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.
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.
Q. What have you read lately?
A: The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen, by Susan Bordo. Fun, intelligent popular history / pop culture exploration of what we actually know about Anne Boleyn (a very small amount, given the lack of source material and the propaganda around her in all directions) and what we as a culture think we know about her. The first half of the book is about the historical record and the contemporary depictions of Anne; the second half is about depictions of her in literature and film since and how those change to reflect the times. Bordo does come off as scolding other writers quite a bit, and at the very end gets a little weird about feminism (pro? con? trying to claim we're all too postmodern for the label? I couldn't tell), but it's a smart and enjoyable book.
Re-read In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Still pretty impressive, though the true-crime tendency (which I believe Capote started) towards printing long letters or manifestos written by angry, often racist, almost always misogynist, uneducated criminals, is something with which I have no patience. Didn't want to be in Gary Gilmore's head; don't want to be in Perry Smith's either. Skipped right over those parts without even skimming.
Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin. Was this (enormous) book amazing and beautiful and an awesome display of Helprin's imaginative powers? You bet it was! Did I skim the hell out of the last 300 pages? You know I did! At a certain point I simply could not spend another twenty minutes of my life reading a description of an aggressively whimsical building or a bizarre philosophical conversation between two hobos (I've seen "Waiting for Godot" something like six times, so I'm good, thanks), and once animal cruelty and infant death came into the picture, I was just like, "LA LA LA," and whisked through to the end.
Q: How is Perdita?
A: So awesome. I am absolutely obsessed with her babbling and cooing, not to mention her laughter.
Q: Any screaming?
A: If I try to listen to anything but NPR in the car, yes. She is not into music while driving these days, but will sit wide-eyed and thoughtful-looking while terrible things are reported in soothing voices and Mama says choice words in a less soothing voice.
Q: As you travel more and for longer periods of time with her, how is bottle-feeding in public going?
A: I never would have thought that not whipping a boob out in public could, on occasion, make me so self-conscious. But fortunately no one has yet given me overt shit about it (one dude did tell me I had her "facing the wrong way", but I couldn't tell whether he was concerned for my child's nutritional needs or just wished my shirt was open).
Q: A mother feeding her baby in public is fair game either way, no? Either she has to have a boob out in public, and risk skeeviness or hostility, or someone's going to comment on the bottle.
A: Far better someone comment on the bottle than that a public space not be nursing-friendly, though. After all, barring someone actually knocking the bottle out of my hand, which even the most ardent member of the Breastapo is unlikely to do, Perdita's not going to go hungry because a space is pro-breast-feeding. And being a mother in public generally means someone's going to give you unsolicited advice no matter what you do.
Q: Is it still hard to feel supported and validated in your bottle-feeding?
A: Alas, yes. I'm so, so happy with our lives as they are. Perdita's growing like a weed (she's in six-month onesies because she's so tall) and sleeping through the night; since we weaned I've lost all but seven pounds of the pregnancy weight (I know, they all tell you it only works the other way around, but I didn't lose an ounce while breast-feeding, because it made me hungrier than I'd been while pregnant and chained me to the couch and the pumping chair); and I'm able to get the cancer screenings I need. I am so much happier since I put that pump away, and I know that I made the right choice for my health and my family. But.
The exclusion I feel from the maternal inner circle, from this perfect ideal of What Motherhood Should Be, is pretty severe. I know that that ideal exists mostly in my own head, and that all parents have their struggles and doubts, no matter how healthy and organic-cotton-scented their lives appear from the outside. But breast-feeding has such potency as a symbolic act, and for me it took on the weight of Motherhood Visibly Done Right. I've never thought of myself as the warm maternal sort, or as a natural mother. I felt like I did pregnancy completely wrong by hating almost every minute of the nine-month experience (perhaps someday I'll post about my wicked antepartum depression, which I didn't even know was a thing but which made my last trimester one of the hardest periods of my life), and that I would be doing a major part of motherhood wrong by going back to work full-time and early, and so I already felt excluded from the inner circle of good happy natural mothers well before the baby came along. Nursing was pretty much my only chance at redeeming myself, and when it turned out to be such a disaster - and when it became apparent that the choice to stop completely was going to be something I would have to fight for - I felt so, so alone. I've not quite gotten over that feeling yet.
