Light and Momentary

Three things to like about November 30

1. It's the feast of St. Andrew! We celebrate at our house with vegetarian haggis, neeps, and tatties. I'll dig out the saltire and hang it in the dining room at dinnertime. I can't pipe in the haggis but I can play "Scotland the Brave" on the violin as one of the boys carries it to the table. Close enough for bagpipe-less me.
2. It's the first day of this beautiful novena.
3. It's the last day of NaBloPoMo. Thirty days, thirty posts, time to stop yammering for a while.

As tedious as a twice-told tale

Remember my happy Dickens project? It was conceived in a bleak Edinburgh winter as a way to keep the literature-loving corner of my brain humming in a season filled with soggy diapers and sibling squabbles. If you keep nibbling at something big, sooner or later you find you've chewed a sizable hole in it. I decided to read a Dickens novel and a Shakespeare play every year.

So in January of 2000 I started out.

Sunday Night Strategizing, Vol. 8

Oh my goodness, I am feeling like I have a million zillion things to do. Got to eat the elephant one bite at a time, I guess. This week's menu:

As the twig is bent

One more post about my wacky family before everybody heads out. We are sitting around reminiscing and my cheeks hurt from laughing. We started with Op, which I learned from a fourth-grade teacher, and moved on to Ubbi Dubbi. I reminded my brother of the time in 1999 when I was trying to cheer him up and started talking to him in French plus Pig Latin. This may strike you as a rather novel tactic for cheering someone up, but it made him laugh out loud, then and now.

My mother said, "What about French plus Pig Latin plus Ubbi Dubbi?" In rather fractured French (but impeccable Pig Latin and Ubbi Dubbi) I said, "Can you understand me?" Everybody cracked up. (Talk about an easy crowd. I suspect that if my husband had been in the room, he and my SIL might have looked at each other with a what-did-we-get-ourselves-into? kind of look.)

I've always thought of my fascination with language as a weird little quirk of mine, but tonight I am thinking that the first steps of the path to the PhD were plowed by a family that thinks Ubbi Dubbi is a laugh riot. I told my 8yo we'd have to have a quick goodnight tonight because he was up late seeing Tangled. We got sidetracked talking about glottal stops in Hawaiian and aspiration bursts in Korean. It makes me wonder what he'll be like when he's the hurried parent: what kinds of conversations will derail his plans for a speedy tuck-in? It's one of the blessings of life in a family: shared fascinations, shared joys.

We amuse ourselves

You know I have a soft spot for the interrupting cow joke. My children and their goofy uncle (and I) spent a long time this afternoon making each other laugh.

Knock knock.
    Who's there?
Interrupting litigator.
    Interrupting litig--
Suuuuue!

Knock knock.
    Who's there?
Interrupting farrier.
    Interrupting farr--
Shooooe!

Knock knock.
    Who's there?
Interrupting passenger pigeon.
    Interrupting passenger pigeon who?
[silence, because extinct things can't go "coooo"]

 

Kicking back with my family and a White Russian

My mother wrinkles her nose. "Blogging!" she says scornfully. "People used to have diaries. That were private."

When I kept my first blog I used to worry that my mother would find it. Now she knows my URL and she never looks at it. Never. I shouldn't have wasted the energy worrying.

I ask my brother, "What should I blog about?" "Bowling," he tells me. Listening to my brother is usually (though not always) a good idea, so bowling it is.

***

Almost the whole gang went bowling tonight: the seven cousins and six of the grownups. We laced up our two-tone shoes and picked out our balls. I don't think I'd been bowling since 1988 and I was surprised to see how things had changed, with displays over each lane that tell you whose turn it is and what your score is, along with gutter guards that pop up automatically when the little kids are at bat (so to speak) and slide back down when the grownups take their turns.

My family never bowled when I was growing up -- never once. I'd never picked up a bowling ball until we got to the bowling unit in sophomore year PE. I had this deep-seated aversion to the very idea of bowling, and my inner soundtrack ("No no no no no, no no no no," to the tune of "Da Doo Ron Ron") probably caused me to tune out what little instruction we were given in the mechanics of ball-hurling and pin-toppling.

