baby FAQ, month 7

Q: So how good are you at putting helpful reading into practice?

A: Har. I read Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner, which is a slightly dated (she wrote it in 2004, before the organic / natural / Pinterest-driven craze among the mainstream really took off) but excellently-done book about the insanity which is modern motherhood. She was the first writer I've encountered to explicitly make the connection between the huge wealth disparities in our society and how that has driven the frantic piano / French / soccer lessons for three-year-olds, because if you don't get into the right preschool and so on down to the Ivy League college, you cannot succeed as an adult. These days, being in the middle class is increasingly synonymous with drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck, and people want more for their children, so they try to give them every advantage even when it means draining their own already-desperate coffers and going crazy. Warner talks about the rise in children who cannot play by themselves because they have never been left unstimulated - mom's been in their face drilling them with flash cards and educational toys since they emerged from the womb, and they grow up with no imagination. (Perdita should have an excellent imagination, by this standard. As a matter of fact, I'm ignoring her right now! [Not really. She's sitting next to me at the table happily eating her Mum-Mums (non-organic) off the tray that we let the dog lick after her meals.]) Warner also waxes eloquent and appropriately-angry about the impossibilities of daycare costs and the way every mother - working full-time, working part-time, stay-at-home - is made to feel guilty and inadequate about her situation, and how the insistence that that situation was a "choice" rather than an occasionally heartbreaking necessity doesn't help anything. It's a really good book. 

Anyway, so after a day reading this book on my breaks, and agreeing wholeheartedly with it, and feeling so much calmer about being an under-achieving mom, I came home to find that Perdita had received her first "report card" from daycare. AND FAILED MANY THINGS. And the degree to which I absolutely lost my shit was both hilarious and tragic. 

She does not play with two objects at the same time. She failed completely drinking from a cup. She can't pull the cover off a hidden toy (isn't that also how you test dogs?), and got a big fat ZERO on "shows interest in discovering the consequences of own behavior" (how on earth do you tell if a seven-month-old has that interest?). 

As we went down the list, Berowne and I protested to each other that she does SO "babble more than two sounds" and say "dada" (she says it non-stop!) and "sit without support". So then we theorized that she only does all that stuff at home, and is clearly spending her time at daycare supine on the rocking swing staring silently at the wall like a Romanian orphan. 

I also said, "Okay, these measures are for 0-9 months, so she still has two months to catch up! She's not a total failure yet!" The words tasted like ashes in my mouth.

Then we got to the very bottom of the spreadsheet, and the comments section, where it said that Perdita has just discovered she can get around by rolling and is just beginning with solid food. And we were like, hey, this is literally a month out of date. And everything was okay - until I realized that the next quarter she will be ten months old, and will therefore be tested on the 10-18 month measures, which involve things like walking and speaking four-word sentences. OH MY GOD SHE WILL FAIL EVERYTHING. Time to break out the flash cards! Because the daycare assessment is presumably part of her permanent record, and the Princeton admissions office will snort with laughter at it over their brandy and cigars! 

Q: Is she at least crawling?

A: Full-on! Imagine if the only thing holding back the Flash was a bulky diaper. She's like the wind if there's a nasty nylabone in her line of sight, and faster than that if there are plugged-in power tools in the room. (Berowne was finishing some bookshelves yesterday.) Don't worry; she didn't reach the tools; my book wasn't that good. 

Q: What have you read?

A: Stone Cold, by C. J. Box. This series is getting too much about a secondary character in whom I'm not interested at all and also too gory. But I'll keep checking out the new ones, I'm sure.

I also muddled through a Val McDermid (The Vanishing Point) which wasn't any good and re-read Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers. Yesterday we got our first snow of the season and it was bitter cold, and it was the perfect day to re-read British mysteries and drink lots of tea and eat Thanksgiving leftovers. 

Q: Does she say "mama" yet?

A: No. Someone tries to convince me that she does, but if so then she's saying it in a surprisingly deep voice. 

Q: How's her signing?

A: She signs for milk, happily does high-fives for hours, and makes the "daddy" sign at the dog. So I'd say excellent. 

Q: I'm not sure the high-five counts as sign language.

A: Who are you, the Princeton admissions office? Shut up!

Next time: more between-wars British mysteries and mommy failures, I imagine. Now off to buy more Mum-Mums, although I could achieve the same long-term effect by just putting glue directly into her hair.  

age and the siren call of the perfect

Last Friday I turned thirty-eight years old, which is roughly one million in literary terms. I'm as old as Mr. Rochester! I'm older than Mr. Knightley. And it is of course telling that a) I cannot even think of any prominent female characters who are thirty-eight and b) Messrs. Rochester and Knightley are both considered perfectly legitimate love interests for eighteen-year-old girls, while two years ago I already had "elderly" slapped onto my medical record.