I suspect that almost every parent has something which makes them feel excluded from the inner circle of perfect parenthood, whether it be an economic situation, a child's special needs, a non-traditional family structure, or the fact that the kid hates the Moby Wrap*. I know I'm not alone in feeling alone, and that if I were exclusively breast-feeding I'd just find something else about which to feel inadequate and isolated. I don't regret my decision, but some days I still feel like the clubhouse sign says ONLY BOOBS ALLOWED.
Okay, I really will try to stop being defensive about it. Getting to be a little bit of a broken record around here.
Q: Speaking of music, what is your husband's idea of making a Johnny Cash song baby-appropriate?
A: "Early one morning while making the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I rented a clown."
Q: And you wonder why she sometimes shrieks in her sleep.
*While I was still technically on leave, Perdita and I went into work for two trainings; for one I snuggled her into the Moby Wrap like a good nurturing mama, and for the other I left her strapped into her heartless, head-flattening car seat. Guess which training she slumbered through angel-fashion and which training I missed nine-tenths of because I was out in the hall with an inconsolable screamer. Since then the Moby has lain in the car's back seat absorbing spills.
The latest in working-mother-adjustment:
I have now been back at my job a month and so far (knock on wood) everyone has survived. But I've had to do a lot of personal work around my loss of control and the intense anxiety that causes me (anyone who's ever been unfortunate enough to have me as a passenger in their car knows my issues around not having control).
The loss of control, of course, started as soon as the pregnancy did. First I couldn't control the physical changes in my body; then I couldn't control my dog's illness; then I couldn't control going into labor and had to be induced; then I couldn't control labor sufficiently to get through it unmedicated; then I couldn't control my milk production... heavens! After the first six weeks or so, Perdita and I got into a rhythm and I felt okay about things again, but then I returned to work, and went straight from our days being our own to having no direct control over her days at all and very little control over mine. Suddenly, with no gradual transition, for forty-plus hours a week my child is with someone else and my time is at someone else's disposal. No wonder I refused to move Perdita to her big crib in the other room, even though she'd completely outgrown the little co-sleeper crib in our room. No wonder I cried a whole, whole lot.
Things are better now: she's sleeping through the night in the other room and I only cry when there's a dog. Like, anywhere. I decided that reading about Rin Tin Tin was a good idea despite this, which resulted in me sobbing to Berowne, "They buried him with his squeaky toy!" (The jaded reply of a man who has seen a dozen squeakers ripped from plush bosoms: "They must have made squeaky toys tougher back then.")
Not unrelatedly, I have decided (based on a control group consisting of me and a couple funny British writers) that the "stress during pregnancy causes lower IQ / mental illness / general ruined-baby-syndrome" stuff being pushed on us these days is almost entirely bullshit. I spent my entire pregnancy with my anxiety turned up to eleven (see: loss of control, above), and hearing at every turn that my cortisol levels were so bad for the baby that I might as well be mainlining heroin didn't, oddly enough, make me less stressed. For nine months I was basically one trigger away from being hauled off in a strait-waistcoat.
The result of that pregnancy is the most easy-going, cheerful baby anyone has ever seen, and she has met every developmental milestone early. Of course she may turn out to be intensely stupid, in which case I'll just have to live with knowing that my terrible negligence in allowing my dog to get cancer is to blame, but so far I'm not impressed with the no-stress rule. Frankly, I think that it's yet another ploy to guilt women into leaving the workforce when they have children. Regardless of what your job is or how much you love it, it's going to have an element of stress, and as the "wisdom" becomes more and more that you must be happy and relaxed every second of your pregnancy unless you want your fetus to be irreparably damaged, any stress in your life starts to seem too dangerous to be worth it. And so women get guilted and pressured out of the workforce even before the baby comes along.
