Light and Momentary

Not convinced about this

My climbing-obsessed 17yo has been asking since forever about going to the closest site with outdoor rock-climbing. We detoured through the park in question on our way to my parents' house at the beginning of this month. My reaction: NOOOOOPE nope nope nope nope. His reaction: Climb All The Things!

My husband agreed to take him and Pete back to the park, camp overnight, and then head to another site with outdoor climbing. At the second site you can climb a cliff that rises from a lake, and then splash back into the lake when you reach the top (or fall). My reaction: NOOOOOOPE nope nope nope nope. His reaction: THIS IS THE COOLEST IDEA ANYONE EVER HAD! THIS IS BETTER THAN INDOOR PLUMBING OR POLIO VACCINES OR PASTEURIZATION!!!

I was FaceTiming with Alex tonight and making my worried face at him as we talked about this trip. What if there are fallen trees in the water and a climber splashes down onto pokey tree limbs? What if there are snakes basking at the top of the routes, and they are less than welcoming when reaching hands appear? 

Alex suggested that if the boys just carried bags of mice attached to their harnesses, they could offer mice to the basking snakes and avoid being bitten themselves. Problem solved! He was totally perplexed by my fallen tree worry. How would they fail to see a fallen tree from the shore? How could a fallen tree remain unnoticed under the water in a high-traffic zone? Was this, like, an Ent I was imagining, able to scoot itself in and out of the water at will? Or maybe, since all the Ents left Middle Earth, some kind of Zombie Ent? He made me laugh until my belly hurt, at which point we went to our local climbing gym.

Lots of people there enjoy outdoor climbing, and they had advice for us. There are venomous snakes, they said, so watch out for them. But they're more of an issue at the base of the cliffs than at the top.They also mentioned venomous spiders, a prospect to which I hadn't given much thought. It makes sense that if you're poking your hands into crevices in the rock, you might need to think about what else is lurking in the crevices.

"They'll have a great time," said the manager. The assistant manager loaned them some of his own equipment. No one there seemed too worried about impending doom.

But maybe they don't know about the Zombie Ents.

Spectator

I had tentatively planned to complete a triathlon with one of my college roommates today, but I bailed on her earlier this month. I was having foot pain after running, and hip and hamstring pain with both running and biking, and I was not enthusiastic about the open-water swim leg. (This whole thing was my idea originally. It's not as if I got roped into it. It's just that my enthusiasm waned.) When I texted Amy to tell her I wasn't going to do it after all, she asked if I would still come along and cheer her on. Sure thing, I said. 

It was today. It was pretty fun. Well, it was pretty fun for me. Fun is probably not the word that she would use.

We did triathlons together in 2016 and 2017, and then signed up for a 2017 race that was canceled because of thunderstorms in the area. They were women's races, known for welcoming beginners. The swim leg was in an old quarry that had been turned into a swimming area. This race was different: fewer competitors, fewer frills, higher expectations. We were trying to drive the bike course last night, but the process involved a lot of squinting at tiny screens in apps that wouldn't talk to each other. We finally concluded that she'd be able to figure it out in the morning.

The morning seemed better organized, but I was really happy not to be getting in that lake. My open-water swim experience is very limited and I always found it intimidating as a kid to swim in water I couldn't see through. Amy had a hard time with the swim. The water was choppy enough that she kept inhaling water, and feeling panicky, and slowing down. When I saw her getting out of the water I could see in her face that she was feeling defeated. "You did the hard part!" I yelled. "Go kill the bike leg!"

During the bike leg I was sitting next to a guy who had never seen a triathlon before. He was reading from his phone: "A reasonably fit rider can travel 25mph over flat ground." ...Whoa, I thought to myself, that is a different definition of "reasonably fit" from the one I am accustomed to using. As it turned out, the winner averaged a whisker under 25mph for the bike leg, so he might also have something to say about that definition of "reasonably fit." Amy finished the bike leg like a real-world "reasonably fit" person, and headed out for the run.

I think every time I've done a race longer than a 5K I've had a bib with my name on it, and spectators would call me by name as I went by. In this no-frills race there were only numbers on the bibs, and so there was no ready-made cheering squad for Amy when she came in toward the finishers' chute. "Gooooo, Amy!" I yelled. "You did it! You're there! That's so awesome! Go Amy goooooo!"

