. I could wait a couple hours and they'd check again, but really, I ought to just go home, take a Tylenol, and go to bed. Dejected and embarrassed, I did. I felt like a moron, and I was still in pain. But I had been told that it was not productive pain, just pain.
Thus began my suffering.
I went home, changed into pajamas. Josh moved the TV from the living room into the bedroom so we could watch March Madness. I lay in bed but did not sleep. I threw up the PBJ and Tylenol. The pain sharpened. I paced, I rocked, I sat, I stood, but nothing helped. As the contractions worsened, I concluded that if this was not labor, then I was not going to be able to stand actual labor.
My wounded pride told me many lies. It told me that I was stupid for thinking I had been in labor before. It told me that I was still not in labor, and I should be able to handle this. It told me that if I went to the hospital now, they'd just give me a Tylenol and send me back here. Labor was causing me pain, and my ego was making me suffer. I cried out, shaking my head, "I can't do this I can't do this."
Finally, five hours after we'd left, I told Josh to take me back to the hospital. If this wasn't labor, well, I still needed medical attention, because something was happening to me.
The second trip to the hospital was remarkably different. Josh had changed out of his bow tie. I only changed out of pajamas into essentially different pajamas because there was vomit on the first set. I didn't call or text anyone on the way, but instead moaned. When he dropped me off at the door, I sat down immediately in a wheelchair that was parked outside and shivered in the cold until he got back. Being admitted was quicker this time because they still had my information, but I was much less helpful. When the nurse came to get us this time, I'm sure she thought, now that lady is about to have a baby.
When the midwife checked me this time, I was at 9 cm. I would have pumped my fist in the air and shouted "TOLD YOU SO" but I was busy shaking and moaning. She told me to moan in a lower register, to direct the sound down. I don't know if that is real science, but it helped. Or maybe finding out that my pain was productive helped. I was no longer suffering. Josh told them that I had said something about an epidural back at the house. The midwife said we could do that, or we could just go ahead and start pushing this baby out. The epidural would make things take longer. I said let's do this.
Somehow, in ten hours of birthing class, I never picked up that pushing a baby out takes hours. Birth videos and sitcoms alike edit that part down. In the movies, it takes three pushes tops. I'm here to tell you that it takes many, many pushes. It took me two hours of pushes. A contraction would come, I would PUUUUUUSH for a count of ten, let out my breath in a scream and then do it again, and again before finally collapsing as the contraction ebbed. In between, I lay there as if dead, out of my head with exhaustion and pain. I was there and yet not.
Two hours of pushing sounds like a lot, and it is, but pushing was a million times better than not. This was something I could do to fight back. In those seconds where I would get my breath back to start a new push, the pain was crushing. So I pushed back.
In the movies, they say, "I can see the head!" and then whoosh! the baby is out. No. That baby's head was just chilling out in my vagina for a half hour, easy. The midwife said I could put my hand down and touch it, which I did, and it was too weird. They wheeled a mirror over so I could see. I thanked them and asked them to take it away again.
Time goes strange in the delivery room. There was a clock on the wall, so I could do the subtraction and tell you how long it had been. But it felt like minutes, and it felt like years. I counted time by the signs that the midwife was preparing for the delivery. The nurse wheeled in a table of instruments. Part of the bed at my feet was removed. A ceiling panel was removed and a giant spotlight pulled down. A group of pediatricians arrived and began setting up in the anteroom in case of emergency. I could tell we were nearly there, but I had no concept of when it would be over.
So when at last, at last, there was a baby, it seemed oddly sudden. There was a little cry, and the pediatricians smiled, packed their things, and left. The midwife handed the tiny, wiggly, goo-covered person to me. The umbilical cord was blocking my view, so Josh had to tell me that I had a daughter. I had a Susanna.
I held my little girl while cleanup and damage control went on below my waist (so. much. blood). Josh took some pictures of the squinting new person, then emailed them to family. When the midwife and the nurses were done, they dimmed the lights and our new little family was left alone. Josh collapsed on the couch in the corner, but Susanna and I were wide awake. I held her to my chest, skin to skin. She made gentle snuffly noises and blinked in the light of her first day. I could've watched the expressions flicker across her tiny face all day. So it was you, I thought. It's been you in there all along.
I can imagine the scene at my parents' house when the email arrived. One of my mom's favorite things to do is tell people good news. I can hear her talking in excited not-really-whispers about her daughter's new daughter while my dad sings "Oh! Susanna." She told Grandmother and showed her the picture. Maybe she got to tell her a few times.
Someone sat with Grandmother all the time. She wasn't allowed to eat because of the danger of her aspirating it into her lungs, which would be traumatic. She couldn't even have water. My mom used q-tips to keep her mouth wet. Grandmother, forgetting, would say she was thirsty, and my mother, her daughter, would have to tell her she couldn't have a glass of water. Grandmother would ask if that was what the doctor had said to do, and then accept it calmly.
She was awake and lucid for a couple of days, as the parade of visitors came through. She'd tell the same stories over and over and then laugh at herself when she realized it. She got weaker. The hospice people gave her some morphine, so there was no pain, no suffering. She died early in the morning, three days after her 78th descendant was born.
I missed the funeral. I heard it was well-attended.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. For Susanna, a time to be born. For my grandmother, a time to die. For mother and I, a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. It's jarring to process it at once: my grief while I hold my new daughter, my mother's joy as she makes funeral arrangements. Birth and death are not opposites so much as complements; we all have to do both to experience any of the things in between, hopefully with as little suffering as possible.
5.04.2015
working mother.
I walked into the office this morning with my purse, a grocery bag containing my lunch, and a black shoulder bag containing a breast pump. I was surprised when I got to my cube and found it exactly the same; the rest of my life had changed so much.
Everyone stopped by to welcome me back asking how I'm doing and whether I've slept at all in the last six weeks. One coworker asked gently how I was doing and then looked at me with concern, as if to let me know that I could feel free to open up. I replied that I was doing fine, and he turned away, almost disappointed, mumbling something about women having trouble leaving the baby.
I did not have trouble leaving the baby. I told my husband where he could find the milk and then reassured him that taking care of an infant was not hard. Well, it's not complicated. And then I just left with my discrete black shoulder bag, off to bring home the bacon. And the milk.
Mid-morning, I decided to investigate my options. I went into the ladies' room and discovered that there is one outlet located by the sink. To pump in the relative privacy of a stall, I'd need an extension cord. My other option appeared to be a storage room, which was more private in that it had a lock on the door and no one would be able to hear the telltale whirrr-click whirrr-click. However, I'd have to put some kind of sign on the door to prevent others with a key from coming in to get the old accounting records, which felt pretty conspicuous. Also, all the outlets were hidden behind shelves of boxes. There were a couple of empty offices and conference rooms, but they all had windows. The only other woman at work recalled that when she'd gone through the same thing a decade and an office ago, the maintenance crew had come in and installed blinds on a window.
It seems like there are laws about accommodating working mothers who need to breastfeed. Installing blinds would be accommodating. Had I brought this up more than half an hour before I needed it, that might have been possible. Since I did not do that, for the time being, I was given an extension cord. A bright orange, thirty-foot extension cord. Itis not ideal, but it works.
So I sat on the toilet, pumped, emptied the full containers into the jar, and then pumped some more. I got milk on my shirt, and the jar I brought was too small. I left the pump parts drying on a paper towel by the bathroom sink, but I had to put the milk jar in the company fridge. I thought about labeling it, in case someone thought about using it for their coffee. Being a working mother is so glamorous.
In the afternoon, I texted my husband to ask what time he would be bringing the baby by to meet my coworkers, because it is apparently a crime to have a baby and then not show it to everyone. He responded that he was at the store, picking up ingredients for dinner. I admired his ambition, as I have only been on a solo excursion with the baby one time, and it was for a required doctor's appointment. I wondered if the baby would fuss or if he would have to change a diaper in the men's room, where there was probably not a changing station. Being a stay-at-home dad is so glamorous.