Naturally, if a woman leaves the workforce while about to add a huge number of new expenses to her life, she'd better have a seriously-well-employed spouse or well-off parents or a trust fund to facilitate this. Which is the worst aspect of the "good mothers stop working" nonsense: the idea that if you don't have one of those three safety nets, you can't be a good mother. This is not only classist but requires the belief that a woman cannot have had an independent life prior to becoming a mother, because if she did, and was participating in the economy for over a decade before even meeting her spouse.... well, basically the question is whether it would have been morally acceptable for me to say to Berowne last summer: "Now that you've knocked me up, my car payment, my dogs' expenses, and the mortgage on the house I bought with my ex-husband are all your responsibility. Good luck!"
Sorry to be cranky about it. I just got so mad about people instructing me constantly that I needed to not be stressed, while making the utterly insane assumption that the loss (or severe decrease: I got lots of advice to go part-time) of my income would lessen the stress in our household. I'm never going to say flippantly, "Nice work if you can get it!" of stay-at-home parenting, because my suspicions that it's exhausting have been emphatically proven, but I'm tired of our society acting like it's an option - or a priority - for all women.
ALSO, because I have not posted in a while and I have too much to say, what happens in the workplaces of those countries which give women paid maternity leaves of a year or more? How do you arrange a year's worth of coverage for a valued employee? Does everyone move up a rung but then get demoted when the mother returns? Is there a massive temp worker industry in Scandinavia? How does this not create a hugely disproportionate burden on the childless employees? (And if it does, do they ever move to America in disgust?) I was gone for under three months and spent my last two months training people non-stop to cover me and it was STILL a hot mess. Everyone talks about the amazing maternity leave policies in these countries (oddly, everyone talks constantly about them to the woman who had to come back to work after three months, as if it's not salt in the wound), but no one talks about how the workplace handles a female employee saying, "Okay, see you in a year and a half." I wonder about these things!
Ah well. Saying that I have to work makes it sound much more grudging than it is. I miss Perdita every moment we're apart, but I can see how much she loves daycare; and, let's face it, I am not the type to join mommy play groups, so if I were a stay-at-home mom she'd never see anyone but me and the dog, and I would never talk to other adults. (A typical conversation since Berowne moved in: "Who were you talking to in the yard?" "So-and-so." "Who's that?" "Um... the guy you've lived next door to for eight years." "He has a name?") In retrospect, if I'd been able to arrange a more gradual return to work that would have been better for my own mental health, but like I said, we're okay.
The latest in monster blowouts:
Location: I-89, on our way to Vermont. Cruising along the highway, I sniffed and said, "Do you think she pooped?" Berowne sniffed as well, and said, "No, I think that was a moose." At the next rest stop, we discovered that the moose had apparently managed to get into the backseat and poop all over the baby without us noticing. Thankfully there was a spare bathroom we could commandeer together, or we would have stood between the two restrooms saying, "You take her," "No, you take her," for about fifteen minutes, and the person who ended up with her would still be mad about it. And we managed to salvage the car seat.
Location: the local tiki restaurant. When the dining room at Fantasy Island echoed with a rumble like a tractor-trailer driving by, I had the sinking feeling that the diaper bag was entirely too light for the situation. And indeed, it turned out that at some point in the past three weeks I had taken a now-too-small spare outfit out of the diaper bag and neglected to replace it. You don't know proud parenting until your baby is wearing a toga made out of a swaddle blanket in public.
Location: a wedding dinner in Vermont (different weekend). She hadn't pooped in about thirty-six hours, so all day at the wedding and the party we were bracing ourselves for a big one. When it was Berowne's turn to change her, and he headed off to the little bathroom, I had my fingers crossed. After a long time passed, I knew that it had been as I hoped. But then more time passed. And more. The speeches were finished, the food was arriving, and still nothing. I started to think that maybe I should gather up extra diapers and clothes and go knock on the door, but because with a baby you have to eat in shifts, I knew I had to eat my food so that I could take the baby when Berowne returned to the table. Also I'm kind of a jerk. When Berowne finally did emerge, he looked like he'd been to Vietnam: the bathroom, apparently, had been a somewhat jungle-like environment even before adding the destructive humidity of an overdue pants-load. Fortunately we had a dozen back-up outfits (I may have gone a little overboard in the buying of wedding clothes) and the only lasting harm was Berowne's insistence that it is my turn for the next month or so.