I met her on the other side of the finish line. "You did it! Congratulations!" She said, "I might throw up." But she did not. She's planning to do another one in two weeks.

Heights

Today Joe and I went to the climbing gym, and on the way he asked if I wanted to do Weakness Wednesday with him. This is normally a Joe/Pete thing, but Pete is in Canada with Boy Scouts. Okay, I said, thinking I would mostly be focused on footwork. Weakness Wednesday is where you do rock-climb-y things you're bad at, deliberately and repeatedly, in hopes of getting better at them. Joe would like me to place my feet more carefully when I climb, instead of aiming above the foothold and sliding my foot down the wall toward it. So, okay, I'm on board with that idea. Place the feet attentively on the footholds. Got it.

But Joe did not assign me a footwork regimen; instead, he said, "Do you know what I think you should do? I think you should let me belay you on a route that's significantly above your level and just keep trying the moves with plenty of takes* in between."

*Takes = supported rests. The belayer holds you up while you shake out your arms and catch your breath.

Ooookay, said I.

The toughest route I've finished so far is a 5.10b, and Joe assigned me to climb a 5.10d. Not just any 5.10d, either -- a tougher-than-average 5.10d. One good thing about tackling something I knew I couldn't finish was that my expectations were low. The first chunk of it was manageable, and then I reached the Realm of Nope. The gateway to the Realm of Nope was the Maybe Bridge, where I fell on my first attempt at a tricky move but got it the second time. And then...I was all out of maybes. I tried doing the next move slowly; I tried doing it dynamically*. Joe was shouting advice from 20 feet below. "Don't do it that fast!" he said. "Don't wait so long while you're thinking about it -- trust the foot placement!" I was not able to find the Goldilocks spot between doing it fast and doing it slow, but I surely did work up a sweat trying. Joe wasn't sure he wanted to let me down. "One more good attempt!" he called up, and I gave it one more good attempt. "I think you should give it two more good attempts!" he yelled. "Joe, I am your MOTHER and I want you to let me DOWN," I said with a certain emphasis. (He let me down. He's a good boy. Just a little bossy sometimes.)

*Dynamically = you jump for a hold that you can't reach from where you're standing.

This evening my husband and I celebrated our 26th anniversary at a newish restaurant, owned by the fancypants Gladlyville restaurant group. We'd never been there before and it was thoroughly delightful: yummy food, pleasing decor, excellent company, happy conversation. I was grateful for a pleasant evening, because for the past couple of weeks we've been wrestling with the 2019 iteration of an argument we seem to have every summer without fail.

The two outings felt pretty different but I think they have something important in common: when you're aiming for a lofty goal, sometimes you hit a spot that feels too hard. Even if you shake it out and catch your breath and try some different approaches, sometimes it still feels like too much. Maybe it feels like everybody else is sailing upward, and you're the only one stuck at that spot, falling again and again. But a true fact about hard things is that they tend to yield to patient effort. Maybe not next time, and maybe not the time after that. But eventually something clicks and the thing that seemed impossible becomes doable. Year 27, day 1: color me optimistic.

I think I can

When I make a summer task list, it always includes "put pictures in albums." My usual tactic is to take a year's worth of photos at a time and pop them into an album in the summer, when life is a little slower. Last summer I did the uploading part and the ordering part, but I never got around to the sticking-down-in-albums part. 

This caused me mounting dread. Two years' worth of pictures is a lot of pictures. I've dug myself out of that hole before, but one begins to wish for Mike Mulligan to get out of his cellar and steam to the rescue. (That would probably cause some structural issues for the town hall, though.)

My approach to albums is pretty simple. I don't buy card stock or stickers and I don't own a corner-rounder and I have never in my life made a spread like the ones in the Creative Memories materials. But I get the photos into the albums with captions as appropriate (usually after some complaining about it on the blog), and the kids love to look through them later. 

I love having done the task. I loathe doing it.