I don't feel old, but that has less to do with the "forty is the new thirty!" or whatever and more to do with the fact that when it comes to adulthood I'm still pretty sure I have no idea what I'm doing. More gray hairs show up on my head every week, and sometimes I wonder if my skinny jeans and motorcycle boots are a bit of mutton dressed as lamb, but for the most part my age can still surprise me. (I do have Clint Eastwood-level crows' feet, but that's been the case for years. Due to greasy skin, I'm wrinkle-free everywhere else, but when I smile it's a total "why is that Muppet made out of leather" moment.) I also resumed my pre-pregnancy weight last week, although I used to be quite toned and now I sport the fungous flabbiness of a Lovecraftian horror, so there's work to be done.

For the most part, my late thirties are treating me exceedingly well. So of course my brain frequently turns to bemoaning all the time I wasted (and still do waste, alas) on perfectionism, because there's no better way to waste your time than to spend it beating yourself up for the time you already wasted. That's some high-level ouroboros-ing; don't try it at home. Seriously, don't. 

But that's perfectionism for you. People who are not plagued by perfectionism think that it means doing everything perfectly, which it doesn't. That friend or relative you have who does everything perfectly is, I guarantee you, not a perfectionist. Perfectionism means that you abandon writing projects halfway through because you can't get that one scene (or even that one sentence) right on the first three tries; that you sit there night after night journaling about how random undignified human moments make you permanently unlovable; that you sabotage good relationships because a known outcome which is a disaster is still safer, in your mind, than an unknown outcome which could be amazing.

(It took all I had not to self-sabotage with Berowne, because going forward into what was almost certainly a really really really good thing was, for me, less appealing than being able to predict exactly the sorrow and solitude which would result from me shutting down and pulling away. The phrase "Why don't we just see where things go?" sends literal chills down my spine, and is one part of why I could never be the Cool Girlfriend [the other part: I am not cool]. I HAVE TO HAVE THE ANSWERS. I CANNOT RISK FAILING THE TEST. Better to know that the answer is "crazy dog lady, alone forever" than to be the person who raised her hand all eager and said, "Maybe he's the one!" and WAS WRONG. WRONG IN PUBLIC. There is no worse fate.)

Perfection, most of the time, means not doing anything. Which is why I'm working really hard on not wasting any more of my time on it. In my personal life, anyway: the irony is that in my computer-oriented-role at work I say, all the time, "Perfect is the enemy of good," and mean it. I can forgive software its limitations, but not myself mine. Maybe try to think of myself as charmingly buggy? Requiring workarounds? We'll see. 

What I've read since last posting:

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee, by Karen Abbott. Abbott's such a good writer, but I didn't like this nearly as much as Sin in the Second City. She made the choice in this to jump back and forth chronologically rather than do a straightforward timeline of Gypsy's life, and that choice didn't work for me. It was harder to feel connected to the story, I thought. Looking forward to her Civil War book. 

Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher. I wasn't in the right mood for this. There was nothing wrong with it, but I have to be in a specific mood for fantasy, otherwise I just get bored. So I found this a bit tedious.

Once Upon a Winter's Eve, by Tessa Dare. Forgettable romance novella, notable only for the fact that apparently breaking a dude's nose is all it takes to render him unrecognizable to a woman who's, by her own admission, been in love with him her whole life. I've only been in love with my strapping hero for a couple years, but I'm pretty sure that if you covered him in dirt and broke his nose I'd still be like, "Oh geez, Berowne, we totally could have come up with a better excuse to leave this party early than you stumbling through the door covered in seaweed and passing out on my shoes*, and WTF happened to your nose," instead of thinking, Why does this mysterious stranger with his dreamy lips act like he knows me? When a plot strains even romance-novel credulity, it's not good. 

The Outcast Dead, by Elly Griffiths. The latest in Griffiths' shamelessly enjoyable "archaeologist fights crime" series. Although this one was about baby kidnapping AAAIIIIEEE. 

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, by Jon Ronson. A fairly disjointed piece of reportage on the psychopath diagnosis and some of the history of mental health treatment in America. Ronson's a good writer, but this felt like a bunch of New Yorker articles that he tried to jam together into a coherent narrative. Which it may have been. 

Arms of Nemesis, by Steven Saylor. I always give ancient-Rome mysteries a try whenever I run across them, now that Lindsey Davis is just hitting copy-and-paste between Wikipedia sites and her manuscripts, but this was terribly dull and the dialogue-infodumping was agonizing. Won't be checking out any more of the series.  

May you all be free of perfectionism as much as possible. (Next time: will Beatrice become a self-flagellating perfectionist about not being a perfectionist? Almost certainly!) 

