Light and Momentary

Accentuate the Positive. Usually.

In my long post on breastfeeding advocacy I wrote that there are two different breastfeeding conversations, one about public health and another about private choices.  In response I got some enthusiastic emails and comments along with some angry ones.  Some formula-feeding women asked, "Why can't you leave us alone?"

If you are a mother struggling with breastfeeding, or a mother who weaned unhappily, or a mother who never put her baby to the breast, here's what I'd like to say to you:  we're on the same side.  I am only another mother muddling through, hoping for the best for my children.  When we cross paths in my neighborhood or here in cyberspace I'm not squinting at you through a guiltometer, deciding you don't measure up.

Why, then, do I sometimes use risk-based language (decried as the "makes-moms-feel-guilty" approach) in talking about breastfeeding?

In my view it's like temperature scales.  Sometimes you need different ways to label the same reality.  When I talk with a mother who's had a hard time breastfeeding I'm going to use the Kelvin scale, in which there are no negatives. Any human milk is valuable, especially in the first days postpartum.  Kathy Dettwyler compares the value of breastfeeding to the yield of an oil well that gushes out bountifully at first and gradually slows down.  I like this analogy a lot:  if your baby goes to breast even once in those early days, you've struck oil.  When to shut down production is your choice.  I understand that maintaining oil wells can lead to unexpected complications (just ask the Iraqis).

The Kelvin scale has its limitations, though. If I tell you it's 263 degrees out, you may not know off the top of your head whether you need a parka or a bikini.  Sometimes it's immensely useful for our frame of reference to shift with context.  Diane Wiessinger has written eloquently about the hazards of focusing only on the benefits of breastfeeding.  If bottle-feeding is regarded as the norm, as the formula companies would like, it's too easy for breastfeeding to be viewed as nothing more than a nice bonus for über-moms with time on their hands.  See them nurse their babies in between batches of homemade granola and lessons in Teach Your Newborn To Speak Italian!

But breastfeeding is not a frill; it is an enormous public health issue. One study determined that reaching the Healthy People 2010 goals for breastfeeding initiation and duration would save a minimum of $3.6 billion -- billion! -- in healthcare costs.  Per year!  That's more than the GDP of 15 different African countries.   And furthermore, it's a conservative estimate because this study only considers three diseases.

Breastfeeding is also a women's issue.  With our own bodies, we can make something miraculous.  Everyone knows that breastfeeding protects babies against allergies and ear infections.  But the list goes on and on:  inguinal hernia, childhood lymphoma, UTIs, and so many other things that you would stop reading if I tried to list them all.  It protects mothers against ovarian cancer and premenopausal breast cancer.  Breastmilk kills tumor cells and destroys warts.  It nourishes our children so efficiently that eight-month-old breastfed babies have ingested 30,000 fewer calories than their bottle-fed counterparts.  Many families swear by breastmilk as a pinkeye remedy.  Peace and harmony follow after lactating women everywhere, and violets spring up from their footprints!  (I deal with too much sibling strife for that last one to be anything other than a joke.  And the only thing springing up in my path is more laundry.)

Seriously, though:  why do so few women speak up when this amazing gift we can give our babies is devalued, when people say formula is "just as good"?  And why are there women calling other women nazis because they are telling the truth about their bodies?

Because I care about women and babies and truth in advertising and public health to boot, I do use risk-based language when the powers that be are undermining breastfeeding.  When I write to Nestle about why I boycott their products.  When I plan a letter to my state legislator about a law protecting breastfeeding in public. (Which I then -- oops -- forget to send. But the law passed anyway so I won't sweat it.)  When I'm talking about a restaurant that says breastfeeding is obscene but wet T-shirt contests are okay.  Early last winter when all that stuff went down with the Ad Council's breastfeeding campaign, I wrote a scorching letter to Tommy Thompson -- a risk-oriented letter.  (I would have liked to send a Howler, but I, alas, am owl-less.  And I know better than to screech when I'm trying to persuade.)  If you had read my letter, you might have pigeonholed me as "one of those nipple nazis."  But I am not any kind of nazi.  I'm using Celsius in that conversation because it's more effective than Kelvin or Fahrenheit.  It's a different way of talking about the same set of facts.