I knew that being behind wouldn't be as bad this time as it was when the kids were smaller. We take fewer pictures. Joe was asking me about this recently, why we have fewer pictures now, and I told him that in our family we usually take three types of pictures:

1. Somebody is doing something that makes me smile, often involving a book. (Seriously, we have so many pictures of kids poring over books.)
2. Somebody is celebrating an occasion with a cake or other festive food.
3. Somebody is going somewhere memorable and we get pre-departure pictures. (We usually forgot to take the camera along, back in the days when we had no phone cameras or only bad phone cameras.)

These days everybody is more grown up and so we have fewer goofy moments. People are more likely to get themselves to their own memorable destinations under their own steam, and so we seem to take fewer pictures of them heading out the door.

At least there will always be cake.

(Exhibit A: a Dobos torte made mostly by Joe for Easter 2018. Doesn't it look celebratory?)

I have now sequenced and organized and stuck down and captioned all the 2017-2018 pictures, which felt like A Job. I have uploaded and ordered and juuuust about finished sequencing the 2018-2019 pictures. I can do this. I don't especially want to, but I can do this.

Free-range mom musings

One of my favorite things about our location is its proximity to a multi-use trail. We live half a mile from a junction known as the Triangle, where visitors can grab a drink or stop in the bathroom before they head north or south or east. There's a little amphitheater as well.

The trail runs all over town, through neighborhoods better and worse, and now and then there are incidents. Maybe once a year, on average, there's a story in the newspaper about a bad encounter -- a robbery, or an assault. There are thousands of trail users in this area, though, so one newsworthy incident per year is a rate that I can live with. I've had my own moments of uncertainty. A mentally ill man used to hang out on my most-frequented stretch of the trail, muttering and occasionally carrying a big stick. Once I was biking at dusk when I saw this huge guy ahead of me. He moved onto my side of the trail and lifted his hands over his head in what looked like a menacing gesture. I wasn't sure what to do. Just bike past him? Bike at him? As I got closer I realized that he was plugged into his headphones, jamming out. He had danced over to my side of the trail, not realizing that anyone was nearby.

About ten days ago a woman was assaulted at the Triangle. She headed out for an early run, but a man knocked her down and began pulling at her clothes. She fought him off and called the police. She's okay. They haven't found the attacker. In the past I've had a dozen reasons for not worrying too much about trail incidents. It's almost always well trafficked, I tell myself. That assault happened right by the sketchy neighborhood. I don't run with any valuables. Etc. But this assault did not happen by the sketchy neighborhood. It happened in my neighborhood, in the place where I am most likely to run.

Stella is doing a summer camp at the amphitheater. In past summers, we've had pairs of Gladly kids walk home from camp by themselves; this year she's the only attendee from our family. Today I walked over to pick her up, and we headed down the sun-dappled trail together. And I wondered: how much weight should I give this news? Should it change my own decisions about where and when I run? It's the happiest place in town for me. I'd hate to think it was unwise for me to be there alone. (But is it?)

And what about Stella? She's 10 now. It is entirely reasonable for her to walk home from the amphitheater after camp is over. But should I tell her to walk home on the town sidewalks, avoiding the trail? Should I tell her what happened on the trail and let her decide how she feels about taking the trail alone? Should I contact the neighborhood mom whose kid lives a block away and see if she's interested in having them walk home together? I'm undecided. And I don't know if I'll get pushback from the camp staff if I tell them Stella will be signing herself out and walking home from now on.

I was mulling it over at the breakfast table when I saw this article about Dutch parenting. I suspect a Dutch parent would chuckle about my concerns. Twenty-first century America is a weird place to be a mom.

The peculiar satisfaction of the penultimate chord

This afternoon when I might have been mopping the floor I dug out the book of Bach two-part inventions and sat down at the piano. I hadn't played a Bach invention in a long time, so it was a slow and clunky process to inch my way through a few of them. But it was an unexpectedly satisfying process too. I love the glimpses inside the brain of someone long dead. I want to ask him: how did you decide on that chord? I would never have come up with that riff on the theme -- how long did it take you? This is, I suppose, why Bach is regarded as a composer of enduring genius and I am not.