*Actually, I'd be very surprised if Berowne's social group hasn't experienced a party at which someone stumbled through the door covered in seaweed and passed out on someone's shoes (and someone else promptly said, "Now it's a party!"). 

a rushed post on an autumn afternoon

I am turning into such a slacker around this blog. I find time to read but not to write about it, for the most part, and then I end up cramming all these books into one entry. Well, I could be doing worse things.

Read since last posting:

Human Croquet, by Kate Atkinson. Fabulous, because Atkinson is always fabulous. This has some weird metaphysical stuff, and the opening section worried me with its pretentiousness, but it gets past that and kicks ass. And the dog doesn't even die. 

The Book of My Lives, by Aleksander Hemon. Hemon is an amazing writer. But if you have children, don't read the last essay. Don't. Don't. DO NOT. And no, this isn't a "now I have to see what she's talking about!" situation, this is a "Hemon's nine-month-old daughter died of a brain tumor and he writes about it more viscerally than you can possibly imagine" situation. I read that one on my lunch break at work, even though any reader smarter than your average sheep knows that an essay which starts, "Our daughter was nine months old when we took her for a routine checkup" is going to go bad, fast, and then it was all I could do to a) not sob at my desk all afternoon or b) leave the office, pick Perdita up from daycare, take her to the hospital, and demand that they scan her brain THAT SECOND. As things stand, I will probably be measuring her head daily for about three weeks. Spare yourselves, people.

Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, by A. J. Jacobs. What it sounds like: Jacobs gets a book deal to try every exercise and diet craze around for two years. He does end up healthier at the conclusion, and it's mildly amusing along the way, but I didn't love it. 

Borderlands, by Brian McGilloway. Very uninteresting police procedural. One of those mysteries whose solution you don't even recall a couple days after finishing it, because you had zero investment in it.

Quiet Dell, by Jayne Anne Phillips. A novel about a real-life murder in the 1930s. Very stylized - no one ever speaks a line of dialogue which an actual human would say, and people make declarations of eternal love after ten minutes' interaction - and I could really have done without the ghost, but it was quite beautiful and compelling. 

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Short and very funny history of the Pilgrims. Nick Hornby sold me on Vowell in Ten Years in the Tub, and I'll be checking out her other stuff. 

And now back to my Sunday afternoon, with posole in the slow cooker and hot cider rapidly cooling next to me while I keep one eye on the screen and the other on the child motoring all around the room (it's still a military crawl, with her stomach on the ground, but she gets where she wants to go). Soon Berowne will be home from his band rehearsal, and tomorrow is our first wedding anniversary. We will of course be very fancy and romantic, by which I mean we will maybe eat at the table instead of on the couch. Everyday life has always been our romance, home-bound and full of undignified laughter, the kind that begins over something like a fart and ends with helpless whooping. I couldn't ask anything better for an anniversary evening than leftover posole (always better the second day) and our little bear falling asleep on Berowne's chest. Lovers for the working-day. 

May you all find the love in the everyday and the routine, and the beauty in November afternoons. And may you laugh to the point of helpless whooping as often as possible.

baby FAQ, month 6

Q: How can it possibly have been six months already?

A: You're asking me? It feels like just yesterday that I was up at midnight and then again at four. Oh, wait, that's because I was. She's occasionally reverting to an old-school sleeping schedule, lucky us.

Q: Relatedly, what was the doctor's recommendation for you in terms of getting over your bronchitis?

A: Eight to ten hours of sleep a night. I was like, yeah, sure, I'll just go do that.

Q: How goes the introduction of "solid" (i.e., pureed) food?

A: Feeding takes four times as long, is ten times as messy, and the subsequent diapers would make a musk ox proud. Also I experienced a little heartbreak around it because she is growing up so fast. And she does not like squash.

Q: What is your advice for Losing the Baby Weight?

A: Develop some flaws before you have a baby. If I'd had a flat stomach before getting pregnant, then this stubborn little belly pudge would be a source of much frustration and self-consciousness, and people would be saying things like, "You're almost there! Good job!" But since I've had a rounded stomach ever since I stopped being twenty-one and started eating actual food again, my clothes fit almost as they did before and I hear, "You look like you never had a baby!" It's called managing expectations. (And I cut myself slack for my physical imperfections now, even though they are virtually identical to the imperfections I had before. So that's good, although it shouldn't take gaining and losing forty-five pounds for a woman to be okay with the body she has, but what can you do.)

Q: What was your Halloween costume?

A: Three Wolf Moon family. Because it comes in a onesie as well. And yes, we did take her to the Halloween party, and she was the belle of the ball, but oh my was she cranky the next day. A little discontented Cinderella.

Q: How is your first Halloween without Darcy going?

