The Belletristic Cat

The Hard Way to Say Goodbye

2012-01-05T20:05:00.000-05:00

I picked Axel's ashes up from the veterinarian today. It has been almost three weeks since we put him sleep and the call that his ashes were ready peeled away all the scabs that had formed since Christmas Eve.

The house is cleaner now. Until he was gone, it never occurred to me how really messy Axel was. The piles of food and spilled water next to the cat's bowls. The litter scattered in front of the box in the basement and throughout the doghouse in the kitchen. The hairballs and piles of half-digested food on the floor. There is no longer an undertone of eau de piss from his persistent peeing underneath the puppy pads in the corner of the dining room. The pee in the dining room and the messy litter boxes we knew about. The rest came as a surprise, as we assumed it was a combination of all three of them.

The house is quieter now. We don't hear the thumping that told us he was running across the floor, lifting up his useless back legs to gain some speed. We don't hear as much meowing. There isn't as much purring. He isn't waiting by the door or on the stairs.

We were too late to help save him. Irritable bowel disease. Possibly a tumor too. A heart damaged by an unknown murmur. By the time we realized he was ill, he had lost two pounds, had bloody diarrhea, was consistently throwing up almost everything he tried to eat. Over a month's time we tried one medication, then another. He refused his food, threw up the medication, spent most of his time hiding underneath the bed. His spark was dying. By the morning of Christmas Eve we knew that it was time.

I took some photographs, that last morning. Axel on the bed, sitting in the sun.

One last trip to the veterinarian. One last consent form. One last credit card payment. A thousand dollars over a month's time, to save our cat. One last goodbye. Me in tears. Toddler Alien confused and a little bit scared, seeing his mother cry and his father so sad. An empty carrier, a long, sad drive afterwards to my parents for Christmas Eve.

Just shy of twelve years ago, we adopted Axel. A Valentine's Day gift from me to Jeff. Our first decision as a married couple, adopting a cat. Saturday, Jeff and I celebrate our twelfth wedding anniversary. Axel's ashes sit in a slightly tacky looking tin box above the china cabinet. My mind racing ahead, some to an artisan, to be shaped in the glass. Some to be scattered in the backyard, Axel in the outdoors he loved.

Jeff stops my thoughts. We have time to decide, he says. Give it time.

Toddler Alien asks where Axel is.

Jeff glances at the tin on top of the china cabinet. He's home, Toddler Alien. He is here.

Heavy

2011-11-01T22:34:00.002-04:00

I am overweight. By enough that my nurse practitioner made the gentle observation that I had gained a considerable amount since I last saw her two years ago. She did not lecture me about the additional weight. In fact she was concerned enough to order some labs to make sure that the weight gain was not caused by an underlying condition, such as an poor performing thyroid. She also ordered a fasting test to check my glucose levels, as diabetes runs on both sides of my family.

The labs were all negative. Simply put, I am fat, out of shape and otherwise healthy. My thyroid is in balance. My glucose levels are good. My cholesterol levels are good. My blood has the appropriate balance of red and white blood cells. I have not had a reoccurrence of HPV. My blood pressure is on the high side of normal, mainly because I have not exercised with any consistency in the past two years.

I'm not comfortable being like this. There aren't many pictures of Toddler Alien and I. Partially because I'm the one usually holding the camera, partially because TA is a daddy's boy and not very keen to sit still long enough to get his picture taken with me. Out of the few snapshots we are able to capture of the two of us, the majority end up getting deleted because I hate the way I look in them so much. It shows – in my posture, in my face, in my whole demeanor in front of the camera.

The dumbest part? I've basically been given orders by my health care provider to start exercising again, in order to keep myself healthy. But I'm not sure how to go about it. It was easier the first time around, when I did not have to feel guilty about J taking on the greater share of Toddler Alien care. While intellectually I know that we can work something out, emotionally I'm uncertain as to how to make it happen. Pulling rank by stating that this is no longer optional, it is necessary feels like a shitty thing to do to J.

My NP suggested doing exercise on demand, and working my way up from that to a regular gym routine. She pointed out that Toddler Alien would most likely want to join me, which was a good opportunity to spend time with him while doing something good for myself. It is a great idea, one that never occurred to me. I just don't know if it would work, as I am too easily distracted when I try to exercise in the house.

I need to figure this out, and soon.

The Devil You Know

2011-10-13T20:07:00.000-04:00

I am not good at work conflicts. I am, in fact, something of a coward when it comes to dealing with bullying, backstabbing and other inevitable high school artifacts that plague the majority of decent sized businesses.

Up until Tuesday morning I had an awesome supervisor who stood between my department the rest of the high school, which meant I could do my work and not worry about the rest. S had spent the last 10 years helping to build the company (her employee number was 5), working her way up from writing documentation to leading a unified team of testers, tech writers and support services employees.

Four weeks after I was hired, the company went through a reorganization. As part of the process, a CTO was hired to forge a development roadmap for the company's future and resolve the issues fracturing relationships between different departments.

When the CTO came on board, we all had brief meetings to discuss what we perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of the company. S had a lot to say about the relationships between the different departments and where she felt the source of the dysfunction was coming from.

In particular, S had some choice words to say about a coworker, V. V has consistently made it difficult for other departments to effectively do their jobs. In charge of writing specifications and managing projects, she did her tasks poorly, when she did them at all. She routinely shows up late for meetings and expects all conversation to stop until she is bought up to speed. She contradicts herself constantly, when speaking and in writing. She micromanages her employees. In the past two years, four have quit and explicitly cited her as the reason for their resignation.

It is important for this narrative to mention that S was not the only employee to find herself in frequent conflict with V.

The same day the CTO's hire was announced, support services was removed from my S's sphere of responsibility. This was painted as a way for her to concentrate on her proven strengths in documentation and QA. In addition, she was informed that she would report to the CTO and her boss was moved to a client facing position. In the months that followed she was left out of meetings that she should have been attending. Her perks were cut. Her input was no longer solicited or welcomed.

Cue the firings.

First to be fired was D, who was informed that her job was not longer necessary due to the hiring of the CTO and the shuffling of departments. D had a long history of conflict with V. In the same breath that she was told that her position was being eliminated, she was asked to stay on until the end of the week to wrap up her work.

D accepted her severance and politely refused to work out the remaining week. Her job responsibilities were given to a recently hired male employee.

Two weeks ago the second firing took place. J was a direct report to V. J had been actively trying to move out from underneath V's sphere. Hired for what she believed was a specific positions, J was instead thrown into projects in which she had little knowledge, with no time to learn. J's job was taken over by a male employee.

This past Tuesday it was S's turn. The CTO told her that he could not envision a role for her in the company going forward. But instead of firing her outright, the CTO offered her the option of between coming back as a contract employee (at a reduced rate of pay, with no benefits) or taking a severance package that was 1/3 the size of the package offered to D. It is our impression that the CTO thought a crappy severance package would induce S to stay on as a contract employee.

S refused. She packed up her cubicle and was out of the building in less than an hour. Two of my coworkers helped her move 10 years worth of personal items to her car, then went out to lunch with her. I learned that she was fired when I walked into her cubicle to ask if she was ready to go to a pre-planned lunch and found it empty.

The CTO scheduled two meetings Tuesday afternoon. The first with my department, to inform us of the personnel change, the second with the entire development team to unveil his roadmap of the future. At the conclusion of our private meeting, he asked the senior qa member, L, to stay behind to discuss some transition issues before the development meeting.

And offered him S's position.

Since the meeting with the CTO, we have had two chats. The first took place on Tuesday after the development meeting. In that chat, L implied that there was some shady dealings occurring with the firings. I slept on this Tuesday night.

Wednesday we met again for our weekly department meeting, sans department head. In that meeting I pointedly asked L if the “shadiness” he was implying had anything to do with the fact that three mid-level female employees had been fired in the past four months and their responsibilities had been reassigned to male employees. L confirmed this statement and also reminded me that all three employees had a history of conflict with V.

It appears that V has trouble working with other women. So the solution to the problem was to fire the women and reassign their responsibilities to men instead of correcting the source of the problem.

The problem is that I am currently working on a project in which V is the project manager. And I may be working with her on a routine basis for the next year. With S gone, I am directly in her line of fire. This worries L.

This worries me slightly, but having already dealt with an epic incident of douche baggery in the past two years, I'm better equipped to deal with it this time around.

Bad Day

2011-10-04T20:55:00.001-04:00

Toddler Alien had a bad day. Instead of coming home sunny, chatty and rearing to zoom around the house chasing a ball in a fit of giggles, he was irritable, angry and cried almost non-stop. He cried because we wouldn't lift him into his high chair. He cried because he didn't want to wait for dinner. He cried because we wouldn't give him more cheese. He was rude to J and cried when I reprimanded him.

So upstairs he went after dinner, an hour earlier than usual, to get ready for bed. He cried over being changed. He cried because I put him in pajama pants instead of shorts. He cried because he I picked out the books. Believing that his fidgeting was due to extreme tiredness, I put him down in his crib, which made him cry some more.

I finally picked him back up and lay down on the bed with him. With his milk in one hand and his teddy bear in the other, he galumphed to the edge of the bed, slipped down the side and headed towards his books, pulling out the ones he wanted me to read to him.

Finally he began to calm. I asked him if he had a good day.

“No” he replied.

“Did you have a bad day then?”

“Yes” he answered.

“What happened?”

Silence.

“Was someone mean to you?” (1)

“Yes”.

“Can you tell me who?”

Silence.

We continued reading, making our way through three readings of Dr. Seuss' the Foot Book and most of the Eric Carle board books in the house, finishing with Good Night Moon and a second reading of Have You Seen My Cat?

I put Toddler Alien in his crib and closed the door. Twenty minutes later I came back to check on him. He was dozing, but still awake. I blew him a kiss and touched the side of his check. He blew me a kiss back, smiled and rolled back onto his side. I moved Teddy to the top of the crib.

“Thank you” he said as his hand reached out to grab the bear.

I can't pretend that I'm not worried. (I also can't pretend that I'm not annoyed to be burning time writing about my child instead of discussing the spreading protests, the upcoming hockey season or ten other things that have nothing to do with the mom part of my life).

I was a sensitive kid and had a rough time up until I left for college. I know I can't prevent Toddler Alien from getting his feelings hurt, but I don't know how to help him shake it off better than I did. And it is hard to explain to a kid who isn't even two years old that sometimes people suck.

(1) This was precipitated by an incident last week in which a slightly older kid informed Toddler Alien when he arrived that he was not allowed to play with the cars. This proclamation was delivered with such a hostile tone that Toddler Alien promptly burst into tears.

Movement

2011-09-27T21:37:00.000-04:00

Since vacation, I have been reading a lot more. I still have two very thick novels (Bolaño's 2666 and Byatt's The Children's Book) to finish, both started and abandoned while I was pregnant, unable to focus on anything more complicated than a Gilmore Girl's episode, during the endless months of fatigue and nausea.

I've started small. A Jo Nesbø novel (complete with classic deus ex machina). Some of Bolaño's poetry. Nonfiction on adjusting to a new identity post baby. The collected works of Amy Tan. Slowly I find myself gravitating towards works that require a little more heavy lifting.

It feels good, as if I'm finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. There is still a lot I know that I need to deal with. At the top of the list is finding a replacement for my doctor, who retired last year. Second on the list is convincing her replacement that the intestinal issues I have been suffering from since Toddler Alien was born are serious and affecting the quality of my life.

I'm still tired a lot. I still find it difficult to put my thoughts into coherent order. But I'm getting there.

Outer Banks III - Control

2011-08-29T21:50:00.000-04:00

One of the frustrating things about sharing the house was J's family was the complete inability on the part of some members to acknowledge the the world does not always work the way they perceive it should. Never was this more apparent then when discussing the different options of dining together as an extended family of fifteen.

While the Outer Banks is a tourist destination(1), it is also populated with individuals who live on the islands year round and support themselves running shops, restaurants and other establishments that take tourist dollars.

Which means that there are months in the 12 calendar month year when they are not making much money.

J's family had a very difficult time understanding why the restaurants are so small and require reservations for large parties. My repeated suggestion that they either make reservations, call ahead to find out if a place could seat fifteen people or eat early enough that it would not matter were dismissed as fear mongering. My attempts to point out that these were businesses that still needed to make a living during the winter months earned me “you have a second head growing out of your neck” looks.

In short, when it comes to dining out some of J's family acts like fucking tourists, the ugly kind that you want to hit soundly and squarely on the head with a heavy object.

And sometimes it happens without ever having left the house.

To fulfill the family's need for a big meal J's brother, J and I organized an old fashioned stove-top clam bake. We purchased steam pots filled with lobster, crab, mussels, clams, onions, potatoes and corn. We added clam chowder, steamed shrimp, pasta salad, ribs, baked chicken and chicken fingers with fries for the kids. I ran to the store and brought crusty french bread, wine, beer and soda.

The majority of the family enjoyed the meal. J's father hated it. All of it. The potatoes were overcooked. The corn and crab legs tasted funny. The lobster was too tough.(2) He didn't like pasta salad made with balsamic vinegar. He had eaten better clam chowder from a can.(3) The steamed shrimp were too spicy.

He ran down this litany of complaints when I went in to relieve him from Toddler Alien bedtime duty. I offered to make him a sandwich(4), which he refused.

When I finished getting Toddler Alien settled, I came out of our room and began cleaning up the kitchen. J's mother told me to sit down, we would take care of the dishes later. I complied.

Once dinner was finished and the first load of dishes was loaded in the dishwasher, the entire family walked down to the beach to fly kits. I stayed behind to keep an eye on Linus. Before they left, J's mother reiterated that I was not to touch the dishes.

Thirty minutes after everyone had left, J's father returned and began giving haranguing me about the dirty dishes. After several minutes, I headed for the stairs as I did not want to argue with him.

I ran into J's sister on the stairs and suggested that she might want to stay out of her father's way as he had a hair up his ass about the dirty dishes.(5) J's mother heard my comments as she was coming up the stairs and immediately went up to see what was happening.

She came down several minutes later and told me to ignore him. She was not happy. I was not happy. Later that evening she suggested I pour myself another glass of wine and come sit out on the deck.

J's father rampaged through the final two days of the trip, making J purchase food items no one really wanted to eat, overruling cinnamon rolls for two cakes (anniversary cake for J's sister and her husband on Friday, birthday cake for same husband on Saturday) and assisting in celebrating the wedding anniversary by taking the entire family for out for a late dinner.(6)

At the end of the dinner, he turned to J's sister and complimented her on choosing a place that served a “nice” meal.

(1) The Outer Banks in July is Pittsburgh South. You can't throw a rock without hitting a Steelers fan.

(2) I agreed with his assessment of the lobster. It had cooked too long. The crab legs, on the other hand, were perfect.

(3) The clam chowder was made with fresh, local clams.

(4) I'm still amazed that I managed to keep my voice neutral and sincere.

(5) My exact phrasing. I was losing my patience.

(6) I regret that I did not have the nerve to flat out say no to the dinner, since we had to wait almost an hour for a seat and it was half an hour past Toddler Alien's usual bedtime by the time we got our entrees. Especially since I knew that was exactly how it would play out. In an astonishingly sensitive move, the anniversary BIL took Toddler Alien for a walk outside while we waited.

Outer Banks II – Bo the Wonder Dog

2011-08-01T20:51:00.002-04:00

Before we left for the beach, Toddler Alien was able to meet two of my mother's siblings, his grand aunt A and his great uncle B. A and B came bearing small gifts from a nearby outlet mall, which gave the affair a strange magi-visiting-the-Christ-child kind of air.

Toddler Alien was mostly charming and his few moments of un-charming were caused by my bad decision. I'm not sure what part of my brain thought that putting brownies in front of an 19 month old was a good idea. Once the brownies had been whisked away, he settled down.

B presented Toddler Alien with a pair of running shorts and a matching t-shirt. B was a long distance runner until his knees gave out several years ago. The shorts and t-shirt were several sizes too large and apparently intended for girls instead of boys, even though there was nothing that would have marked the outfit as more feminine than masculine.

Knowing my uncle as I do, I also know that these clothes were chosen with zero consciousness about gender.

A gave Toddler Alien a plush dog. A Ty, Bo “The First Dog” Portuguese Water dog. Complete with red, white and blue Bo tag. A owns this breed of dog, a sweet, well trained girl with a ton of personality.