Playing music is a specifically incarnational kind of pleasure. My brain signals my fingers with a blend of long-buried muscle memory and busy in-the-moment thought; my fingers tell the keys to move the hammers, which set the strings and the wood case into vibration. My ears receive that vibration, and through the everyday miracle of a lightning-fast Fourier transform I am able to make sense of the signal. My soul is fed by something that requires the intense engagement of my body. The work of sitting at the keyboard, fixing my mistakes and slogging along to the next measure, affords me an enjoyment that I just don't get from listening to recorded music, pleasant as that may be.

Today I felt a distinctive burst of satisfaction every time I got to the last measure and played the chords before the final resolution. There's a bit of dissonance in that last measure, most often a seventh chord that's prepping the listener for the last note. And I don't know why, but today that dissonance scratched a spot I hadn't known was itchy. I am telling you this in case you could use a little encouragement to sit down at a slightly dusty musical instrument. Mopping has its virtues but I don't find that it feeds my soul.

Death by Breastfeeding

There's a new article out in Nature, looking at breastfeeding habits in the hominin species Austrolopithecus africanus. The researchers measured barium concentrations in fossilized teeth, which allowed them to estimate the importance of breastmilk in the diet across time. Nifty, right? They learned that A. africanus mothers nursed their babies exclusively for about 6-9 months, and then continued to offer breastmilk along with varying quantities of solid food for about 5 years.

So far so unsurprising, at least from my perspective as a hominin mother who is also a breastfeeding researcher and an IBCLC. These days hominin babies also get interested in solid food around the middle of their first year of life, and they often keep going for a while, augmented by varying quantities of solid food. This is old news. Anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler was publishing in the mid-90s on "normal" breastfeeding duration, and her work suggested that a natural age for weaning would range from 2.5, at the earliest, to about 7, at the latest. You can read a nutshell version of her work here, but the core idea is that we can learn from other species about the markers that indicate it's time to wean. For instance, some primates wean at the time of the emergence of the first permanent molars, which corresponds to an age of 5 or 6 in humans. Just like A. africanus!

(Standard disclaimer goes here: let's all do what works for our own families; let's also agree not to mutter darkly about the motivations of women who breastfeed for more or less time than we might find optimal.)

I was more than a little surprised, though, to see the investigator's take on these findings. Breastfeeding is metabolically costly, he says, and so perhaps the species died out BECAUSE the mothers kept nursing their children for so long.

Given what we know about primate nursing duration, this line of thinking suggests to me that the entire global population of primates ought to have died out in a mass extinction event some thousands of years ago. "Well, Pops," I imagine an early hominin mother saying to her grieving husband, "it was nice knowing you but I am PLUMB DONE IN by breastfeeding our offspring. And now I die." She keels over, like Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, while her overly breastfed 5-year-old continues to paw at her stiffening mammaries.

The researcher's comments tie in with a cultural narrative that breastfeeding is too draining, both literally and metaphorically, for women to manage. I first encountered this idea in college, when an older friend's father was telling her how much more rested she seemed when she gave the baby a bottle. I bumped up against it in person when I first nursed a toddler. "Oh, that must be very tiring," said a new acquaintance. (Awkwardly, she was my husband's boss's wife and she found it SO ODD for a 21-month-old to be nursing that her customary British reserve evaporated entirely.) The thing that's exhausting, though, is mothering a small child. Once you get past the initial bumps in the road, breastfeeding is more likely to be the shortcut than the hard road. (See the Swiss army knife analogy in this old post.)

You know who profits from pushing that breastfeeding-chews-you-up-and-spits-you-out business? Not mothers, not babies, not young children, but manufacturers of human milk substitutes and complementary foods. I am not aware of scholarly studies that support this idea of breastfeeding as health hazard -- not in human mothers from food-insecure populations, where the question can be of life-or-death import, and not in animal studies. Could it be that these were just normal primate mothers doing a normal primate thing? Could it be that pathologizing long-term breastfeeding -- though "pathologizing" seems an inadequate verb for "suggesting it is to blame for the extinction of an entire species" -- is a bad idea not grounded in actual science?

I told my kids they should keep an eye out to make sure I don't go extinct from breastfeeding.

Incognito

There's a student from my department who works at the rock-climbing gym, and she is going to be taking one of my classes in the fall. I feel awkward about this.