Today my old life met my new one. It was the first day of the new normal.
Everyone stopped by to welcome me back asking how I'm doing and whether I've slept at all in the last six weeks. One coworker asked gently how I was doing and then looked at me with concern, as if to let me know that I could feel free to open up. I replied that I was doing fine, and he turned away, almost disappointed, mumbling something about women having trouble leaving the baby.
I did not have trouble leaving the baby. I told my husband where he could find the milk and then reassured him that taking care of an infant was not hard. Well, it's not complicated. And then I just left with my discrete black shoulder bag, off to bring home the bacon. And the milk.
Mid-morning, I decided to investigate my options. I went into the ladies' room and discovered that there is one outlet located by the sink. To pump in the relative privacy of a stall, I'd need an extension cord. My other option appeared to be a storage room, which was more private in that it had a lock on the door and no one would be able to hear the telltale whirrr-click whirrr-click. However, I'd have to put some kind of sign on the door to prevent others with a key from coming in to get the old accounting records, which felt pretty conspicuous. Also, all the outlets were hidden behind shelves of boxes. There were a couple of empty offices and conference rooms, but they all had windows. The only other woman at work recalled that when she'd gone through the same thing a decade and an office ago, the maintenance crew had come in and installed blinds on a window.
It seems like there are laws about accommodating working mothers who need to breastfeed. Installing blinds would be accommodating. Had I brought this up more than half an hour before I needed it, that might have been possible. Since I did not do that, for the time being, I was given an extension cord. A bright orange, thirty-foot extension cord. Itis not ideal, but it works.
So I sat on the toilet, pumped, emptied the full containers into the jar, and then pumped some more. I got milk on my shirt, and the jar I brought was too small. I left the pump parts drying on a paper towel by the bathroom sink, but I had to put the milk jar in the company fridge. I thought about labeling it, in case someone thought about using it for their coffee. Being a working mother is so glamorous.
In the afternoon, I texted my husband to ask what time he would be bringing the baby by to meet my coworkers, because it is apparently a crime to have a baby and then not show it to everyone. He responded that he was at the store, picking up ingredients for dinner. I admired his ambition, as I have only been on a solo excursion with the baby one time, and it was for a required doctor's appointment. I wondered if the baby would fuss or if he would have to change a diaper in the men's room, where there was probably not a changing station. Being a stay-at-home dad is so glamorous.
Today my old life met my new one. It was the first day of the new normal.
3.17.2015
baby dreams.
Still pregnant. Moving on.
Some pregnant women have dreams about their babies. Sometimes, these dreams even reveal insights, like the baby's gender. When we tell people that we are waiting until the birth to find out the sex of the baby, some of them ask me if I have any intuition about it. I'm really not sure how that would work. Even assuming there are noticeable differences in carrying a boy versus carrying a girl, how would that be communicated to my brain? While I'm pretty confident dismissing most old wives' tales about telling the gender, I'm willing to admit that maybe I'm just not the intuitive type.
I know another pregnant lady who is about 3 months behind me. She felt that the baby was a girl before they had the ultrasound confirming her intuition. She said she had a dream about her daughter and she just loved her so much. Isn't that nice? I'm sitting here agonizing over my ambivalence towards my baby, and she has a dream where she just loves it so much.
Let me tell you about my baby dreams.
Dream 1: I drop the baby (just "the baby," not a son or a daughter, just some anonymous swaddled infant). It rolls under a table, and I can't find it.
Dream 2: The baby has weird yellow eyes. Special Agent Mulder is there, probably because the yellow eyes indicate that the baby is an alien or a part of a government conspiracy.
Dream 3: The baby is crawling and has a comically large head, like the size of a balloon.
See? Just not the intuitive type. Or maybe our dreams reflect what we're already feeling, rather than revealing any secrets. Also, no more X-Files before bed.
Some pregnant women have dreams about their babies. Sometimes, these dreams even reveal insights, like the baby's gender. When we tell people that we are waiting until the birth to find out the sex of the baby, some of them ask me if I have any intuition about it. I'm really not sure how that would work. Even assuming there are noticeable differences in carrying a boy versus carrying a girl, how would that be communicated to my brain? While I'm pretty confident dismissing most old wives' tales about telling the gender, I'm willing to admit that maybe I'm just not the intuitive type.
I know another pregnant lady who is about 3 months behind me. She felt that the baby was a girl before they had the ultrasound confirming her intuition. She said she had a dream about her daughter and she just loved her so much. Isn't that nice? I'm sitting here agonizing over my ambivalence towards my baby, and she has a dream where she just loves it so much.
Let me tell you about my baby dreams.
Dream 1: I drop the baby (just "the baby," not a son or a daughter, just some anonymous swaddled infant). It rolls under a table, and I can't find it.
Dream 2: The baby has weird yellow eyes. Special Agent Mulder is there, probably because the yellow eyes indicate that the baby is an alien or a part of a government conspiracy.
Dream 3: The baby is crawling and has a comically large head, like the size of a balloon.
See? Just not the intuitive type. Or maybe our dreams reflect what we're already feeling, rather than revealing any secrets. Also, no more X-Files before bed.
3.12.2015
horizon.
Last week, I hit 39 weeks, which is full term. That means the baby is basically done cooking, and now we are just waiting for it to decide that the confines of my body are not enough anymore. I can't imagine how that decision hasn't already been made, as I can feel little parts pushing outward, often at two different points, like someone stretching at the beginning of the day. I wonder if maybe the baby is trying to burst out, not knowing that the gate is down.
Before 39 weeks, the baby was coming soon, and now it's coming at any time. I hate open-ended plans, where a punctual person like me is ready at the earliest possible point, and then is forced to kill time in such a way that doesn't mess up the existing preparations nor causes me to be too involved that I can't just drop everything. Baby is not yet late, so the fact that the crib is still in pieces is fine. Lateness in this case is not even accurate, as due dates are not an exact science, and really, Baby comes when Baby is ready. But I can't help thinking that when Baby shows up in relation to the due date will be the first test of whether it is his mother or his father's child.
I am in limbo. I am ready to not be pregnant anymore. I am tired of sleeping with a pillow between my knees and having to do a 20-point turn just to roll over. I'm tired of being limited to my five maternity outfits. I am tired of getting out of breath from putting on my shoes. I'm ready for something else now.
Ready to not be pregnant, but ready to be formerly pregnant, i.e. a parent? After the birth is a horizon I can't see over. I can't imagine it. The most I can muster is to picture my life as it is now, but there's a baby hanging out in the corner. I don't think that's accurate. Maybe that's why it feels like time has stopped. Before, there was a clear distance before the horizon, where I had time: time to get supplies, time to go to San Francisco, time to read books on birth and raising children. Now there is just that horizon, suddenly very close, and then nothing, like what flat-earthers must picture coming to the edge of the world must be like.
Every night I go to bed and think, well, it wasn't today. And then I wake up in the morning and wonder if today is the first day of the rest of my life. Or rather, I wonder if it's the opposite, the last day of the first part of my life. I had a teacher in high school who talked about life changes as the death of the person you were before. Graduation is the death of your grade school selves, marriage is the death of your single self, etc. My non-parent self is dying, along with my husband's non-parent self. Is this the last time we'll hit the snooze button to get nine more minutes of quiet snuggling?
My mother-in-law tells me to treasure this time, but she is the type to say that about every period of life. Her advice is really about awareness and gratitude. I'm aware, but I'm not sure I'm grateful. I appreciate these last few days, just the two of us, but without being able to picture what comes next, I'm scared and even a little bitter that it has to end. My non-parent self does not want to die, though she is on the verge of killing my pregnant self.