Let me say again that I understand how many obstacles women face in this country when they set out to nurse their babies.  I was lucky with my first son -- all kinds of lucky.  The NICU gave me rotten advice about pumping, but I am an overproducer so I could compensate for the inadequate pumping schedule.  They gave me rotten advice about engorgement, but I survived with no lasting damage.  They gave me horrible stupid awful inexcusably bad advice (not that I was bitter or anything) about getting Alex to the breast, but we figured it out once we got home.  I can attribute some of our success to determination, but I know a lot of it was just plain luck.  When I see you in a restaurant with a bottle, I don't know what you've been up against.  I'm not going to assume you didn't try hard enough.

Breastfeeding advocacy can be a delicate thing.  We're looking at the graphs of initiation and duration rates, hoping that for the sake of babies and their mothers, and for the sake of our creaking groaning overstressed healthcare system, we can increase the area under the curve.  The math is relatively straightforward, but the emotional calculus is complex.  Where do you start when you hope to change a whole culture?  In oil-well terms, how do you balance the undeniable need for a national resource with respect for the landowner's right to run things as she sees fit?

To muddy the waters further, we also need to think about a third conversation -- the one we have with people about how to feed their future babies.  On reflection, I think this might be where most of the anger comes from.  The team that prepared the national breastfeeding awareness campaign found that "benefits of breastfeeding" language had no impact on how the people surveyed planned to feed their children.  Talking about the risks of formula, on the other hand, did make a difference.  But what happens in this country, where medicalized births are the norm and good breastfeeding support can be hard to find, when families think of formula as risky?  Does it galvanize them when they encounter problems?  Does it motivate them to demand more support from doctors and hospitals?  Or does it leave them angry at breastfeeding advocates when things don't go as planned?

I don't have answers to those questions. I'd love some input, preferably epithet-free.  Just one more thing here and I'll be done:

As passionate as I am about breastfeeding, I know that it's only one part of my job as mom.  When I think back on my time as a mother there are things I am proud of (getting my reluctant oldest son out of diapers was one of my shining moments) and things I regret (getting my reluctant second son out of diapers was not).  I expect you'd say the same thing.  I know too that I have never wanted anything as badly as I want to do the right thing by my children.  Again, I'm guessing the same is true for you.  So if we cross paths, please know that I'm assuming the best about you and your intentions regardless of our differences.  I hope, when you hear me talk about this subject that's so close to my heart, that you can do the same for me.

Holy Ground

After both of my miscarriages our priest came to our home for the burial.  Both times we planted a rosebush.  (Both times it died.  I am better at children than plants.)  Both times those little graves remained a source of comfort to me, a place where the temporal and the eternal intersected.

I am a convert to Catholicism and I knew nothing about Catholic funeral rites until I buried my own first baby.  I did not know that the priest would bless a patch of ground for her to lie in, but I loved that he did.  It still looked like an ordinary yard, but I knew it held a sacred place.  At Dominic's burial the priest prayed:  "O God, by whose mercy the faithful departed find rest, send your holy angel to watch over this grave."  And I loved that, too:  the idea that my son's grave was precious not only to me but to the Lord God, that he would appoint an angel as watcher and guardian.

I sit there sometimes while the boys are playing outside.  Sometimes I pray the rosary; sometimes I just sit and think.  (Sometimes I am dodging tricycles and Super Soaker jets, which makes it less conducive to fruitful meditation.)  Yesterday in Perelandra I read Ransom's reflections on the impact of the Incarnation on the whole created world [brief pause as I search high and low for Perelandra, kicked under the couch during yesterday's cushion battle]:  When Eve fell, God was not Man.  He had not yet made men members of His body:  since then He had, and through them henceforward he would save and suffer.  It reminds me that with my own hands I can do holy work as I change diapers and chop onions.  With my own feet I can walk a sacred path, even if it looks like I'm only going to the library and the playground.