Unfortunately, we could not take Bo with us, as J's family contains several members who are conservative with a capital “C”. While a part of me would throughly enjoy provoking fireworks amongst the oppressed elite in my husbands family, the other part of me wanted no part of accusations of indoctrination and why liberals are the root of all evil in the Marvel Universe.

So Bo stayed behind, to be picked up on our way back home. This morning Toddler Alien wandered around and about the upstairs with the dog in his arms, leaving a small trail of fake Bo hair behind him. When it was time to go downstairs, he gravely handed Bo to me to return to his crib.

Outer Banks I – Lost in Northern Virginia

2011-07-31T21:49:00.000-04:00

In a moment of weakness many months ago I agreed to an vacation with J's immediate family on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The primary reason I caved after almost ten years of just saying no, was because my father-in-law finally agreed to accept the monetary contributions from all interested parties that would facilitate the renting of a larger house.

I can't say that the week was all bad. The beach was lovely and it was good for Toddler Alien to spend time with his five cousins. But it was not the most relaxing of vacations and J and I are both leaning towards waiting another 10ish years before we even contemplate doing it again.

Our journey began with a drive to Northern Virginia, home of my brother and his wife. The initial drive as lovely. We skipped the highway in favor of navigating through the Laurel Highlands, past Nemacolin Woodlands. We did well and made good time until we got lost trying to find my brother's home. After several (increasingly desperate) calls to my sister-in-law, K was able to pinpoint our position well enough to come get us and lead us back to the home she shares with my brother.

A snack and two glasses of sangria slush shook the dust from the road. It was a late night for everyone, including Toddler Alien, who was enjoying the novelty of being allowed to play with tupperware well past his bedtime.

Because we could not check into the rental until Sunday, we spent Saturday trying to stay cool in the 90˚+ heat. K and went to Office Depot to find clipboards and to Wegman's to buy milk for the house and snacks for the road. We walked out with milk, snacks and four bottles of Folie à Deux Ménage à Trois red wine.

While J napped in the afternoon, K and I took Toddler Alien for his first dip in the pool. Because of the heat, the water felt like it came from a warm tub, but TA did not seem to care. He splashed and giggled and had a great time.

Sunday morning we packed up the car and started the drive south.

An Uncomfortable Moment

2011-07-17T20:26:00.000-04:00

I have to make this quick and dirty, as I promised J that I would get some more sleep to mitigate the after affects of the migraine I suffered yesterday. The upside was that I was prepared and had medication ready when the aura started(1), so I was able to enjoy a pain-free day. But I am still wiped out and need the additional sleep.

J's parents and nephew T came today to help J clean up the back yard(2). T is 12 years old, loves spending time with his grandfather and volunteered to tag along and help out.

Toddler Alien adores his grandmother. In his hierarchy of favorite people Grandma is first, Daddy is second, I am third, then there is everyone else.

A little past four we gathered for dinner. Toddler Alien gets anxious when he sees that dinner is forthcoming. We have been working on getting him to remain calm while preparing him meals, but it has been a long, hard journey to turn him from screaming maniac to civilized child(3). Even though he had been snacking on cheddar Goldfish crackers all afternoon, he began to fuss. To quiet him I poured the rest of the crackers from his snack cup onto the tray's surface.

And he promptly and deliberately threw several of them onto the floor while screaming. J's father admonished not to throw food.

And I promptly and deliberately removed the tray, made him get down from the chair, pick up all the crackers he had thrown and walked him to the trash can so he could see me throwing them away. All the while he cried, but he picked them up.

All the while my in-laws, my nephew and my husband watched. J watched tense, ready to spring in an defend me. His parents and our nephew were silent.

The entire time this was occurring, I was incredibly self conscious. I knew that I was holding up dinner. I knew that the easy thing would have been to quietly pick up the crackers and not delay our guests. And I thought, This is really, really hard and embarrassing.

But I did it anyway. After the trip to the garbage can I put Toddler Alien back in his chair and we sat down to a nice meal of cold cuts, egg salad, cold drinks and cold pickles. Toddler Alien ate an egg salad sandwich, had some prosciutto and finished with some dried apples. Without acting up once.

(1) The worst migraines I have are always triggered by me running around in 80+ degree, sunny, humid weather without eating enough.

(2) Four trees down, four to go. I mourned the loss of the crabapple and quietly cringed that we had to cut down a mulberry too, but the ridiculously tall pine trees had to go. As it turned out, one of the trees was infested with stinkbugs to the point that the tree was probably going to come down on its own anyway.

(3) I can't even begin to imagine what prompts this behavior, but it is so otherwise out of the ordinary that even his daycare teachers have commented on it. J's instinct it to put him in the chair and let him scream it out. I'm more likely to try to find something for him to do to “help” me in the kitchen, but it is still difficult.

Awful

2011-06-18T23:05:00.000-04:00

It is a lovely, warm night. I can hear crickets chirping and the fans are buzzing. Toddler Alien is sleeping, J is sleeping. I'm drinking a bottle of homemade mead, one in a case of bottles J found buried in a cooler. It was given to us by friends who moved West several months ago and did not want to take the mead along. The alcohol content of the mead is high, over 12%, but it is smooth with a ginger finish.

I have a full time job. With a 10% raise over my last gig, at a company with a structured development process. A company that is going to allow me to learn how to directly test databases. At the company that lowballed my first salary offer, then came up after I refused the first offer. At a company which, as it turns out, is perfectly happy to allow me to work a schedule flexible enough to get Toddler Alien when he is sick.

A good thing in the scheme of the universe, because sickness occurred on Friday, at the end of my first week as a full-time employee.

The weekend turned into listening to an 18 month old scream for hours on end, until we took him to Children's Hospital(1) and discovered that he had a massive ear infection which required antibiotics. Saturday night he cried himself almost to sleep in my arms, pointing to his crib after his tears, exhausted from being unable to sleep more than an hour for the last 36 hours. A week later he is bright eyed and happy.

All of this and I feel awful over something so stupid and insignificant that I should brush it off and move one. Right now I can't.

J and I took Toddler Alien to Lego Kidsfest this afternoon. It was a fun, overwhelming experience. Lots of people, lots of activity.

As we were leaving the convention center, J asked me to “take a picture of us” in front of one of the Lego models. In equal parts annoyed (because it was loud, I was tired and wanted to leave) and touched, I agreed.

Only to find out that the “us” J was referring to was Toddler Alien and himself, not the three of “us” as a family.

And I felt hurt. Even though J did not intend to hurt my feelings. Even though he communicated clearly and I misunderstood. I was hurt and felt awful, and lo these many hours later I still feel awful. Excluded.

And J feels terrible. Terrible enough that he gave me my card and birthday present (Legos. No really, he gave me Legos. I collect the Modular Building sets. I would collect the Harry Potter sets too, but J drew the line at that) early to cheer me up.

I've adjusted, mostly, to the concept that I am this person/role/vocation called “mom”. But I'm not the fun mom. I'm the “pick up the food you threw on the floor and put in the trash/put your toys away and brush your teeth” mom. J is the fun dad and I am the disciplinarian. Which means that while Toddler Alien does love me, throws me kisses and will not go to sleep most nights until I come in to say goodnight and tap him on the nose, I'm extraneous the moment J walks into the room.

Which is what I felt when I realized that J wanted a photograph of him and Toddler Alien without me. Extraneous.

(1) I'll have a post on them shortly, because Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh is an awesome institution. This post will include a rant about the standoff between UMPC and Highmark. A standoff that could essentially cut off access to 2/3 of the hospitals in the Pittsburgh metro area to Highmark subscribers.

Thursday of This Week

2011-05-21T08:58:00.002-04:00

Was the day that felt like everything had just gone to hell, which is a good topic to discuss on this, the Saturday, the supposed day of the rapture, an event that I don't believe is happening as I've seen nothing in the series of tubes of people being lifted up into the sky at 6pm.

Thursday was the day I received a phone call from the unemployment office saying, in essence, that I did not qualify for unemployment because I did not make enough money at Borders and because my separation from my former employer was voluntary. To the credit of the Mr. F (no first name) he sounded almost sympathetic as I explained that the separation from my last job was due to the stress of a probation that was indefinite and ill-defined (as I received no goals for improvement or milestones to reach).

So I'm out of personal money, a point that was driven home when I attempted to purchase two new bras at Marshall's yesterday and discovered that I did not have my check card with me. My check card was sitting in a drawer with my checkbook, placed there as an acknowledgment that I have no money.

No money for bras. Which I need, as the ones I purchased after Linus' birth are ratty and ill fitting. All my clothes are ill fitting right now. My new pants slide down my hips. One pair manages to be too large and has a zipper that refuses to stay properly up. The new t-shirts did not survive the first wash. I look and feel like a slob.

Thursday was also the day that I realized that no job offer would be forthcoming. D, the recruiter, had promised to call me last Monday. It is now Saturday and I have not received a phone call. Which means no offer.

I stood up for myself and it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Unemployed, no income, simultaneously overqualified and unqualified to work.

Bridge Building

2011-05-19T11:54:00.000-04:00

I don't know my father's side of the family very well. After finishing his degree, my father moved from the Midwest to the east coast. There he met and married my mother, a decision that caused a great deal of tension in his family (1). Over the years there have been unpleasant incidents between my mother and members of my father's family. Between the incidents and the geographic distance, most of my knowledge of my paternal aunts, uncles and cousins comes from letters and photographs. Several years ago there was a family reunion. My brothers and I were not invited. From my point of view, it seemed the final split for any semblance of a relationship with the paternal branch of my father's family.

So I was surprised when a cousin I last met when I was too young to remember her, reached out and contact with me via Facebook. This contact was facilitated by the more reasonable of my father's two sisters. Interestingly, the cousin is the oldest daughter of the less reasonable sister. (2) She and I occasionally exchange messages.

She has a daughter (ST) who has been accepted into a prestigious program at Pitt for her junior and senior year of schooling. As she is coming from out of state, the tuition is incredibly expensive and the housing costs will almost double her final bill.

ST wrote to me recently, asking if J and I could help her out by allowing her to stay in our home during her schooling in Pittsburgh. She offered to pay a nominal amount of monthly rent ($200.00), assist in cleaning and childcare, cover her own groceries and has already made arrangements to stay somewhere else on weekends.

On one hand, it is completely fair to view the her actions as a rather nervy violation of etiquette. I know a good number of otherwise reasonable people who would be insulted by this request.

I'm not insulted. I think it takes a lot of courage to reach out to a previously unknown family member and ask for help. As an individual who has paid out-of-state tuition and is still paying off the loans, I can sympathize with her predicament. Off campus housing would be less expensive, but she is under 21, coming from out-of-state and it will not be easy for her to rent a safe, inexpensive place without an adult co-signing for her.

I'm uncertain how to help her. Our house is tiny and the only room we would be able to give her is currently my study. I have no desire to take on the financial risk of cosigning for a rental property. We can definitely give her a safe place to do laundry, get a hot meal and get a break from campus. But I wonder what we could gain by opening up our home for her for a little while.

(1) My mother is Catholic, my father Baptist. His family was not pleased.

(2) The less reasonable sister was especially critical of my mother and fond of making cutting, passive-aggressive remarks about our moral and spiritual upbringing. I recall one incident in particular when I was around ten when she told us a bible story using a book of solid colored pages. She was surprised that my brothers and I were able to interpret and explain each of the colors in the book.

Uncharted

2011-05-16T11:12:00.000-04:00

I'm still in a holding pattern with the current job opportunity. D, the recruiter who set up the interview, called on Thursday. The news was not great. Initial reports are that the salary the CEO is willing to authorize is 2K less than my bottom line.

I can not pretend that I did not feel a little bit of relief at the news. My first impulse was to take his offer to tell the company to sock it.

Instead I asked for some time to think about it and told D I would call him back on Friday morning.

J and I sat down and talked Thursday night. It was an uncomfortable, productive conversation. J admitted that my return to work would take some pressure off us financially and felt that I should give the opportunity a shot. He also felt that some of my response was out of ego.

Which upset me, as I did not feel that he was giving enough weight to my feelings about it. To be fair to J, it is a integral part of our relationship that we give each other occasionally harsh reality checks when issues such as job offers come up, in order to ensure that we are responding to negative feedback intellectually instead of emotionally. J was only doing for me what I have done for him many times in the past – making sure his ego was not the only thinker in the room.

I can't disagree with his argument about the money. While we are doing OK on just his salary, there is very little room for mistakes. Me returning to work would mean that I could pay for daycare, bank the rest and give J enough room to increase our retirement investments.

The problem, from my point of view, is that one of us needs to work at a company that allows the flexibility necessary to raise a small child. And J's company is not that place. If this initial feeler is any indication, then this place is not appropriate either. Right now, they have not made an official offer, which means I can walk away without affecting my unemployment compensation. The initial amount does not include enough PTO for me to securely take care of Toddler Alien when he is ill or enough money for me to hire an interim nanny when he can not go to daycare.

I called D back on Friday and told him that it would not be enough money, for all the reasons I expressed to J. We discussed what I would consider reasonable (flexible time off that could be made up, additional PTO, other factors) and he put in a counter offer.

Now I wait. D feels optimistic that he will be able to work something out. I'm skeptical. My gut instinct (and downright cynicism) tells me that they would not have attempted such a lowball offer if the name on the resume had been male and they will not be all that interested in discussing my need for an appropriate work-life balance. Considering the fact that several of the people I interviewed with admitted that they had difficultly filling the position, you have to wonder.

But, at the very least, I have stood up for myself.

Decision

2011-05-09T16:13:00.000-04:00

I'm a huge fan of XKCD. Randall Munroe has created some pointed (and poignant) comics over the years.

Today's comic like a slap-upside-the-head. Zombie Marie Curie says to aspiring girl scientist: “But you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and doing that it so hard that you become great in the process”.

When was the last time I wanted to do something so hard that I became great?

I can't remember. Literally. Maybe going to graduate school in North Carolina.

My entire life, I have fallen into things. Fallen into English because I thought I was good at it and comfortable. Fallen into QA because I followed an impulse to answer an add asking for liberal arts majors to apply.

I can recall many times when teachers and friends spoke out and said “You would be great at this”. Such as my high school math teacher, who nagged me to go to an engineering camp for girls because “you have a creative brain. You would be good at this”. J's most recent pep talk, when he talked about a children's book I wrote many years ago, but never illustrated.

But I can't remember the last time I made a conscious decision to want to do something, then followed through the tough parts to become great at it.

I have a decision to make. On the surface, the choice is simple and should be automatic. But the more time I give over to thinking about it, the harder it becomes to determine which is the correct path. The decision is this:

I am in the process of negotiating my salary for an interesting and challenging QA position. It would be a great opportunity.

Except that I don't think I want to do it.

Aimless

2011-04-13T11:42:00.000-04:00

Last week, I sat for too many minutes staring at a Craigslist ad for a Personal Assistant for an unspecified company. I knew I could do the work with my eyes closed, yet the desire to apply for the job was not there.

I'm spending a lot of time in the past couple of weeks trying to get back to OK. OK with the increasing knowledge that my career as a quality assurance professional is essentially over. I can't compete with out of work developers with scripting skills. The jobs I am being offered are well above my abilities.

OK with the fact that my employment at major-chain-bookstore has come to an end as the location will be permanently closed at the end of the day Friday. I've been scraping pennies together to buy a bottle of something bubbly and take to the store Friday morning, so the staff for the final shift has something to share at the end. Working at the bookstore was my Plan B and it was ideal. More time to spend with Toddler Alien. More time to write. Some pocket money, so I do not feel like I am mooching off of J whenever I want to buy something for myself.

OK with asking J for money, whether it go towards buying milk for Toddler Alien or a pair of jeans for myself. This is a difficult one, as J vacillates between being easygoing and freaking out whenever we have a big expense.

Case in point: my last trip to the doctors, to get a prescription written to end a multi week sinus infection, ended up costing roughly $250.00. Ninety dollars went towards the office visit and the remaining $160.00 for the antibiotics and two inhalers the nurse practitioner prescribed to control the coughing from the infection. The reason it was so expensive can be found in J's plan – a high deductible H.S.A plan that does not cover prescriptions or anything other than a well visit to the doctor until the the deductible is reached.

