Light and Momentary

Unexpectedly

When I found out I was pregnant, I immediately thought I'd have to give up my fellowship for next year. Both Elwood and my advisor encouraged me not to be hasty, and in the weeks since then my advisor and I have talked a lot about how I could meet the requirements of the fellowship after this baby arrives without losing my mind. I have been gobsmacked (in a good way, a grateful kind of gobsmacked), by her flexibility and willingness to work with me.

But I have been a little worried about talking to the professor who administers the grant. She is very careful about following the rules, which specify that I am supposed to be acquiring teaching experience and putting in a specified number of lab hours, and she is also 15 or so years older than I am. She came up through the ranks when it was much harder to be a woman and an academic than it is today, when it was still acceptable to say things like, "You're pretty smart for a girl," and I think she remains ambivalent about the compromises required of her as a mother who was also a scientist.

This could, it seemed to me, nudge her in either of two directions. She might think that I need to pay my dues, and man up (woman up, it has to be, since this issue is far less painful for men than women), and teach next spring as originally planned. Or she might think that it's about time for the department to make it easier for women to be mothers and scientists at the same time.

I just didn't know. I knew it wouldn't be a disaster, since even if she recommended that I decline funding for this year, we'd figure it out financially. I was dreading the conversation anyway.

Then I got an utterly unexpected email from her. She was talking about rescheduling a meeting, and she said, "Now that I am experiencing life without day care, I realize again what a tremendous effort you make to work on your Ph.D. while raising your boys.  If you ever need to make special arrangements for your involvement on the grant, please know that we will be very willing to accommodate your needs, whatever they might be." She went on to suggest some specifics that could make my life much easier in the spring.

Last fall I kept meaning to post about this fellowship, which was simply providential. I am sitting here tonight and re-reading her email, feeling gobsmacked again. It seemed like a crazy idea to work on a PhD with four young children. I would have guessed it would be impossible with five. But these gifts keep falling into my path: a great fellowship, a fabulous advisor, this email out of the blue. I keep on working, and it keeps on working out. How cool is that?

Speaking of plaid

I was given a new maternity top that the giver found on sale. It is emerald green, turquoise, chocolate brown, and white. Plaid. It is heavily smocked across the front, like the little dresses I wore in 1974.

Eek. I think I know why it was on sale.

But do you want to know a funny thing about me? I have a weakness for loud pants. In general I dress conservatively (see previous post: white shirt, khaki jumper, no jewelry -- pretty typical). I would no sooner wear this new shirt than I would eat it. And yet I often wear a pair of plaid pants in exactly the colors I was mocking in my last post: lime green, turquoise, and yellow (not, lest you wondered, with a plaid top). I have another pair that's pale green with huge hot pink flowers. I wear them to work.

Is it weird that I don't want anything loud on the top half of my body and at the same time I collect crazy pants? Maybe it's because my hair is so loud -- bigger and vivider than you can tell from my picture over there. This is the most self-indulgent post ever but I'm going to hit publish anyway. Got any fashion quirks you want to share?

Defense

This morning I dreamed that I opened my closet and found the perfect outfit to wear for my defense this afternoon. There was a cotton blazer hanging next to a sundress, fitted but with enough give to accommodate my burgeoning belly. "They're so colorful!" I thought in my dream. They certainly were. They were turquoise, lime green, and yellow plaid -- slightly different plaids for the two pieces. I am cracking up at the memory -- I hope the idea of this ensemble amuses you even a quarter as much as it does me.

For my defense I wore a white T-shirt with a knee-length khaki jumper. No one could have accused me of being overly colorful. I got more and more jumpy as 2:30 got closer. My prospectus meeting last summer was tough, two hours of unrelenting questions and then many, many revisions requested in my document.

This meeting was also two hours long, with plenty of tough questions, but it was less stressful -- whether because I was expecting it to be long and hard, or because I have the data in hand confirming my hypothesis, I can't say. (Data! Confirming my hypothesis! I still get a little rush when I say that.) I collected information from mothers on a variable that is a Hot Topic in the mommy wars, and I think for as long as I am talking about these findings to women, I'm going to be dealing with ancillary issues arising from their own experiences. Oh, well. That's part of why I'm choosing a different focus for my dissertation.

