Light and Momentary

Obstetrically improbable

I've been ticking along with my pleasant slow read of War & Peace. My college friend Stephan is doing it too, and occasionally one of us will send the other an enthusiastic text. But I am having some thoughts about the chapter in which Prince Andrei's son is born, and I don't think Stephan is the right audience for them.

Spoilers for a 160-year-old book: Prince Andrei returns from the war to find his wife in labor. He listens from the next room. Here's how it goes down in the Project Gutenberg version:

He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.

“What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andrew in the first second. “A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is the baby born?”

Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry, sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face.

Part I of the weirdness is that I remember half of this vividly. Our professor talked about Prince Andrei's moment of confusion when he heard the baby cry, and that particular moment has stayed with me since 1990. But how, friends, HOW did I forget that in the very next paragraph he found his wife dead?

Part 2 of the weirdness is that I do not think this makes sense obstetrically. Probably 1990 Jamie thought, "Ah, yes, women died in childbirth all the time in 1806." But deaths in childbirth have a mechanism. This doesn't add up, right? She was making loud noises right until the baby was born. The baby wasn't in bad shape -- he was making a good respiratory effort if his cries could be heard clearly in the next room -- but then something so sudden and final happened that the doctor walked away without attempting to save the princess.

What could it have been? I don't think you can push effectively and scream loudly with fulminant eclampsia, can you? That doesn't really sound like someone having a seizure or a stroke, right? And I know that lots of women bled out after childbirth, but it takes a little time to bleed to death. Even in 1806, they were massaging hemorrhaging uteri, weren't they? What causes sudden maternal death with no hope of effective intervention? Amniotic fluid embolism?

Dr. Google says that placenta previa was the "condition which aroused more anxiety in the attendant and was more dangerous to the mother than any other complication of childbirth." Maybe that was it, but I'm not convinced. Five minutes from actively pushing to so-persuasively-dead-the-doctor-walked-away -- is that plausible? 

Meh

I am trying to focus on the positives from the personal training session. She did not talk to me about body composition. (In response to a question on yesterday's post: I didn't get on the InBody scale when I was asked to, so I don't know what those numbers might have told me. I can do single-leg lower-body exercises with equal weights, so I think it's more likely to be an asymmetrical mobility issue than an asymmetrical strength issue.)

I did spend a lot of time practicing sitting back into a squat, which feels a little scary. I know I sometimes overcompensate for that worry by tilting forward, so it was useful to focus explicitly on that skill.

It's probably useful for me to be more consistent about a structured warmup if I have concerns about mobility, and I liked the way she set that part up.

But it did not feel individualized, which seems like the whole point of personal training. She herself doesn't routinely squat to depth, which makes me wonder how well suited she is to help me with issues that arise when my squat gets deeper. She didn't address ankle mobility at all, even though I had told her I suspected an asymmetry there could be causing problems higher up the chain. I felt like she was gatekeeping the barbell after I had explicitly said I wanted to work on squatting under load. She didn't pay particular attention to my left hip, the one I had said was the source of my concern. She told me at the end of the session that she'd spent the whole hour thinking my name was Julie. 

I'm a little frustrated with myself for not speaking up.

Place your bets

I got a notification from the gym last month: I had enough loyalty points for a free personal training session. I made an appointment with the scheduler, saying explicitly that I wanted to address an asymmetry in my barbell squat.

"Hop on the InBody scale," the scheduler said as soon as we arrived in his office, "so I can get a sense of what your goals might be."

"My goal is to fix my squat form," I said in my polite-but-immovable voice, "and I don't think the numbers from your scale are going to be helpful to me."

He blinked in surprise but didn't push it.

The front desk staff asked me on Sunday afternoon about the training session. "Oh, you're working with Hannah," one of them exclaimed while the other one nodded. "She'll do such a great job helping you with your body composition goals." I didn't say anything to them about it, but isn't it weird to assume that a person has body composition goals? Is it just a safe bet that every woman in the gym wants to modify her diet to get smaller? Even the person who was LITERALLY JUST TELLING YOU about hitting a deadlift PR? (185 pounds, look at me scooching along toward 200!) (This is relevant because after the early stages of lifting it works much better to focus on one of the two: either seeking new PRs or attempting to lose fat -- it gets harder to combine them.)

I have been super-explicit with Hannah over email -- as direct as I can possibly be -- that my goal is to fix a specific issue with my left hip that arises in heavy barbell squats.

Is she going to try to talk to me about fat loss? What's your guess?

Some drama at the Solo & Ensemble Festival

Today was the regional music contest that brings kids from all over to a local high school. I was hoping Stella would find it less stressful than she did last year, and for a while it seemed like that might be the case. She sang a Schubert piece for her vocal solo; it went well. But immediately afterward, her anxiety spiked. She studies voice and piano with the same teacher, who played the accompaniment for her vocal performance. The teacher leaned over the keyboard afterward and whispered, "The piano judge is giving 3s to ALL OF MY STUDENTS." She was incensed. "I'm going to complain after it's over," she added.

When I was a piano student in the 1980s, it was really hard to get a 1. Every time I went to one of these competitions, I had practiced for months beforehand, and every time I got a 2. But these days, a reasonably prepared student will get a 1. Even a performance that seems rough and fumbly may well wind up with a 1 rating; the judging has shifted over the years. I've been taking kids to these competitions for ten years now, and I've never heard of anyone getting a 3.

Stella left the room after her vocal solo and immediately started to cry. 

Thankfully, she spent some time laughing with friends in between the two rounds of judging, and she was happy to learn that she got a 1 on her vocal solo. But the time ticked by, and all too soon we found ourselves in the room with two other participants, their families, and the piano judge, who was running behind for reasons that will shortly become clear.