This is melancholy, I know, and no one wants to hear a monologue on dying selves when they ask if I'm excited to have a baby. It's just the waiting. I just need to get past this horizon.
Before 39 weeks, the baby was coming soon, and now it's coming at any time. I hate open-ended plans, where a punctual person like me is ready at the earliest possible point, and then is forced to kill time in such a way that doesn't mess up the existing preparations nor causes me to be too involved that I can't just drop everything. Baby is not yet late, so the fact that the crib is still in pieces is fine. Lateness in this case is not even accurate, as due dates are not an exact science, and really, Baby comes when Baby is ready. But I can't help thinking that when Baby shows up in relation to the due date will be the first test of whether it is his mother or his father's child.
I am in limbo. I am ready to not be pregnant anymore. I am tired of sleeping with a pillow between my knees and having to do a 20-point turn just to roll over. I'm tired of being limited to my five maternity outfits. I am tired of getting out of breath from putting on my shoes. I'm ready for something else now.
Ready to not be pregnant, but ready to be formerly pregnant, i.e. a parent? After the birth is a horizon I can't see over. I can't imagine it. The most I can muster is to picture my life as it is now, but there's a baby hanging out in the corner. I don't think that's accurate. Maybe that's why it feels like time has stopped. Before, there was a clear distance before the horizon, where I had time: time to get supplies, time to go to San Francisco, time to read books on birth and raising children. Now there is just that horizon, suddenly very close, and then nothing, like what flat-earthers must picture coming to the edge of the world must be like.
Every night I go to bed and think, well, it wasn't today. And then I wake up in the morning and wonder if today is the first day of the rest of my life. Or rather, I wonder if it's the opposite, the last day of the first part of my life. I had a teacher in high school who talked about life changes as the death of the person you were before. Graduation is the death of your grade school selves, marriage is the death of your single self, etc. My non-parent self is dying, along with my husband's non-parent self. Is this the last time we'll hit the snooze button to get nine more minutes of quiet snuggling?
My mother-in-law tells me to treasure this time, but she is the type to say that about every period of life. Her advice is really about awareness and gratitude. I'm aware, but I'm not sure I'm grateful. I appreciate these last few days, just the two of us, but without being able to picture what comes next, I'm scared and even a little bitter that it has to end. My non-parent self does not want to die, though she is on the verge of killing my pregnant self.
This is melancholy, I know, and no one wants to hear a monologue on dying selves when they ask if I'm excited to have a baby. It's just the waiting. I just need to get past this horizon.
3.10.2015
snow day.
A few weeks ago, I said it would be really nice to have one good snow. The winter looked to be almost over, and we'd had promises of the white stuff, but nothing had happened. I like one good snow a year. The first snow is pretty and fun, but anything after that is just cold and inconvenient. So if you only have one a year, you're set.
A couple of weeks ago, the forecast was calling for a good snow. And then it was calling for a great snow, 8 - 12 inches. I'm honestly not sure if I've seen that much snow in my life. It was supposed to start around 8 pm. In the afternoon, I went to the store and stocked up. I can't speak for other locales, but going to the store before a winter weather event is a Southern tradition. The joke is that everyone freaks out, buys bread and milk, and then we get a dusting. I went to two stores, because Josh wanted his special mouthwash that only Harris Teeter carries. Fresh breath is very important when you can't leave the house. Food Lion was busy, but orderly. Harris Teeter was a madhouse. I bought plenty of produce and some bottled water, plus things like mouthwash that we were just out of. Thinking of having a good ole fashioned snow day, I made sure we were stocked up on pancake ingredients. I did not buy bread or milk, because we already had those at home.
Of course, telecommuting has all but ruined the good ole fashioned snow day. Our office tends to go by whatever the public school system says, so if the schools are closed, so is the office. That just means we have to work from home. Thank goodness our productivity has not been ruined by a little ole snow storm. There was a day last year when the temptation was too much, and I spent the day watching a Harry Potter marathon with my husband and brother-in-law instead of working. The next day, I had to report that I had taken a personal day. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?
The night the snow was due to start, I went out to dinner with some friends. The weather was, of course, the big topic of conversation. We were talking about storms of years past, and one lady mentioned how awful it was when some hurricane came through, because she was living with her parents, who were on a well. For all you city slickers out there, when you get your water from the ground instead of from the city, you rely on a pump to get the water from Mother Earth to your faucet. And when the power goes out, the pump goes out, too. This means no drinking water, no showering water, and no flushing water.
That was the first time it occurred to me that 8 - 12 inches might make the power go out. A fun snow day is when you can lie on the couch and watch Netflix, maybe go outside to tromp around and throw snowballs before coming back inside for pancakes. A not fun snow day is when there is no power. No pancakes, no Netflix, no heat.
We were asleep at the time, but the best we can figure is that the power went out at around 2 AM. We woke up, and the house was silent. We were warm, but we were snuggling under a blanket. Outside, the world was covered (only 6 inches).
Well, I couldn't work from home.
We set up in the living room, pushing the futon into position about two feet from the fireplace. With the remains of an oak tree that killed our car a few years back, we stayed comfortable, if not cozy. We snuggled on the couch and read. We played a board game. We sat and stared at the fire. The dog had to be coaxed onto the couch, and every time the fire popped, she jumped down and ran to sit in the hall. I wanted to take a nap, but I knew that we'd run out of distractions when the sun took its feeble light away, and I needed to stay up.
Lunch was peanut butter and jelly with a side salad. I had some ice cream, too, to save it from melting. We packed ziplock bags full of snow and put them in the fridge to help keep things cool.
We had our cell phones. Josh's wasn't fully charged, and so after a few minutes of use, the red light started to show. Mine was charged, but I was keenly aware that we needed to save it in case there was an emergency, like my water breaking. So I limited my use to checking the power outage map. Yup, there was our neighborhood, out of power. The first morning, it reported over 200,000 homes were out of power. I made myself only check it every hour or so to see the progress of the work crews. The number came down rapidly, then more slowly, as the big neighborhoods were taken care of. Ours had a blue dot, which meant less than 50 houses affected. It would be a while before they got to us.
We had an emergency light and radio that worked by using a crank to charge the battery. Supposedly, you could also charge your cell phone by plugging it in and using the crank. Probably this is just for emergencies, rather than web browsing, as it seems to be pretty difficult to get much juice this way. At least, that's the conclusion I came to after watching Josh attempt to simultaneously crank the handle and scroll his Facebook feed.
Dinner was more of the same. We prepared and ate it by candlelight. And then we sat on the couch, watched the fire, and alternately talked or sat in comfortable silence. It wasn't so bad. There's no one I'd rather be stuck in a powerless house than my husband. I was thankful the baby was still inside me and thus required no maintenance. Josh put a big log on the fire to last the night, and we went to sleep on the futon.
I used to sleep on that futon every night. I was ten years younger and not pregnant at the time. I would not recommend it.
Day two, still no power. The outage map showed 15,000 homes still without power. I wondered how far down the list we were. By noon, the cabin fever was setting in. We decided to find someone who would let us use their shower, and if that didn't happen, we'd go be smelly at Starbucks and charge our devices. Josh's brother was at work, but told us to feel free to use our key to let ourselves in and take advantage of lights and hot water. He hadn't lost power at all and had spent the day before watching Netflix. He'd had eggs and crabcakes for breakfast. Jerk.
It was nice to get out and nicer still to get clean. We dawdled a little bit to charge our phones and see what we'd missed on the internet in the last day. Spock died.
We reluctantly headed back to the house. We could only get a third up the driveway. As we walked in, something felt different. It was cold, but not as cold. And there were humming noises. Hark! The power was on. We cheered, flushed the toilets, and had a hot lunch. Our adventure was over.