As I was looking for the words to the graveside prayer quoted above I found this alternate prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, by your own three days in the tomb you hallowed the graves of all who believe in you and so made the grave a sign of hope that promises resurrection even as it claims our mortal bodies.  And I love that, too -- that what looks like the end of the line is meant to be a sign of hope.  When I die they will lay me in consecrated ground.  Let it be a consolation to them as it has been to me.

Dominic's rosebush never grew, even though I followed the directions on its pot carefully.  The naked canes made me sad -- it's hard to be hopeful looking at something dead.  Yesterday I took my potted mint plant from the farmer's market and put it in the ground next to the rosebush.  I don't know much about gardening, but I hear you have to work pretty hard to kill a mint plant.  Sometimes when you don't get what you expected, you can still be glad for what you have.  That's what I want to remember when I see it in that spot, green and fragrant and alive.

Exam Report

1. The FIRST thing I want to tell you about today's lactation consultant certification exam is that:
a) Nigella Lawson showed up to give me a Domestic Goddess apron and ask me to correct Saturday's post:  she does acknowledge that the odds of finding halloumi and Thai basil at the supermarket are low
b) Her grocer came along to thank me for the publicity because he's been doing land-office business since that last post
c) The hospital cafeteria was serving Slut-Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly
d) I am cautiously optimistic

2. The MOST useful outcome of my marathon Saturday cram-avoid-cram-avoid-fest was:
a) I confidently answered every question about making shortcrust pastry
b) I included the recipe for Molten Chocolate Babycakes on my comment sheet because I figured they'd have to give me extra credit for it
c) Turns out The Breastfeeding Atlas, in which I immersed myself for most of Saturday afternoon, proved extremely helpful
d) At stressful moments I could console myself with the prospect of Spiced Pink Soup.  (Which will actually be Spiced Orange Soup because I have orange beets in the fridge.  It's delicious:  blend baked beets, stock, cumin and coriander, salt and pepper and lime juice; add sour cream and leave it to chill with split green onions steeping in it.)

3. The MOST worrisome prospect for me is:
a) answer sheets being carried off to England by Nigella Lawson's absent-minded grocer (really, if he can't remember to order Thai basil, how far can you trust him?)
b) ignominious failure
c) my pencils were actually not #2 and my answers will not scan
d) I might have missed a bunch of questions because I ruled out the right answer

Let me explain.

The first of the sample exam questions provided by IBLCE asks for the MOST important recommendation you'd give a mother with a high fever and a red streak on her breast.  Two of the answers were easy to dismiss.  Suppose it was something like this:

a) apply a poultice of chayote pulp and shredded boomslang skin while invoking the aid of Nuestra Senora de Buen Parto y La Leche
b) nurse frequently
c) see a doctor or midwife to discuss antibiotic treatment
d) wean immediately to formula, and ever after heap imprecations on the heads of happy breastfeeders

I went back and forth briefly between b and c, but in the end b seemed like the clear winner to me.  Here is my suggested protocol for mothers dealing with high fevers and red streaky breasts:
1) Go to bed.  Go directly to bed.  Do not pass go; do not collect $200.  Rest.
2) Take baby with you and nurse at every squeak.  If she rejects the affected breast (the milk may taste saltier to her), pump or hand-express.  Keep the milk moving or the misery will multiply.  If you're up for it, you can try warm compresses on the affected spot.  You might not be up for it right now.
3) Get some help (and I say this as a person who hates asking for help) -- someone to hold the baby if she gets tired of hanging out in bed and to bring you large glasses of water and regular doses of an OTC pain-reliever and fever-reducer. 
4) When you call your HCP about the best OTC medication choice, ask about antibiotics.  Some HCPs will suggest that you start taking an antibiotic immediately.  Some will suggest that you wait a bit and see if the fever begins to come down on its own.

IBLCE says that the correct answer is c -- she should see her doctor or midwife.  This baffles me.  She should drag herself to the doctor's office?  So her HCP can say, "Yep, that's a fever.  Yep, that's a red streak"?  I have only had two bouts of infectious mastitis, but I remember clearly that dialing the phone seemed too effortful at the time.  And in that state I needed to go and see my HCP more than I needed to rest and nurse?  I am not convinced.