Even though I attempted to explain to J that it would be expensive, he freaked out when I came home and showed him the bill, leaving me feeling useless and ashamed that I could not cover it. I need to take this medication from April to October in order to control my symptoms. I should also being taking an antihistamine with the inhaler, but I have cut that from the regime because of the expense.

So here I sit, knowing that I need to find a job, any job, that will give me halfway decent medical benefits so I can control the asthma and see a doctor to deal with ongoing, lingering aftereffects of the pregnancy. And I have zero motivation to do so.

A Quick Entry Before an Orgy of Cooking

2011-03-07T09:43:00.000-05:00

As it is jambalaya day, in celebration of Fat Tuesday.

I went to a baby shower yesterday. The shower was held in honor of a former coworker. Unlike the last shower I attended, this one was a much less stressful affair. I still got dressed up, but instead of the pretty purple Ann Taylor number, I opted for nice jeans and a killer jacket.

I sat with two other former coworkers and four members of the guest of honor's bowling group. It was a comfortable arrangement. The food was fair, the gifts were nice and there were no games, which made the majority of guests very happy.

As I had additional baby stuff to give the GOO and her husband, I hung back at the end of the shower, waiting for the party to break up. GOO approached our table and I showed her some recent photographs of Toddler Alien, then passed the iPod to one of the other guests.

"Your first?" she asked.
"And only" I replied, laughing. "One and done!
"You don't want to give him a little brother or sister?"
"No. I hated pregnancy and I hated childbirth" I explained.
"Well some women have a hard time" she said. Her tone and body language implied that I had experienced complications.
"Oh no, the pregnancy was completely normal. I just really hated being pregnant and have no desire to do it again".

The look on her face was priceless.

The Liquidator

2011-02-20T15:07:00.000-05:00

Note: This is a continuation of my last post. I spent the weekend trying to get a handle on what upset me so much after completing my shift on Friday. Now that I have pinpointed the source of my emotional disturbance, I wanted to distill it for posterity. Because I like to read myself talking or some such rot.

Friday morning, we had our morning staff meeting. The café shut down when the doors closed on Wednesday night, the employees charged with packing and transferring as much as possible to the two stores remaining open.

K, a service manager who has worked at the store for 20+ years, since before the build of the location was complete, struggled to remain composed as she announced the corporate office put up the store for bids by liquidators. By the end of the day all the stock and fixtures would be sold to the highest bidder, who would sell it off for whatever profit could be made.

After shelving new magazines, I offered to answer the phones, in order to give the long-term staffers a break from answering the same painful questions over and over again.

The end of day occurred at noon, when a crew of men carrying briefcases and floor plans entered the building. They stalked the floors, studying the shelves and layout, taking notes and making a concerted effort to avoid eye contact and stay out of the way of the staff.

A second man followed closely behind, in search of the store manager, D. He had heard the store was closing and upon locating D began asking information about the general layout and square footage of the space, as he was interested in renting the location.

Finding myself with a few free moments, I headed to the staff room to grab my iPod, so I could show a new coworker some photographs of Toddler Alien. D called to me in the staff room, asking if I was available for a quick task.

The liquidator was in the stockroom, surrounded by several FedEx boxes, addressed to the store, that needed opened. D introduced me, and I put my hand out in a genuine attempt to be professional.

It is now, two days later, that I realize why this man's handshake was so indistinct. He had not wanted to shake my hand.

The boxes contained the “going out of business” signage, which needed to be sorted for use in the next few weeks. Included were a set of walker boards. “These will be used outside” said the liquidator. When D asked if he would need store staff, the liquidator replied “No. Usually we go to the homeless shelter and offer some guys $20.00 to stand outside during the day”.

D continued going through the boxes while I silently stacked placards on a cart. The liquidator held up a set of stickers and said “These are seals for the service door. Every time you open the door, you need to place a new seal and log who opened the door and when, such as when you take out the trash”. When D explained that the service door could only be opened by a service manager and offered to have the staff remove trash from the front, the liquidator replied “No, because then the employees will just hid the books in the trash bags and take them out the front”.

At this point, I was finished stacking placards, all of the boxes were open and I was beginning to actively dislike the man. He had not wanted to shake my hand, he showed not an ounce of empathy for the homeless and assumed that the staff would be out to steal his stock by hiding it in the trash.

Shortly before the end of my shift, K gathered us all together again to update us on the current news. She instructed us to remove anything considered a personal item before the end of the day. When I asked about the collection of ARCs, she said to take them today, as tomorrow they would be sold.

Another service manager, G, checked me out at the end of my shift. I offered to push someone out a window for him. He said “Can you push the liquidator out the window. That man does not have an ounce of empathy in him”. I replied “I suspect there will be a line”.

Back to the Land of the Unemployed

2011-02-18T15:53:00.000-05:00

Which is where I will be returning sometime in the next weeks. After trudging through the holiday season, selling calendars like it was something I was born to do, I was delighted to accept an offer for one of the two open part time spots at the major-chain-bookstore, thus delaying any decision about returning to full time work for several more months.

Only to discover when I came in for my second shift this past Wednesday that the major chain was filing for bankruptcy and the store that had so recently hired me was on the list of closures.

I have an emotional advantage over the rest of the staff, most who have spent years working together at this location. One manager was hired the store opened twenty years ago and remembers when the company was building it out. So today I volunteered to spend my shift manning the phones, answering the same set of questions over and over again and listening to the same set of comments.

When are you closing? I don't know, a time line has not been set yet.
Are all the stores in Pittsburgh closing? No, stores X and Y will remain open.
When are you going to start discounting the inventory? No time line has been set.
Are you still taking gift cards? Yes, online and at the stores which are remaining open will honor gift cards.
This really sucks. Yes. Thanks.
I'm so sorry to hear that you are closing. You are my favorite store. Thanks.
Channel 4 said you were going out of business this weekend. To quote a coworker after I got off the phone "Channel 4 lies".
This is bullshit. I understand.
And my personal favorite "I live in Dormont. I don't want to drive across Pittsburgh and the country to use my gift cards". When I suggested he used the online store, he digressed into a rant about Amazon.com and how he still had not received an order he placed for a Christmas gift, leaving me so aggravated that I removed one of my shoes and mimed banging it against a counter while fantasizing that I was aiming it at the caller's head.

The speaker of the last quote also threatened to "call investor relations" and complain because I could not tell him when the liquidation sale would start.

The liquidator came today. He is an older man, blandly dressed in a grey suit, black shoes, white hair. His may be the most indistinct hand I have ever shaken. I relished the snarky thought of him coming down with whatever crappy illness that has been lingering in my immune system for the past two months.

In the very brief period of time I spent in his presence he struck me as a most unsympathetic of men.

To be continued...

Back From Hiatus

2011-02-02T11:35:00.000-05:00

I've started looking for full-time work. I'm only a couple weeks into my search and I'm already seriously considering a change in profession. Remain a part-time bookseller for the large chain with severe financial problems? Get a paralegal certificate? Go back to my self of 16 years ago and be an administrative assistant?(1) Wait tables?

There is nothing quite like a bad interview. I'm still fuming from the last interview, 50 minutes over the phone(2) with a bad connection, speaking with an individual who asked vague, broad questions and had the nerve to complain to the recruiter who set it up that my seven years of QA experience did not make me "qualified enough" as she would have to invest too much time to "train" me to use the bug tracking system and other (very expensive) testing tools. The fact that it has been a function of my profession to learn how to use such tools on my own completely escaped her. And it was not from the lack of trying on my part either.

I know what the problem is. I am totally unwilling to put up with any bullshit from any interviewer or organization at this point in my life. I would much rather be upfront about what I want and what I think I can provide then go through the rigmarole involved to land a job these days. I know that odds are stacked against me - I'm competing with laid off developers with MIS degrees and tons of experience working on $100,000 defect management systems while I have been trained/self-taught and work almost exclusively with open source tools.

Ugh.

(1) Interesting detail - the wage I am paid now, as a part-time bookseller is the same amount as the wage I was paid in 1996 as a full-time receptionist at a collection agency.
(2) Really, if you are going to waste my time with a phone interview that long and I'm in the area, just bring me into the office.

Cognitive Dissonance:

2010-12-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

Is watching a woman in a full-length fur coat, waiting for a $5.00 latte, scream about how oppressed she is. So loudly that all conversation in the tiny mall coffee shop comes to the screeching halt, as none of the other customers are able to hear each other.

Scenes from a Mall

2010-11-05T14:56:00.000-04:00

I'm still regrouping.

As part of the regrouping process, I have taken part-time seasonal(1) work staffing a calendar kiosk run out of a large national bookstore chain. This affords me plenty of time to watch mall life unfold and write tiny notes about what I see and think on pieces of register tape, tiny sheets of notepaper and on the back of half-sheets of invitations to a store's open house. (2)

The kiosk which I am staffing is in a small mall located in suburban Pittsburgh. The stores a mix of independent and upscale chains such as Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma and Anthropologie.

Most weekdays, my pacing around the kiosk is punctuated by the click-swish sound of hands washing mahjong tiles at the nearby tables. Almost daily, groups of four women take over the tables, set out the racks and shuffle tiles. Some bring a thick, felt cloth to muffle the sound of tiles on formica. They bring over trays of lunch from the nearby Panera and spend the afternoon playing. On breaks they wander over to the kiosk to look at the calendars and offer up bits of information about their lives. One woman, a thin, wiry individual with orange-red hair confesses that she comes every week, she is widowed and playing gives her something to do.

The customers offer up all kinds of information to me. They talk about their children, grandchildren and favorite pets. Some stop on the way into the movie theatre and return after the show to give me a short review and pick up a calendar as a Christmas gift.

There are crazies as well. One man asked me why anyone would purchase a calendar of Michelle Obama, as she is a “jerk” and went on a rant about how “we” paid for her Harvard education. I politely demurred that we stocked calendars for all tastes. Dissatisfied with my answer, he sat down at a table, turned the chair so it would be directly in line of sight of the cash wrap and proceeded to glower at me for the 20 minutes it took the upstairs Chinese restaurant upstairs to bring his take-out order to him. Another co-worker warned me that there she has been sexually harassed by a man, who followed her around the kiosk while telling here what he would like to “do” to her. When I asked her why she did not call mall security, she confessed that she did not know if that was okay.

(1)I worked for the same organization for 1.5 years in the early 2000's while J was under and unemployed. I was hired as a seasonal employee and the manager was happy with my work and asked me if I would continue part-time. I worked there until J and I moved to Pittsburgh.

(2)The invitations are placed on open tables by the owner of the florist/tchotchke shop located directly in front of the kiosk. She is a cranky, cranky woman who spends a lot of time complaining about the state of her business and the fact that her customers are “crowded” by the portable display pods in front of the kiosk. Many of the tchotchkes she sells are of a genre hereby dubbed “christian, inspirational”, which would not be a problem except for the fact that a significant demographic of mall customers are older Jewish women who have (I suspect) little use for tin figures of santa claus and gold-glittery tin signs that proclaim “Jesus is King!” She bought several scripture-a-day calendars, stating that she gives them as Christmas gifts to her girlfriends every year.

Law of Unemployment Number One

2010-10-04T11:28:00.002-04:00

Unemployed + uninsured + visit to the dentist = 1 cavity and a $400.00 bill.

The upside? The bill was the most painful part of the experience.

Marshall's Greentree Road, 3:00 PM

2010-10-01T14:09:00.000-04:00

Wednesday afternoon is the time to wander the Marshall's on Greentree Road if you are interested in observing the cross section of humanity that is the wealthy housewives of Mt. Lebanon. It is also the place to be if you want to come within inches of colliding with a former Penguin turned color announcer known in the Pittsburgh area as the “Ol' Two-Niner”.

The housewives are a scary lot. Unfriendly, dressed to the nines, they stalk the store and stake a claim at the racks of designer clothes at cut-rate prices, hovering over the large, button down w/collar white shirts with scary intensity, sending out a “I'll cut you” vibe to any individual tactless enough to attempt to reach for that size 12 Calvin Klein suit jacket and matching size 14 skirt and ramming into me with their miniature sized shopping carts, pausing to say “excuse me” after bruising my poor hip. The “excuse me” is delivered unrepentantly, a two-word verbal dressing down meant to convey how nervy I am, to be standing in the aisle, blocking her way to the size 6's.

I feel very large next to these women as I rummage through the size 12 and 14 pants, wondering when I will have enough energy to push myself back into shape and reminding myself that even if I am able to achieve some sort of “shape” my hips may be unwilling to allow me into anything smaller than a twelve.

I watch a 14 year old girl try on a short, red strapless dress for an upcoming homecoming dance. Her father comments that she looks sexy. As I enter the dressing rooms to try on a stack of pants and a couple of suits, I tell her to lean over and shake, to make sure the strapless top stays put.

He talks about how he is raising her on his own. It is an excellent ploy, as he and his daughter receive more female attention then either know what to do with. One woman suggests Spanx to wear underneath the dress, to give it a cleaner line. Another gives him options and advice about shoes. As he talks on about her, how conscious she is of her body, her voice floats out from the dressing room where she is changing back into street clothes

“Dad, you know I can hear every word you are saying, don't you?”

The suits don't fit without major alterations to both pants and jacket. No money for alterations now, no suit. The pants look terrible, cheap and ill fitting. I sigh and return everything to the attendant.

I wander a little longer, seeking pajamas for Baby Alien. At 9.5 months old, he measures 34 inches long and towers over most of his mates in the baby room at daycare. I've already looked in several thrift shops, but have not yet gathered the patience necessary to dig through the poorly organized sections of baby wear, a puzzlement as the adult clothes are neatly organized by color and size.

I've been tired a great deal this week. I sleep a lot during the day, my body's way of recovering from the months of stress it has been carrying. Next week Baby Alien drops to part time daycare and I am making plans for the days he is home.

Pushed Out

2010-09-26T09:34:00.001-04:00

On the 22 of this month I became officially unemployed. For the first time in my life, since I started working at the age of twelve, I deliberately walked off a job.

It is cold comfort that I choose this status voluntarily.

It is cold comfort that Pennsylvania is an “at-will” state and my contract allowed me to exercise an option to leave their employ without notice.

It is cold comfort that the majority of my coworkers were upset and threw a cocktail hour in my honor on Friday evening.

It is cold comfort that my former employer framed my resignation in such a way as to imply that I was fired and made a major error in the subject line of the email he sent out (1) to the rest of the company announcing my departure. I swiftly dispatched the notion that I was fired as untrue and requested that they tell anyone who believed that I was fired the truth.

It is cold comfort that one of the most libertarian, pro-business of my friends was the first to suggest, without having listened to any analysis of the situation from myself or J, that I was pushed out deliberately because I had a baby. He also, in all seriousness, suggested that I sue them into non-existence, pointing out that “they don't make enough money to settle and you'll bankrupt them if you sue”.

J and I don't have the money to sue, but it was interesting how to witness how quickly an individual's professed values change when it concerns people he or she knows in real life.

I can't prove that my former employer pushed me out. Instructions were always given verbally, never in writing. Negative feedback, on the other hand, was given in writing and usually involved some element of, for lack of better phrasing, “making shit up.”

It has been five days and I'm still emotionally and physically exhausted. The teeth grinding has stopped and the migraines are gone, but I feel achy and sore and bruised all over.

And I have no idea what I'm going to do next.

(1) He referenced an employee fired in January instead of myself.

F(*) You, Go to (**)

2010-08-24T18:42:00.001-04:00

Note: In case the title isn't enough of a warning, this post will be a rant. Possibly a profanity-laced rant. I would like to think that the profanity used in this post will be judiciously chosen, well placed and not suffer from overuse, but I make no promises.

I've reached the saturation point of bullshit that I can handle. So much so that the driver who honked at me this morning under the misperception I was taking up too much of his lane (never mind the parked cars that kept me from pulling over or the fact he was going approximately 15 miles over the speed limit) reduced me to tears. Because of the stress of the last several weeks, I’m tearing through my extremely limited supply of migraine medication at an unprecedented rate. As my last checkup included a demoralizing lecture from the nurse practitioner on my BMI being too high and a grilling on why I needed to take sumatriptan instead of Excedrin Migraine (1), I was not eager to call and ask for more medication. Fortunately, I received the answering service and left my request in the form of a message.