A couple of weeks ago, the forecast was calling for a good snow. And then it was calling for a great snow, 8 - 12 inches. I'm honestly not sure if I've seen that much snow in my life. It was supposed to start around 8 pm. In the afternoon, I went to the store and stocked up. I can't speak for other locales, but going to the store before a winter weather event is a Southern tradition. The joke is that everyone freaks out, buys bread and milk, and then we get a dusting. I went to two stores, because Josh wanted his special mouthwash that only Harris Teeter carries. Fresh breath is very important when you can't leave the house. Food Lion was busy, but orderly. Harris Teeter was a madhouse. I bought plenty of produce and some bottled water, plus things like mouthwash that we were just out of. Thinking of having a good ole fashioned snow day, I made sure we were stocked up on pancake ingredients. I did not buy bread or milk, because we already had those at home.
Of course, telecommuting has all but ruined the good ole fashioned snow day. Our office tends to go by whatever the public school system says, so if the schools are closed, so is the office. That just means we have to work from home. Thank goodness our productivity has not been ruined by a little ole snow storm. There was a day last year when the temptation was too much, and I spent the day watching a Harry Potter marathon with my husband and brother-in-law instead of working. The next day, I had to report that I had taken a personal day. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?
The night the snow was due to start, I went out to dinner with some friends. The weather was, of course, the big topic of conversation. We were talking about storms of years past, and one lady mentioned how awful it was when some hurricane came through, because she was living with her parents, who were on a well. For all you city slickers out there, when you get your water from the ground instead of from the city, you rely on a pump to get the water from Mother Earth to your faucet. And when the power goes out, the pump goes out, too. This means no drinking water, no showering water, and no flushing water.
That was the first time it occurred to me that 8 - 12 inches might make the power go out. A fun snow day is when you can lie on the couch and watch Netflix, maybe go outside to tromp around and throw snowballs before coming back inside for pancakes. A not fun snow day is when there is no power. No pancakes, no Netflix, no heat.
We were asleep at the time, but the best we can figure is that the power went out at around 2 AM. We woke up, and the house was silent. We were warm, but we were snuggling under a blanket. Outside, the world was covered (only 6 inches).
Well, I couldn't work from home.
We set up in the living room, pushing the futon into position about two feet from the fireplace. With the remains of an oak tree that killed our car a few years back, we stayed comfortable, if not cozy. We snuggled on the couch and read. We played a board game. We sat and stared at the fire. The dog had to be coaxed onto the couch, and every time the fire popped, she jumped down and ran to sit in the hall. I wanted to take a nap, but I knew that we'd run out of distractions when the sun took its feeble light away, and I needed to stay up.
Lunch was peanut butter and jelly with a side salad. I had some ice cream, too, to save it from melting. We packed ziplock bags full of snow and put them in the fridge to help keep things cool.
We had our cell phones. Josh's wasn't fully charged, and so after a few minutes of use, the red light started to show. Mine was charged, but I was keenly aware that we needed to save it in case there was an emergency, like my water breaking. So I limited my use to checking the power outage map. Yup, there was our neighborhood, out of power. The first morning, it reported over 200,000 homes were out of power. I made myself only check it every hour or so to see the progress of the work crews. The number came down rapidly, then more slowly, as the big neighborhoods were taken care of. Ours had a blue dot, which meant less than 50 houses affected. It would be a while before they got to us.
We had an emergency light and radio that worked by using a crank to charge the battery. Supposedly, you could also charge your cell phone by plugging it in and using the crank. Probably this is just for emergencies, rather than web browsing, as it seems to be pretty difficult to get much juice this way. At least, that's the conclusion I came to after watching Josh attempt to simultaneously crank the handle and scroll his Facebook feed.
Dinner was more of the same. We prepared and ate it by candlelight. And then we sat on the couch, watched the fire, and alternately talked or sat in comfortable silence. It wasn't so bad. There's no one I'd rather be stuck in a powerless house than my husband. I was thankful the baby was still inside me and thus required no maintenance. Josh put a big log on the fire to last the night, and we went to sleep on the futon.
I used to sleep on that futon every night. I was ten years younger and not pregnant at the time. I would not recommend it.
Day two, still no power. The outage map showed 15,000 homes still without power. I wondered how far down the list we were. By noon, the cabin fever was setting in. We decided to find someone who would let us use their shower, and if that didn't happen, we'd go be smelly at Starbucks and charge our devices. Josh's brother was at work, but told us to feel free to use our key to let ourselves in and take advantage of lights and hot water. He hadn't lost power at all and had spent the day before watching Netflix. He'd had eggs and crabcakes for breakfast. Jerk.
It was nice to get out and nicer still to get clean. We dawdled a little bit to charge our phones and see what we'd missed on the internet in the last day. Spock died.
We reluctantly headed back to the house. We could only get a third up the driveway. As we walked in, something felt different. It was cold, but not as cold. And there were humming noises. Hark! The power was on. We cheered, flushed the toilets, and had a hot lunch. Our adventure was over.
3.07.2015
lentil soup.
Josh is currently doing a Daniel Fast for Lent. The Daniel Fast is based on a passage in the Bible where Daniel and the other good Jews ate a strict diet and still were big and strong and handsome. It's a vegan diet, but also no fried foods, leavened bread, additives/preservatives of any kind, and you can only drink water. I did this with him once, right before we got married, and it was totally just a way for me to lose weight. I hated it. I was always hungry, and finding something that I could eat was just such a chore. He's done it a few times. Generally, you do it for three weeks, but he's going the whole forty days. I decided that having a baby during Lent was enough of a sacrifice, so pass the ice cream, I need calcium.
Anyway. For the most part, I let him fend for himself. He eats a lot of apples with peanut butter. But Saturday soup is a standing tradition now, and so I still try to do that. The first time, I made a roasted sweet potato soup which he ate, but did not really care for (little did he know that it is improved with a dollop of sour cream). But last week, I realized that I already had a Daniel-friendly soup recipe in my binder. See? We eat healthy things sometimes. It's not all Paula Deen recipes.
Lentil Soup
My changes: Decrease olive oil to 1 T. I used a 10 oz pack of frozen spinach. I added 1 t cumin and a sprinklin' of cayenne. For the vinegar, I used balsamic. If you are on the Daniel Fast, you'll probably need to use fresh tomatoes, as canned tomatoes almost always have additives of some kind.
Do you like lentils? They're funny little things, and they always remind me of Cinderella, whose step-mother threw some lentils in the fireplace and made her sift through the ashes to find them. They're also really very good for you, full of protein, fiber, and iron. Coupled with the ice cream, that's all a pregnant lady needs.
This soup is really good. I'm sure there are excellent lentil soup recipes out there that start with some kind of pork fat, but I do not miss the meat when I eat this one. Whip some up for your favoritecrazy person Daniel faster today.
Anyway. For the most part, I let him fend for himself. He eats a lot of apples with peanut butter. But Saturday soup is a standing tradition now, and so I still try to do that. The first time, I made a roasted sweet potato soup which he ate, but did not really care for (little did he know that it is improved with a dollop of sour cream). But last week, I realized that I already had a Daniel-friendly soup recipe in my binder. See? We eat healthy things sometimes. It's not all Paula Deen recipes.
Lentil Soup
My changes: Decrease olive oil to 1 T. I used a 10 oz pack of frozen spinach. I added 1 t cumin and a sprinklin' of cayenne. For the vinegar, I used balsamic. If you are on the Daniel Fast, you'll probably need to use fresh tomatoes, as canned tomatoes almost always have additives of some kind.
Do you like lentils? They're funny little things, and they always remind me of Cinderella, whose step-mother threw some lentils in the fireplace and made her sift through the ashes to find them. They're also really very good for you, full of protein, fiber, and iron. Coupled with the ice cream, that's all a pregnant lady needs.
This soup is really good. I'm sure there are excellent lentil soup recipes out there that start with some kind of pork fat, but I do not miss the meat when I eat this one. Whip some up for your favorite
3.06.2015
young people church friends.