I was really bad. (I should have taken my brother's tack: he used to try to get the lowest possible score. "Once I got a 7!" he said proudly. Since he was ten years behind me in school, I didn't have the benefit of his ideas at the time.) I expected to be really bad tonight. It turns out that one advantage of coming from a family of non-sports people is that you don't look nearly as stupid bowling as you did in tenth-grade PE. Or maybe you look just as stupid to an outsider, but there's much to be said for looking stupid all together.

Since I tell you all about it when our kids follow in our footsteps in things like math competitions, I should probably tell you that my boys bowl just like their mama did as a kid. The scores in our lane were pretty dismal, but we had a good time anyway. I almost broke 100, but not quite.

Maybe that's part of what it means to be a family: you can all be inept together and have fun anyway.

She hastens and fastens

Hurray, it's Thanksgiving tomorrow! I love Thanksgiving. Butter and gratitude are two of my favorite things. I am going to spend it with my whole family: parents, brother, SIL, niece, nephew, sister. Looking hugely forward to it; lots to do between now and then.

I'm grateful for y'all who stop by and read my ramblings -- for your comments and emails and for your friendship. Wishing all of you a day full of blessings!

P.S. I kept meaning to put that birth post back up after I got over my attack of November-itis; it's there now if you were curious. Or maybe that was just Lilian. ;-)

23

It's the twenty-third day of NaBloPoMo and my daughter is 23 months old today. This means...it's time for a guest post! My pal Jenny (Stella's godmother) was at her birth, and at Stella's baptism she gave me her account of it. Such a treasure! (All typos are my doing. Thanks again, Jenny!)

More Annoying

So I went to Philadelphia for two days with Stella. My professional organization's big meeting was there, and I was supposed to present but I wasn't quite ready to leave town without my little girl. I found a college-aged babysitter through a La Leche League friend-of-a-friend (all hail the Old Boobs Network), and cajoled a grad student I actually knew into being my backup during my session just in case the unknown babysitter didn't work out, and off we went.

She did as well as you could possibly expect a not-quite-23-month-old to do under the circumstances, but it was a relief to head home. We were boarding the plane in Philly, along with several other mothers traveling alone with little children, when a sneering pronouncement from behind caught my ear:

"God, I hope these kids go to sleep. There's nothing more annoying than kid noise." Her companion agreed: "Yeah, I know."

Nothing?? Nothing more annoying than kid noise?? In a world that includes dengue fever, sewers that back up into people's basements, horseflies, the My Humps song, and Big Mouth Billy Bass, the thing you find most annoying is kid noise? Because -- whoa.

A partial list of things more annoying than kid noise (want to add your own in comments? go crazy): PMS. Lemon meringue pie filling that has been dyed neon yellow. Mud tracked on freshly cleaned floors. The Superbowl. Pokemon movies. Library fines. Bounced checks. Chitchat in movie theaters. Oh!! People who take phone calls while in the audience at a conference presentation!! (The rudeness!!) My own absent-mindedness. Stockings that run the first time you put them on. Unannounced reformulations of the few products to which I have fierce brand loyalty. Bloviating politicians.

I get it that some kids out there are terrible travelers. I get it that some parents are lax disciplinarians. And I get it, I really do, that my 14-year immersion in kid noise might leave me with less empathy for people who are seriously bothered by noisy toddlers.

BUT STILL. These women were SLPs returning from the same convention I'd just attended, and you'd think they of all people ought to know: it takes a long time to learn to say, "Mom, I'm bored and uncomfortable. Could you help me find a distraction?" So sometimes toddlers might squawk instead. You can't become an SLP without learning that communication and self-regulation are complex skills, and that's why toddlers are still working on acquiring them.