In addition to being placed on indefinite probation, my supervisor oh-so-casually mentioned to me on Thursday that they were relieving me of my responsibility to facilitate an annual client meeting as they had decided to “go in a different direction with the group”. This was followed up with an email from the unofficial leader of the group (2), who thanked me for my service.

And promptly assigned responsibility for the meeting to an individual who, slated to present at the last client gathering, bailed two hours before it was scheduled to take place without submitting any of his materials and without telling me (the person who was supposed to get the materials for incorporation into the meeting) directly.

An individual who has created for himself quite a reputation for pawning his work off on his all female team who he endearingly refers to as “my girls”. If I'm still employed when the next meeting comes around, I am going to get a great deal of pleasure out of saying “NO” to organizing slides and taking notes.

I was bluntly honest with my supervisor. I admitted that I was not terribly upset that I was being relieved of this particular duty, as the leader of the group is especially difficult to work with (2) and preparations for the meeting take an inordinate amount of time. But the timing of this decision goes a long way to confirm my suspicions that they are building a case for my dismissal. Removal from the group also disqualifies me from any year-end bonuses that may be distributed.

As an example of my mindset, this exchange between J and myself from a few days ago:

but does it really matter? They are just saying the same shit your family says. I'm just tired of being the bigger person. Really tired of it. Where has it gotten me, really? I'm being pushed out of my job, my mom wavers between passive aggressive and abusive, your family acts like I'M the crazy one when I do defend myself and the people that I count amongst my closest friends feel free to demonize my values and totally disregard my feelings.

The furor over Park51 (formerly known and Cordoba House) has made a specific subset (aka libertarian/conservative) of my friends go insane. I violated my steadfast rule of not engaging with friends or family members over controversial targets and put myself squarely in the line for a series of ad hominem attacks that summed me up to be a lazy hypocritical communist liar only interested in taking away other people's property from two of my friends. This should, on the surface be laughable.

I'm not laughing in the least. I've spent the last several days crying and trying to pinpoint when it was that I learned that it was not OK to defend myself and I should not bother trying. I think sometime during my adolescence, between teachers who told me I should just suck it up, stop being childish and that I deserved the bullying and my mother, who proclaimed that my expectations of behavior from other people were “too high” (3).

I'm “hypocritical”. The agency for this accusation is based on the claim that (as a liberal) I do not criticize the way they treat Muslim women. When I pointed out that conservative Christians are more than happy to give just about every other religious creed (including Christianity) a pass on their treatment of women and that it was inconsistent to demonize an entire faith while simultaneously claiming that they were the only parties who cared enough to speak out against the terrible treatment of Muslim women, I was told that listing the negative practices of other religious faiths was “excusing” the mistreatment. What?

Here is a short list of known liberals who actively campaign against the mistreatment of women (including Muslims) : Nicolas Kristof, William Jefferson Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Greg Mortenson, Oprah Winfrey, William Gates, Jimmy Carter. Granted some on this list are not directly speaking out against the mistreatment of Muslim women. Instead they are building schools, funding vaccinations, supporting micropayment programs and training programs, all work that gets on with the job of helping women help themselves. The argument that liberals don’t care about the rights of Muslim women is disingenuous, as it assumes that liberals deliberately exclude Muslim women whenever they discuss the practice of FGM, forced marriage, stonings, rapes and other atrocities committed upon women everywhere.

I'm a “Communist liar.” I don't even know what to say this one, except to check the calendar and make sure it is 2010, not 1955. Ditto for “taking away people's property”. I don't have any idea what to do with that statement, it doesn't make sense.

And the worse accusation, that I'm “lazy”. I’m “lazy” because I support welfare, social security and programs such as WIC, even though I’ve only asked for a handout once in my life and paid the money back as soon as I had it available. Aside from that one example, I have never asked any individual, organization or governmental entity for money. The time that my parents covered the gas bill and paid my federal taxes while I was in graduate school? They offered when they saw how little I made on my previous year's tax return.(4) When I wanted to move back to PA after my stint in South Carolina went awry? They offered to me a room in their home until I got married, so I could save money towards a place to live. When J was underemployed and making only enough money to pay the mortgage and nothing else, I got a second job. When we got behind on the gas bill because I was not making enough money from two jobs I arranged a payment plan.

I put 10% of my paycheck towards retirement savings every month because I don't have any expectation of relying on social security. Until Baby Alien arrived I was saving an additional 1K a month as rainy day money. I used that money to fund my maternity leave and did not ask for a cent from my employer. I don’t carry a balance on my credit card for longer than two months and I pay all my bills on time.

I’m “lazy”, even though the original statement, “Would you support the building of a shrine at Pearl Harbor” is a bad analogy that could have been confirmed as such with a 10 second web search using the terms “shrine” and “Pearl Harbor”. I’m “lazy”, even though I’m not the one that proceeded to argue that there shouldn’t be a Shinto shrine there either, because the Japanese attacked the United States. What the fuck does the practice of Shinto have to do with one sovereign nation attacking another? Japan doesn’t have a national religion.

Want lazy, you who could not bother to spend five minutes to determine the source of "the shrine at Pearl Harbor = cultural center at Ground Zero" analogy or the groups currently using it. One of those groups? The same subset of people who attempted to argue that even “if” Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, he wasn’t a US citizen because Hawaii was not a state when he was born. Granted that group backpedaled (eventually) from that assertion, but using an intellectually lazy group of crazies as source material for your arguments is being intellectually lazy squared.(5)

Want lazy? You did not bother to pull up a map and actually look at the location of Ground Zero or the proposed location of the cultural center. You argued that because the wheel of a plane went through the roof of the building at the site of the cultural center, it is part of Ground Zero. When it was pointed out to you that using where parts of a plane fell is poor criteria, as it includes an enormous chunk of Manhattan, you declared all of Manhattan to be sacred and went off on a rant about how the area should be zoned Mosque free. When it was pointed out to you that zoning the area to not allow the building of a Mosque or Muslim community center violates the first amendment, you conveniently ignored that oh-so-inconvenient establishment clause by arguing that if an HOA can dictate what color a property own can paint his or her home, then the city of New York can zone Manhattan as Mosque/Muslim community center free.

In arguing as such, you conflated “freedom of expression” and “freedom from religion”. Freedom of expression means that the government can not prevent you from saying what you want. It does not protect an individual from the private consequences of public speech. Home Owner Associations are not public government entities, they are private organizations.

Freedom from religion means that a public government entity can not permit a city to zone an area as free from one specific religious faith. It is either all or nothing. You want a Islam free zone in all of Manhattan? Fine. Kiss goodbye to every single church, synagogue and religiously affiliated community center in Manhattan as well. You are aware that under that criteria, that list would possibly include the YMCA?

So for calling me a lazy hypocritical communist liar, fuck you. Go to hell.

(1) Excedrin Migraine gives me the shakes, a side effect so bad that I would prefer the pain and nausea instead.
(2) See posts from April 2009.
(3) Blaming my mother is so passe, yet here I am.
(4) I would have done my own taxes, but my father enjoys that sort of thing and it became a ritual for him to do it every year, just as I would wrap my mother's Christmas presents from him every year.
(5) Try to follow the logic of the organization who is offering such sparkling arguments, gentlemen. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, located on Hawaiian island of Oahu (a U.S. Territory since 1898) in 1941, they were attacking the United States so Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor = BAD. But when Barack Obama was born in 1961 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu (the same exact island attacked by the Japanese 20 years earlier), he was not born in the United States, thus can’t be a citizen. Which one is it?

Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1893 and became a U.S. Territory in 1898. In 1900, citizens born on the Hawaiian islands were granted United States citizenship. So even if Hawaii had not been an actual state in 1961, Obama would still be considered a U.S. citizen because he was born on a U.S. Territory to a U.S. citizen. Which I learned in 20 minutes of research.

Evaluation

2010-08-15T20:48:00.003-04:00

I don't like changing jobs. I am proud that my employment history indicates a personality that is happy to stay around long term. I try very hard to work out differences. When I changed jobs two years ago, I agonized for several months over leaving, even though I knew intellectually that I was not challenged enough and could earn a considerable amount more somewhere else. But it was not until six months into my new position, when I learned that my former employer had fired everyone and closed the office that I breathed a sigh of relief over moving on to something new.

I've been trying for the past two weeks to wrap my brain around the fact that I will need to start looking again. It is becoming painfully apparent that I am not a good fit at this job and that I must find a new position before I find myself unemployed.

An implementation with a new client went terribly wrong and I am on probation, indefinitely. All the work I do must be reviewed by my supervisor on a weekly basis and by the VP on a monthly basis. If I fail to complete any task by the end of the week, I must give my supervisor a detailed explanation as to why it was not completed.

There is a long story behind this, but any explanation I have tried to come up with ends with me sounding as if I am incapable of taking responsibility for my failures. The VP is not interested in my perspective on what went wrong – if he was, he would have asked me about my perspective before announcing that I as going to have the hell micromanaged out of me. There is also a strong element of scapegoating behind the VP's decision. Conversations with the other actors in this project have revealed that I was the only individual disciplined.

So I'm looking. And considering my options.

Heartache

2010-07-11T20:12:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday was the Fourth of July. As is our custom, we drove out to Washington County to celebrate with close friends, a married couple (C & D) with a large home and lots of property. Plenty of grilled food, cold salads, chips, desserts and beers of both the home brewed (by J and C) and mass produced variety. J and the party's host set off fireworks after dark.

It was especially joyful this year. Baby Alien, at seven months, is a stubborn bundle of laughter so interested in the world around him that bedtime is considered a personal affront. He might miss something. The house was overrun with children, including a little girl several months older than Baby Alien. D, eighteen weeks pregnant with twins, was passing around the latest set of ultrasound images. A boy and a girl.

Monday afternoon, D miscarried. Both babies lost. There were no warning signs. D was in perfect health, the pregnancy was progressing well, all her tests were normal.

Just one of those things that happens sometimes.

When words fail, make food. Express love and concern via a dish that takes some time and a bit of effort. Effort to hunt down the correct chili varietals to season the dish. Spend some more time carefully removing seeds and veins from the dried peppers, washing hands thoroughly to avoid getting oil in the eyes. Hack apart 4.5 pounds of pork shoulder while the chilies reconstitute, simmering in a mixture of water, tomatoes, cumin, onion and garlic. Throw together, cook overnight. Skim the fat, add grits.

Try not to think about how colossally unfair are the machinations of the universe. Try not to think about the last fifteen months, how miserable you were to be pregnant, while your friend would give anything to still be in that state. Hope that she doesn't hate you now. Think of clichés instead, because the words are easy.

Today J and I drove out to their home, Baby Alien in the backseat, a container of pozole on ice in the trunk. J stayed in the car with Baby Alien while I headed towards the front door. I handed them the food, gave them hugs. Told them how sorry I was. D cried. I cried. C asked us to wait a moment, he had something for J.

A case of the latest home brew. An apology for being so sad, but “we picked up the ashes today”.

Drive away. Hope that they know the food was a gesture from the heart and that exhortations that they call us if they need anything are more then just empty words.

Baby Alien sleeps now. He has a lingering cough that he can not shake, a remnant of his first illness (the croup). Intellectually I know that is nothing, as I caught the virus from Baby Alien and have not been able to shake the cough either. Still, tomorrow we will call his doctor.

The Unbearable Frustration and Anxiety of Being

2010-05-26T18:10:00.001-04:00

I am not OK, some days. Some days the normal vagaries of life wear me down to pointlessness. Some days this is more than just the normal weariness that accompanies caring for an infant.

It is the little things. The attempts to reach out that seem to backfire. The moments that I step out of my comfort zone that go awry. Some days I feel that no matter how much I try, I will always remained isolated. That Baby Alien will grow up to deal with a weird, sad, socially maladjusted mama whom he is embarrassed to call his mother.

My interpretive skills have gone to total shit. I seem to have lost any ability to navigate social settings with anything resembling grace, and I was never all that good at reading people to begin with.

I went to a bridal shower a few weeks ago. Part of stepping out (I hate showers) of my comfort zone. I bought a dress from Ann Taylor. I dug out the pretty silver shoes I wore to my brother's wedding. I put on the pretty Baccarat crystal necklace J purchased for me as a gift on our trip to Paris. I ruined two pairs of pantyhose before leaving the house. I tucked a bottle of wine into the gift bag, to go along with the corkscrew set off the bride and groom's registry. How bad could it be? I knew the groom - he was the brother of a close childhood friend. I knew the groom's mother (like a second mother to me), his sister, his two sisters-in-law, his aunts, his cousins. I knew some of his friends and the bride - J and I had socialized with him, her and their friends enough to be excited over their upcoming wedding.

It was awful. Not the kind of awful that you walk into right away, but the type of clusterfuck that starts out innocuously and slowly builds momentum until you hit a point where you wonder why you bothered to buy the pretty Ann Taylor dress and dig out the silver sandals that really don't fit your feet properly. The wild desire that you entertained days earlier to get out of the house and do anything gives way to frantic plots to escape.

The groom's mother greeted me warmly and made another place at the already crowded table for me to sit, with the rest of her family. Demanded to see baby pictures of Baby Alien. Passed around the iPod containing cute photos of baby. With the exception of one aunt (1), all cooed over photos and caught me up to speed on small town gossip while the aunt changed the subject to her children whenever anyone at the table asked me a question about Baby Alien.

The three, KN, KB and H, sat in a fog of tension so thick it was visible. Cut out of the shower planning by the bride's sister and multitude of friends while still expected to front the money to pay for the party, they plotted ways to avenge themselves on the other bridesmaids and spent the bulk of the shower tracking gifts and cleaning up wrapping paper with politely bitter smiles. In a classic demonstration of social ineptness, I missed the cues that the wanted my assistance in exacting said revenge by declining to put the tickets in the baskets. (2)

And so the shower progressed, with angry bridesmaids on one side, a politely hostile aunt on another and a disinterested waitstaff on the third, as I was unable to get a drink or refill of water. The guests grew restless and hungry (but not thirsty, as I appeared to be the only person in the room forced to ration her beverage), with nary a roll or leaf of lettuce to nibble on an hour into the party. Many guests, desperately downed the elaborate wedding cake cookie placed at each table as a party favor. One table managed to score several six packs of Miller Lite and were merrily drinking their way through bottle after bottle.

Desperate for some distraction from the lack of food, the angry sisters took it upon themselves to begin drawing tickets for the baskets. Service of the meal was rushed as the bride needed to begin opening gifts in short order if the party was going to end at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as originally planned.

The gifts included the traditional mix of tacky lingerie and other "martial aids" that are so de rigor at bridal showers in these parts. It ended with the groom appearing with a large bouquet of flowers and the groom's mother asking me if I had eaten the fish, as one of the guests had become ill shortly after finishing her meal.

While on my way out, I stopped in the restroom to change my clothes and heard the aforementioned sick guest in the next stall. It was not the fish that had bought her low. It was the several bottles of Miller Lite.

Weeks later, this should just be a funny story. But it is not. Instead all the subtext from that day has been tinged ugly. This past weekend my brother told us that S and H are hosting a bonfire, to which J and I were not invited. He did not invite us because his wife, H, did not want me there.

Rationally, I understand that the bridal shower had nothing to do with the bonfire. H has never warmed to me and this is not the first time we have been excluded from plans that include my brother and his wife.

But it stung. It stung me, who has tried so hard over the years to get along with H, a person who I genuinely like. It hurts to see J, who counts S as one of his closest friends and chose S to be the best man at our wedding, who socialized with S and my brother before he met me, excluded and to know that I am the reason.

Now the comment that one of the sisters made before I left the shower, about how dressed up I was, seems catty rather than a humorous observation. And my efforts to get out in the world seem foolish, useless and pointless.

And worse of all, I am afraid I am turning into someone J is ashamed of.

(1) I was unsurprised. Several years ago I took a beautiful candid photograph (really, it was a great photo) of her youngest daughter playing during a family party and offered up a copy for her album. She complained that I made her daughter look too old and has apparently entertained an active dislike of me from that day forward.