I started attending a weeknight Bible Study at church. Suddenly, I figured out where the young people were. All the friends we've made at church have been of an older generation. Either through the couples-only supper group or through the choir, all the folks we spent our time with were just in a different stage of life. It was surreal listening to their stories and realizing they had whole other lives they'd already lived, in other places, doing other things. All their children were grown, which in my present state makes them seem like superheroes.
Sunday morning sees a pretty wide variety of ages in attendance, but there doesn't seem to be much intergenerational mingling. We saw that there were other people our age, but because we were involved in older people activities, we didn't interact with them. Until Bible Study.
Every other Wednesday we meet to discuss the scripture readings for the upcoming Sunday. In the Episcopal church, we have an official three-year calendar of readings. So each Sunday, we hear something from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Gospel, and the New Testament. Then the priest gives a sermon inspired by one of those readings. It's a pretty good system. It keeps the focus on scripture, while making sure that the whole book gets covered, rather than the same old favorites over and over again.
And it's predictable, so we can have a meeting on Wednesday night that talks about passages that will come up again Sunday. For the record, I also go to a Sunday school class that discusses the passages again. You'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, to see how much variation can come from talking about the same short excerpts.
Anyway, Bible Study is a young folks activity, for those who consider thirty-year-olds young. It's mostly couples. Actually, it's all couples, except for me, because Josh has other obligations on Wednesdays. Some of the couples have children, and for them, childcare is provided in the room next door. There are usually snacks.
It's really, really nice to be around people my age. We have plenty of friends outside the church, mostly picked up in the orbit of Josh's band. But when we started going to church again, many of them thought we'd lost our minds. Me, I'd always intended to get back into the church habit someday. I'd had a pretty good experience in the church growing up, which I know is not the case for everybody. While I've definitely outgrown my childhood faith, I still feel very at home within that atmosphere. Josh wanted to go back so he could represent himself well to the preacher who was going to be marrying us, but he got sucked in by the nice people and the cookies and the singing and what some would call the Holy Spirit. We still have our old friends, and they just know that church is something we do, like some people are into hiking or poker. None of them seem to have any interest in that area, and that's fine.
But now we have young people church friends, and it's awesome to be at the same stage of life with people and also share this thing that we do. And we still have our older people church friends, too. So many friends!
Last week during Bible Study, one of the men excitedly held up a grainy black and white picture: an ultrasound. And there was a great swarm around them, high-fiving the beaming father and asking the mother how she was feeeeeeling (I refrained from asking this specific question, but found that I had no idea what to ask. Working on that). So there was their little bean, my much larger bean, plus another infant sucking from a bottle, and one more bouncing on dad's knee. Rather than looking at our older people church friends and wondering if we will ever make it to the other side of parenting, we will be making this journey along with our young people church friends.
What's more, our children will be growing up together. I do not know why that thought makes me happy, but it does. For me, both as a child and an adult, church has largely been about community. My baby will have a community just by being born - young people church friends and their parents, plus a whole choir full of extra grandparents. Lucky kid.
Sunday morning sees a pretty wide variety of ages in attendance, but there doesn't seem to be much intergenerational mingling. We saw that there were other people our age, but because we were involved in older people activities, we didn't interact with them. Until Bible Study.
Every other Wednesday we meet to discuss the scripture readings for the upcoming Sunday. In the Episcopal church, we have an official three-year calendar of readings. So each Sunday, we hear something from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Gospel, and the New Testament. Then the priest gives a sermon inspired by one of those readings. It's a pretty good system. It keeps the focus on scripture, while making sure that the whole book gets covered, rather than the same old favorites over and over again.
And it's predictable, so we can have a meeting on Wednesday night that talks about passages that will come up again Sunday. For the record, I also go to a Sunday school class that discusses the passages again. You'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, to see how much variation can come from talking about the same short excerpts.
Anyway, Bible Study is a young folks activity, for those who consider thirty-year-olds young. It's mostly couples. Actually, it's all couples, except for me, because Josh has other obligations on Wednesdays. Some of the couples have children, and for them, childcare is provided in the room next door. There are usually snacks.
It's really, really nice to be around people my age. We have plenty of friends outside the church, mostly picked up in the orbit of Josh's band. But when we started going to church again, many of them thought we'd lost our minds. Me, I'd always intended to get back into the church habit someday. I'd had a pretty good experience in the church growing up, which I know is not the case for everybody. While I've definitely outgrown my childhood faith, I still feel very at home within that atmosphere. Josh wanted to go back so he could represent himself well to the preacher who was going to be marrying us, but he got sucked in by the nice people and the cookies and the singing and what some would call the Holy Spirit. We still have our old friends, and they just know that church is something we do, like some people are into hiking or poker. None of them seem to have any interest in that area, and that's fine.
But now we have young people church friends, and it's awesome to be at the same stage of life with people and also share this thing that we do. And we still have our older people church friends, too. So many friends!
Last week during Bible Study, one of the men excitedly held up a grainy black and white picture: an ultrasound. And there was a great swarm around them, high-fiving the beaming father and asking the mother how she was feeeeeeling (I refrained from asking this specific question, but found that I had no idea what to ask. Working on that). So there was their little bean, my much larger bean, plus another infant sucking from a bottle, and one more bouncing on dad's knee. Rather than looking at our older people church friends and wondering if we will ever make it to the other side of parenting, we will be making this journey along with our young people church friends.
What's more, our children will be growing up together. I do not know why that thought makes me happy, but it does. For me, both as a child and an adult, church has largely been about community. My baby will have a community just by being born - young people church friends and their parents, plus a whole choir full of extra grandparents. Lucky kid.
3.05.2015
february 2015 books.
Three Men on a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)
Jerome K. Jerome
This was kinda fun. It's the story of three Brits taking a little boating vacation down the Thames. Nothing really happens other than various minor misadventures that happen on outdoor excursions, but the narration was very funny. There's lots of tangents and anecdotes, which makes up for the basic lack of plot. Overall, I would call it droll, which I don't get to say nearly enough.
Fun fact: The 'K' stands for 'Klapka.' He changed it later in life to honor the Hungarian general György Klapka.
The Last Temptation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzakis
I bought this book because it was written by Kazantzakis, who I like a lot. I had no idea there was any controversy about it, whatsoever. So I read it, and I noticed that there were definitely parts that some folks might consider heresy. And then I started doing a little research, and holy cow. Most of the controversy seems to be centered around the movie, which I have not seen. I found some really angry stuff from Christians, who mostly saw it as an attack by Hollywood and Liberal America on their faith. I even found a guy who blamed it on the Jews (because they run Hollywood, remember).
So, this is the story of Jesus. You know, that guy. At the beginning, he is simply a carpenter who is suffering from what we would now call mental illness. He senses a birdlike creature following him always, sometimes clawing at his head because he is not on the right path. Everyone in town is also very upset with him, because he's been making crosses for the Romans to crucify various Zealots that the people hope might be the Messiah.
One thing that struck me throughout the book was what people expected to be the Messiah. I knew they were expecting a king and a warrior, but it didn't occur to me that they were looking for someone to save them from the Romans, and by "them," they meant specifically Israel, or the Jews. Part of what was so revolutionary about Jesus' message was that the Romans were our brothers. This is probably obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before, having grown up with the idea that Jesus is for everybody.
Finally, Jesus gets tired of this birdthing on his head, and he goes out to a desert monastery. The birdthing goes with him, but stops hurting him, so it seems to approve of this task. Judas also follows him there, with the intent to kill him for making all those crosses. But Jesus, having made peace with his birdthing, is ready for whatever, and Judas thinks he might be the Messiah, so he's gonna just follow him around until he's sure.