I thought to myself, "They must work with adults." But working with adults shows you every day that the human frame is fragile. It doesn't take a lot of self-awareness to realize that thirty years from now, when you have your stroke or your basal ganglia circuits are shorted out by Parkinson's, the people who will take care of you are those same kids you're so hostile towards today. How about a little bread on the waters, ladies?

I have been thinking over my reaction to their exchange, mindful of that plank in my eye. (In the moment I said nothing. I turned around, with Stella sitting on my hip (silently, TYVM) and my poster tube in my hand, and looked at them with a look that meant, "Wow, did you really just say that while standing next to a colleague who is also the mother of a toddler?" After I turned back around one of them said lamely, "Well, it's true.") It's possible that I feel unreasonably entitled because I have children who've been known to make noise. It's possible that they're voicing a majority opinion and I'm the weird one here.

But you know, I'm not looking for special treatment for my family. I think all kids deserve compassion from the adults around them, from strangers as well as friends and family. I'm still seeing the face of the little boy who was crying on that flight -- he was traveling with an ear infection and he was in terrible pain. An adult might suffer in silence; most kids can't. In my view their limited capacities mean that they need more kindness, more understanding -- not less.

Placeholder

I came home from Philadelphia late last night. I just wrote 700 words about the flight home and the cranky women who sat across the aisle from me, but I think I'm too tired to finish that tonight. I wanted to say that they made me think of the bit in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again," and that I hoped they could find themselves some bigger scoops somewhere, but I'm not that blind. Planks/motes/eyes/extrications and all that.

Nine more days of NaBloPoMo...

Finally

I think I've found a spiritual director, after months of wishing I could make it work. We met tonight and it feels absolutely right. She's a nun who just took permanent vows this spring, younger than me and full of joy. She laughed all through our meeting. I came home with some notes on a paper napkin and a peaceful heart. Next time I'll take something better to write on.

Captain Destiny's Narrow Escape

My oldest son was doing his share of the pre-dinner tidy with a cardboard box over his head, calling himself Captain Destiny. He was also needling a younger brother and I said, "You have to stop being a pain in the butt."

"Captain Destiny is never a pain in the butt!" he boomed from inside his box.

"You're being a pain in the butt right now."

"Captain Destiny thinks you must be mistaken," he answered politely.

And you know, there are all kinds of ways a kid could make that rejoinder, many of them defiant or mouthy or disrespectful. But that boy knows exactly how to crack me up. Instead of telling him to get that box off his head right now, I burst out laughing.

He came in here where I am nursing the baby and said, "Captain Destiny Junior! You are needed to fight evil!" "Mmph," she said, still nursing.

"Busy?" he said, and went off to team up with a brother. Evildoers, beware.

I blame the alien spaceship

There are some bits of motherhood that make it clear to me just how blissful ignorance really is. I lived almost 30 years of my life without knowing how difficult it would be to teach four boys that they really truly honestly are expected to don clean socks and underwear every day. Without fail. Even if it is raining. Even if they are in a particular hurry to get dressed so they can get back to reading that great book. Even if an ALIEN SPACESHIP lands on the lawn when they are getting out of bed -- EVEN THEN, clean underwear and socks.

Recently one of my sons (details redacted to protect the incorrigible) was telling me earnestly that he couldn't change his underwear because he didn't have any to change into. I said, "How could that be? I'm caught up on laundry." We agreed that it was a mystery -- it wasn't in a brother's dresser and it wasn't in the hamper. Things disappear around here pretty regularly and they almost always turn up again.

I brought a backpack up from the basement so I could pack and I thought it seemed a little too bulky. Apparently, when I said, "Unpack the clothes you took to Grandma's house and put the bag on the shelf in the basement," only the second half of the message made it through. Perhaps I can blame the alien spaceship on the lawn and its Sound-Absorbing Destructo-Beam. Whatever the reason, more than half of this boy's underwear and socks had been in the basement since the summer.