The latest in reading:
The Wrong Mother, by Sophie Hannah. A nasty little thriller, which is what Hannah does. So freakin' creepy! And effective about the grim side of motherhood.
I finished Ten Years in the Tub, by Nick Hornby. No sooner, of course, had I written in the last post that I enjoyed Hornby despite our differing views, than he devoted an entire column to how Cheryl Strayed's Wild was one of his favorite books of the last ten years. Well, I suppose if you never were a self-obsessed, self-pitying, twenty-something woman, the travails of one might be more interesting to you than they were to me. But really? In ten years a voracious reader reads roughly a thousand books, if not more; and you think this was better than, say, nine hundred of the other books you sought out deliberately during that decade? A decade is a LOT of reading. I don't think Hornby realized the height of the podium he's erecting for Strayed there, is all I'm saying. But I did enjoy this collection despite that.
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, by Susan Orlean. I avoided this book for a while because I knew it would make me cry, which it did (as previously noted). I may not have been quite ready for it as it was, but I'm glad I read it. Orlean's writing style is the kind of reportage I really like - direct and friendly, imparting lots of information without ever seeming cluttered - and of course how could I not love the story of a dog rescued from a WWI battlefield who became fiercely bonded to his owner and beloved by millions? Replace "WWI battlefield" with "bad owners in Baltimore", and you have the life and legend of Darcy-Bear, who totally could have become a film star if a) there been an open casting call for "Game of Thrones" in our area and b) he had responded to most commands with anything other than a skeptical look and the occasional fart of disrespect. (He could have been the equivalent of Rin Tin Tin IV, a very sweet but rather dense dog who never actually acted in the 1950s television show bearing his name, but did the publicity bits.) Anyway, this book was fascinating and melancholy and I cried and cried at this bit:
Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him, it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient.
I miss his pricked shepherd ears and his giant fluffy tail so, so much. But I know that he was a very happy dog in the little cottage by the sea, and I will try to let that be pure and sufficient.
Read:
False Mermaid, by Erin Hart. I've seen raves about another book by her, so I checked out one which the library had available, and was really unimpressed. I'll probably still read the raved-about book when it becomes free, but this one was boring.
The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Tells the story of an Indian family, in India and America, in the aftermath of tragedy. It took me a little while to get into it, but its understated beauty became hypnotic, even when I didn't necessarily think that the characters were behaving in believable ways. Eventually I didn't want it to end.
Little Failure: A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart. I've never read any of Shteyngart's novels, but this memoir got such good reviews that I checked it out. It was quite excellent: one of those books that makes you (almost) wish away your (mostly) calm happy upbringing so that you could also write something hilarious about your bizarre family. And Shteyngart's descriptions of attending a liberal arts college in the 90s were so, so perfect that I had to put my head down and weep with joy while reading them. Oh, Russian-speaking friends: does the phrase really translate as "go to the dick"? I hope so, because Berowne and I have already started using it.
I left unfinished The Abominable, by Dan Simmons. The premise was "horror on Mt. Everest", so naturally I had very high hopes. But dear heavens, this was dull and disappointing. It's 300 pages of possibly the most boring and clunky exposition I have ever read before they even get to Mt. Everest. Entire chapters, endless in their tedium, about the history and design of oxygen cylinders. Passages listing mountaineers' names and dates that are like the catalog of ships. And then it's another 150 pages before yetis even kill anyone, which happens off-stage; and then it turns out that they were actually Nazis disguised as yetis (yes, that hoary literary trope). Given the promises this book made, I should not have had to skim 450 pages of a mountain-climbing manual before even a faint and ultimately false waft of yeti drifted out of the text. I struggled onward to almost the last eighty or so pages, but once it became apparent that real yetis were not going to arrive and eat the Nazis, I gave up.