I really liked what Kazantzakis did with Judas in the book. I've always felt conflicted about old redbeard. He's the bad guy, right, because he betrayed Jesus for some money. But the whole point of Jesus was that he died. Someone had to play this Judas part, and then we get all mad at him for it and a perfectly good name is ruined forever. In the book, however, Jesus tells Judas to betray him because he is the only one strong enough to play this role. None of the other disciples know about it. I'm not sure if this scenario is considered heresy. It's not in the Bible, but is it unBiblical?
Jesus comes out of the monastery and starts being that guy we all know. He saves a prostitute from being stoned, he preaches about love and brotherhood, he heals some people, he talks about the poor getting theirs, he picks up some disciples along the way. There is a great scene where Barrabas, another of the Zealots, has been sent to murder him, again for that cross-building thing. He slaps him, and Jesus turns the other cheek. The nonviolence of it just stops Barrabas and the assembled crowd in their tracks.
One of the disciples that starts tagging along is Matthew, who takes it upon himself to write all their adventures down. He has an angel over his shoulder, guiding him and telling him him what to write. And some of the stuff that he writes is not true, but the angel told him to write it, so he does. At some point, Jesus reads some of it, and gets really mad that Matthew is making up stories about virgin births and Bethlehem and Magi. Matthew defends himself with that old chestnut, "an angel made me do it," and Jesus says okay, whatever. It's implied that the angel does this to align Jesus' birth with prophesies in the Old Testament. I've heard that the gospel of Matthew was likely used to speak to Jews to convince them that Jesus was the Messiah, and therefore there is a lot of stress on fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be actually controversial to me.
At some point, Jesus realizes that he has to die, as he says that death is the door to immortality. He sets up the betrayal with Judas, gets arrested and tried. Meanwhile, Barrabas has also been arrested for killing Lazarus. Kazantzakis apparently wondered whatever happened to Lazarus after he came back from the dead. It wasn't pretty. He's all brittle and decayed and smelly. He seems to be recovering slowly, but Barrabus kills him to prevent him from walking around and being a living reminder of Jesus.
While Jesus is on the cross, his guardian angel comes to him and takes him away, saying that God is rescuing him because he did the right thing. He is swooped off to Mary Magdalene, who is a sort of childhood sweetheart figure for Jesus. They make sweet love before she is killed by an angry mob, led by the hunchbacked Saul. Jesus is not overly upset about that, but goes to Mary and Martha, where he marries the pair of them and lives a normal, happy life as a carpenter and patriarch.
This whole life is a dream that the devil (the guardian angel) has set up for him to tempt him to choose a normal life as a man, rather than dying young to save everybody else. This is the last temptation of Christ. We have a title, folks!
During this life, he is visited by Saul, now Paul. Jesus gets kinda pissed off that Paul is telling everyone that he died and was resurrected, but Paul tells him that it doesn't even need to have actually happened, because the story is working anyway. Again, this part seems pretty controversial to me, but more people seemed to be up in arms about the sex with Mary Magdalene.
Finally, when he is an old, old man, he is visited by the apostles, who are also very old and very sad. Except Judas, who is royally pissed at Jesus. Judas held up his end of the bargain (betrayal), but Jesus did not (dying). And this is what makes Jesus realize that it's all been some kind of alternate history dream put on by Lucifer. He rejects it and immediately his nice life disappears and he's back on the cross in agony.
And that's the happy ending.
The parts that I found controversial were not the parts that the greater public got upset about. I can see people being offended by a movie sex scene featuring their savior. But as far as I can tell, people were mostly up in arms that Jesus would've rather had a nice, simple life with wives and children than die in agony in his thirties. Seems pretty relateable and also biblical. Jesus prays the night before his arrest to please let there be another way to save humanity, because this way sucks, Dad, c'mon.
Being tempted is a part of being fully human, which is again, the big deal about Jesus. He goes to the desert and the devil tempts him. Maybe it's a misunderstanding of the word. Like, the devil could hold out a nice juicy cantaloupe to tempt me. But cantaloupe is gross, so it would not actually tempt me. I could reject the devil and his cantaloupe, no problem. It's not being tempted if you don't want the thing, and it's not a virtue to reject it. The importance of Jesus being sinless was not because he never wanted to sin, it's that he definitely wanted to, just like the rest of us.
I dunno. I'm sorta having to glean what I can of what the controversy was, so maybe I am not representing it in its most coherent light. I liked the book, is what I'm saying. Sorry about all the plot summary.
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
You know, when I think back about the plot of this book, I'm sorta at a loss as to what I liked about it. A lady goes back to her home town, finds redemption and forgiveness and belonging. It's set in Arizona, so there's lots of Native American spiritualism. None of that would appeal to me particularly, but somehow in Kingsolver's hands, I am always sucked in.
Part of it is her actual prose. As Josh says, I read like a scientist, which means for content rather than form. I really have to make myself slow down and notice the individual words and how they interact. A few times while reading this book, I found myself noticing a really good metaphor. It'd be great if I had written one down for you to see, but I did not do that. Kingsolver does a good job of conveying a feeling by comparing it to something more relateable. Apparently, I'm into that.
Her books also have a very strong sense of place. The characters visit a reservation and a couple of old Pueblo villages. The landscape seems dry and mostly red-brown, yet the people make it vivid and beautiful.
And there are peacocks. I'm pretty sure they're symbolic peacocks.
Josh says it's not important to be able to pick out individual literary devices; that you just read, and you'll feel them intuitively. I am skeptical of this. I am sure it's true for him, but he has some kind of special relationship with words. But Kingsolver makes me think it could be true for people like me, too.
Jerome K. Jerome
This was kinda fun. It's the story of three Brits taking a little boating vacation down the Thames. Nothing really happens other than various minor misadventures that happen on outdoor excursions, but the narration was very funny. There's lots of tangents and anecdotes, which makes up for the basic lack of plot. Overall, I would call it droll, which I don't get to say nearly enough.
Fun fact: The 'K' stands for 'Klapka.' He changed it later in life to honor the Hungarian general György Klapka.
The Last Temptation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzakis
I bought this book because it was written by Kazantzakis, who I like a lot. I had no idea there was any controversy about it, whatsoever. So I read it, and I noticed that there were definitely parts that some folks might consider heresy. And then I started doing a little research, and holy cow. Most of the controversy seems to be centered around the movie, which I have not seen. I found some really angry stuff from Christians, who mostly saw it as an attack by Hollywood and Liberal America on their faith. I even found a guy who blamed it on the Jews (because they run Hollywood, remember).
So, this is the story of Jesus. You know, that guy. At the beginning, he is simply a carpenter who is suffering from what we would now call mental illness. He senses a birdlike creature following him always, sometimes clawing at his head because he is not on the right path. Everyone in town is also very upset with him, because he's been making crosses for the Romans to crucify various Zealots that the people hope might be the Messiah.
One thing that struck me throughout the book was what people expected to be the Messiah. I knew they were expecting a king and a warrior, but it didn't occur to me that they were looking for someone to save them from the Romans, and by "them," they meant specifically Israel, or the Jews. Part of what was so revolutionary about Jesus' message was that the Romans were our brothers. This is probably obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before, having grown up with the idea that Jesus is for everybody.
Finally, Jesus gets tired of this birdthing on his head, and he goes out to a desert monastery. The birdthing goes with him, but stops hurting him, so it seems to approve of this task. Judas also follows him there, with the intent to kill him for making all those crosses. But Jesus, having made peace with his birdthing, is ready for whatever, and Judas thinks he might be the Messiah, so he's gonna just follow him around until he's sure.
I really liked what Kazantzakis did with Judas in the book. I've always felt conflicted about old redbeard. He's the bad guy, right, because he betrayed Jesus for some money. But the whole point of Jesus was that he died. Someone had to play this Judas part, and then we get all mad at him for it and a perfectly good name is ruined forever. In the book, however, Jesus tells Judas to betray him because he is the only one strong enough to play this role. None of the other disciples know about it. I'm not sure if this scenario is considered heresy. It's not in the Bible, but is it unBiblical?