Now I do a lot of laundry. I do my best to make sure everybody always has clean clothes to wear, even if finding them might require an occasional rummage through a basket of unfolded things. But I don't do enough laundry for a kid to get by on three pairs of underwear. Part of me wants to know exactly how seldom he was heeding my "every single day!" admonition, if he's only mentioning in November that it's a problem. The rest of me -- the rest of me thinks ignorance is bliss.

Rhymes with orange. Really!

Dear Jamie, I urgently need a quick and easy dinner recipe. The kids are gnawing at each other's ankles and CCD starts in 25 minutes! Whatever shall I do?? --Priscilla Procrastinator

Dear Priscilla, fret not! Spornge is your friend when a dinner deadline looms. You may be thinking, Spornge? spornge?? Is that a typo, Jamie Gladly? Has NaBloPoMo left your usually assiduous inner copy editor hogtied under her desk, squirming and grunting and trying to free herself?

Spornge is a recipe from the breakfast chapter of Whole Foods for the Whole Family. Both of the women who submitted it came from Wisconsin, so maybe it's a Wisconsin thing. The note in WFWF says it's pronounced "spornj," which totally rhymes with orange in my dialect. (How about yours? Do you say orange with one syllable or two?) You can't beat that, huh? Ultra-speedy and reasonably nutritious dinner and a solution to the age-old question of how to finish that love poem: "Your eyes so green / your hair so orange / you're never mean / you make great ____ ."

Spornge is perfect for those bare pantry days when you don't have enough eggs to scramble and you don't have enough bread for French toast. It's sort of a hybrid, with its own charms. Here's the basic recipe: Melt a generous knob of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. When it sizzles, add about three pieces of whole-grain bread, torn into pieces. Let the bread brown in the butter, and pour six beaten eggs on top. Turn the heat down to medium-low and scramble the eggs gently. Serve hot, with crumbled bacon on top if you like.

To adapt for dinner, whip out your grater while the bread is browning in the butter. Grate a pile of zucchini and summer squash first, and toss it in the pan when the bread is almost ready. Stir briefly before you add the eggs. While the eggs are doing their thing, grate a little pile of Parmesan cheese. Sprinkle it on top before serving and pass more at the table. It makes a grandma-approved dinner (vegetables, starch, and protein too) in one pan at the speed of lickety-split. And it's tasty, too, with those crispy buttery bits of bread and soft-set egg around their edges. I served this to the four youngest kids and myself for dinner and it worked out about right, so scale up if you're feeding a hungry horde.

Now close up that laptop, Priscilla P., and get whisking. CCD waits for no mom.

Ambitious

I think I should have put fewer things on my to-do list this week.

Thirty posts in thirty days feels like a lot of posts.

The end.

Magic

My daughter is in the middle of a language explosion.

Mostly, our kids have taken their time figuring out words and sounds. With one part of my brain I know that this is fine, that kids have their own timetables. With another part of my brain, the part that resembles nothing so much as a squirrel on meth digging frantically for something to worry about, I spend a lot of time fretting. Is she on the slow end of normal expressively? Has he slipped into the "delayed" range? How's her comprehension progressing? Can he identify objects by function? When is she going to be able to manage a place shift within a word? Do I need to schedule an eval? Should I be trying to do therapy? Is it just their genes or is it ALL MY FAULT because I wasn't careful enough about long-chain fatty acids during pregnancy?

And then some internal switch flips and the magic happens.

There is nothing cooler on the planet than a kid learning to talk. It's kind of a wacky idea, that we can produce fairly random strings of sounds -- say, a voiced alveolar stop ("d") followed by a low unrounded back vowel ("aw") followed by a voiced velar stop ("g") -- and be confident that anyone who speaks the same language will know we're talking about a four-legged animal that barks. How do babies figure it out so early? It's even more remarkable, in my view, that toddlers catch on so quickly to the idea of bound morphemes: if you add an -s to "dog," it means more than one.

Stella's pulling out words I've never heard her use before, and I am eating it up. She wasn't very interested in dinner tonight, but when we went into the kitchen afterward she was very emphatic about the ham sitting on the counter. "Meat!" she intoned. When I did not leap to saw off a piece for her, she made sure I knew what she meant. "MEAT! Meat meat meat meat!"