(2) I am routinely astounded by how quickly moments like the above can propel me back to high school, when I was painted as scolding, moralistic tattle-telling goody-two-shoes merely because I was disinterested in participating in any of the dumb juvenile delinquency of my classmates. And I never told on anyone, ever. I got that, much undeserved reputation when I inadvertently revealed to a male upperclassman that the girl he was dating had lied about her age. I shall never forget the upbraiding I received from one of the cheerleaders, nor the threat that she would "make my life hell" if he broke up with the girl. As my high school life was sheer misery, I'm not sure what she could have done to it any worse because it was that bad. As for the sisters - if they had spelled out for me what they wanted I would have happily volunteered.

Things I Don't Like

2010-05-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

I don't like being held up as an example of how pregnant women are supposed to act.

However one of my (male) coworkers has deemed it fit to use me as an example whenever his pregnant wife complains that she is tired or feels limited in what she can do on a day-to-day basis.

As his wife is not working, my coworker feels that it is necessary to remind her that I got up and went to work every day until the end of my pregnancy. Literally. When I pointed to out to coworker that I did very, very little but go to work, forcing J into multiple roles of cook, dishwasher, cleaner-of-kitty-litter boxes and scrubber of toilets, he shrugged off my gentle objections with a "but, still..."

I am not amused. I am offended. And I would not be at all surprised if this poor woman, who is now late in her third trimester, hates me.

If Not for You Meddling Kids...

2010-04-29T20:56:00.000-04:00

Or, in this case, replace “meddling kids” with “meddling in-law”.

I'm glad for a little bit of minor personal family drama. It is something useful to escape from the non-stop attention Pittsburgh media has been paying to the quarterback formerly known as “Mr. Play for Jesus”, now better known as “showing up in the lyrics of Eminem's most recent song”.

Escape has not been as easy as turning off the television/radio and eschewing print and online Pittsburgh media because said quarterback's most recent travails have confirmed the bias I always held against him from the moment he was drafted – that this was a guy I would not want to spend five seconds alone with in a room.

End of digression Number 1. For further digressions, please see the footnotes, they are especially voluminous and verbose today.

J's mother, especially, can be a force to be reckoned with. During one of my less than finer moments in the past ten years I suggested that J's family has some Jewish members in the woodpile(1), such is the amount of passive-aggressive guilt that J's mother can pile on victims unsuspecting and otherwise.(2)

I have a thing about celebrating my birthday which can be traced back to the fact that I share a birthday with my brother, M. My twin brother. For roughly twenty years M and I had to negotiate our birthday celebrations. Some years he won and choose the dinner. Some years I did and got to eat chocolate cake. Some years (all occurring after I reached the age of 30) I've had to pretend that it was not my birthday at all and been yelled at by my mother for telling people that it was. I've had many a horrible birthday in my half-lifetime and have become stupidly neurotic about striving to have a good day.(3)

The thing that has developed with celebrating my birthday is that I want to be the one to plan it. Planning usually involves spending the day with J in some sort of fun activity, such as a visit to the National Aviary or Warhol Museum or making an elaborate and expensive meal for some of our friends. Some years I take the day off from work. Some years I plan for the closest Saturday. We get up, we go to breakfast, we go do something. This year I was looking forward to figuring out something that would involve Baby Alien(4) and toying with the idea of the Children's Museum, as there would be lots to look at and I could indulge in one of the fun things about being a parent – playing with children's “stuff” without fear of censure from other adults. And because doing something fun would remove the taint from the past two years.(5)

All my ruminations have come to a bad end, as my mom tipped me off during a recent phone conversation that my mother-in-law, gods bless her meddling little heart, was planning celebratory-type activities for my birthday and Mother's Day.(6)

My mother knew this because my mother-in-law called to ask her to come for Mother's Day, then attempted to pull a guilt trip on my mother because my parents will be on vacation in a location eight hours away and are rightfully reluctant to drive back in the middle of their vacation for one day.

The conversation moved from Mother's Day to my birthday and my MIL desire to plan my birthday celebration and her desire to gain my parents participation in the plans.

My mother reminded her that it was also my brother's birthday. I'm not sure if she did this because

she still remains under the impression that my twin and I somehow coordinate birthday celebrations,
my twin would be offended by my parents only celebrating with me,
she could not conceive of celebrating our birthday without my twin or
it was the easiest way to bring the conversation to a conclusion.

The more I think about the conversation, the more hilarious it becomes. My mother-in-law was bewildered that my mother would find driving back for one day unreasonable. My mother was bewildered that my mother-in-law was attempting to make her feel guilty and sat in awe of her powers of passive aggressive persuasion. Thinking about it now makes me laugh out loud.

She ranted, a little bit, about how unfair it was that I would not get to decide what I wanted to do on Mother's Day. In a spectacular display of tone deafness she also complained about my twin being excluded from any birthday plans she might want to make.

I, for what is worth, have resigned myself to rolling my eyes and allowing her to plan out both days, as they are taking Baby Alien for a night so J and I can attend a wedding - which is occurring the same day as the graduation party of J's oldest nephew. Payback.

(1) I admit that I put a toe across the border into heavy stereotyping with this comment. However, J's great grandmother was from Poland, came from a part of the country with a large Jewish population and immigrated to the United States in the 40's. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that family members converted to Catholicism to avoid rising anti-semitism, then immigrated. However, I have also been told (guilty of stereotyping again) that the only thing worse than a Jewish mother to pile on the guilt is a mother who happens to be Polish-Catholic. Additionally, the joke seems to be on me as J passed the Jewish suggestion on to his mother, who laughed then quietly admitted that there was a possibility that some of her fore-relatives may have converted.

(2) While I still can't completely suss out when she will strike, my reactions have gone from righteous annoyance to eye rolling, whining, mental shrugging and the occasional conciliation to her desires.

(3) As J expressed to me last night, one would think after almost 40 years I would give up trying.

(4) Going back to original nickname.

(5)The great [non] birthday fiasco of 2008 was followed by 2009, in which J was sick and spent most of what was possibly the only day in the first 20 something weeks of pregnancy that I was not unbearably nauseated, asleep. All I wanted was a card and a cupcake. I got neither. I did, however get a phone call from A in Switzerland (the same friend who sent me photographs of pregnant and newly postpartum supermodels to make me feel better about my increasing girth in late pregnancy. From anyone else this would have been considered highly misguided, as I'm certainly not the kind of pretty or thin that could be classified as “supermodel”. From A, who could never resist looking a beautiful woman, it was kind of sweet and did make me feel better in a weird sort of way) which rescued the day from becoming a tear-filled disaster.

(As a further digression, A revealed to me several weeks ago that he and his wife (who is supermodel- territory beautiful, brilliant and fabulous) are expecting their first child, thus providing a theory to explain his offbeat obsession with pregnant supermodels – his wife was in early pregnancy when he sent me all the photos and links.)

(6)I'm offering odds to those in the know on whether these plans include some way of getting me to go to mass.

Hurts Men Too

2010-04-12T19:59:00.000-04:00

Saturday night BooBoo decided he was not going to sleep in his crib. Every time J put him down he woke up and began to yell. By attempt number three J was exhausted and frustrated and warned me that he was going to let BooBoo yell it out for a while, to see if he would put himself to sleep. I agreed to let him do it.

It did not work. I did not expect it would work. I've noticed over the past week that BooBoo is starting to understand that he is a separate little person, with a separate little will that does not have to mesh with his parents. I'm proud to see this. Seeing him turn his head and watch me walk away when I drop him off at daycare instead of gazing at the ceiling made me feel pretty good.

So what I see as a normal (albeit annoying) developmental milestone has left J reeling. And anxious.

“What is wrong with him” he asked, exasperated after wrapping the child up in a blanket and handing him to me to hold. While BooBoo stared at me, with eyes wide and full of immense concentration, I threw out a few suggestions – headache, ear infection, tummy trouble, just-plain-lonely.

“Should we take him to a doctor?”

Seventeen weeks into this journey and already I hate, hate, hate when J asks any variation of this question, beginning with the trigger phrase “should we”. What appears to be a perfectly innocuous inquiry from his point of view makes me want to beat down every single male and female who taught J, through words or stupid example, that he is incapable of trusting his instincts and intuition as a father. Not a parent. A father.

“I don't have an instinct for this” J says whenever BooBoo has cried a little too long because he is hungry, or needs a diaper changed or just-needs-to-cry-over-his-incompentent-staff-damnit.

My response – “Yes, you do. Spend more time with him.”

J dislikes that I do not step in or otherwise interfere when he cares for BooBoo. As long as he does not appear to be in danger or downright hysterical, I usually leave J to figure out what BooBoo needs with minimal interference from me. I suspect that he thinks, although he is smart enough to never admit it, that I'm abdicating responsibility.

Which I am. I'm abdicating sole responsibility of BooBoo to his biological father in order to avoid a dynamic in which I become the single decider and doer in all issues connected with the care and feeding of baby. I don't want that level of responsibility.

Still, there remains this idea that men like J are not competent enough to care for their own children. Members of J's own family are still express surprise at how comfortable I about J taking BooBoo to visit his grandparents, hang with the guys at Quaker Steak and Lube and watch J and his friends brew beer – without me along to supervise.

The Dairy (1) is Now Closed

2010-03-19T21:20:00.001-04:00

I've been writing this entry in my head all week. But every time I try to sit down and put the words on screen I hesitate for a myriad of reasons sensible and senseless all at once.

BooBoo is now 100% on formula. And I could not be happier.

I read a lot of stuff. (Stay with me. There is a point to this). Some at the library, more online. One of the biggest complaints my family had throughout BooBoo's (2) gestation was that I read too much and knew too much about what was going on with my body. I shouldn't have been reading so much, it would make me worry too much.

Victorian/Edwardian much? Ignorance is bliss? Reading was one of the few things I could do to maintain some semblance of control during a process that was very much out of my control.

I was not surprised when I had to put away my lovely bras in favor of quasi-sport style bras and tanks with snaps and cutouts.
I was not surprised to have to buy shoes that would expand enough to fit my feet during the last months of pregnancy.
I was not surprised to find, three days after delivering BooBoo, that the shoes I had purchased in point 2 didn't fit. I left the hospital in a wheelchair, sporting socks. If it had not been December, I would have forgone the socks altogether and left barefooted.

The weeks wore on and the two of us settled into some kind of rhythm. Even though it was still taking almost an hour to nurse him. Even though I had to give him both breasts every time. Even though it continued to hurt like hell every time he nursed off my right breast (which was every time he nursed). Even though the only time he seemed to not be hungry ½ an hour after finishing was when J gave him a bottle with formula. Even though he was barely above his birth weight and J was giving a bottle every night to help him gain.

Week eight came and went. I was still getting only an hour of sleep at a time. I was becoming increasingly depressed, to the point where I was contemplating hurting myself. I was not eating. I had no time and was not hungry anyway. I resented BooBoo. I resented J.

On the Monday morning of the ninth week I spent an hour nursing BooBoo. I put him down on his play mat for a few minutes so I could get something to eat. From the kitchen I could hear him crying. He was hungry. Again. He had finished nursing only five minutes before and he was screaming as if he had never eaten at all.

And the thought of me putting him to my right breast, of experiencing another ½ hour of burning pain that had no cause, was too much. I reached for a bottle. 2 ounces of water, a scoop of formula, shake like crazy.

And BooBoo took the bottle. Hungrily, easily, happily. When he was finished he looked at me with a contented expression and feel into a comfortable sleep.

And I experienced a moment of mental and emotional peace that I had not felt in months. I decided that today was a good day to start weaning BooBoo for daycare. Pump and bottle feed during the day, nurse in the morning and at night.

It was a good plan that didn't work. I didn't produce enough milk to send what he needed to daycare. I altered the plan. Give him formula during the day, nurse in the mornings, breast milk from a bottle in the evenings.

Which worked for two weeks, until I got food poisoning and the milk supply quit altogether. Quit cold. The painful weaning that I read about? Didn't happen. I just stopped producing.

I read a lot. A lot of blog entries from other women who have quit breastfeeding because it just didn't work for a myriad of reasons. And a I read the comments, supportive and cruel. Comments from women who were able to successfully breastfeed their children for a year plus yet got that sometimes it just doesn't work. Cruel comments from “lactation activists” (3) about sucking it up and soldiering on, no matter the mental, physical, emotional cost.

Since I stopped, being with BooBoo has been a joy. It is a joy to get up at 5:00am, while he is still sleeping, so I can be showered and dressed when he wakes. It is a joy to listen to him cry (he is not a morning person) as I change and dress him for the day. To make funny faces and silly noises in the off chance that he will smile. To hear him learning how to laugh.

And I know, deep in that part of me that just knows, that I would not have felt this if I had continued trying to do something that was fundamentally not working.

Thank you, from every fiber of my being, to those who offered support through emails and comments in these past weeks. Your kindness amazes me.

There has been one surprise. I was surprised to discover that my very flat feet are now flatter and the first few steps I take whenever I get up from a chair hurt.

(1) Quoth Jeff to a friend “We have a dairy in the back of our fridge” when I was still pumping out a decent amount every day. A very apt description.
(2) The Alien has graduated to the nickname BooBoo.
(3) I refuse to invoke Godwin's law in an entry about breastfeeding. Not going to do it.

Work Again, Work Again, Jiggity-jig

2010-03-13T19:24:00.001-05:00

I started back at work a day later than originally planned. Having to call off on my first day back was embarrassing, but necessary, due to the semi-massive bout of food poisoning both J and myself suffered late Sunday night into the wee hours of Monday last.

After some discussion, the culprit was determined to be the (many days expired) soy milk that J used Sunday morning to make chai tea. The tea sat on the counter for most of Sunday and I threw the caution I usually utilize(1) when sampling J's wares to the wind and had several glasses. As did J.

Late Sunday night, after simultaneously cursing and celebrating Canada's win over the United States in Olympic gold-medal round hockey(2) I expressed to J that I was not feeling very well. We compared notes on our symptoms.

And about 15 minutes after that conversation all hell broke loose for the adult members in our household. J and I spent the next several hours trading off time in the bathroom. For the first time in many a day I found myself, cheek to cool tile floor, wishing for a quick death(3).

Around 1:00am, as the two of us lay on our bed, the following dialogue took place:
Me: Would this constitute enough of an emergency to call your mom?
J: Yes.
Me: Why don't we do that then?
J: Now? (Even the question mark was in italics).
Me: Why not?
J: I'll call them in the morning.

At 6:00am I dragged myself out of bed, fed (from a bottle, I'll be damned if my kid accidentally gets food poisoning from me(4)) and dressed a perfectly healthy and happy L for his first full day of day care. I am unable, two weeks later, to explain how I managed to get him to the center and back home again. All I know is that the delusion I maintained at one o'clock in the morning that I would be able to make it into work was completely shattered. I sent an email off to my supervisor and collapsed into a stupor on our bed once again.

J's parents arrived around 3:00pm, food for their dinner in hand(5). They helped J (who was far sicker than I) pick up L and took care of him until 5:00am Tuesday morning. After they left I discovered they had done all the dishes and left food in the refrigerator.

Food poisoning aside, returning to work has been delightful.

(1) J's desire to NOT waste food means that he will drink and eat many days expired items from our fridge. I've even caught him eating moldy bread. I, on the other hand, am usually far more cautious.
(2) Cursing as the United States lost. Celebrating as the game-winning goal was scored by the Penguins' Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovech-whathisnamewho? did not get within smelling distance of a medal of any variety. This is not because I think Crosby is more talented than Ovechkin. This is because I can't stand seeing an athlete as talented as Ovechkin unnecessarily thug it up on the ice.
(3) The difference between this and the many times I wished for a quick death during my recent time gestating the alien? No tile floor and guilt-free access to tequila.
(4) I'm pretty certain that this was a contributing factor to the beginning of the end of my function as a dairy.
(5) My father-in-law has, for years, maintained that we have no food or beverages in our home. Which translates to no food or beverages J's father would be willing to eat or drink. This habit goes back almost as long as J and I have been married, when we had a spirited discussion with J's father over the fact that we never had soda/pop in our home. This is the same man who turned down homemade chicken noodle soup because he wanted chili then complained that I made the chili wrong. Yes, I am still a little bit bitter about the five hours of my life I will never get back from that incident.

Bad Mom – Entry Number 1

2010-02-19T12:18:00.002-05:00

My in-laws are not pleased with me.

My in-laws are not pleased with me and think that I am a bad, disinterested mother.

My in-laws are not pleased with me and think that I am a bad, disinterested mother because I have zero qualms about my child's father (their son) taking L for the day without me. To his parents (my in-laws) home.