Jesus comes out of the monastery and starts being that guy we all know. He saves a prostitute from being stoned, he preaches about love and brotherhood, he heals some people, he talks about the poor getting theirs, he picks up some disciples along the way. There is a great scene where Barrabas, another of the Zealots, has been sent to murder him, again for that cross-building thing. He slaps him, and Jesus turns the other cheek. The nonviolence of it just stops Barrabas and the assembled crowd in their tracks.
One of the disciples that starts tagging along is Matthew, who takes it upon himself to write all their adventures down. He has an angel over his shoulder, guiding him and telling him him what to write. And some of the stuff that he writes is not true, but the angel told him to write it, so he does. At some point, Jesus reads some of it, and gets really mad that Matthew is making up stories about virgin births and Bethlehem and Magi. Matthew defends himself with that old chestnut, "an angel made me do it," and Jesus says okay, whatever. It's implied that the angel does this to align Jesus' birth with prophesies in the Old Testament. I've heard that the gospel of Matthew was likely used to speak to Jews to convince them that Jesus was the Messiah, and therefore there is a lot of stress on fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be actually controversial to me.
At some point, Jesus realizes that he has to die, as he says that death is the door to immortality. He sets up the betrayal with Judas, gets arrested and tried. Meanwhile, Barrabas has also been arrested for killing Lazarus. Kazantzakis apparently wondered whatever happened to Lazarus after he came back from the dead. It wasn't pretty. He's all brittle and decayed and smelly. He seems to be recovering slowly, but Barrabus kills him to prevent him from walking around and being a living reminder of Jesus.
While Jesus is on the cross, his guardian angel comes to him and takes him away, saying that God is rescuing him because he did the right thing. He is swooped off to Mary Magdalene, who is a sort of childhood sweetheart figure for Jesus. They make sweet love before she is killed by an angry mob, led by the hunchbacked Saul. Jesus is not overly upset about that, but goes to Mary and Martha, where he marries the pair of them and lives a normal, happy life as a carpenter and patriarch.
This whole life is a dream that the devil (the guardian angel) has set up for him to tempt him to choose a normal life as a man, rather than dying young to save everybody else. This is the last temptation of Christ. We have a title, folks!
During this life, he is visited by Saul, now Paul. Jesus gets kinda pissed off that Paul is telling everyone that he died and was resurrected, but Paul tells him that it doesn't even need to have actually happened, because the story is working anyway. Again, this part seems pretty controversial to me, but more people seemed to be up in arms about the sex with Mary Magdalene.
Finally, when he is an old, old man, he is visited by the apostles, who are also very old and very sad. Except Judas, who is royally pissed at Jesus. Judas held up his end of the bargain (betrayal), but Jesus did not (dying). And this is what makes Jesus realize that it's all been some kind of alternate history dream put on by Lucifer. He rejects it and immediately his nice life disappears and he's back on the cross in agony.
And that's the happy ending.
The parts that I found controversial were not the parts that the greater public got upset about. I can see people being offended by a movie sex scene featuring their savior. But as far as I can tell, people were mostly up in arms that Jesus would've rather had a nice, simple life with wives and children than die in agony in his thirties. Seems pretty relateable and also biblical. Jesus prays the night before his arrest to please let there be another way to save humanity, because this way sucks, Dad, c'mon.
Being tempted is a part of being fully human, which is again, the big deal about Jesus. He goes to the desert and the devil tempts him. Maybe it's a misunderstanding of the word. Like, the devil could hold out a nice juicy cantaloupe to tempt me. But cantaloupe is gross, so it would not actually tempt me. I could reject the devil and his cantaloupe, no problem. It's not being tempted if you don't want the thing, and it's not a virtue to reject it. The importance of Jesus being sinless was not because he never wanted to sin, it's that he definitely wanted to, just like the rest of us.
I dunno. I'm sorta having to glean what I can of what the controversy was, so maybe I am not representing it in its most coherent light. I liked the book, is what I'm saying. Sorry about all the plot summary.
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
You know, when I think back about the plot of this book, I'm sorta at a loss as to what I liked about it. A lady goes back to her home town, finds redemption and forgiveness and belonging. It's set in Arizona, so there's lots of Native American spiritualism. None of that would appeal to me particularly, but somehow in Kingsolver's hands, I am always sucked in.
Part of it is her actual prose. As Josh says, I read like a scientist, which means for content rather than form. I really have to make myself slow down and notice the individual words and how they interact. A few times while reading this book, I found myself noticing a really good metaphor. It'd be great if I had written one down for you to see, but I did not do that. Kingsolver does a good job of conveying a feeling by comparing it to something more relateable. Apparently, I'm into that.
Her books also have a very strong sense of place. The characters visit a reservation and a couple of old Pueblo villages. The landscape seems dry and mostly red-brown, yet the people make it vivid and beautiful.
And there are peacocks. I'm pretty sure they're symbolic peacocks.
Josh says it's not important to be able to pick out individual literary devices; that you just read, and you'll feel them intuitively. I am skeptical of this. I am sure it's true for him, but he has some kind of special relationship with words. But Kingsolver makes me think it could be true for people like me, too.
2.13.2015
no way out but through.
My sister asked if I was scared of giving birth. I am not, particularly. I don't expect it to be pleasant, in fact I am quite certain it will suck more than most things that have ever sucked before. But there's no way out but through at this point. My sister has given birth six times, so maybe you need the experience to have the dread.
I am also not scared of taking care of the baby. Not that I feel confident about it, but it does seem that there are complete morons out there who manage to keep a baby alive. I am not a complete moron, so my husband and I will probably muddle through with only light scarring. There will be mistakes, things that I feel bad about for an hour or a day or a week even, but then will tell as a reassuring story to some pregnant woman someday.
I am scared of other things. My continued ambivalence scares me. I thought I'd be more excited by now. I read a pregnancy forum that has been really helpful for me in that whatever symptom I'm having, other people are having it too. Plus, some women are having worse symptoms, plus relationship issues and dealing with controlling parents. A good story about a mother-in-law throwing a hissy fit about a baby shower really helps my pelvic pain. And there are threads where women fearfully ask if anyone else isn't excited "enough." So I'm not alone there. Other women, who already had babies, reassure the rest of us that they never felt particularly excited, but they're happy with their babies now.
That is reassuring. My lack of excitement makes me worry that I'm going to hate this motherhood thing. I asked a friend who already has a baby whether she bonded with her baby immediately upon birth. She did not really understand the question and reassured me about the keeping the baby alive part of it. That leads me to believe that new parents are too busy to worry about whether or not they actually like parenting. That's actually a bit comforting. Misery is worse when you have time to dwell on it. If I feel the cold grip of regret on my soul, I'll just start a load of laundry.
I have trouble picturing my life with a kid. It's like my due date is the horizon; after that, I can't see anything. I know my life will be drastically different, but I can't picture what it will look like. I try to insert a baby into it, but that just looks like my existing life with some random baby hanging out. I can't picture my baby. Maybe this would be easier if we knew the gender, then I could at least picture a baby with a bow on its head or something. I don't know how to be excited about spending 18 years with someone I don't even know.
Still, no way out but through.
I am also not scared of taking care of the baby. Not that I feel confident about it, but it does seem that there are complete morons out there who manage to keep a baby alive. I am not a complete moron, so my husband and I will probably muddle through with only light scarring. There will be mistakes, things that I feel bad about for an hour or a day or a week even, but then will tell as a reassuring story to some pregnant woman someday.
I am scared of other things. My continued ambivalence scares me. I thought I'd be more excited by now. I read a pregnancy forum that has been really helpful for me in that whatever symptom I'm having, other people are having it too. Plus, some women are having worse symptoms, plus relationship issues and dealing with controlling parents. A good story about a mother-in-law throwing a hissy fit about a baby shower really helps my pelvic pain. And there are threads where women fearfully ask if anyone else isn't excited "enough." So I'm not alone there. Other women, who already had babies, reassure the rest of us that they never felt particularly excited, but they're happy with their babies now.