I am also not the one grading the exam, though, and I wonder how many questions I missed today for similar reasons.  So let us return to this exam, in which I am the one with all the right answers--

4. My approximate cup size after ten hours without nursing was:
a) D
b) DD
c) H
d) V
e) I don't really want that on the web, do I?

4. With the remainder of my evening I am going to do all of the following EXCEPT:
a) put on comfortable pajamas
b) fix myself a giant bowl of ice cream
c) curl up on the couch with Perelandra
d) look up all my guesses from today and torture myself with thoughts of being the lowest-scoring candidate in the world.  Lower, even, than Nigella Lawson's grocer.

Try Aisle 4

I am wrapping up my preparation for the lactation consultant certification exam.  Monday morning I will head to a hospital in a tough part of town where from nine until four I will answer multiple-choice questions about breastfeeding.  Ugh ugh ugh I hope I pass.

When I was in school I always had good intentions about studying for my exams well in advance, with a keenly focused mind and an eagle eye for important details.  I always got distracted.  By the length of my toenails.  By my failure to answer a letter.  By my need to figure out the guitar part for that cool song playing on the stereo (ostensibly "to help me study") immediately.  Thankfully I'm a good test-taker.

At least I used to be a good test-taker.  I'm anxious about this one.  So why oh why, if I'm worried about failing, have I been such a goof about studying for it?

Today I have been trying to cram some last shreds of knowledge into my head but I have been badly distracted.  I have been trying to remember that FIL stands for feedback inhibitor of lactation while PIF is prolactin-inhibiting factor.  But really I have been thinking about Nigella Lawson's supermarket.

Nigella Lawson is forever saying, of obscure items in her lengthy ingredient lists, "Oh, I buy this at the supermarket."  Sambal oelek,* lemongrass, Thai holy basil -- it's all there.

I pull myself back to the task at hand.  Prolactin is secreted from the anterior pituitary; oxytocin from the posterior.  When milk is removed from the breast, the hypothalamus inhibits the release of dopamine, stimulating the release of prolactin and causing milk produc.....

...Our supermarket in the UK was a tiny place whose powers-that-were deemed decaf coffee and Parmesan cheese too exotic to stock regularly.  There was no whole-wheat flour.  And yet Nigella's supermarket keeps za'atar** and halloumi*** on its shelves.  What gives?

MUST. GET. GRIP.  Lymphocytes constitute the remaining 10 percent of white cells in the milk. About 20 percent of these cells are B lymphocytes, which give rise to antibodies; the rest are T lymphocytes, which kill infected cells directly or send out chemical messages that mobilize still other components of the immune system. Milk lymphocytes seem to behave differently from blood lymphocytes. Those in milk, for example, proliferate in the presence of Escherichia coli, a bacterium that can cause life-threatening illness in babies, but they are far less responsive than blood lymphocytes to agents posing less threat to infants.****

...I know some of it is a US-UK difference.  In our little supermarket with no bagels and no cream cheese I could always buy ground almonds and marzipan for baking.  I could find Seville oranges and red currant jelly.  But white raspberries? white currants? white peaches?  Holy galangal, Batman -- where is this place, with its albino produce and its endless spice aisle?  Imagine popping in to get something quick for dinner and emerging laden with game stock and lavender flowers and shrimp paste (not to be used in the same recipe.  Or at least not yet.  Who knows what Nigella's next cookbook will offer as a follow-up to Slut-Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly?).

Perhaps chardonnay jelly is the stuff of which my brain is made, because I have slogged through most of the chapter on breast pumps in Jan Riordan's Breastfeeding and Human Lactation and I cannot make sense of this bit:  A pump does not pump, suck, or pull milk out of the breast.  It reduces resistance to milk outflow from the alveoli, allowing the internal pressure of the breast to push out the milk.  What does that mean?  I thought if I read it enough times I would understand, but at this point I am thinking that if there is no pumping, sucking, or pulling, it must mean that the Milk Fairy waves her wand at the breasts and milk is magically ejected.

I wonder if the Milk Fairy works second shift at Nigella Lawson's supermarket.  Maybe she supervises the production of the mascarpone cheese and the French butter, the creme fraiche and the Greek yogurt.  I wish that in between jobs she could sprinkle some fairy dust on that breast pump chapter to render it just slightly more intelligible, but I know she's a busy gal.