Anyway: I passed! I was holding back on feeling gleeful until I looked through their marked-up copies of my document, because I was not going to rejoice if I had a hundred hours' worth of revising to do. But I took myself to dinner at my favorite place in town and looked through their comments, and it seems like the revisions should be very manageable. I passed! Hurray!

Sock Knitting and the Christian Life

The weekend before last I started knitting a pair of Monkeys. Then I started again. And again, and again. On the fifth try, I got them going. (A 32-inch needle is really too short for magic loop, but it can work if you are stubborn enough.)

A couple of days later I talked to a dear friend who has been having a hard time. I got it into my head that I would make these socks for her, praying for her whenever I sat down to knit, and offering up the frustrations that came my way in the process. I wondered if this was a dumb idea, and if maybe I should just take her a casserole if I wanted to do something concrete. But I think, on reflection, that sock knitting and the Christian life have more in common than you might expect.

Both require perseverance, for one thing. A pair of socks requires about 30,000 stitches, which roughly corresponds to the number of days in an average American woman's life. It takes patience and discipline to keep going through all those stitches, all those days. Sometimes I am tempted to throw my knitting across the room, or throw up my hands and plan a move to New Zealand.  Second Sock Syndrome is a fine metaphor for midlife, "the long, dull, monotonous years," as Screwtape advised Wormwood, which are "excellent campaigning weather."

Remember the bit in A Wrinkle in Time where one of the Mrs. W ladies compared human life to a sonnet? The form presents many constraints, she said, but you are free to make something lovely of it. So also with socks. Within the requirements of cuff, leg, heel, gusset, foot, toe, you have the freedom to do whatever suits you: lace or cables or top-down or toe-up or some kind of crazy Cat Bordhi sideways thing. One of my friend's struggles is the question of (paraphrasing cautiously here) how human freedom and divine sovereignty intersect -- does God intervene in the details of our lives? I cannot address the theological fine points, but I am certain that there are many ways for a Christian woman to fashion something beautiful out of her days, or her yarn.

I was well into the toe decreases when I spotted a dropped stitch back up in the leg. I felt like an idiot. I thought, "I can't even post to Ravelry to ask how to fix it because they'll all know I'm an idiot. Plus they will look at my notebook and see my ugly sweater cast-ons." Then I got a grip, and realized that this would be Exhibit A in how not to live the Christian life. Mistakes happen. You fix them the best you can. Misplaced pride only keeps you from getting where you're going.

Non-knitters really don't get sock knitting. You're knitting a sock? When you could buy a sock at Target for approximately 35 cents? You're spending all that time on a sock that will go on someone's smelly foot and eventually get holes in it? As my husband said when I, full of pride, showed him my first finished adult sock, "Ah, yes, an excellent use of 20 hours of your life." I did not poke him with a dpn, though I thought about it, because sock knitting teaches a person patience (and the importance of not breaking dpns). Here, too, I think the parallel is clear: you can devote yourself to fashioning a chain of tidy stitches or a string of well-ordered days, but usually those efforts will be hidden. (There are occasional mothering moments that I might compare to being stuffed in a smelly shoe.) Always, in socks and life, the result is ephemeral. Make it beautiful anyway.

The last line of the instructions for these socks says, "Block well." Blocking, for any non-knitters with the patience to read this far (and that's a lot of patience! you should think about taking up sock knitting with all that patience!), means that I will swish the sock in water and press out the excess gently. I will pin it out, stretching it in all directions, and leave it to dry. This will open out the lace pattern and even out the stockinette stitch, so that it looks the way the designer meant it to look. While I am blocking I will pray for my stretched-thin friend again, for peace and trust amid the stretching. I believe that in the seasons when we feel like we've been stretched too far and hung out to dry, God can work in us, calling forth the women we were meant to be. I would appreciate it if you'd pray for her, too.

Snippets

You guys know about my aikido black belt, yes? And I've posted before about our top-of-the-line home security system, that wails minatorily when someone even approaches the house with bad intentions? I mention this because my husband is out of the country for the week, and I would hate to have to beat the stuffing out of any stalker types who happened to read this post.

Alex is away at Scout camp this week also, which means I am the only person in the house whose age is measured in double digits. I'm not used to that. It was bad timing to attempt to discontinue the Unisom I've been taking for nausea. I'm almost better, I thought to myself, so I'll probably be fine. OH MY GOODNESS, I was not fine. I think I'll keep right on taking the drugs.