Maybe I should wear a pair of Groucho Marx glasses so she will think she is encountering a different person with wild curly hair at the gym than she is in the classroom. Or perhaps I should adopt an accent. I can do a plausible Scottish accent, and then I will just seem to be a visiting Scot. With Groucho Marx glasses. I hear all the Scots are wearing Groucho Marx glasses these days. Especially for rock-climbing.

Recently I was talking to one of my boys about his reluctance to try new physical activities, and I mentioned an old post in which I said, "Why do I even have a category called Fitness? It would be more accurate to call it 'Jamie Fears That People Will Point And Laugh If She Does Hard Things But Surprise! They Do Not Point Or Laugh.'" This would be an unwieldy name for a blog category, but we believe in accuracy here at Light and Momentary.

My office is right across the street from the student fitness center, and a membership there only costs me $8 per week. But I don't usually have an active membership there, because I feel self-conscious about working out in a place where I am certain to run into my students. Do I wear a bathing suit to class? Absolutely not. Do I want to encounter students in my bathing suit? Absoluteli-est not. 

This is me being unreasonable, I know. She is probably a friendly helpful student, like the rest of the staff at the rock-climbing gym. She is unlikely to point or laugh, or post stealth videos of me being clumsy on YouTube. And yet I still feel the edges of my soul curling in a bit when I think about it -- like, this is the place where I go to do fun hard things with my kids, to strive and fail and strive again. It is not a place where I ever don my professional persona, and I like it that way.

So maybe I will don some Groucho Marx glasses instead.

The Vegetable Project Returns

I am always oscillating in the summer. Should I treat it like a vacation, in which I can take the time to linger over an extra cup of coffee and a 9x9 KenKen? Or should I treat it like the Getting Stuff Done window in which I have enough space in my head to deal with complicated tasks? 

Tuesday was a Getting Stuff Done kind of day, in which I dealt with a dozen different annoyances and loose ends. But then on Wednesday I was tired, and today I was still tired. I have done a bunch of KenKens instead of following up on the annoyances and loose ends.

I have discovered over the years that produce makes me productive. The single biggest determinant of my ability to be happily engaged with the attention-sucking stuff in my life is a diet in which my vegetable consumption dwarfs my simple carb consumption.

Fourteen years ago I blogged about my first Vegetable Project. I had 20 pounds of baby weight to lose and I resolved that I would address the problem with vegetables. It was a pretty simple plan: five servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day, with no refined sugar. (I was tandem-nursing my two youngest children in a minimally air-conditioned house, which is why my water consumption was so high.) In 30 days I lost 13 pounds and, to my surprise, found myself full of zip and determination.

In the years since then I have tried a whole bunch of different food strategies -- ten rounds of the Whole 30 and a number of variations thereupon. But you know, the original Vegetable Project offered the benefits of simplicity and sustainability; the Whole 30 is neither simple nor sustainable. And here is a weird downside to the Whole 30: it makes me so eager to Get Stuff Done that I become impatient with the people in my life who are less focused on ticking to-do list boxes. So my plan is to Eat All The Vegetables (and none of the sugar), and see what happens.

So many things have changed since I wrote those first Vegetable Project posts. The baby I was snuggling that summer is now a teenager, though he is still curled up right next to me as I write this post. In the middle of that month I wrote a post that got way more attention than expected -- thousands of hits and dozens of comments. In those days I thought I wanted more traffic, but then I got a taste of the wackadoodlery that ensues when you get more traffic. Nooooo thank you on the traffic!

I do miss the way people would read a long post in 2005, and write something thoughtful about it instead of reading the first sentence and posting a .gif in response. I am reading Mark Shea's By What Authority, first written in the late 90s, in which he talks about the potential of the internet to educate and unify. I did not foresee its potential to dumb down and polarize.

Today I got an email that was intended for Melanie of The Wine Dark Sea, complimenting her on her lovely blog but sent to my email address. It made me wonder if the author had some sort of ongoing address/content mismatch-- perhaps she sent an email to Melanie about Mrs. Darwin, and an email to Mrs. Darwin about me. 