I had hoped that in the years since my last big test I would have become more mature and purposeful, less distractible and flighty.  Apparently not, though, because a mature non-flighty person would never ask the question to which I am led inexorably by my intersecting trains of thought*****:  does this supermarket, where quinces and quail's eggs nestle cheek by jowl with eaux de vie and orange oil (Boyajian, please) -- does it have breastmilk on its shelves?  Because that -- that would be a memorable supermarket.

*Indonesian chili paste, found hidden deep in Chinatown
**Middle Eastern spice blend comprising sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds, tracked down at Penzey's
***Cypriot cheese made of sheep and goat milk, available at Whole Foods for the low low price of one arm + one leg (per pound)
****from a 1995 Scientific American article by Jack Newman, reprinted here
*****if you have intersecting trains of thought, does that make your mind a train wreck?

A Surfeit of Salad

Don't open my refrigerator, okay?  It's a jungle in there.

My friend and I are splitting a CSA share this summer.  We signed up in February and I thought for the rest of the winter about all the beautiful organic vegetables that would be coming my way when the weather turned warm.  Chard! Kale! Pattypan squash! Unwaxed cucumbers!  I could practically taste the tomatoes.

I wasn't counting on all the salad stuff, though.

See, I am not a huge fan of green salads.  I ought to be, I think.  A more elegant version of me, a Jamie who would have sleek hair and pedicured feet, would be waxing rhapsodic about all this organic mesclun.  The existing me, though -- let's just say rhapsodic is not the word that springs to mind.

I ate it all the first week.  I ate most of it the second week.  But now I have an alarming backlog of lettuce in the crisper drawer.  I'm a little reluctant to open it, for fear of an Audrey-II-esque thing arising from its frigid depths and howling, "Feed me, Seymour!"

Next week my friend is going to be on vacation and I will have twice as much lettuce.  I have a mental image of myself being buried in a mountain of mesclun.  The farmer is shoveling it on top of my vanishing head as I try to say, "Stop!"  It comes out as "pflvvvp," though, because my mouth is full of mesclun.  (See, the Gladly family is a font of funky fricatives.)

I am typing this wondering if it is too silly to post.  I should just call up my neighbor who likes mesclun, the one who no longer participates in this CSA because she could not keep up with the profusion of produce.  (She has sleek hair and pedicured toes, incidentally.  Do those things usually go together?)  I should take my frugal Scottish self firmly in hand and toss the lettuce when it gets slimy.  (Instead I'm holding out, as if I'm magically going to like salads better when they are made of rotting leaves. Yum!)

First, though, I have to summon the courage to open that crisper drawer.  If you don't hear from me after this, tell 'em it's Audrey's fault.

Elegy for a Fricative

Joe learned early on that if you can't combine sounds very easily it's wise to have a big repertoire of individual sounds to get your point across.  We joked that he sounded like a little Xhosa speaker with his tongue clicks.  He used two different kinds of raspberries and a combination of lip smackings to communicate with us.  If you smack your lips three times in my house, I'll expect you to mean sandals, keys, or penis because that's the Joe lexicon. 

All of those sounds I could label and classify.  One of his favorites had me stumped, though:  a fricative I couldn't duplicate and couldn't even find a name for in the International Phonetic Alphabet (yeah, language geek that I am, I looked).  Fricatives are the hissing sounds in a language.  We have nine of them in English* but lots more exist -- the soft b used in Spanish, the two ch sounds in German (one in "ich" and a slightly more posterior one in "buch"), the French r sound (which, if memory serves, is a uvular fricative.  Isn't it nice to know you can talk with your uvula?).  Children with cleft palates sometimes rely on pharyngeal fricatives (sort of a deep gargly sound) because they can't muster enough intra-oral pressure to make sounds like /s/.