They want to know “what is wrong with [me]”. Nothing that a few hours of uninterrupted sleep would not solve in short order.

On the upside, the fact that the question irritates me means that I'm feeling more like myself.

Snzzzz

2010-02-13T22:54:00.002-05:00

I have not had much to write about lately, as my life as a bus-riding, full-time worker bee has temporarily ceased to focus on helping L to figure out how to live in the world. I spend several moments every day struggling to fill my brain up with something other than the three god-awful songs emitting from the Fisher Price 2-in-1 Playful Puppy Gym.

But L loves this hideous piece of plastic and it has become a key part of our daily routine, as the 20-30 precious minutes L spends enthralled is more than enough time for me to get a shower and breakfast. Enthralled in this case means that he waves his skinny arms, vigorously kicks his feet and emits an occasional shout when the music ceases playing.

Such is my desperation some days to get out of the house and into the world sans infant, that a trip to Costco turns into an event. Hours I can spend, wandering the warehouse, debating the merits in the purchase of a 24 pack of San Pellegrino Limonata and Aranciata (I passed up on the opportunity) and resisting the temptation to purchase $60.00 worth of iTunes gift cards for $55.00. Only to turn around and spend an embarrassing and slightly obscene sum of money of bulk goods ranging from a 5lb bag of unshelled pistachios to 64oz of dishwashing detergent.

Today's score? Two 40lb bags of kitty litter for the low price of less than $10.00 a bag. Such a little bulk saver I am becoming.

Such was my obliviousness to the bulk buying process that I failed to observe that items are not actually bagged. Instead they are placed into boxes recycled from the item's packaging.

One of these days, something interesting may happen to me again.

Notes From the First Six Weeks

2010-01-28T16:42:00.000-05:00

My younger brother shocked the daylights out of both of us when he drove 4 plus hours from his home on the day of L's birth just to see him. And drove back home the same day.
Nothing tasted as sweet as that first shot of tequila after bringing L home.
All those experts who state that newborn babies sleep 18 out of 24 hours are full of crap.
The sleep deprivation is as bad as I thought it would be.
I'm never going to enjoy breastfeeding. And I'm OK with that.
You know you are doing something right as a couple when you manage to successfully tick off both sets of grandparents for essentially the same reason.
Babies can cause insanity in previously normal and low maintenance family members.
A trip to Costco feels like a night on the town.
My tolerance for alcohol has dropped to levels not seen since I was twenty-one years old. One glass of wine and I am loopy for several hours. I am officially a “cheap date” once again.
We managed to get through our first post-baby date night without calling home to check on L.
I am not cut out to be a stay-at-home mother.
The perception that one's child is cute is a biological construct created to prevent a parent from killing their child.
It is rather sad that I had to have a child in order to earn the respect and the right to be treated like an adult from some parties. It negates everything else that I have accomplished in my life.
Dr. Seuss footed pajamas and magna onesis = total win. Best gift we received, hands down.
Every time I think I can't be more overwhelmed with graditude for the kindness and support of once internet strangers, I am overwhelmed once again.

Aftermath I

2009-12-28T19:32:00.002-05:00

L is lovely.

I hate breastfeeding. Really, really hate it. I don't produce enough to keep L satisfied. I don't produce enough to pump. And L tends to fall asleep, so every second that he is feeding I am actively struggling to keep him awake.

His doctor says I need to start pumping now to get him used to bottles. The LC says I need to wait, since he is having issues with feeding. Last night I had a breakdown at midnight. J took L from me, told me to go to sleep, went downstairs and fixed a bottle of formula, which he fed to L. Two hours later I was up and feeding him again.

My mom says to follow my instinct (that he is not getting enough from me) and supplement.

I hate this. I'm going crazy inside my house. I can't go out, because I can't feed him him without exposing myself. I'm home alone for part of the day until next week, when J goes back to work full time.

Part of me wants to give up now. But I think about the financial waste – the pump, the breast shields, the storage bags, the cost of formula and I cringe to think about how much money we would be throwing away.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

2009-12-16T21:29:00.002-05:00

Summary: J and I are now proud (and sleep deprived) parents. Our child, L, was born on Saturday afternoon, at 3:58pm.

The Bad: Labor. The whole thing. From the membranes breaking on Friday at 11:30 in the morning while I was at work, to the drive to the birth center, to the back-and-forth from birth center, to hospital, to birth center and finally back to the hospital over the course of 28 hours.

Highlights included witnessing the driver of an 18 wheeler do a u-turn in the middle of Stanwix street, denting the guardrail and nearly taking out a convention center support beam and several cars, vehicles driving the wrong way up Penn Avenue and two trips to the hospital, the first to assess why my blood pressure had become so unstable and to do an ultrasound, the second as a formal transfer, as my contractions never developed any rhythm due to L flipping to a posterior position (aka “back labor”) and I was dilating too slowly to remain safely at the center.

The Good: The hospital staff, from the anesthesiologist who applied the epidural and took the time to explain not only what he was doing, but how and why, the midwife and hospital nursing staff who worked together to prevent a knife-happy OB/GYN from forcing me to have a cesarean section and J, who hid his fear and anxiety until after L was born.

Surgeons were consulted on L's positioning. Nurses not assigned to the labor stopped by to offer suggestions and moral support. The neo-natal unit was called down to take L at birth to ensure that he was healthy. I can confidently say that I would not have made it without their support and care.

The Ugly: J's parents showing up while I was in labor and in no shape to see anyone, in total and complete disregard of my previously and repeatedly expressed wishes that they stay home until otherwise instructed. J's parents do not handle hospitals well. They came into the room to make themselves feel better and I found myself wasting time and energy trying to reassure his mother that I was OK. I finally quietly and politely asked them to leave the room.

My parents also showed up in defiance of my previously expressed wishes. I took their arrival slightly better, if only because both of my parents are nurses and they know how to behave in such situations. They stayed only five minutes and I did not have to ask them to leave.

That it took two people, a surgeon and the midwife over thirty minutes to stitch me back up.

That J's sister showed up with her husband and children (against the express wishes of the hospital that children under the age of 12 remain at home) in the maternity ward at 8:00pm (visiting hours end at 8:30pm), after being told by J's parents that both of us were exhausted and NOT to visit us on Saturday. Her explanation? That they were “too busy” to come visit on Sunday, Saturday was more convenient for them. J refused to allow them into the room and the family went home angry because they were not permitted to see me or hold L, and complained to J's parents about how unwelcome they felt.

For the record, this is the same sister who was offended when I stopped her from touching my stomach.

Filed Under...

2009-12-07T22:00:00.001-05:00

...things you should not say to a woman entering week 37 of pregnancy:

“Oh, you are too high! You are not going to drop for weeks. Its gonna be a while yet before you have that baby”.

Then giggle and start talking about how you did 10 jumping jacks on a hot summer day to make your water break, which it did the next morning, and how horrified you were because 10 jumping jacks may have ruptured the placenta.

Continue in this vein for several more minutes, bragging about how early all your children were and offering unsolicited advice while ignoring the frosty silence and stiff smile of the luckless pregnant woman forced to listen to such twaddle.

Compound that with having to listen to conversation about "how wonderful" it would be to have an infant at Wigilia this year, as if my sore, sleep deprived, learning-how-to-breastfeed ass will want to do nothing more than feed the infant, pack myself into a car, drive an hour and subject myself to 30+ people in a small room.

Programming Note

2009-12-03T07:53:00.000-05:00

To hapless spouses of first time pregnant women everywhere:

It does not behoove you to complain about giving up four Saturdays over a forty week period to attend some childbirthing and don't kill the baby classes. Especially when pregnant spouse has actively encouraged you to go out with mutual friends, continue playing the sports that you love, pushed you to get exercise and spend time with your parents and siblings and essentially done everything within her limited power to make sure that you continue to maintain some sense of normality during a highly abnormal period of time. You sacrificed four Saturdays. Your spouse, on the other hand, has sacrified her physical being and emotional sanity. She wins. Stop being a jerk.

Too Many Days

2009-12-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

Less than four weeks. I'm uncomfortable, cranky and offering myself up as a willing guinea pig for any person willing to cast any sort of voodoo spell that will shorten the end of the alien's gestation.

I'm not willing to put up with too anything from anyone. After almost 36 weeks of restraint, my mother decided to pull out the clichés during a post-Thanksgiving dinner conversation and was promptly smacked down. In the defensive, injured air put on by any individual who knows better, but goes ahead and does it anyway, she protested that she had exercised restraint over the past 35 plus weeks. I pointed out to her that if she had been successfully able to hold her tongue for over 35 weeks, four more should have been easy.

Last week, for the first time in my life, I yelled at a healthcare provider. Concerned that I might be leaking amniotic fluid, I called the midwives, who squeezed me in for an appointment for an internal exam and to take a specimen. The nurse who examined me neglected to mention that because of the potential risk of infection, she would be unable to use any lubrication or that I might be “extra sensitive” until after I started yelling at her while on the table.

She was apologetic about the incident. Which soothed my feelings, but not my poor parts, which ached for the rest of the week. The leakage turned out to be a false alarm,

I feel subtle changes. I'm getting sweaty. The migraines, which never went away completely, have increased to their pre-pregnancy level of intensity and duration. Tylenol is completely ineffective as is the only other cure available to me right now – a solid night of sleep. And the nausea of the first 20 weeks has returned, in a slightly more manageable form.

The first of now weekly checkups came with a list of instructions. When to call the midwives – if I have another full blown migraine(1) or my water breaks. What to do if I start early labor near bedtime – call the midwife and take a Benadryl(2) to get some sleep.

My crankiness has increased since I started this post, three days ago. I feel incredibly isolated, angry and lonely right now and acting in ways that are highly counterproductive, such as isolating myself even further so I don't act out against the undeserving, including J. Who feels the tension and anger anyway and has responded by inviting a bunch of our friends over to our home on Saturday to watch the Penguins/Blackhawks game. It is the correct thing to do – I'm too uncomfortable to go out for extended periods of time at this point and I need to socialize with other people.

Too many days left.

(1) It is interesting to observe what healthcare professionals will freak out about. I've had several migraines over the course of this pregnancy, just of a lower level of pain and shorter duration, mild enough that it never occurred to me to mention them. Especially since not every woman experiences a cessation in migraine activity during pregnancy. I mentioned the headache because I was curious if it acted as a precursor to labor, a sign that my hormone levels were returning to a non-pregnant state. From the midwife's point of view, it was an indicator of something more serious.

(2) I had no idea how many off label uses there were for Benadryl until I got sick in the past month.

Five Weeks

2009-11-24T08:41:00.000-05:00

The older I become the more that I am convinced of the studies that suggest that some illness is an immune system stress response. Throw up on a bus, wake up two days later with a head cold and no access to any of the OTC medications I regularly use to ease the symptoms at night.

Take diphenhydramine (benadryl) instead the midwives suggest, as the primary side effect (drowsiness) should be enough to knock me out so I can sleep. And if that does not work, call the center and they will write a prescription for a sleep aid. I can't take an OTC decongestant, but I can take an Ambian?

The diphenhydramine works. I take a half dose and nearly lose the pill, so tiny and clear that it falls from the blister pack and blends in with the wood of the dresser. While I wait for it to take effect J wipes down the walls and moves the furniture around, trying to make the room more comfortable. In half an hour I am fighting to stay awake and my dreams go from color to black and white and are disappointedly mundane.

I elect to skip a second dose in favor of elevating my head with a wedge pillow and running the vaporizer from the moment I get home to when I wake up in the morning. The felines like the new arrangement, little grey Lucy is especially fond of the wedge as it leaves her enough room to sleep above my head, paws occasionally kneading at my head. The other two have started sleeping at my feet, one on each side and hanging out on the bed and chair during the day. Lucy elects to split her daytime sleeping hours between the car seat and the crib.

Between three cats, a husband and my enlarged size, there is little room to turn over at night.

The head cold lingers, all week. Lingers through the decontamination of the scarf and bag, through dragging myself up and out of bed every morning, head and belly aching. I drop things. Thermometer, keys, clothes. A mint M&M rolls underneath the bookcase. I shrug my shoulders and leave it there.

A (male) friend tries to improve my spirits over my enlarging size by sending me stories and photographs of supermodels currently in the stages of late pregnancy and early postpartum period (1). I find Gisele Bundchen beautiful but the photographs of her irritating (2) and Heidi Klum awe-inspiring, with her 45 pound pregnancy weight gain and the fact that she looks, four weeks after birth, like a woman who recently had a baby, even after dropped 25 pounds.

It lingers through the weekend, while I try put together a white chili to freeze for later. I can not locate the can opener. I have to call J, away for the weekend helping my brother and sister-in-law move, and ask him where it is. It broke, he says. Some plastic part fell off of it. He threw it into the recycling bin. I fish it out. It works just fine.

It lingers through today, as I drag myself out of bed to face another day, quietly reminding myself that I am slowly inching towards the end of this journey. While my head is marginally clearer, I feel slightly nauseated from eating too much yesterday and realize that I will have to go back to the hobbit-esque eating habits of eight months ago.

(1)Yes, my friend has a weird sense of humor. His point is that even supermodels achieve orca-like proportions while pregnant, so fretting about my size is really stupid in light of the fact that I'm actually on target for “acceptable” gain based on my height, starting weight and BMI.

(2) Not because she is six inches taller, 30+ pounds lighter and seven years younger than myself, thus able to carry the excess weight in an attractive manner, but because she is married to Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback. I'm more of a Steelers fan than I thought. Most Steelers fans can not stand anything to do with the New England Patriots, primarily because the insistence of most national sports media on referring to them as “America's Team” when there exists an enormous, world-wide Steelers diaspora that puts the Patriots fans to shame and routinely goes unacknowledged.

Bent

2009-11-14T08:27:00.001-05:00

Nothing speaks “humiliation” like throwing up up on one's shirt, coat, bag and pants while on a moving bus. Nothing adds insult to such injury like having to use the brand new scarf, a shower gift sent all the way from a friend in Germany, to clean oneself up.

And nothing makes a person question the general humanity of the population like listening to the witnesses of my unfortunate display of stomach histrionics make fun of me, without a single soul taking two seconds to ask if I was OK.

It is not as if I feel like I'm entitled to any sympathy. I just can't help but wonder what is wrong with the world that half a busload of grown adults (not teenagers, not college students) can watch a woman throw up all over herself, then do her damnedest to clean herself and her surroundings up while crying so hard she can not breathe and not only not feel the slightest bit of pity but find it entertaining to audibly and clearly make fun of her.

Suffice to say, I checked in with my boss and went home for the day. I'm not proud that I completely lost my composure acted the classic stereotype of a woman in late pregnancy. But I could not face dealing with the world yesterday after what happened on the bus.

People really, really suck sometimes.

Salvo II in the Parenting Wars – the Breastfeeding Edition

2009-11-08T19:40:00.001-05:00

I was in a foul mood this morning and lying quietly in bed listening to the Lucy cat purring softly did very little to alleviate it. Cat therapy can only go so far in combating the general wankery of the population.

Yesterday was my first of two breastfeeding classes. I suspected that I was in for a long three hours when I pulled up behind the instructor's (lactation activist/consultant) caravan and saw the “Babies are Born to be Breastfed!” bumper sticker, which provoked me to say “Oh god, no!” out loud, to myself.

It got a little bit worse, as I was one of only two women out of the five who did not have her partner with her. Three of the women knew each other from previous classes, and after an initial exchange of hellos proceeded to freeze me out of their conversation while throwing pitying glances my way because J did not attend the class with me.(1) The sensation that I had regressed to high school was strong and unpleasant.

The instructor definitely tilted toward the crunchy-granola side of the breastfeeding conundrum. Her general perspective was that all difficulties with breastfeeding could be solved by a correct latch and a close observation of your child's cue, with a few potshots at medicated labor thrown in just to “encourage” the class to stay on the straight and narrow path of the unmedicated.

I prefer realism to relentless optimism. Telling me to “chill”, that I will have an awful start breastfeeding if I end up having a medicate labor, that lanolin will not be necessary because my body will produce enough natural nipple protection and if all else fails, La Leche League is an excellent source of information is NOT reassuring.