Participant #1 warmed up, and the judge asked her to introduce herself. "What?" the judge said when she heard a Korean name. "I don't know how to pronounce that. Say it again." Afterward she summoned the student to the table. "Next year," she said, "you'll need to step up and play something more challenging. And do you know what a metronome is? You should really practice with a metronome."

Participant #2 stepped forward. "Ray-jay?" the judge queried. "Raja," he answered. He played his piece competently, but she spent 5 minutes afterward telling him how important it was to honor the dynamic markings. "I could tell you were trying," she said in a voice that oozed condescension, "but you really have to honor those dynamics."

Then it was Stella's turn, but her teacher wasn't there yet. We were totally clear, absolutely 100% clear, that the person we were waiting on was Stella's piano teacher, who had the copy of the music that the judge would review. When the teacher walked in, it was entirely obvious that she was there because she was Stella's piano teacher. This is why it seemed a little odd that the judge spent 5 minutes after Stella's performance complaining that she needed to relearn how to pedal.

This, I thought to myself, was a serendipitous choice of things for her to complain about. Stella's teacher is a stickler, an absolute martinet, when it comes to pedaling. She has coached and coached; Stella has practiced and practiced. We knew Stella might hit a sour note somewhere in there, but we were all confident that the pedal would be flawless. Mysteriously, the judge was lecturing the teacher about how Stella should go back to pedaling quarter note rhythms, because lots of pianists think they know how to pedal when they actually don't.

That, I thought to myself, is A Choice, to tell a well-respected piano teacher to her face that she probably needs to relearn the basics.

Stella kept her brave face on while the judge was talking to her, and then she walked out into the hallway with her best friend and immediately dissolved in tears. I said goodbye to the teacher, who whispered, "She's going to get a 3. Everybody's getting a 3." 

And then Mr. B came along. Mr. B is a music teacher in the district who taught Joe back in junior high and also taught Pete in high school. Different as they are, they both loved him. He asked Stella how it went, and she said, tearily, "Not the best."

He gave her the loveliest pep talk, you guys. He said he'd been watching the ratings coming out of the piano room all day, and he invited her to think about the bigger picture. Had she grown as a musician in preparing for the contest? Had she learned some new skills and sharpened old ones? Had she put in the work to become a better pianist? It was so sincere and spot-on that I wanted to fling my arms around him and say "THANK YOOOUUUUU," but I restrained myself. 

"This is just one more step on your journey," he assured her. He nodded wisely and walked off. But less than a minute later he looped back. "You're Stella, right?" he said. She nodded. "Never mind," he said. "You got a 1, kid." 

***

I came right home after the contest and wrote it all down; I wanted to capture the details while they were fresh in my mind. But I also felt like I had some more thinking to do about the whole thing.

How much does rating inflation matter? How much does consistent judging matter? What do kids take away from a numerical rating, and does it help or hurt their future musicianship? 

I don't know the answers to any of those questions. But I will remember Stella's soprano voice, soaring lyrically across the lines of German verse. And I will remember her brave face, her resolution to do the best she could despite the judge's truculence and her refusal to crumple in the face of criticism afterward. 

I hope that for the rest of her life she finds joy in music, in all the ways we can teach our hands and voices to do hard things in the pursuit of evanescent beauty. I hope that she never gives much weight to the opinions of people determined to criticize, when it's really about the magical intersection of patience and skill and joy.

(Also, I hope they find a different piano judge for next year.)

In the spring a young person's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of mittens

That's what all the young people think, right? It's March; I need some new mittens!

Back in December I decided to make some mittens as a Christmas gift for Joe's girlfriend. They went smoothly and reasonably quickly, by knitter standards, and I decided to make some more mittens. Ysolda Teague released a fun fall pattern with a quilt vibe, and I decided to crank out a pair of those for Marie.

Oh my stinking heck, they have been a PROJECT. Fingering weight yarn instead of worsted, garter instead of stockinette -- that wouldn't have been a big deal. But the reason they have a quilt vibe is that you make them with tiny pieces, picking up stitches and decreasing rapidly. One Raveler's project notes observe that the pattern generates 108 yarn ends. 

That is a lot of ends, even if a person tries to exercise prudence and forethought and knit them in as she goes.

They're pretty cute, though, I think. This is the first one before I used the rainbow-y yarn to add a bit of ribbing at the cuff, the thumb, and the top of the hand.

I'm almost done, you guys. I have to add the ribbing to the second one and deal with the remaining ends. I just need a little more coal in the tender of my metaphorical Steam Engine of Knitting Mojo.

In between quilt-flavored mitt #1 and #2, I decided to make Joe a pair of mittens too. I thought a worsted weight project would take the edge off, and I had yarn left over from making him a scarf a few years back. I would crank out some speedy mittens to match his scarf, I told myself, and then I would be ready to tackle the fiddly second mitt for Marie. It didn't quite work that way, though.

Joe's scarf was made from a free pattern that describes itself as a houndstooth check. It makes a pleasant cozy fabric, but the structure is a little tricky to read. I drew myself a chart to convert it to a mitten pattern, and I only realized near the end of the second mitten that I made a mistake with the thumb increases. They shoot out to the side like iguanodon thumbs, even though very few humans have iguanodon thumbs and even fewer iguanodons wear mittens. It should be fine, since knitting is stretchy, but it is mildly vexing nonetheless. 

Joe's mittens are also almost done. I need to make one more thumb and weave in some ends. I could get both projects completely finished in about two episodes of Great British Bakeoff (maybe three, depending on the situation with the ends), and I will feel much better when they are no longer niggling at me.

Then I can turn my attention to the bulky-weight cardigan I haven't been working on because I kept thinking I should finish the mittens first, but that's a story for another day.