In all this panoply of fricatives, though, there's nothing like Joe's sound.  He seemed to take the whole back half of his vocal tract, squeeze it tight and let 'er rip.  It sounded like a combination of a jacked-up guard cat and an angry pressure cooker on the edge of geyserhood.  He used it to mean anything related to "spray" or "squirt":  Windex, shower, catsup, hose.  Last night, though, we passed a sprinkler on the way home and he said "Spray!" (rendered "bay" but close enough for me).  I was curious.  I asked him, "How does it go?" 

He couldn't make his sound.  He tried and came out with a half-hearted Spanish x.

The thing I wasn't prepared for about childhood seen from the other side was its evanescence.  Everything changes so quickly.  I knew the schlocky songs ("Sunrise, Sunset," "Turn Around") but nothing could prepare me for the reality:  in roughly the time it takes to floss, my firstborn has grown from a pink inscrutable infant into a person with permanent teeth, favorite kinds of sushi, and a voracious appetite for science fiction.  Today he lifted me up off the ground.  (And then he promptly fell over.  But he did it.)  I mean, whoa (she says articulately).  How did that happen?

From my children's mutability arises my parenting mantra, This Too Shall Pass, and its corollary, Enjoy It While It Lasts.  The things that annoy me, the things over which I've wrung my hands and gnashed my teeth -- they've faded away like those first teething pains.  (When Alex was cutting his first tooth, I was sure something was seriously wrong with him.  Cancer.  Undiagnosed genetic disease.  Something Really Bad.  I was so embarrassed when his tooth popped.)  Conversely, the things I've loved and reveled in, like Marty saying "No like it very all" to express displeasure as a not-quite 2yo, or Alex's trilling "happy noise" from the same age -- those are gone too.

There is a prayer I often pray:  Oh, God, make of my life a lovely thing.  Sometimes it's on bad days, when "non-hideous thing" seems like a more manageable goal.  But tonight I am thinking hopefully, envisioning the ephemera of my children's lives as jewels on a delicate chain.  The reality fades, but I hold the memories like something precious, something sparkling and beautiful and many-faceted.

Goodbye, Mystery Fricative.  It was nice knowing you.

___________________

*f, v, th, TH, s, z, sh, zh, and h

They speak to me of the glory of God

You would expect the antecedent of that pronoun to be something, well, glorious.  Like my children's faces or spectacular sunsets or whatever.  Instead I'm talking about beets.  I love beets.

Once my friend Jeff was telling me about his share in a CSA.  He was excited about the variety of vegetables -- the fennel! the kohlrabi!  He was unenthusiastic about the beets, however. 

"Jeff, how can you hate beets?" I interjected earnestly.  [I think I am doomed to earnestness.  Periodically I try to suppress it so I can be reserved and cool, but it always sproings forth like an irksome cuckoo from a kitschy clock and causes me to say things like--] "They speak to me of the glory of God."

Jeff has ribbed me ever since about my reaction (and rightly so, some would say), but it's true.  Tonight I sliced open beets for a salad and had a quick surge of that "God's-in-his-heaven-all's-right-with-the-world" feeling. 

I love that magnificent color.  Imagine biting into a beet for the first time, discovering that this unassuming-looking thing was possessed of a fabulous magenta interior.  Beets remind me that in this world there is extravagant beauty in unexpected places.  You just have to keep digging and tasting.

I also love the sweet and earthy taste.  Tonight's beets were shredded raw in the food processor and tossed with walnut oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and fresh parsley.  They were a hit.  How could they not be?  (I think I'll have to go polish off the leftovers when I finish this entry.)

My favorite thing about beets is the rings within them, the way that when you slice them you see the bands of deepest fuchsia divided by stripes of paler pink.  It reminds me of that Hopkins poem "Pied Beauty."  You know it; it was in your high school English text.

Glory be to God for dappled things--
for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim
Fresh firecoal chestnut falls; finches' wings...

I'm sure if they ever unearth a first draft there'll be a line about beets.

The Rain in Jane Falls Mainly on the Plain

I had a plan.  I was going to finish Sense and Sensibility, the one Austen novel I hadn't read yet, and then I would be at the top of the library hold list for The Jane Austen Book Club.  I had read a couple of delighted reviews and I was so looking forward to reading it myself.