On Friday I am defending my early research project. If I pass, all I'll have left to do for the PhD is my dissertation. (My department abolished comprehensive exams shortly before I entered the program, intending to replace them with something as yet unspecified, but the students in my cohort don't have to take exams or do the mystery new thing either: coursework, early research project, dissertation, we're done.) In order to pass, I should probably prepare for the defense. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten past drawing cracks on a picture of a highway for my opening slide (see above re: only adult in the house and still throwing up).

While things are quiet I should probably work, not blog, so I will leave you with a quick random scramble.

Pete already has the lawyerly tendency that drives me so crazy in his oldest brother. Friday night I said, "Guys. You have to stop running around the house." He replied, "Me not running around house, Mama. Me running across house."

Oh, silly me. Running across the house is A-OK. (She said sarcastically.)

One of the kids on my caseload has the largest tonsils I have ever seen, and I have been trying for months to get a more informed opinion about them. I need to see his velum, which doesn't seem to be doing its job properly, but it's hidden behind his tonsils. His pediatrician has not seemed to be concerned in the slightest about these tonsils that meet in the middle, but the mom finally wangled an ENT referral. The ENT took one look and said, "Oh, those have to come out." He scheduled surgery for a few days later. I could not help but wonder if the pediatrician would have been so laissez-faire with a child who had good insurance. (Here's a tonsil picture if you have only a vague idea where your tonsils really are -- they live in between the two arch-y things you see in the back of your mouth (more properly known as your anterior and posterior faucial pillars). They should not, just in case you wondered, meet in the middle.) But I'm hoping the surgery makes a difference for him.

A pair of mourning doves built a nest on our front porch, and the mama sat on that egg for weeks and weeks. I felt some sympathy for her because she starting setting her eggs right when I found out I was pregnant. I would watch her up there in the cold April wind and think queasily, "It's hard work to help a baby grow, isn't it?" I kept watching and watching, waiting for little baby peeps from the nest. But there were never any peeps. This weekend they gave up. I peeked inside the nest, after weeks of trying to stay away from that corner of the porch, and saw one perfect-looking egg. I should probably toss the nest, because rotting egg is not something I want that close to my house. There's something so sad about an abandoned nest, though.

All right, time to get to work. Wish me luck!

Ineffable Gibbets

The American bishops are debating about translations again, fretting that Joe Average Catholic will be confused by dependent clauses and words like "wrought."

Perhaps I am biased here, because words are my thing. I have an undergraduate literature degree because I loved words and the ways they fit together. I distinctly remember using the word "ineffable," another of the proposed word choices criticized as inappropriately arcane, in a paper that I wrote when I was 18 (John Donne was the topic). In the ensuing 20 years, I have never once observed anyone panicking or shutting down in the face of the word "ineffable." I have never even observed any unhappy text-messaging in response: "Hlp 2 mny big wrds!"

The prayers of the Church already incorporate complex syntax. The first time I read the Angelus, it took me four or five tries to parse it. "Was made known by the message of an angel may by his Passion and Cross be brought"? I couldn't get those nouns and verbs to line up in a way that made sense to me. Do the bishops think we need to re-translate that as well?

I do not. I believe that people are wired to adapt to complex syntax. Every summer I read a Dickens novel (only three left!), and every summer I spend the first 60 pages thinking, "Oh, Mr. Dickens, your editor must have been sleeping at the switch. Was it necessary for that sentence to be a hundred words long?" Then my brain adjusts. Brains do that.

We are built for learning language. Whenever we listen to someone with an unfamiliar accent or an unfamiliar lexicon, we go through the same process: an initial "huh?" stage, a figuring-it-out stage, and eventually, an effortless stage. Some people do it with more ease than others, and some speakers (William F. Buckley, say) have an enduring ability to induce head-scratching in the listener. But it is preposterous -- an underestimation of God's design for the human brain -- to suggest that longer sentences in the liturgy would be a lasting impediment to comprehension.

When I was a new convert, reluctant to switch from my beloved NIV Bible to the NAB, one of the things that persuaded me to make the move was the language of the NAB. I remember Hebrews 1 pulling me up short: Jesus as the refulgence of the Father's glory still makes my heart sing. The Bible is full of unfamiliar words -- hyrax and chrysoprase and propitiatory (as a noun). Should we all switch over to The Message so we don't get confused? (Song of Songs: the daughters of Jerusalem say, "That dude's so into you!") One bishop objected explicitly to the word "gibbet," saying he hadn't heard it since 1949. But it features prominently in the NAB version of Esther -- surely he has read Esther in the past 60 years.