Yesterday I was pushing her in the stroller and she wanted the...thing spread out over her head. What would you call it? It's not really an umbrella or an awning or a hood. She didn't know the word for it either, but it didn't stop her. "Hat!" she told me, gesturing. Close enough, right? Something that goes over your head to keep you dry?

Tonight she and Pete were having a disagreement that turned into a scuffle, and she came to me with a grievance. "Head!" she grumbled. "Pete!" It's not behavior I especially want to encourage but it's a milestone all the same: baby's first tattle.

Sunday Night Strategizing, Vol. 7

Oh, you guys, my outlook on life is about a zillion times cheerier than it was last night. Perhaps two zillion. Good things from today: more sunshine than the forecast led me to believe we would have, a solo run, some outdoor playtime with the kids during which the boy who insisted he could not ride a two-wheeled bike finally got rolling, a reasonably successful trip to Mass with Stella*, and a marvelous concert by the campus women's choruses. SO much fun.

*It was the Life Teen Mass and she was happily jamming along with the band. She was headbanging so enthusiastically that I thought she might concuss herself on the next pew, but she did not. You know you've been in a tough stretch when "no skull fracture" = "a good Mass with kids."

I mostly hit my goals for this week, with a relapse on the sugar front last night when self-pity sparked a raid on the kids' Halloween candy. I wouldn't want to stand up in front of a group and recite the Sacred Heart prayer, but we can get through it together. And I didn't get that job application submitted. Turns out the date they'd posted was not a hard deadline, which was good since I only had a paragraph of my cover letter written by Friday afternoon.

This week I am keeping my goals modest, because (a) when I am feeling like the Voice of Gloom it's hard to get things done and (b) I'm traveling during part of this week to present my dissertation at a conference. I hope I remember what it said. :-)

• Get to a weekday Mass and spend some time on Lectio Divina at least once.
• Be diligent about getting to bed on time and about treating this mysterious and vexing arm pain. Run twice, disregarding discouragement re: geriatric pace. Keep slogging along the anti-Gloom path: fish oil/SAD light/no sugar.
• Settle on a new book to read to the younger boys. (Treasure Island was a big hit with my 8yo -- high five! He wants to read Kidnapped next, but I think Kidnapped is much weaker. I suppose we can try it.)
• Work: Finish that job application by Tuesday morning at the very latest. Start chapter 9 in the multivariate book. Review dissertation findings. (Oh! Also: find a blouse to wear for the presentation.)
Home: Clean house. (I am taking a break from the basement.)

• Finish Christmas letter. Address some envelopes every day. Finish a knitted gift. Order remaining extended family gifts. Decide whether to bake something in the Christmas cake/Christmas pudding family.

The Cruellest Month

November gets me down. I've never bought the idea of a cruel April: the cruel month is November, or maybe February. At least in February the days are getting longer, and you know there will be crocuses in a few weeks.

It was gray all day with intermittent spatters of cold rain, and I'm in a matching mood. I've been trying to buck myself up to no avail. If it weren't NaBloPoMo I would have just gone to bed, but here I am with your daily dose of Gloooooom. Vitamin G, let's call it.

This morning I was getting an unusual amount of traffic from Facebook, linking to the post I mentioned here and finished last night. Usually I love it when that happens. I think, "Hi, new visitors!" and send cheery cyber-waves in their direction. Today I thought, "Is there a cave I could hide in? Because I just do not have it in me to deal with a comments brouhaha today." I decided it was wiser to send the post back to my drafts folder than to go on a spur-of-the-moment spelunking expedition. Maybe I'll put it back up when the sun comes out.