I needed my ORM in a big way, though.  I wanted to say, "Hey, I would have the Bertrams over for dinner, thank you very much."   Kingsley Amis notwithstanding, I would make them trifle (so they'd feel at home, being in the wrong century and on the wrong continent), and we could talk about whether Maria had learned her "duty to the lessons of affliction" yet.

Plus I wanted to talk about Sense and Sensibility with someone and Austen is just too girly for my husband.  At least he thinks she is.  Elinor personifies sense, right, and Marianne sensibility?  Austen seems to be holding Elinor up as the ideal, but doesn't she strike you as rather a cold fish?  Wouldn't they both be nicer if they hybridized themselves?  Or am I too much a product of my let-it-all-hang-out times and culture?  That was my burning question about S&S and no one in the book club touched on it.  That's the trouble with listening in on other people's imaginary conversations.

Stop here if you're planning to read The Jane Austen Book Club, but how about that ending?  You can usually tell Austen's estimate of a character's merit by the match she makes in the end.  The rain of this entry's silly title is not meteorological, since England has an equal-opportunity lousy climate, but figurative, as in the kind that falls on the just and the unjust.  Difficult marriages, in Austen's universe, are for plain, spiteful girls who think too much about money.  Why, then, does Allegra end up reunited with Corinne?  And how about Bernadette and Senor Obando? Where did that come from?

Maybe I should reread Pride and Prejudice instead of looking for Austen in somebody else's book.

Curious About George

The party went off well.  It's always good to see the roommates and their families (at least once the planning stress is out of the way) and they made happy noises about the food.  I am eating the remnants of the trifle.  It didn't turn out quite as planned.  For fear of its being rubbery, I cut the amount of gelatin and the result was a bit soupy.  Such are the perils of inventing recipes for food you plan to serve to guests the next day.  When I put it away, though, I poked a few more ladyfingers into the soupy layer and now it's perfect.  Here I sit, listening to fireworks at the high school and enjoying my leftover red white and blue trifle.

But my point here tonight is that I'm curious about George.  Actually, I'm curious about the man with the yellow hat.  When will he realize that Curious George cannot be left alone?

In case you haven't read the Curious George books lately, the plots run like this:  the man with the yellow hat tells George to stay out of trouble.  MWYH leaves.  George makes trouble.  Big trouble.  But he also does something useful, and everyone decides that the useful thing mitigates the awfulness of the troublesome things.

It makes me want to scream.  It makes me want to take my ORM (Over-involved Reader's Megaphone, a handy gadget I will invent someday which will allow me and my fellow over-involved readers to shout warnings and advice to book characters.  Like:  "Hey, Anna K!  That guy is Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with V and that stands for Vronsky the Villainous!"  The deluxe model will have a translation chip so I won't have to learn Russian.) and bellow into the pages:  "Nooo!  He cannot stay out of trouble!  He is constitutionally incapable of staying out of trouble!  Supervise him or take him home to the jungle!"

Alas, MWYH never listens, and none of his neighbors seem overly troubled by George's shenanigans.  Me, though, I'm troubled.  Maybe I should get a life.  Or a better ORM.

MWYH makes me think about mothers on the playground and the range of mother involvement you can see there.  I've moved on the spectrum, from breathing down my firstborn's neck to giving my three sons lots more room to be on their own.  Always, always, I've second-guessed my choices.  I suppose it's because there's something to be said for wherever you land on the continuum.  My oldest had astounding language skills in part because he spent hours every day engaged in conversations with me.  He also had a lot of trouble realizing that I did not exist to entertain him, and that sometimes he needed to wait for my attention.  My youngest plays beautifully by himself and with his brothers (usually -- he succumbs to the occasional urge to beat the 4yo about the head with a Lego structure), but I am afraid I'm so accustomed to his independence that I respond too slowly to him when he honestly does need me.

In contrast to Curious George, however, my youngest has neither flooded the house nor completed a solo space flight.  So I'll worry about that another day.

Notes in closing:
1) Moderation in most things, including attention paid to children.
2) Do not purchase or even check out of the library those vapid CG books based on the TV series.
3) Must keep plugging away at ORM.  Imagine the possibilities!