I am, for the record, enthusiastic about the phrase "the gibbet of the Cross." I think we have lost sight of the shame of crucifixion, of what an improbable instrument of redemption a cross really was. "Gibbet" offers exactly that connotation. It's not so hard to teach people what "gibbet" means.

I hesitated to write this post because it could sound elitist, but I think there may be more elitism in some of the bishops' comments. People can learn new words; they do it all the time. They do not usually throw up their hands and say, "Well, I guess I'm too stupid for this." I would argue, too, that one purpose of liturgy is stretch those who are listening -- to deepen their understanding of God and not merely to spoon-feed them the familiar. More cynically, I have to wonder if the bishops are overestimating the attentiveness of many of us in the pews. I include myself among the distracted -- I cannot count subordinate clauses while dealing with wiggly children.

This got longer than I thought it would (good thing I'm not trying to write for the bishops, since long is apparently bad in their view), but here's one last thought: when the Holy Spirit inspired St. John to describe the eternal nature of Christ, the result was "In the beginning was the Word." Christ the Word brings truth to us; we are designed to receive it, to share it. We were created to learn about the ineffable -- whether or not we know how to spell it.

RIP

Harriet McBryde Johnson died last week.

I had never heard of her until her 2003 NYT article on Peter Singer, which made me want to stand up and cheer. Sometime in the preceding year or so, in a short article I cannot find now in the NYT archives, the magazine had written uncritically about the practice of killing disabled babies in the Netherlands -- taking a syringe filled with poison and injecting newborns with painful congenital conditions. I sat at my kitchen table and wept, reading it. Two weeks later I wept again when I read the letters page, because not one published response -- not one -- suggested that there was anything immoral about this practice. 

I thought about writing in myself but I could not even think where to start: "News flash! There is a profound difference between alleviating suffering and poisoning a baby with the intent to kill." What kind of world do we live in where that distinction even needs to be made? I was delighted to read Johnson's account of her visit to Princeton -- it is smart, brave, ambivalent, unforgettable. It seems cliched to call her brave, but I cannot leave it out so cliched I will be.

Johnson provided a breath of fresh air in the Terry Schiavo case. The political posturing and media maelstrom made me want to hide under the bed until it was over, but I love her piece from Slate. "Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice," she wrote. Damn straight.

More than her writing on end-of-life issues, it is her views on day-to-day life with a disability that will stay with me. I have spent a sizable chunk of my professional life in long-term care facilities, trying to help people who, like Johnson, have brains and muscles that don't communicate effectively. She wrote in another 2003 NYT essay on the stripping away of small freedoms that many of her friends had faced, of the small things, like long hair and a gold bracelet, that marked her as an outsider when she visited them.

The essay made me think about my own choices in my work with with chronically disabled people. In long-term care, at least 75% of an SLP's workload is assessment and management of swallowing disorders. Can a resident keep liquids out of his airway? Can she chew well enough for adequate intake? If not, we recommend thickened liquids or pureed foods or both. Many SLPs approach these decisions conservatively, since aspiration pneumonia can be rapidly fatal. If you suspect aspiration and don't recommend thickened liquids, you could get sued in a hurry. (Oh, yeah, and also your patient could die a painful death. Much as I hate the tendency to emphasize the potential lawsuit over the human cost, it's easy to think that way.)

I will always remember Johnson's choice to decline a feeding tube, even when she weighed 70 pounds. By the time I read her essays I had moved away from the hyper-caution of my first year of practice, preferring to outline options and risks for families and encourage joint decision-making. Johnson's voice, though, is a potent reminder of the ways that we strip away patients' autonomy "for their own good." I'm not going to practice like that ever again. You want to bring your husband some homemade chicken soup? Sounds delicious. Let's talk about how we can keep it out of his airway, so you don't feel like you have to give it to him on the sly. 

I don't know how much clinical work my future holds, since I am in training to be a professor and not a clinician. But I hope I can share Johnson's wisdom with my future students: When you work with people who have disabilities, you can help to make their world a little narrower or a little broader. Go for broad.