I'm deep into, and enjoying very much, Nick Hornby's Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade of Soaking in Great Books, which is a collection of columns he wrote for the magazine The Believer in which he, well, did this blog first and much better. Where we have read the same books, Hornby and I agree perhaps one time out of ten. He adores books that I barely made it through, and vice versa. And yet his delight in reading is so infectious, so genuine, that after every essay I had another book to add to my to-read list. That's some sort of magic: that after three pages of disagreeing with his opinions, I would still react to a paragraph about a book he loved with the sense that I must find that book immediately. Magic or perpetual hope. Hard to say. Although I don't at all know what to do with Hornby's conflicting statements that Dickens is his favorite author and that he barely got through Our Mutual Friend even when he had been hired to write an introduction for a new edition. What? (He also claims that his kids aren't interested in reading because they're boys, which statement is proved a lie by almost every man I know and is shorthand for the loathsome "boys will be boys" lazy parenting [i.e., "my kid can punch other kids without fear of punishment"]. No, Nick, your kids aren't interested in reading. Full stop. It has nothing to do with gender.)
So, there's been a mighty saga around arranging my first post-baby cancer screening. Back in May my oncologist recommended an MRI, which you can have while breastfeeding (I was still pumping then), and sent off the request to my insurance company. The company replied with what was clearly a form letter saying I have no risk factors for breast cancer because I don't have the BRCA2 mutation, and I should get a mammogram like everyone else.
Yeah. Note to insurance companies: if you're not even going to pretend to review a patient's medical history before denying her services, you should make sure she a) didn't spend her adolescence arguing with a lawyer and b) hasn't been dealing with medical insurance companies as part of her job for ten years. My response letter was a masterpiece of controlled rage, after which the MRI was swiftly approved (though they're dragging their feet on sending the authorization number). But, in the interim, I decided that I needed to at least be able to get a mammogram, and that the tiny trickle of breast milk I was able to produce over four or five miserable pumping sessions wasn't worth going un-screened. And so I put the pump away, and weaned fully, and we were able to schedule a mammogram. (Worst Mother Ever! Putting my own health needs above those of my child! I'm pretty sure that, y'know, a mastectomy and chemo would also necessitate weaning.)
I had the mammo last week, and it was not exactly arranged to ease my massive worry. The tech called me in, took four pictures, and told me to go back to the waiting room.
What I should have said, because this is not my first rodeo: "Um, are you sure? You didn't get all of the breast tissue in those, and usually they want to see more angles, and... I really don't think we're done."
What I said: "Um, okay." And went back to the waiting room, which was populated by a family with two small screeching children, about which I tried to be understanding because it was obviously a situation where Grandma, who was getting the mammogram, didn't speak English, and her daughter came along to translate and didn't have child care available; but once the kids started screaming about how they didn't WANNA go to the LIBRARY after the appointment, my patience fled down the same path as my ability to be logical about being called back in for more pictures four times.
Logically, I knew that the radiologist wasn't seeing alarming things which warranted further investigation. He just wasn't seeing the whole breast, and kept telling the tech to get pictures which included the whole breast. But the logical voice in one's head can be drowned out by a fly's footfall under the circumstances of "my cancer might be back and I have a three-month-old", and so I sat there just trying not to cry. And I know it is possible to take, like, sixteen pictures the first time you have me in the room! Why she was only willing to take one or two at a time, before sending me back to the waiting room while saying, "I'll come get you for the next round in a bit," and then shuffling off at a glacial pace to show the radiologist the pictures she did take, I'll never know. The process dragged on for over an hour, and I was terrified the whole time. When my next one comes due, no matter how much sooner a slot is available at this location, I will request one at the location where I usually have it done.