Neither is listening to the partner of one woman, when prompted to introduce himself and suggest a breastfeeding myth, launched into a several minute rant against a recent essay, discussing the ways in which certain segments of the population are using breastfeeding as a way of bludgeoning and guilting working women into conforming to a specific ideal and guilting them into leaving the public sphere. Aside from the fact that he missed the point of the essay, his partner admitted later on in the afternoon that she would not be working after their child is born.

I was happy when the class ended half an hour early.

(1)J and I split duties Saturday – I went to the class and he went to a birthday party.

Postmortem of a Baby Shower

2009-11-02T21:57:00.003-05:00

First, a digression in the form of this recent verbal exchange:

J: Did you put the bananas in the freezer?
Me: Uh, No.
J: Are you sure?
Me: Yes, I'm sure. I took a banana last night, that is the last time I touched them.
J: Because I don't remember putting them in the freezer.
Me: You took one this morning. It had to be you, you are the last person to touch them.
J: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
J: I was really out of it this morning.

Saturday could have been worse. Much worse. I could have been forced to play “Guess How Fat the Pregnant Guest-of-Honor Is”. Instead I had to listen to 10,000 variations on how our life will change and 10,001 variations on how I'll change my mind about being pregnant once the first one is born.

I had to physically block J's sister from touching my stomach. She was offended, possibly because since I am family, she shouldn't have to ask permission. It is interesting that the biggest offenders in the pat-the-pregnant-belly game have been members of J's family. I have not had this problem with my family members, total strangers or even J (who checks first, because sometimes the muscles are so sore that I could cry).

As I am of the persuasion who believes that pregnant women and infant children are not public property, even to family members, I was indifferent to her outrage. And I will continue to practice that indifference after the alien comes and the full on assault of complaints about hand washing and limited traveling begin.

Other than that incident, the shower went smoothly. I managed to maintain a straight face through lunch, while listening to a friend of J's family talk about how hard she had prayed for her daughter to have a child (uh, maybe her daughter did not want to be pregnant?) and how she can't understand why anyone could be an atheist after experiencing the miracle of conception, pregnancy and childbirth. My friend B, who was able to come and sat next to me during the meal, got a great deal of enjoyment out of watching me maintain that straight face and was able to bear witness to the the craziness of J's family.

And my friend B received, as a prize for baby bingo, a “Keep the Christ in Christmas” magnet, which I found hilarious, as B is an agnostic who appreciates the irony in spreading an anti-consumerist message by selling something.

Listening to my MIL attempt to organize baby bingo into special games was also entertaining and led me to make the crack "You can't tell this is a room of Catholics" to my sister-in-law.

The gifts were lovely and not too Christmas themed. The atrocity of the day belongs to a soft pink Winnie-the-Pooh layette set, given by an individual who must really, really want an alien of the female persuasion.

Sunday was spent sorting and storing all the paraphernalia, writing 38 thank you notes and washing, folding and putting away clothes. J spend the morning hanging pictures and the afternoon with his family, who asked him when we were planning on having another child.

Oy. The first (and only) one has not even arrived and they are already salivating over the possibility of a second. I can not help but think that they intentionally waited for a time when I was not present to ask this question, as my response would have been extremely snarky.

Uncomfortable

2009-10-30T19:49:00.001-04:00

My back hurts. More precisely, a muscle underneath my right shoulder blade has a large, stubborn knot that refuses to release and aches, the pain following of the line of my rib cage to the front of my body. I spent a chunk of my rapidly dwindling funds (when you get paid once a month, funds tend to dwindle near the end) for a massage. Although the massage was wonderful and allowed for the first pain free night of sleep I have had in approximately four months, the knot stubbornly remains, an unwelcome distraction from work, sleep and plain, old fashioned sitting around. J has tried to work it out over the past week, going so far as to pick up a mini massager from Brookstone. The massager is wonderful, even working out the knots leaves me close to tears, but I'm looking at the pain as an opportunity to practice my breathing and visualization techniques. I'm tempted to bring it into work and hand it to one of my coworkers when the pain gets bad.

The most irritating element of this particular knot is the fact that is not caused just by my current gestating state. It is stress, caused by my FIL's recent channeling the behavior and mentality of a five year old encased in a 60+ year old body.

I would like to say that I'm not seething over the incident any longer, but that would be a lie. I'm not interested in turning the other cheek, pretending that it never happened or just letting it go. I've never wanted to kick anyone's ass so badly in my life, which is saying something as I repress the desire to kick the behind-quarters of individuals known and unknown on routine basis. The temptation to go completely nuclear on not only J's father, but his entire family, is overwhelming.

My first test in maintaining some sort of reasonable attitude is coming on Saturday, the day of the baby shower. I'm dreading this, as I will be roundly outnumbered by J's family/friends and the contingent belonging to my mother. Out of the people I know personally, friend A lives overseas and was never going to be able to attend, B is attending a work related convention, C was forced to bow out earlier this week to play trophy wife (1) on a last minute work-disguised-as-social-function for her husband's boss and friend D has to supervise the tear-down and clean up of a school-related function and wants to take her child trick or treating in the afternoon. Upon learning about the last cancellation I had a mini-meltdown and have spent most of today trying to control my tears.

Rationally speaking, I know that this is an incredibly stupid thing to cry over, that the majority of the my friends are unable to attend my baby shower. I have no illusions that my decision to have a kid automatically puts me at the center of everyone else's universe. Most of my friends are friends because we share similar personality traits – such as a deep and abiding aversion to baby showers. That friend C would rather attend a baby shower then play trophy wife indicates the true awfulness of her upcoming afternoon. And to add a level of absurdity to my tears, friend D and I have a very cordial, but not close relationship, which would not exist if I her husband and I had not known each other from a very young age.

As the alien's due date grows closer, the conversations between J and myself on how to handle visitors after the alien's birth grow more contentious. No matter how many times and ways I attempt to communicate to J that I am not going to be up to handling twelve+ emotionally demanding and manipulative people descending on our small house at the same time, he does not understand and does not seem interested in trying. Repeated attempts to discuss the issue, links to metafilter threads and articles on the topic of handling visitors after bringing a new baby home, detailed explanations of the biological processes that occur in a woman's body after delivery and suggestions that he talk to coworkers and acquaintances who have recently had children all seem to have fallen on deaf ears. As far as J is concerned, his family's method of descending like a plague of locusts upon the hospital room of mother and child an hour after birth is perfectly acceptable. (2)

J feels he needs the help and support during the first few weeks, and wants that help and support to come in the form of his parents and family. I want and need to know that the needs of myself and our child overrule the whims of his family (and my own), even if it means that some family members end up with hurt feelings.

They already disapprove of some of my decisions. They don't understand why we are not coming to celebrate Christmas. They don't understand why I'm seeing midwives instead of an OB. They don't understand why I want to use a birthing center instead of a hospital. They don't understand why I would want the minimum number of interventions during labor. They don't like that I have said they should stay home while I'm in labor and that we will tell them when it is OK to visit. They don't like that they will have to drive 40 miles to visit us.

They will not like that they will not be permitted to visit without an explicit invitation. They will not like that they will be permitted only to stay a finite amount of time and will be expected (and asked) to leave if they exceed the time set. They will not like that they will not be permitted to hold the alien until hands are washed. And they will hate fact that I do not intend to go anywhere but the doctor's office until at least six weeks after the alien's arrival.

I. Don't. Care. that they will be uncomfortable.

(1) Playing trophy wife (or husband) is shorthand for any function in which the “trophy” is required to dress up and behave in a pleasant, vacuous manner to impress the boss and/or coworkers of the spouse.
(2) J's originally proposed solution to handling visitors was to suggest that I recuperate at his parents home for a couple of weeks, because their home is larger and it would be “more convenient for visitors”.

Roughness

2009-10-18T13:18:00.001-04:00

Last night was rough, as a combination of back pain and restrained fury kept me from sleeping properly. I suspect the two elements that combined to keep me awake for most of the night and command that I rise a the obscene hour of 6:00 am on a Sunday morning are linked. Without the fury, I suspect the pain would be less unpleasant.

My in-laws came for brunch yesterday. My MIL bought some baby clothes from the St. Vincent DePaul thrift store and we spent a few minutes admiring the different items and showing off the crib before taking them to The Original Pancake House to eat. The restaurant was an easy decision, based on our one prior visit to the establishment (in spite of the waitress accidentally dropping my strawberry belgium waffle at my feet, shattering the plate and leaving a dot of whipped cream my sandals) and the sight of vehicles overflowing the lot every time we drove past.

The visit seemed to go smoothly. There was the inevitable fight over the check, but we are used to that. There was equally inevitable lecture over tithing to “the church”, something neither J nor myself are willing to do, as we believe that there non profit organizations out there with far better uses for our money.

Both of J's parents are involved in their diocese's current capital campaign. The amount of money my in-laws are donating over the next five years to the campaign is staggering (it would easily cover one year's worth of tuition, room and board at any state university) and is less than officials wanted J's parents to give. After dropping that small detail into the conversation, J's father told us a story of a recent phone conversation with a parishioner, which took place while the parishioner was going through a fast-food drive through. He voiced disapproval that the woman could afford a fast food meal but was not willing to give more than $50.00 a year to the campaign. The ridges in my tongue grew deeper.

There was a second argument back at the house because my FIL wanted to break into a space that “sounded” hollow in the basement foundation, over my objections. Too tired to continue listen to my FIL browbeat me over the fact that I had little desire to clean up a potential train wreck I finally agreed to allow J to cut into the section a little bit, just to establish whether it was hollow or not. It was not.

During the course visit, my MIL asked us what big items we needed for the alien. I explained that my mother was purchasing the stroller (a jogger style stroller, selected after some careful research which included stopping random strangers I saw pushing the candidate in the street and asking them what they liked about it) but that we still needed a car seat, bottles, clothing, a diaper bag and all sorts of miscellaneous things. They offered to purchase the car seat. A gracious and generous offer. I showed her the registry list so she could get an idea at the type of car seat we wanted.

The trouble began after my in-laws had left, as I was crashing on the couch, idly watching college football and trying to complete a novel and J was working on a side project with a friend. Our house phone rang.

The caller was my MIL, they were at Target looking at a jogger travel system and my FIL was debating whether to purchase the system, in spite of my previous, explicit explanation that my mother was purchasing the stroller. I calmly explained that the brand they were looking at was not the same stroller my mother was purchasing and thanked her for the call. Then I hung up the phone and announced to J “if they go ahead and do this, I will kill your father”.

To understand why this would cause back pain and a sleepless night, you must understand that my FIL has a very bad habit of undercutting other people's plans, charging full speed ahead and creating massive chaos without any consideration for anyone else's feelings. As example 1, I offer up the incident recounted four paragraphs up.

As example 2, I offer up an incident from several years ago, when my FIL went behind my back while I was out of the country and offered to purchase a new ragtop for J's convertible as a birthday gift, after I told his parents that I was saving up my money to surprise J with the top as a Christmas gift. J, unaware of the surprise I had been planning, accepted the gift. To say that I was infuriated would be an understatement. To me, the ragtop was not just a practical gift. As J and I had spent many happy hours in that car on various road trips, the presentation of the new top had a sentimental significance for me and I was proud of the fact that I could earn enough money to give him a gift I could not afford when we first started dating. While I never voiced to my FIL the affect this actions had on me, I could not hide my hurt feelings from J. And the gift was poisoned from that day until the day that J traded in the car.

However, those actions only affected me. This recent development gives my FIL an opportunity to act like super grandfather at the expense of my mother. I'm especially concerned that if they purchase this system, they will present it at the shower, which my mother is attending, leaving me to deal with the fallout of my mother's hurt feelings once the festivities are over.

Minor Annoyances

2009-10-17T10:28:00.002-04:00

Minor Annoyance 1: That I find more amusing then anything else – the more obviously and visibly pregnant I become, the less that people on the bus are willing to make eye contact with me. And the more ashamed they look when they see me coming.

My amusement was compounded this morning by the middle aged man who insisted on completely blocking the aisle precisely halfway between the front and the back of the bus, thus keeping passengers from reaching one of the several seats available at the back and the woman at the front of the bus who needed not only a support bar but three straps to keep her steady. I studied her, as I stood there in all my unbalanced “glory” wondering why she felt all three straps were necessary.

My musings were interrupted by the recent vacancy of a seat near the front, which J, noting that the extreme heat of the bus was making me progressively paler, blocked out so I could sit down. This maneuver was followed by one of the women, already sitting down, glaring at both of us. I imagine we must have been quite the distraction, the 7.5 month pregnant woman and her husband colluding to get her a seat so she does not pass out on the bus.

Minor Annoyance 2 & 3: Recent articles and comments in the New York Times

The New York Times has been running a series of articles entitled 21st Century Babies, on the increased use and suggested abuse of fertility treatments in the United States. The first article, The Gift of Life, and Its Price discusses the special risks involved in having twins.

Other writers, such as Julie at a little pregnant, have delved into the inaccuracies of the articles and the ignorance of some of the commentators. My irritation was how the article was framed.

I am a fraternal twin, naturally conceived. My brother and I were born a week before our actual due date. My mother did not know she was carrying twins until after my brother was born, when she continued labor. To say that all parties in the room were surprised would be an understatement. Aside from a lower birth weight (I was 4lbs, 4oz and had to stay in the hospital an extra week, since my brother was over 5lbs he was released with our mother) both of us were perfectly healthy.

According to the framing of the New York Times article, I should be down on my knees thanking the gods above that we were among the only 40% of twins born full term (seriously, a week short of full term as a twin is, for all intents and purposes, full term), healthy and without most of the
Statements such as “while most twins go home without serious complications, government statistics show that 60 percent of them are born prematurely. That increases their chances of death in the first few days of life, as well as other problems...” make me want to bang my head against something, because the subsequent problems described in the article are all issues that occur in pregnancy of singles as well.(1) The New York Times does not give any comparison analysis of how much higher the rates are between single and multiple pregnancies and, frankly, manages to make me feel like a freak of a nature.

Later this week I made the mistake of wading into the comments on an article about a woman who had a five year relationship with a priest, conceived a son who is now terminally ill and has spent over twenty years trying to get the father to own up to it financially. Except that the father is a Franciscan priest and has essentially hidden behind his order and weaseled out of any personal responsibility towards the child he conceived. Oh, and there is this little incident midway through the article when the woman learns that this same priest has been carrying on a sexual relationship with a young woman, that started when the woman was in high school. His punishment? He was sent to a treatment center for sex offenders and put in charge of teaching seminarians how to be celibate.

Naturally, a goodly number of comments put all the blame squarely on the woman, because of her mental health issues and three divorces, which point to her being unstable and irresponsible. Obviously she is a “loose” woman with questionable morals who is trying to persecute the priest, the order and the Catholic church. Unfortunately, I did not stop reading before hitting the inevitable “Catholic bashing” comments that always drives me insane.

So I say to self, “Self, you really must stop reading the article comments” and self agrees. Self will probably not follow this suggestion.

(1) Mr Cloth diaper and his wife, for example. A week after deflecting his attempts to assert his moral superiority, his wife went into labor and delivered their single daughter 8 weeks early. Mother, father and child are all fine.

Under Pressure

2009-10-13T18:46:00.000-04:00

This past weekend my friend K admitted to two of us that she was feeling pressure to get pregnant. She is in a difficult position, with me 10 weeks 6 days (but who is counting?) from my due date, a second mutual friend about to embark on the long road of fertility treatments and M, who quietly announced to K and myself (after putting her foot firmly in her mouth over some comments about my food choices) that she was 5 weeks along and on her second attempt to have a baby. (1)

M and I were blunt in telling her that just because every woman she seemed to know right now was gestating, there was nothing wrong with her not wanting to have children, either right now or ever. I pointed out to K that my pregnancy was more an accident then anything else, that I had considered terminating, that the depression was bad enough to keep me from getting out of bed some mornings and would be a major factor . M reminded K about the horrors surrounding the end of her first pregnancy.

We both stressed that this was not something a woman did because her friends were doing it. This was something a woman did because she felt it was the correct decision for her. We were both brutally honest in discussing our feelings.

I hope it helps her.

(1) I ordered a salad with gorgonzola cheese and an iced tea. In an attempt to be funny, she asked me if I knew about the prohibition against pregnant women eating unpasteurized cheese and drinking caffeine. My response was not good natured and J, listening in on the exchange, politely told her where he thought the medical establishment could stick their food rules. M pulled me aside later and explained that she had been trying to be funny, recounting the ordeal of her first pregnancy, which ended in an abortion at 16 weeks when she learned the fetus tested with a 1/5 chance of Trisomy 21.