A: Very sad. I haven't planned any costume for Bingley; he wouldn't have been able to come to this past weekend's party anyway, but for the past four years there were dog costumes documented heavily on Facebook (Red Riding Hood and the wolf; Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles; St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio; hipster Red Riding Hood and hipster wolf). Bingley has a red hoodie which (obviously) has been utilized extensively, and Perdita has a white fuzzy suit with ears, so perhaps he shall be Red Riding Hood yet again and Perdita will step into the wolf's role. 

Q: Hipster wolf?

A:

He is concerned that his kibble is not local.

Q: How are you finding time to read with a six-month-old?

A: Honestly, I am not sure. I feel like I just snatch a page here and there and somehow it adds up to books. I know that sounds like humblebragging, or like protesting that you can find time for anything if it matters to you!! but that's not my intention. And I am careful about my intention when saying things like that, because I was one of those horrid judgy people pre-baby, thinking, "There is no way I won't find time for working out every day; it's simply a matter of priorities; mothers who say there's no time are just making excuses," and then of course on days when she goes to daycare my priorities come up solidly against the chronological limitations of twenty-four hours and my own physical limitations in terms of needing more than five hours of sleep in that twenty-four. Ah well. Pride goeth before a saggy butt. 

Q: What have you read in the snatched intervals when you should be un-sagging your butt?

A: Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream, by H.G. Bissinger. Pretty intense and good. While on maternity leave, I tried watching the show because everyone raves about it, and after eight episodes during which I got more and more grudging about this self-assignment, I thought, Okay, well, we must be nearing the end of this season, I can probably get that far, and then I discovered there are TWENTY-TWO episodes in that first season and the experiment ended. So I figured I'd read the book instead. I should have just done that in the first place. 

American Thighs: The Sweet Potato Queens' Guide to Preserving Your Assets, by Jill Conner Browne. Mildly amusing but only rarely laugh-out-loud funny.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. Fraser is such a good writer. This was a fantastic biography.

Blood on the Water, by Anne Perry. My Early Reviewers book: the latest in Perry's William Monk series. The characters grow increasingly two-dimensional and more representative than human, which is an unfortunate trend I note in many long-running serials. And Perry does go a bit heavy on the coincidental "hero meets old friend for tea, old friend happens to have crucial information which breaks the case" endings, and this book was no exception. But they are cozy bathtime reads nonetheless. 

May you all have someone to step into the wolf role this Halloween, in memory of the big dog who needed no costume.  

farmhouse in autumn

I've mentioned before that my family has a farmhouse up in Vermont. We spent time there most summers when I was a kid, and this time introduced us little desert rats to humidity, mosquitoes, black flies, the concept of it not cooling down at night, and the outhouse in the barn which was clearly the origin point for all the earwigs in the world. Although the forests were excellent for games of Robin Hood, everything else about the place was ill-suited to a child whose idea of heaven was her other grandparents' house, at which children were encouraged - nay, expected - to sit silently in the giant soft armchairs and read all day.

As an adult, I mostly put up with going there because it was where extended family congregated, and because the bathroom finally functioned. I started to have some fondness for the ancient wooden floors, and to worry less that the ceiling was going to fall on me in my sleep (ironic, given that the ceiling is probably more likely to fall on someone now than it was thirty years ago), but my visits there were always about the people, not the place.

Berowne fell in love with the property the moment he set eyes on it. The house is his idea of perfection: enough work to keep him busy for quite a while, but with solid and charmingly shabby bones. And the land! The opportunities for gardens! The barns full of ancient tools! He probably married me for the place. (Kidding! He married me because I got pregnant.)

We started talking about spending some time up there in the fall, and this year managed to make it happen, getting in just under the wire before it was shut up for the winter. We piled as much of our household as would fit into a small car and headed north (if you ever find that merely adding a baby to a road trip doesn't slow you down enough, I can recommend including a dog too neurotic to be left alone in the car at rest areas), and eventually arrived at a cold dark house possibly full of bats and I freaked out and started calculating how much coffee I'd need to get my child and dog back safely to Boston that night. Then Berowne got a fire going in the kitchen stove and all was well. If he had to evict multiple bat squatters, he didn't tell me.

The weekend that followed was utterly lovely. Nights were cold, but Berowne got up every few hours to feed the stove, and having Perdita snuggled into bed with us was fine except for my realization that co-sleeping past the age when babies are helpless swaddled potatoes is for parents with the ability to sleep through being punched in the face. But since we didn't have to do anything with our days but sit in a cozy kitchen, wander around the gorgeous property, hang out with our Vermont friends who were able to come visit, and nap occasionally, pugilistic nights were acceptable. I got a fair amount of reading done, and Perdita wore some seriously adorable hats. Monday morning, packing up under an overcast sky with the leaves suddenly falling fast and hard, we both wished we could batten down for the winter and stay.