Finally, however, the radiologist called me in and told me that all is well, and recommended a year's wait before another screening. We shall see what my oncologist says; both she and I prefer the MRI for its extra detail, however little I enjoy the actual event (though it says a lot about being a new parent that my absolute first thought about a procedure which has previously induced panic attacks was, "Oh man, half-hour nap, awesome"), so we will keep pushing for one of those soon. But for now I have been given an all-clear, and that's huge.
Q: Are you tired?
A: No, I'm thriving on five hours of sleep a night and an extra-large fully-caffeinated beverage in the morning. It's like college, except that at four in the morning there are fewer Wawa runs (only because I no longer live somewhere with Wawas) and more viewings of things which seemed like a good idea to put on the Netflix queue years ago. (Sure, let's watch a documentary about Shackleton, because it's not like puppies get shot or anything OH WAIT.)
Sidebar: I do not know how college kids these days do it, what with the entire internet and its social networking and streaming video marathons available as procrastination tools. In my day we had only Bejeweled, dorm-room theatrical readings, and Péter Nádas books to distract us (true story: when I was feeling a desperate refusal to write my papers, I would order bad Chinese food and re-read portions of A Book of Memories, which, yes, is a 900-page Hungarian stream-of-consciousness novel; for some reason this was the most comforting thing imaginable at that point in my life, and I still feel slightly warm and fuzzy when I regard my MSG-stained copy). End sidebar.
Yes, I'm exhausted. Because it's been so long since caffeine was a part of my life, there's still the exciting couple of hours in the morning when I code unstoppably and can't imagine ever being hungry again, but I am terrified of becoming inured to coffee. Fortunately the weekends are usually a time of recharging, napping when she naps, and ignoring the state of the kitchen.
Q: What happens when a weekend is non-stop socializing?
A: We've tried that once, and on Monday I could barely work three hours before having to go home and sleep until four in the afternoon. The spirit was willing, but that day never really stood a chance.
Q: How is being back at work / having her in day care going?
A: She LOVES day care. Everyone there knows her as "the happy baby". There is so much to look at and listen to, which she's always thrived on, so it's pretty ideal for her (and for them, since I gather she's the easiest infant-related money they've ever made). I can't say that I am thriving on being back at work quite as much, but my workspace doesn't have as many brightly-colored things in it. I do have a window, which looks out on a building with a giant lobster painted on it... so there's that.
Q: Who are your new least-favorite people?
A: The ones who, in a non-crowded parking lot, decide they must have the spot right next to me, and when they cannot immediately access that spot because my rear door is open while I am strapping my child into / removing her from her car seat, they honk repeatedly until I am either finished or I climb fully into the car and shut the door behind me. Seriously, this has happened three separate times now, once when we were virtually the only two cars in the lot. It is the strangest and most infuriating thing.
Q: So when you're thirty-seven and have a great life and are driving down the highway while your husband and child nap happily, on the way back to your little island home, and your brain decides it's going to catapult-launch that incredibly embarrassing thing you did fifteen years ago directly into your consciousness, you can laugh it off, right?
A: Humankind has not yet evolved that capacity. But I only brooded on it for about a mile before bringing it up to Berowne, and we laughed, and later Perdita farted directly into Berowne's face, which of course made me realize that my life lacks nothing. (Except a big white dog, but a) that's a given and b) if we are getting our faces farted into then Darcy remains with us in spirit. Walking up the stairs behind him was the deadliest game.)
Q: Have you been reading stuff?
A: In bits and pieces, yes.