Conversation

What if we named the baby for a Greek god or something? Like we could give it my screen name, Surreal Hephaestus Quasar.

    Wheezer?

No, Quasar. You know, like the star.

    We've always given a saint's name and a family name.

Well, maybe we should branch out a little. Like name the baby Mohammad or Buddha. Or Elvis.

    No. Just no.

Why not? Lots of people consider them saints. Saints, prophets, same difference.

    No.

Let's name the baby for me. Alexander the Second.

    No.  

How about Otto?

    For...?

Otto von Bismarck.

    No.

I know! Genghis!

    You're trying to get me to blog this conversation, aren't you?

Notes from the Zookeeper

The boys had coupons for a free lunch at Subway, so today we picked up sandwiches for lunch and had a picnic at the park around the corner. It's an old park, with big trees and weathered tables and little in the way of equipment, so they were trying to figure out good games to play.

The trouble with having kids 2.5-3 years apart is that they can't play physical games together very well. The 6yo is never, no way nohow, going to be able to catch the 11.5yo when they play tag. This is frustrating for the 6yo.

I looked up from the sock I was knitting (say! I never knew how fun it is to knit socks on two circs! next up, magic loop) and said, "What if we played some kind of tag where I was the director, and I would say, 'You walk like an elephant, holding your ankles,' or, 'You take long jumps like a kangaroo'?"

The idea caught their fancy and we spent an animated ten minutes working out the details. What we came up with for the cast of characters:

• Invertebrates: a spider, who scuttles around on hands and feet; a slug, who must crawl on his belly; an octopus, who drifts around wafting his arms but who can shoot "ink" (i.e., chuck grass) at a pursuer who must, if hit by the ink, stand still for ten seconds while the octopus escapes. Am I mixing up my cephalopods? Should that be the squid?
• Quadrupeds: elephant, who must hold his ankles but is free to move as fast as possible in that position; cow, who walks on all fours mooing (there was discussion of whether the cow should have to eat some grass if he forgot and walked like a biped -- I vetoed that idea even though I was the one who suggested it); goat, who can make a head-butt gesture and immobilize the tagger for a count of ten.
• Tree-dwellers: bird, who runs around flapping; gibbon, who brachiates, whooping loudly; monkey, who can briefly claim any tree as base.
• Big cats: tiger, who can make a slashing motion that stops a pursuer for a count of ten; panther, who can be briefly invisible (everyone else has to cover his eyes for a count of ten); cheetah, the only one who can run flat out on two legs.

The director makes the animal assignments and switches them at frequent intervals. "It" is a flamingo (sort of); he must chase everyone while hopping on one foot, holding his other ankle. This was the announcement that made Alex say, "No. I am not playing that game." But everybody else was excited, so we gave it a whirl. Joe says, "It was very fun and you should tell everybody it's called 'zoo tag.'" Marty says, "It's an interesting game that could go on forever as long as somebody doesn't lose their voice." (That was the reason I called a halt.) I see more zoo tag in our future.

School's Out

First day of summer today, at least according to our school district. I'm looking forward to having all the boys home -- can't decide if that's madness or merely optimism. Also my first day in maternity pants. I'm in that in-between stage where the maternity clothes look like clown pants but the clothes with waistbands are just not going to happen. Won't be out of the first trimester until Thursday, but my belly is...advanced, just like my age.

Also on Thursday I'm leaving town for a conference. Today I need to get my poster off to the printer and firm up accommodations. I have a couple of reservations but I think I'm going to cancel them both and stay in a university facility.

Do you think I will have a mutiny or only grumbling on my hands when I announce to the boys that immediately after we pray Morning Prayer from the Divine Office, we are going to clean the house? I do not think that this is what they had in mind for their summer vacation, even if I promise to follow it right up with a long browsy trip to the library and lunch out to celebrate the beginning of freedom.

We shall see. All three of the big boys are still sleeping, the fruit of a weekend scouting campout at our nearest minor league baseball field. Pete thinks this post is very boring, and perhaps he is not alone. Let me just add to the boring by saying that before I leave town, bright and early Thursday morning, I WILL have dealt with the accumulation of paper clutter, including the backlogged budgety bits and bobs (people, I have not balanced the checkbook since I got pregnant), the treasury report for which I begged an extension in early May (I'm a volunteer -- what will they do, fire me?), and the everlasting laundry pile.

The end.