Never mind that a lot of work would have to go into the house to make it habitable through winter. Never mind things like finding jobs up there and the state requirement that we buy a Subaru. You have to admit that if I, who am definitely a suburban mouse used to a certain amount of comfort and not-bats, was suddenly living in rural Vermont restoring an old farmhouse, that it would make a hell of a blog. And I probably wouldn't even die, because Berowne knows what he's doing! Together we could make it through anything, barring the bathroom plumbing failing. Shudder.

Ah well. These are the dreams that drive you out to whatever version of Walden Pond you can find, when the commute from day care to work feels longer every day* and your neighbors are building a giant house on your already-cramped little street. Almost everyone in my family has dreamed about living there at some point: my brother and his partner make it their summer retreat for about six weeks every year. It's a good spot, and I'm glad I can finally see that.

The reading I've done lately:

Riveted, by Maljean Brook. The third, and the one I liked best by far, in her romance steampunk series. Set in Iceland, with mechanical contraptions that don't feel gratuitous, and a likable hero and heroine who are, remarkably for romance novels, emphatically non-white. (Although Brook features characters of color and mixed race a lot, which I like.)

Any Duchess Will Do, by Tessa Dare. Slight romance novel in a Pygmalion vein. I like Dare in general, but couldn't warm to this one's heroine, who loses her rustic accent in something like half an hour of tutoring and goes on impossibly from there.

The Cuckoo's Calling, by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling). Mystery with no characters I really liked. I have no way to compare this to Rowling's other writings, because I never got farther than a quarter into the first Harry Potter book. The pre-Hogwarts stuff I liked, because it's very Roald Dahl, but once he got to Hogwarts I became bored to tears. Anyway, won't be checking out the rest of Rowling's books for adults either. 

Haunted Ground, by Erin Hart. This gets an emphatic meh. So much clumsy infodumping about archaeology that would insult any listener who ever watched "In Search of the Trojan War", let alone one who's supposed to be a brilliant fellow academic, but of course when our hero does it it's supposed to be all kinds of sexy and our heroine (the aforementioned brilliant academic) sits there wide-eyed instead of being like, "Dude, keep up the mansplaining and you're getting a trowel to the balls." 

The Claverings, by Anthony Trollope. Didn't like it. Our hero just doesn't deserve any of his good fortune, including the two nasty people between him and an inheritance going on a conveniently doomed yachting trip (though I laughed and laughed when it became apparent that's what was going to happen - very Kind Hearts and Coronets).

May you all have bright autumn weather and places to batten down in when the leaves fall.

*It IS longer every day, because it goes through Salem, which becomes impassable during the month of October. It will ease up a little come November.

baby FAQ, month five

Q: What is your sense of self as a mother?

A: I was going to be a cool mother. I was going to rumble up to daycare in the Mustang Bullitt and unload a baby wearing the hippest of outfits and have a rule that the staff was not allowed to call her "princess" and so on. Of course it turned out that the realities of a car seat in the back of a two-door muscle car, and the ludicrousness of not getting use out of the fifty-some pieces of clothing we were given as gifts, overrode any investment in coolness I have. So I make a subdued entrance in my Focus, and hand over a baby who, when she's not dressed in pink head to toe, might well be wearing a shamrock-festooned onesie reading "Daddy's Lucky Charm" (it has long sleeves! fall wardrobe!). I don't even attempt to convince anyone that she's dressed that way ironically.

Like I've said before, I never thought of myself as a "natural mother", which term I think I defined as someone warm and hospitable and nurturing, who keeps a welcoming home and loves other people's children. Me, not so much. And so I fell back on the idea that I could be a cool mother, which was always ludicrous because I have never been cool at anything. Fortunately I produced an incredibly cool baby who wears the shamrock onesies and pink frilly jackets with aplomb. And I'm gradually figuring out that I don't need to be a generic ideal of motherhood: I need to be a mother to this very specific child, in our very specific family, while keeping myself happy and sane in my own specific way. YOU DON'T SAY.

It also occurred to me, because I write down lots of deep thoughts when I should be doing the dishes, that part of my struggling with a sense of me-as-mother is due to what we are led to believe about our bodies post-children. For me, it started with the breast-feeding debacle, when - setting aside my poor milk production and my need for screenings - the way my breasts were treated by the lactation consultants and nurses made me angrier than I have previously admitted to anyone. I've had breast cancer treatment, for crying out loud; you don't get more handsy towards the boobs than that. But no one involved in my cancer treatment or my post-treatment care ever just grabbed my boob and hauled it about without a by-your-leave or even a warning, the way the nurses and lactation consultants did. I only went to one breast-feeding support group, despite the enormous struggles we were having, and I only went to that one because Berowne was worried about me, and I made some excuse about how I couldn't try to feed her then and fled after fifteen minutes. I could not stand the thought of ever having someone treat my boobs like that again, and I knew seeing a lactation consultant meant just that. There really was an attitude that my breasts were not part of me-the-human at all: that they were merely tools which I was too stupid to use correctly and they had to be taken out of my hands. The very people waxing the most rhapsodic about how this was a beautiful natural bonding thing were treating my breasts like they were not connected to a human at all and were nothing but milk production machines (in my case, very faulty ones). I immediately wanted nothing to do with this. 