Longbourn, by Jo Baker. The premise is that Baker is exploring the lives of the Bennetts' (from Pride and Prejudice) servants, in order to write a book about class discrepancies in Regency England. And I think this book would have been much more enjoyable if she had not done the riff on Austen, although that is the book's gimmick and who knows if it would have sold otherwise. But it means that she's just slamming beloved characters left and right, including having Lizzie sneer that referring to the footman as "Mr. Smith" made her think the speaker "meant a gentleman", which doesn't ring true at all. And I put up with it the first fourteen times our heroine, the Bennett girls' maid, thinks, "Jane and Elizabeth have X, Y, and Z and are still not grateful, while I would be content with half a potato sack to make socks out of BECAUSE SERVANT CLASS", but the next forty-five times I read the same sentiment it's rather like the Monty Python Yorkshiremen sketch: "Elizabeth gets Mr. Darcy, while GIRLS LIKE ME would be happy to have a rotting warthog carcass to warm our bare feet because we ate our shoes last spring and no one will spare a potato sack".
If you don't know the Yorkshiremen sketch, I'll wait while you google.
In any case, I liked the section of this book which was about Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper. And I like Baker's writing style. But Sarah, the maid and our primary protagonist, is like the heroine of a bad romance novel: too sassy for words and anachronistically feminist (and socialist), and every man she meets falls in love with her because that's easier than making the character actually lovable. (And would everyone in Regency England really have been that blasé about an interracial romance? Like, really?) Also, true, she has to do the Bennetts' laundry, but I wasn't particularly impressed with how much she whines about her lot in life given that she has a roof over her head, clothes on her back, food in her belly, and apparently lots of time to go on walks and read books. She's not dredging the Thames for bodies here.
This isn't a book you need to avoid or anything, but I was mildly disappointed after all the hype and waiting so long for a library copy to be available. My recommendation would be to read The Undertow instead. Baker's writing skills are on full display there, with no gimmicks.
The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, by Alan Bradley. The latest in his Flavia de Luce series. Short and very melancholy, and ends on a note which suggests the series may be over.
How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America, by Otis Webb Brawley. I didn't get much more than a third of the way into this before I couldn't take any more. Brawley is an oncologist, so his tales of failed care and terrible outcomes are all cancer-related, and usually breast-cancer-related. I am emotionally equipped to handle, oh, exactly zero such stories, and after four I put the book down.
The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny. So sad! So overwrought! Gamache is so impossibly-perfect! Love her stuff. This one is about Gregorian chant, which Perdita is into right now, so that was especially nice.
Going up to Vermont this weekend. I will potentially get some reading done, but it is a lot more likely I will repeatedly get through one page before passing out in the Adirondack chair, while my parents cheerfully entertain the Happy Baby. I can think of worse things. Hopefully I will be able to handle Monday this time.
I went back to work this week. Before 9:00 Monday morning I had made three discoveries:
1. That the move of my workspace from one office to another was not completed, despite the people involved knowing my return date. Thus I had no office or computer, or really anything to do but roam the halls missing my child. As I said on Facebook, I was La Llorona in business casual.
2. That, due to the company's transition to earned time the week before, I had several more weeks of leave available, and could have stayed out longer.
3. That the coffee I stopped for on the way in was NOT decaf. I am allowing caffeine to creep back into my diet these days, but when it is unexpected it results in things like teeth-grinding.
It was a bad day.
The second day, however, was worse. Perdita had been up at two, after her nap schedule was thrown off by being in a new place, and so I staggered to work exhausted, and set up pictures of her on my desk, because pictures are nice! And I put them next to an old photo of both dogs which has been on my desk for a while.
I should have anticipated where this was leading, especially since I kept Darcy's death close to my chest at the time. Five people at least asked me, "What do the dogs think of the baby?" and five times at least I had to explain that Darcy died in March. And then came the follow-up questions: how did he die, and was he old, and oh my god how did I cope with that while also being eight months pregnant, etc. So I relived those emotions over and over, while sleep-deprived and missing my child and second-guessing everything about having gone back to work (and also hearing, repeatedly, "Oh, she's how old? That's too little to be away from her mother!" and the utterly horrified "She's in day care??" as if the speaker has heard of this barbaric concept but never known anyone unfortunate enough to experience it, much like the Siberian gulag). Somehow I did not cry.