That is reassuring. My lack of excitement makes me worry that I'm going to hate this motherhood thing. I asked a friend who already has a baby whether she bonded with her baby immediately upon birth. She did not really understand the question and reassured me about the keeping the baby alive part of it. That leads me to believe that new parents are too busy to worry about whether or not they actually like parenting. That's actually a bit comforting. Misery is worse when you have time to dwell on it. If I feel the cold grip of regret on my soul, I'll just start a load of laundry.
I have trouble picturing my life with a kid. It's like my due date is the horizon; after that, I can't see anything. I know my life will be drastically different, but I can't picture what it will look like. I try to insert a baby into it, but that just looks like my existing life with some random baby hanging out. I can't picture my baby. Maybe this would be easier if we knew the gender, then I could at least picture a baby with a bow on its head or something. I don't know how to be excited about spending 18 years with someone I don't even know.
Still, no way out but through.
2.09.2015
mommy friend recommended.
Disclaimer: This is seriously some first world problem nonsense. I am very lucky to be able to afford nice things for my baby which will keep him/her safe and ease my life as a parent. Furthermore, I am lucky to have a choice in these things. Finally, I am the luckiest because other people buy me this stuff, so I don't have to consider cost as a huge factor in deciding which thing to use.
Baby stuff is a racket.
I sent an email to some mommy friends (because I have mommy friends), asking what sort of items I will need to care for a new baby. My frugal heart tried to get out of buying/registering for as much as possible. For example, I wanted to just skip the whole infant car seat. I mean, you have to buy another car seat when they get older, and some of those big kid car seats say they support newborns. It seemed like the whole infant car seat thing was a scam. Of course, pretty much no one recommended doing this, and everyone said you had to get the infant one. For safety reasons, and also so you can carry the sleeping baby from the car without waking it up.
Yeah, well, what if I want to wake my baby up? You know, to teach it about the inherent chaos that is life? What then?
FINE, I'll get an infant car seat. Also, did you know that you're not supposed to buy used car seats? It's because the seat might have been in an accident and therefore compromised. Also, they expire after six years. A scam, I tell ya.
So I started looking at car seats. And as bad as it was when I started adding up the cost of each of these items, when I started trying to figure out which one to buy was when my head started to spin. There are approximately 42 billion different options, and they each have very slight differences. These variations may seem minor, based on personal preferences even, but if you read enough product reviews, you'll find that it makes the difference between life and death. If you buy a car seat that doesn't have good LATCH support, then your baby will die or at least grow up to hate you. Then again, if you buy one without adequate belt connections, then your baby will become maimed and never be able to form meaningful relationships. Either way, most car seats are not installed properly, and it's really a wonder anyone survives the ride home from the hospital.
I was stressing out about all this stuff, venting to my husband first about the expense and then about the choices. After describing various seemingly trivial options in car seats to him, he smiled and said, "See? You're starting to get into this."
I glared at him. "No, but someone has to make this decision, and you'd quit after five minutes." That is true, but I can't even tell whether that might be a better strategy. Go to Amazon and pick the best reviews or just ask a mommy friend. You'd probably end up feeling like you did okay, you'd likely never know if other versions were better, and there is no way you'd tie your child's future emotional instability to a poor car seat choice.
I finally picked a car seat. I was oddly reassured to see a picture of the Duke of Cambridge carrying the baby prince in the same model. Yup, we went with this one because my royal mommy friend recommended it.
And repeat, with each item. We received as gifts two baby carriers. One of them seemed nicer, as it supported a front-facing position, because who doesn't like to see babies bobbing on their dad's chest, smiling at the world? As it turns out, front-facing has a danger of over-stimulation, because babies just aren't ready for the world. Also, the way certain carriers support the baby possibly leads to hip dysplasia. Hip dysplasia. I thought that was just something dogs got from being inbred. I yearn for the days before internet reviews, where you just asked your mommy friends what they had and liked and then you bought it and babies had hip dysplasia and liked it. Babies were tougher then.
Last night, when I was explaining the carrier dilemma to Josh, he began to see the insanity that is deciding on anything, ever. He was inclined to choose one model because someone who is more his friend gave it to us, as opposed to the one given to us by someone who is more my friend. But then he found out about the hip thing, and how one was designed with input from baby hip specialist-type people. Whole worlds of frightening possibilities opened up to him with the realization that there are people who study baby hips. Just when you think you can trust your mommy friends, you find out they're trying to give your kid hip dysplasia.
Baby stuff is a racket.
I sent an email to some mommy friends (because I have mommy friends), asking what sort of items I will need to care for a new baby. My frugal heart tried to get out of buying/registering for as much as possible. For example, I wanted to just skip the whole infant car seat. I mean, you have to buy another car seat when they get older, and some of those big kid car seats say they support newborns. It seemed like the whole infant car seat thing was a scam. Of course, pretty much no one recommended doing this, and everyone said you had to get the infant one. For safety reasons, and also so you can carry the sleeping baby from the car without waking it up.
Yeah, well, what if I want to wake my baby up? You know, to teach it about the inherent chaos that is life? What then?
FINE, I'll get an infant car seat. Also, did you know that you're not supposed to buy used car seats? It's because the seat might have been in an accident and therefore compromised. Also, they expire after six years. A scam, I tell ya.
So I started looking at car seats. And as bad as it was when I started adding up the cost of each of these items, when I started trying to figure out which one to buy was when my head started to spin. There are approximately 42 billion different options, and they each have very slight differences. These variations may seem minor, based on personal preferences even, but if you read enough product reviews, you'll find that it makes the difference between life and death. If you buy a car seat that doesn't have good LATCH support, then your baby will die or at least grow up to hate you. Then again, if you buy one without adequate belt connections, then your baby will become maimed and never be able to form meaningful relationships. Either way, most car seats are not installed properly, and it's really a wonder anyone survives the ride home from the hospital.
I was stressing out about all this stuff, venting to my husband first about the expense and then about the choices. After describing various seemingly trivial options in car seats to him, he smiled and said, "See? You're starting to get into this."
I glared at him. "No, but someone has to make this decision, and you'd quit after five minutes." That is true, but I can't even tell whether that might be a better strategy. Go to Amazon and pick the best reviews or just ask a mommy friend. You'd probably end up feeling like you did okay, you'd likely never know if other versions were better, and there is no way you'd tie your child's future emotional instability to a poor car seat choice.
I finally picked a car seat. I was oddly reassured to see a picture of the Duke of Cambridge carrying the baby prince in the same model. Yup, we went with this one because my royal mommy friend recommended it.
And repeat, with each item. We received as gifts two baby carriers. One of them seemed nicer, as it supported a front-facing position, because who doesn't like to see babies bobbing on their dad's chest, smiling at the world? As it turns out, front-facing has a danger of over-stimulation, because babies just aren't ready for the world. Also, the way certain carriers support the baby possibly leads to hip dysplasia. Hip dysplasia. I thought that was just something dogs got from being inbred. I yearn for the days before internet reviews, where you just asked your mommy friends what they had and liked and then you bought it and babies had hip dysplasia and liked it. Babies were tougher then.
Last night, when I was explaining the carrier dilemma to Josh, he began to see the insanity that is deciding on anything, ever. He was inclined to choose one model because someone who is more his friend gave it to us, as opposed to the one given to us by someone who is more my friend. But then he found out about the hip thing, and how one was designed with input from baby hip specialist-type people. Whole worlds of frightening possibilities opened up to him with the realization that there are people who study baby hips. Just when you think you can trust your mommy friends, you find out they're trying to give your kid hip dysplasia.
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