I didn't even tell Berowne this, because - tellingly - it didn't seem like a good enough reason to stop. Wanting my body to belong to me again seemed equivalent to wishing that I hadn't had a baby. I don't at all support the Fit Mom brand of shaming, but I also refuse to accept that if you choose to have a baby then you forfeit all right to your body as your own. That it becomes just a tool and you should only be aware of or invested in the nurturing things it can do for your child, not anything it can do for your own health or pleasure. 

Clearly, I'm cheating. I honestly feel that way sometimes, and that I must be merely watching this child until her real mother, who is willing to give up all bodily autonomy for her, comes back from building yurts for orphans and sweeps Perdita away to raise her in Brooklyn and Tibet with the money from her MacArthur genius grant and assistance from the rest of her interpretive dance troupe.

Yes, I know that the idea of a mother who gives up everything for her child also not being present during the child's first five months doesn't make any sense. This is not about logic. This is about feeling like I can't deserve something this joyful because I'm not miserable enough (which is not about logic either, obviously), and about being defensive regarding my fiercely drawn boundaries and my insistence on retaining them, and about having been one of those kids who's supposed to set the world on fire and never did. 

And I think I hit some sort of nail near the head with the concept that you only deserve joy if you're miserable at the same time. We are, after all, endlessly fed the claim that motherhood is suffering, sacrifice, Profound Love, and no fun. During my pregnancy I only heard that it would be a) the hardest thing ever and b) the most rewarding thing ever. Sounded solemn as hell, either way. In the event it's been utterly farcical on so many levels, and I laugh so much. Far more a Marx Brothers movie than a Pinter play, thank god. 

Of course, maybe motherhood is fun for me because I abandon my precious infant in dingo territory at daycare. I love her madly, and I miss her every moment we're apart, and come Monday morning there's the bit of me which can't wait to get back to my desk and my data. Plus she's learning the ways of the dingo getting all sorts of socialization and access to a Jumperoo. It's all good.

Q: She's sleeping through the night?

A: Most of the time! Although every time I brag about it she's up at two a.m., which serves me right. Some weekend mornings she even consents to go back to sleep after her five o'clock bottle! The first time this happened, though, it wasn't restful because I kept turning over in bed towards my bedside table, frustrated and thinking I must have left my lamp on. Eventually I realized that the irritating light was, in fact, coming from that thing called "the sun", which had not risen before I in five months.

Q: How is her separation anxiety?

A: Right, "hers", har har. Actually, she has developed the desire to always have me in eyesight when we're home: though she's perfectly happy to be left at daycare or with Berowne (who works from home two days a week, the lucky dog!), if I am home with her I have to tote her or drag her swing with me wherever I go or there is screaming. It being a very, very small house, this isn't any real hardship, although it does make taking the dog out or fetching the laundry from the line challenging. But we have nice conversations in the kitchen while I'm cleaning her bottles.

Q: Still in the swing? How long will that last?

A: Well, she can't quite sit unassisted yet; after a few seconds she tends to tip sideways. But she's so invested in crawling that her tummy time has become a constant Training Montage, complete with appropriate musical accompaniment (because, as established, I am having entirely too much fun with this whole thing). Who knows what sort of Pavlovian reaction she may have, down the road, to the opening chords of "Eye of the Tiger". 

Q: What have you read in between this silliness?

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft, by Ulrich Boser. Intriguing, although at times it just turns into a long list of the con men and otherwise sketchy people Boser meets during his research, which gets a little tedious. 

Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi. Amazing. The Snow White story, updated to the 1950s and about race, and just astonishing. I was so mad when it ended, not just because the end is crazy-abrupt and without closure (my one quibble about its narrative structure) but because I didn't want to stop reading. 

Stella Bain, by Anita Shreve. Meh. Woman loses memory during WWI; is amazing at everything; all men are obsessed with her; best mother ever. Sorry, but I find that kind of protagonist more and more boring all the time. And I lost patience entirely when our amnesiac heroine discovers she has children, after a scene in which she, whom we are told is a brilliant nurse whose brilliant nursing has all come back to her, examines her own body and can't even be sure whether she's a virgin or not. THE FACE I MADE WHEN I READ THAT. Sure, her youngest is eight or so, and I know they say stretch marks fade (the ones puberty gave me sure as hell never did, but hey), but it still wasn't a successful choice on Shreve's part to go the "my heroine is so physically flawless that a trained nurse can't tell she's had children" route. "I so identify with this woman! I am invested in her success!" said no reader ever.  