And then I went to day care to pick her up, and all the other babies had already been picked up, because their mothers are not Stalin, and Perdita was all alone in the infant room (with the caretaker, of course, but still). The smallest baby there, and the one away from her parents the longest. I immediately thought of young Scrooge, abandoned at boarding school, and realized that I am no better than Scrooge's mother.
Then I remembered that Scrooge's mother is pretty clearly dead by the time he's hallucinating literary characters, so I guess I have an advantage over her in that sense. My mothering: better than that of a dead Dickens heroine! Success is all about where you set the bar.
The next two days were better. I felt more at ease in our new routine, and I started meeting some parents of older kids at day care who said that their kids started at Perdita's age, and those kids were not visibly emotionally scarred or resentful of their parents, which was reassuring.
I did eventually get a workspace, and my computer back, which is how I learned that I'm mortifyingly stupid now. The medicinal resumption of caffeine is helping, but the complicated things with data that I did just three months ago are like my journals from college: I recognize that this is, in fact, my work, but I have no idea how I got from Point A to Point B (in college, as a general rule, Point A was "I like this boy" and Point B was some sort of implosion). Also I make an equally squinchy face when studying both artifacts.
What I've read:
The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Yeah, worth the hype. A huge novel about botany and love and the intellectual life and eighteenth-century exploration and nineteenth-century scientific discovery and one woman's life. I will say that the female characters other than our heroine are a little underdeveloped, although that may be because we see them through her eyes, but that is my sole quibble. I didn't want it to end.
Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans, by Gary Krist. My Early Reviewers book. It talks about the red light district in New Orleans in the early twentieth century, the political machinations that kept that district alive, and the jazz that came out of the city at that time. Didn't grab me, though I don't consider it badly done by any means.
My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead. Mead revisits Middlemarch, which she first read and loved as a young person, in her middle age. I thought that this would be more autobiographical, but though there are elements of that, it's mostly about Eliot's life and about the book itself. I liked it very much, even if Mead does mention, in her last chapter, that when she first read Middlemarch she thought Mary Garth was boring. Had this statement been made in the first chapter, I don't know if I could have trusted anything Mead said thereafter. (She also states in that last chapter that fourteen-year-olds are too young to read Jane Austen, let alone Eliot, which is odd given that her target audience is people who have grown up with classic literature. Fourteen is too young for Persuasion, certainly - I read it when I was fifteen, thought it was killingly dull, revisited it at twenty-seven [Anne Elliot's age] and from that day to this will defend it as Austen's best - but not for Pride and Prejudice or Emma, which latter book is [in my extremely unpopular opinion] overhyped as balls, much like Great Expectations.) Mead was apparently glamorous enough as a teenager to identify with Dorothea, not Mary, which wasn't the case for me. Despite that, and the accompanying claim that no one upon their first reading of Middlemarch cares about the Mary-Fred love story, this book was both charming and intelligent and I really liked it.
Bellman & Black, by Diane Setterfield. A fairly simple if uncommon premise: a man makes a bargain with dark forces and ends up starting a funeral emporium. Not much actually happens in this book, and there are majorly pretentious interlude chapters throughout, but I found the descriptions of the emporium and its stuffs for sale lovely, and the book overall readable as heck. The tragedy section, though - a fever comes to town, and the protagonist has children, and... yeah - is rough. I would think it would be so even if you don't have offspring yourself, but it was especially hard for me. (I'd been thinking about re-reading Wolf Hall for many months now, but I honestly don't think I could endure the part where his children die again. It shredded me the first time, when I hadn't even met Berowne and the Perdita-shaped gleam in his eye yet.)
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, by Scott Stossel. Stossel uses stories of his own paralyzing anxiety disorder and the years of therapy and medication he's gone through to discuss the historical treatments of and contexts for anxiety. I am not sure that it's fair to expect a book to be good enough to keep the parent of an eleven-week-old awake, but if that is the test then this failed pretty emphatically.
Well, that's all for now. Now to try to get as much sleep and Perdita-time as possible this weekend (damn their mutual exclusivity) before returning to the Schliemann-esque excavation of my hard drive on Monday. Wish me luck.