Hmm, the later parts of this post don't have much to do with the beginning of this post. I will now tie them together: blogging = GOOD. Vegetables = ALSO GOOD. Refined carbohydrates and mean people on the internet = NOT GOOD. Vegetable updates to follow soon! The end!

Home sweet home

We made it back. It was a stressful drive -- we never did figure out why the car was making loud weird noises on Tuesday, and every time I heard even a tiny noise in that same range I was instantly on edge. We were a couple of hours from my parents' house when a large and alarming wrench appeared on the dashboard display. "Joe," I said, in the calm-calm-oh-so-calm voice that my children have learned to interpret (alas) as an indicator of significant inner tension, "pull out the owner's manual and let me know if that means we need some ordinary maintenance or if it's something more serious." 

"Power train fault," Joe read, and I died a little inside. "Well," I said, even more calmly, "let's see what services are at the next exit." The combination of loud weird mystery noises and a power train fault seemed unlikely to end well. At the next exit there was pretty much nothing: a Dollar General, where I suppose I could have purchased a box of tissues to weep into, and a gas station, and nothing else. I pulled into the gas station parking lot. In Maximum Calm Voice I said, "Here is the plan. I am going to turn the car off, and we are going to pray, and then I am going to turn it back on." And do you know, the wrench went away and did not reappear. 

I stopped at a Ford dealership further up the road, where they were utterly unhelpful. "Everybody's got problems today," snarled the man on duty when I approached the service desk. One might think that a service desk exists because everybody has indeed got problems, but apparently he did not view the matter in the same light. It would be at least a 90-minute wait, he said, and he didn't know whether they could tell me anything useful if the indicator wasn't on. "It could be something really bad, like your transmission failing," he said. (This prospect hurled me from Maximum Calm Voice territory into Never-Before-Observed Levels of Calm Voice territory, a development which struck dread into my children's hearts. Maybe I should just go ahead and freak out?) "Or it could be something like a throttle body. Impossible to say, but if you don't want to wait you can ask them to check it out at the auto parts store down the road."

The guy at the auto parts store was much friendlier, but he couldn't persuade his scanner to talk to my car. I did not know why the car had been making weird bad noises on Tuesday. I did not know why the Wrench of Doom had appeared and disappeared. I could not tell if driving off into the bowels of the rural Midwest was a reasonable risk to take or a terrible decision. But we talked it over and decided to head for home.

The bad noise did not recur; the wrench did not reappear. We weathered the storms and the uncertainty and I am really grateful. It's good to be home.

Roadblogging

We are visiting my family again and I am a little worried about our car. We squeezed into our little Fusion for the trip specifically because it’s newer and healthier than the van, but it is having an attack of — I don’t know of what. Car-catarrh? Would that be cartarrh? It is making a whiny hum at moderate speeds, sometimes but not always when the brakes are engaged. A loud whiny hum.

I heard it once on the way down here and wondered if it was some weird interaction between the new road surface and the wheels. But today I was coming back from taking the kids climbing (of course) and I started hearing it frequently. It got louder and louder. “What is that?” Joe asked. Some kind of tire/wheel thing, I told him. 

I miss my husband keenly when there is car stuff or house stuff that I have to deal with on my own. There is a particular way he says “hm” that lets me know it will all be all right, whatever it is. You would think that “hm” would not be a hard thing to say, but I haven’t had much luck finding a substitute hm-er when we are apart. Left to my own devices it is too easy for me to whip myself into a froth. Perhaps I can unclog the kitchen sink with some help from this banana, I think to myself. 

My father and I drove over I the auto repair place after dinner, and the car didn’t make a peep. This is good news, I suppose, from the perspective that an inconsistent problem is often a less severe problem. This is likely to be bad news, however, from the perspective of the people trying to diagnose the problem in the morning. 

When we were here in January it seemed certain that our van was toast. The transmission seemed to have failed, but it was actually a cheap and easy fix, even on New Year’s Day. I am going to ask for the intercession of St. Thomas the apostle, whose feast day is tomorrow. I am hoping for a quick and accurate diagnosis and a quick and inexpensive fix. Each day has enough trouble of its own, I am telling myself. Borrowing trouble is always a bad idea, I am telling myself.

I still wish my husband were here with his very distinctive hm.