Wait, says this reader, I thought you were just all up in arms about women being allowed to get their bodies back post-baby. In the sense of being allowed to feel ownership over one's body, yes. In the sense of completely unrealistic expectations of getting said body to look like it never grew a human, no. Even if I lose these tenacious last four pounds, and get close to being as toned as I was before (actually, my arms are better than they've ever been, because my child is huge), I'll probably always have the stretch marks and the linea negra. And I'm okay with that. I do look different: I look like I had a baby. Fancy that. 

obnoxious heroines, and on not being the wolf's human any more

Last weekend, our little family made an outing to a local Puppy Mill Awareness event (for the record, it was anti-puppy mills). There were some booths and a police dog demonstration, and Perdita slept through almost everything. Then we walked around town, and behaved badly at the local chocolate shop (you'd think $27 worth of chocolate would last longer than two days, wouldn't you?), and generally had a lovely time.

Bingley got lots of attention, which he never used to, being completely overshadowed by the Great White Rockstar. It was wonderful to see him receiving lots of scritches and praise, and hearing people comment on his beautiful brindle coat, and having little kids refer to him as "a BIG dog!" which, again, is something that would never have happened before. As I waited for Berowne outside a shop, a gang of late-teens-early-twenties girls came down the street, one of them complaining loudly about her awful day, and when she saw Bingley she broke off mid-sentence to ask, "May I pet your dog?" and, after much ear-rubbing and wagging, told me that her day was now 100% better.

Wonderful, like I said. He's a glorious dog and I've never felt he got enough attention or admiration. But that night, home and consuming chocolate, I confessed to Berowne that being out at a dog event without Darcy-Bear had hurt far more than I expected it to. For all the attention that Bingley got, we were still pretty much just a couple with a stroller and a dog. I grew accustomed to a lot more than that, in my five years with Darcy. I was used to jaws hitting the ground when we walked up, to being surrounded by a dozen or more awe-struck people at once, to know that absolutely everyone within a two-block radius is staring amazed at your beautiful giant wolfy companion. I never got tired of telling his story over and over, or of saying, "Shepherd-malamute mix" until the words stopped sounding like anything.

Not only did I love him for himself, because he was wonderful beyond words, but I was so proud to be his human, and I loved taking him places. I loved the attention we got. And oh, how he would have looked next to the stroller! His head would have been level with Perdita's gaze as we walked along, and she would doubtless have laughed with joy at this, as she laughs at Bingley's antics now.

I know that the only thing worse than dealing with his illness and death while hugely pregnant would have been dealing with it while also dealing with a newborn baby, or having the final moment come when we were in the hospital. But it was so hard to accept that he would never see the baby, nor she him. And after being part of something so special, realizing we're now just another couple with a stroller and a dog makes me feel his loss with a very sharp edge.

He was supposed to live long enough for Perdita to remember him (though I knew even before he got sick that that was a long shot). There were supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood photo shoots, damn it. He was supposed to live forever, because I loved him, and now I'm about to get into Auden territory about a dog, but it's how I feel. Every day I miss the big dog and it hurts like hell.

Well! That cheerfulness aside, there's a lot of reading, because I've slacked on writing about that:

Now You See Me, by S.J. Bolton. I wanted to finish this, even though it was total hate-reading from about page five, but it defeated me. Our heroine and narrator is ridiculous: so gorgeous that she has to wear fake glasses and baggy clothes at work to be taken seriously, got the highest marks ever at police academy but behaves like a twelve-year-old on speed when it comes to common sense or impulse control (she's supposed to be "rebellious", I think), and as a teenager lived on the streets for eight months and did tons of drugs because she is SO cool and badass (and magically immune to the effects of such a period on one's looks or career prospects). I learned all this by page three, though; page five is when it became apparent that the sleeveless-T-shirt-wearing, "turquoise-eyed", hyper-misogynist superior officer is her love interest, and that Bolton's idea of a love interest means having her heroine think, "I hate him SO MUCH but I lose all my breathtaking intelligence around him, and the incredibly offensive way he takes charge of my life and makes inappropriate comments about my fabulous body makes me all tingly, so I'm going to make inappropriate comments right back because that's how two adults who work together handle these things, right?" Also the fact that the serial killer is obsessed with her is presented as further proof of how awesome she is.