Stella took a monster nap today and was not at all tired when bedtime rolled around. I have changed CDs for her about fifteen times in the writing of these four paragraphs. (I know I am given to exaggeration, but fifteen is actually pretty accurate. She likes to listen to the first 45 seconds of a song and then request a new one.) She is finally slowing down, nursing in my lap. Oh, and she is cute even when I'm ready to slip her a little laudanum. (Wholesome, organic laudanum, of course.) She kicked her foot into the desk with a fair amount of force. Still nursing, she grabbed the foot and drew it up to her mouth so she could kiss it better herself. She's an independent little thing.

Ready for my close-up

It's probably predictable that this article would push my buttons. It's about women fixing their hair and makeup immediately after their babies are born so they'll look nice when the pictures are posted on Facebook.

In my view, the expectation that a woman will look just like she always does in the moments after she gives birth trivializes the event. If I had just finished a triathlon, would you be surprised to find I had untidy hair? (The people who know me in real life say, No, Jamie, the surprise is when your hair is not untidy.) I have never done anything as physically demanding as giving birth to my children. Their birthday pictures remind me that I poured my heart into something beautiful -- they could all be captioned "Mettle, tested." I love those pictures for their nakedness, even though I am clothed in all of them. Concealer is beside the point.

In this picture I am looking a little peaky even though I am on top of the world: that's because I hemorrhaged after my second son's birth. Sometimes birth can be brutal and dangerous. Honestly, I think the idea that a woman should be Facebook-ready twenty minutes afterward is one of the crazy expectations that contribute to the incidence of PPD in this country. Pregnancy weight gain = bad! Get back in those skinny jeans! Hurry up and go back to work! What's the matter with you that you can't get out of the house? "The matter" is that you just had a baby -- it's supposed to be a life-altering event.

Here's the thing I find most curious: what's going on with the baby while mom is blending her eyeshadow? Does it make more sense as part of the hospital birth scene, where it's not unusual for babies to spend some time being examined or bathed away from their mothers? I love that first postpartum hour or two, basking in the post-birth glow with the hard work behind us. I have held my babies greedily all through those hours, nuzzling their damp little heads and memorizing their faces. (I have been wrestling with this paragraph for an absurdly long time now because I think it might sound judgmental and that's not my intent. The tone is more puzzled than judgy, I promise.) I have never been happier than I was in this picture. And yeah, my face is red. So what? You propel a 9#12 baby with a 38+cm head through your pelvis, and then tell me if you're thinking about skin tone.

One of my college Greek classes was taught by an elderly professor with a quavery voice and silvery hair. We were reading the first chapter of the gospel of John and he taught us something I'll never forget about the word translated as "children" in verse 12. It's a word without an exact analogue in English -- a participle, teknon, that means "one having been born." It connotes, he said, the tender love a mother feels for the child she has borne, a love refined in the crucible of sweat and blood and pain. Irrevocable love. Transforming love.

By any objective standard I am not looking my best in this picture, taken in the first minute after my daughter was born. (That's meconium smeared on my pajamas. All the fashionable moms are wearing meconium this season.) But I see this picture and I remember that sometimes determination is costly. I remember that sometimes you have to lean into suffering to find a way through it. I remember that fear gets me nowhere. And I remember longing fulfilled, the joy beyond words of seeing that little face at last. It's a glimpse of a place between worlds: she is no longer contained within my body, not yet untethered from it.

I have spent hours writing about the lessons birth has taught me, as well as some time writing about beauty. I know that my views on epidurals and eyeliner (in a word: overused) are not the norm, and the point of this post is not to say "Women of America, UR DOIN IT RONG." I think it's worthwhile, though, to push back against the idea that we just want to erase the pain of birth along with any traces it might leave. I believe real beauty has nothing to do with mascara. I believe we're never more beautiful than when we say, "This is my body, given up for you."

Google Haiku

I have been working on a post about this article, but I am afraid it sounds too earnest and judgy to see the light of day tonight. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since the light of day disappeared HOURS ago (not that I'm bitter about standard time or anything, she said with more than a trace of rancor). So tonight it's search term haiku instead.

Four-month-old hungry,
Infant pulls away from breast,
Abhominable.

Tonsil grading and
I hate nursing covers; hold
baby constantly.