But still I trundled on, until our heroine is almost killed by a suspect, and when she wakes up in the hospital, her reaction is zero percent thankfulness that she's alive and one hundred percent screaming sobbing meltdown because her nose was broken and she might not be quite as beautiful any more. She's far too cool and jaded and sexy for emotions; people getting killed in front of and for her doesn't phase her in the least; but when she thinks her nose might become slightly crooked she throws a temper tantrum. (Wouldn't crying hysterically with a broken nose hurt like crazy?) And this is the cue for DCI What'sBestForYou to take her in his arms and declare his love, because nothing says "relationship material" like "cares more about her appearance than about the victims whose murders she's supposed to be solving". Nothing says "heroine with whom we're supposed to sympathize" like that, either, to the extent that I sent this book back to the library tout suite.

I've lost all tolerance, if I ever had any, for the female character who is a total asshole (because she knows how impossibly gorgeous, impossibly successful, and impossibly brilliant she is) but whom the author repeatedly tells us is the most generous and giving person in the world. These heroines are especially awful because they're always narrators, and so you have to spend a whole book in their head while they talk about how annoying it is to have men walking into walls around them, and how disgusting that fat woman over there is, and how pathetic and slutty this other woman trying to get a man's attention is, and how tedious other people are when you're the smartest person in the world, BLAH BLAH BLAH, and then there's ALWAYS some other character piping up with, "You have the kindest heart / most generous nature / best personality ever," as if the reader's just going to nod along with that after a couple hundred pages of flat-out mean narration towards everyone the heroine has ever met. A very good example of this: Diana Gabaldon's Claire, who spends thousands of pages thinking the nastiest things imaginable about gay men and all other women (because they are all after her man, don't you know), and also being casually racist, and when leaving her daughter forever (as in: will never see her again, never hear from her again, will be separated from her by a magical two hundred years, FOREVER), tells her, "Try not to get fat." To which the daughter's father replies, not sarcastically, that she is the best mother ever, the same way that all the other characters are constantly extolling her to the skies as the kindest person ever to walk the planet even as she's thinking vile things about them based on their race or sexual orientation or bodice size.

I just can't deal with that shit. I was floored by the "try not to get fat" thing years before having a daughter of my own, and now it makes me break out in a cold sweat. I mean, when I decide that the present has entirely too much hygiene and medical science to be sexy, and I must journey into the past for my sexy times, I don't think leaving my daughter a legacy of body hatred will be my first instinct. (Of course, taking said journey would not be my first instinct either, as my turn-ons include owning property and not dying in childbirth.)

ANYWAY. 

Red Bones, by Ann Cleeves. Another in her Shetland mystery series, which I like very much. Makes me want to live on a Scottish island SO BAD (although, to be fair, waking up in the morning can also make me want that). 

Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue. Oh, Emma. She's such an amazing writer, and it's just all historical prostitutes, all the time. This one also had horrifying stuff about historical child neglect and illness which had me blubbering like a walrus (and briefly not wanting to live on a Scottish island unless I can find one with a state-of-the-art pediatric medical facility). 

A Dying Fall, by Elly Griffiths. The latest in her archaeologist-sucked-into-police-investigations series. Around the second book the premise got strained, but I'm willing to go with it because I like the characters and the writing. However, I grow weary of how the protagonist's single motherhood is presented: as not nearly wearing enough. It's just a sort of tossed-off, "Ruth is often tired these days," when, as someone five months into fully-partnered parenthood, I am quite certain that after two years of completely solo parenting, being described as "often tired" would make you go into Blanche DuBois levels of hysteria if only you could remain conscious long enough. Ruth also occasionally feels guilty about being late for pick-up at the "childminder", but never does she have trouble finding childcare or worry about the money involved. Hrrrm.

Orphan Train, by Christina Baker Klein. To say that this is a book-club book is not to say anything negative about it - book clubs are awesome - but it does describe a certain type of book in a way that I hope you understand. It was a good book, and made me cry, and I hustled through it. 

I left unfinished Marisha Pessl's Night Film. All the reviews said it was pretty god-awful, but I wanted to give it a try anyway. The reviews were right.

Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. I... did not know this was in verse.

Fetch the Devil: The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America, by Clint Richmond. This was my Early Reviewers book, about the murder of a mother and daughter in the Southwest in the 1930s, and how Richmond believes that it was related to espionage. He makes a good case, but the reporting was a bit dry and too heavy on portraying the law enforcement involved as rugged cool dudes. There is a way, I know, to write about an unsolved mystery without making the reader feel that their time has been wasting in reading about it. I can't quite articulate how it works, when it does, but it didn't in this case. 

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, by Alison Weir. Very interesting after my last reading about the misinformation around Anne Boleyn; Bordo had some scathing things to say about Weir. There were indeed moments when Weir assigned motives (often spiteful) to Anne that the historical record doesn't support, but she was mostly good about admitting where the holes in our knowledge are. I got the feeling that Weir didn't like Anne, but was trying to be fair. 

Next time: adventures in chocolate budgeting! Ha, that will never happen.