Because You're Weak

2009-10-09T22:00:00.002-04:00

There is no way for me to adequately convey my irritation at my upcoming baby shower. On a purely rational level it is illogical and hypocritical of me to complain because a group of people want to get together and give me gifts. I should quit whining. I agree.

But as J succinctly put it, when I whined “why did I agree to this?”

“Because you're weak”.

On an emotional level, the fact that I agreed to participate in this charade in the purely mercenary hope of getting one or two necessary items leaves me wishing that someone had smacked me upside the head hard before I agreed to participate in such a venture, if only to rid me of the high delusion that I would receive anything useful out of this party. I'm getting a great deal of passive-aggressive pleasure out of the fact that we decided not to gender the alien before birth, as it will marginally decrease the atrociously gendered clothing and crib sets that may be coming my way. (1)

My first objection to this ritual, aside from the fact that I hate showers of all stripes on general principle, is that my input on the type of party I would like to have ended when I submitted my guest list to my MIL. I would have been happy, nay thrilled, to have gathered in a back room at Dino's, where the guests could munch on semi-stale popcorn, order garlic wings and cheese fries, and had themselves a beer and a good chat in between the opening of gifts and watching college football on the enormous, flat screen televisions. I could have eaten cheese fries and snuck sips of beer.

Instead it is being held at the same venue as my bridal shower and will be a semi-formal, catered lunch with soup or salad, a quiche of some sorts accompanied with coffee, iced tea or water, capped with a yellow cake with vanilla icing sporting storks, baby booties and Congratulations!, all in alternating blue and pink icing because J and I have the nerve to refuse to find out the alien's gender or theme the nursery.

I also have trouble understanding what is so entertaining about watching someone else open a pile of gifts in such a public fashion, as both the gift giver and the recipient. I enjoy giving gifts to other people, but I could care less if they open it in front of me or not. (2) I don't fake enthusiasm for bad gifts very well, my sense of humor is such that it takes a mammoth amount of self control to put off making fun of truly heinous items until the giver is two states over and to the left from where I am standing.

Then there is the growing panic that I am going to be forced to participate in shower games, specifically a popular and truly atrocious one called Let-Us-Humiliate-the-Guest-of-Honor-by-Guessing-How-Fat-She-Is-! which requires party guests to cut a piece of string into what they think is the circumference of the MTB waist. The strings are wrapped around the MTB and the winner is the individual with the most accurate string length.

Why the panic? Because the hosting duties have transferred from my normally sane (other than her heavy hand with the guilt trips) MIL to a sister-in-law, one of J's older (in their 40's) female cousins, my mother, J's sister and her two daughters, aged five and seven.

A five year old and a seven year old are co-hosting my baby shower. I know these little girls well. They are lovely, bright, outspoken (which I quietly encourage as much as possible) mostly well behaved children who would nonetheless thoroughly enjoy measuring their aunt's expanding waistline and would not understand, egged on by the older cousins who find such games amusing, why their aunt would be bothered by such entertainment. The shower is scheduled to last three hours. A lot can happen in a three hour period.

Over fifty women have been invited to my shower. Out of those fifty, thirty-five of the invitees are either friends or family of J's mother. My mother and I have a combined list of around twenty and I can think of at least three off hand from my list who will be unable to attend for one reason or another. I am completely outnumbered in the moral support department on this one. If I refuse to participate, then I shall be labeled as unreasonable and can hear, clearly, the voice of my mother instructing me to stop making a scene.

I am weak.

(1) I'm still reeling from the pink crib set that a neighbor dropped off at our house. There is pink and then there is pink. This is pink.
(2) I openly admit that I'm still a bit bitter that I was forced to open our wedding gifts in front of a mob instead of in the quiet of our home, just J and myself, with some soft music and a glass of wine as a way of winding down from a weekend of non-stop activity.

Ugh II

2009-10-07T20:10:00.002-04:00

I rolled (almost literally, I'm getting rather round) out of bed at 5:40 AM Monday morning in order to reach a downtown lab for round 6001 of miscellaneous indignities that a pregnant woman is forced to suffer in the name of gestating a healthy alien.

Today was the much dreaded one hour glucose tolerance screen and third trimester CBC blood screen. As I'm pretty certain that I shall fail the one hour screen, because the gods hate me and want to see me suffer through repeated needle stabs over a three hour period, I put off the appointment for a week and a half before trundling off to the bus in the pre-dawn of a chilly fall day.

But first I had to eat something, as fasting before drinking 50 grams of sugar solution is generally considered a bad idea. At 100 grams (the amount I'll have to drink in a few weeks when I'll get stabbed repeatedly with needles over a three hour period) it is required. J was also up early and bought me breakfast – a travel mug of tea and a glazed cinnamon yeast pretzel doughnut. Apparently J did not get the memo in the form of me repeating, verbatim, multiple times, the midwife's breakfast instructions, which were “Eat protein and healthy carbs. Don't eat a doughnut”.

“I can't eat that”. J stared at me, looking slightly offended at the rejection of his customary morning tea and glazed offering.
“I'm trying to make you feel better. What's wrong with it?”
“The midwife specifically said no doughnuts. Go ahead and eat it”.
“Are you sure? Why not eat it later”.
“Fine, put it in a bag, I'll have after the appointment”.
“What do you want then? And at least try the tea, I didn't put that much sugar in it”.
“Toast with butter. Do we have protein bread?”(1)
“Its the Omega 3 bread”.
“That is fine”.

As J stalked back downstairs to make me toast, I took a couple of sips of tea and left the mug sitting on my dresser, as I could not tell how sweet it was. And left it there, where it is still sitting unless one of the cats knocked it over during a stroll across my dresser.

The waiting room of the downtown lab was empty when I stepped through the door a few minutes before 7:00 AM. One customer in the office behind the locked door, registering for blood work. Not another person to be seen or heard except for the phlebotomist.

The customer left suddenly. What I collected from the conversation was that she had a condition that was counter indicative of having her blood drawn and the phlebotomist had advised her to wait until the condition was resolved.

I was called in, registered, given 50 grams of a bland orange sucrose solution to drink in five minutes , instructed to avoid throwing it up and made to sit in the still empty waiting room for an hour. I passed the time listening to a podcast of “Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me” and watching white collar employees come and go

At the appointed time the phlebotomist called me back, took my blood in possibly the most painless fashion I have experienced in the past seven months and sent me on my way with the admonishment to eat something that did not contain much sugar, since the solution made me feel slightly woozy – a repeat the time my freshman year of college when I combined too many Oreo cookies with too much caffeine during finals week.

I was tired for the rest of the day, a result of the subsequent sugar crash, and ended up eating far too much sugar and carbs anyway, in a purely reactionary response to the fear that I will have to endure the three hour tolerance test, fail that and eat nothing but protein and leafy greens for ten weeks.

(1) During the height of my nausea, when I could not stand the smell of any meat or peanut butter and wanted crackers, tea and toast J started buying protein enriched bread in order to get something other than carbs and fat into me. My aversion to meat went away, I still can't bring myself to even smell peanut butter, which is another one of nature's jokes since peanut butter is a nutritional staple for many pregnant women. And we continued buying protein enriched breads because they were multigrain and tasted fairly decent, if a bit heavy.

Pain

2009-10-04T15:56:00.001-04:00

I'm in pain. Not just the ongoing emotional pain that I have endured for the past 28 weeks and is gradually increasing. Mainly because my physical discomfort is getting worse.

Many years ago I developed this weird little twitch in one of the muscles over the ribcage on my left side. It was not painful, just an annoyance that would routinely catch me off guard as I went about my day. As the twitch developed during the same time frame as my asthma, my doctor ordered an echo cardiogram along with several standard diagnostic tests for asthma, to rule out any issues with my heart.*

No heart issues. Just a twitch from the electrical impulses in the muscles going haywire. He offered to write a script for muscle relaxants and a painkiller, which I turned down because the twitching was neither often enough to warrant a muscle relaxant nor painful enough to warrant prescription drugs.

The twitch has evolved, must likely because of the expansion in the rib cage, into a constant, burning spasm that has driven my already depressed self into even more despair. Forgoing the bra is not an option (and didn't work). Wireless does not work. And sleeping in any other position other than on my back (which I'm not supposed to do) makes the pain worse, especially when I roll over and am awakened from a dead sleep by the searing burning sensation.

Other things that have not helped in recent weeks – the constant gloom and doom of my mother, who can not help herself from uttering at least once during every conversation that I might end up having a cesarean section. As if I exist on planet la-la land, where pregnancy complications never happen and every birth is done vaginally, without painkillers and produces powerful orgasms that instantaneously wipe out the memory of the pain of labor.

The edema is not encouraging either. I was prepared for foot and ankle swelling. I went out and purchased two pairs of shoes, a pair of Sanita clogs in blue faux snakeskin and a pair of Wolky Stage wedges in red patent leather, because I knew I would need room in my shoes for my feet. The shoes were embarrassingly and almost prohibitively expensive, a sum of money that I should be saving instead of dropping on shoes.

But the shoes work. They work so well that I don't notice when my feet are swelling until after I have removed the shoes and seen my toes nearly disappear into each other. The first time this happened was Friday night. My shrieks of horror provoked first concern, then annoyance in J, who offered the following solution to my problem: “don't look at them”.

There has been some hilarity. Men especially seem to like the clogs and I've collected quite a few compliments on their style in the week I have been wearing them. The highlight of this past week was the clerk at a local used media store, with whom I shared the following exchange:

Clerk: Nice shoes. Great color.
Me: Thanks. I'm not going to be able to see my feet in another month, so I decided to go with something a little bit obnoxious.
Clerk: (long pause) Won't be able to see your feet?
Me: I'm pregnant.
Clerk: (with relief) Oh. I thought you were going to have them amputated or something. Is that real snakeskin?

It is a better story in the telling then in print...

*This is probably an example of the type of testing overkill the right claims is driving up insurance costs. The doctor who ordered the tests was a personal friend of my both parents, had worked with both of them for years and was an excellent and instinctive diagnostician who knew in the office that I probably had asthma. Nonetheless he was not going to be on the hook to explain to my parents why he missed a potentially fatal heart defect.

Raise the Banner

2009-10-03T20:46:00.003-04:00

J and I went to the Penguins season opener, one of only six games we will be attending this year. The Penguins like to add some ceremony to their season opener, which means video of the greatest plays from the previous season, smoke machines and formal introductions of the owners, executives, coaching staff and players.

This year the ceremonies took a little bit longer than usual, with an extended video narrated by Dennis Miller, the display of a really shiny trophy at center ice and the raising of some sort of banner. And fireworks.

I wanted to write a long post, rhapsodizing about what it means to be the fan of a championship sports team, especially a hockey team. About how accessible the Stanley Cup is to fans and how much effort teams put into making the fans feel like part of the fun.

But I decided to skip all that. Instead, I shall say - it was electric.

The Opening Salvo in the Parenting Wars

2009-09-18T19:45:00.002-04:00

I have thought for some time that with the amount of miscellaneous work necessary to prepare for the upcoming arrival of a child, first time parents-to-be would be too busy to start oneupmanship contests with other gestating couples.

I was most unfortunately incorrect in this perception. With fourteen weeks still to go, I have already had to extricate myself from a conversation that was less about the care and feeding of aliens and more about establishing some kind of moral authority over the question of which is superior – cloth or disposable diapers?

Or rather, I stated that we intended to use disposable diapers and was treated to a lecture by the non-childbearing member of the couple on how the decision was wrong, wrong, wrong. Evidential proofs were tossed (“Babies with cloth diapers don't get diaper rash! It is less expensive in the long term! Hire a diaper service if you don't have the time to wash them! My mom used them on me when I was a child!)

Silently I cursed the gods for ruining a perfectly good evening out, imbibing garlic parmesan wings, eyeing mixed drinks lustfully and feeling overall like a normal, non pregnant, female being for a couple of hours to the service to making him feel smug and pretentious over using cloth diapers (1). I tried, twice, to explain in very simple clear terms that we had neither the money to pay a diaper service nor the time to clean them ourselves (2). He continued lecturing.

So I changed the topic by asking him if his wife was planning breastfeeding, playing the odds that any couple that committed to using cloth diapers was probably also going to be breastfeeding instead of using formula. The gambit paid off, we found a topic of common agreement and the conversation turned to other things as agreeing about breastfeeding is not as interesting as probing for other proto- parenting decisions to criticize.

(1) I suspect if they find out that their budget can not stretch to paying a diaper service they will revert to disposables after a few weeks of trying to clean them.

(2) Massive digression that probably needs a separate entry. In our house this would translate to me cleaning them, as the laundry has evolved into my primary duty. Most of the time I am actually OK with this, as J handles all the outdoor yard work, including mowing our little patches of lawn, caring for the five rose bushes we have lining the driveway and up the steps to our house and tending to the flowerbeds. This actually consumes as much time weekly as doing the laundry, so it is a fair division of labor. And prevents me from killing the plants, as my power to keep living things alive does not extend to things green and leafy.

To be fair, I should say “did” the laundry as J has stepped up laundry duty in the past months as a natural consequence of me first being too overwhelmed with all-day morning sickness and fatigue to keep up with it, then becoming too unbalanced on my feet to properly navigate the narrow basement steps with a full basket in my hands.

However, as good as J is at remember to start the laundry, he is not very good at remembering to finish it, leading me to ask him at least twice every weekend and once during the week to bring the clean clothes upstairs for me to fold. As there is an unspoken expectation that I will be taking over laundry again once the alien has arrived, my desire to spend additional time soaking and cleaning nappies on top of the addition of onesies, pajamas, layettes, burp clothes, crib sheets, blankets, and towels to our regular weekly loads, is nil. In our conversations about disposable versus cloth I got the sense that J would prefer to use cloth, but since I will end up as the party responsible for cleaning the things, I elected to veto for the sake of my sanity.

Patience Worn Thin

2009-09-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

It has been awhile since I witnessed my father-in-law behaving atrociously. I have gotten better at choosing when to interact with J's family and at filtering out the worse of his irritating behavior. He has gotten better at behaving himself, especially in our home, a direct result of J insisting that he conduct himself in a more civilized manner.

Unfortunately, with the upcoming arrival of a new grandchild, the pressure to include myself in more family activities has begun anew and has been gradually ratcheting up over the past few months. As agreeing to allow my mother-in-law host a baby shower on my behalf puts me back on the obligation hook, I reluctantly and not very willingly agreed to accompany J to a family lunch on Sunday.

I chose to ignore the voice in the back of my brain that woke me on Sunday morning, suggesting that lunch at the in-laws was not the best of ideas on this particular day. As I could not find a legitimate reason to back up my sense that it was not going to be a good day, I elected to fulfill my promise to make J happy.

To lunch we went, arriving approximately 45 minutes from the noon hour (planned) and waiting an extra 20 minutes (unplanned) past noon for his siblings to arrive, thus underscoring one of the ongoing irritants of J's family – with the exception of one sibling (who is not J), none of them are capable of arriving for 90% of functions on time.

I filtered it out. I filtered out J's sister using me as an object lesson in fetal development, with her insistence that I describe how “big the baby in my belly (1) was right now” to her three children. Setting aside that my knowledge of an alien at 25 weeks falls under “large enough to be uncomfortable”, my sister-in-law was not content with an estimate of length and weight – she wanted a detailed descriptions of the alien's features. I filtered out the discussion over the relative merits of the different high school football teams and leagues in the area. I filtered out the church talk, the complaints about the federal government giving aid to overseas, faith-based missionary organizations.

I filtered out up to the point of hearing J's father saying “Well we all know why South Africa is receiving aid, with the kind of president we have in the White House”.

I could not filter that out. I called my father-in-law out on the statement. I reminded him that the federal government had been giving aid to faith based charities for at least eight years. I stated that his comment was racist and he should retract it.

He said his comment was not racist and refused to retract. J's brother, who has spouted forth some of the finest poor-oppressed-upper-middle-class-white-man absurdities I have ever heard come out of the mouth of anyone upper middle class white man, vocally expressed that he did not think it was racist either.

Less you believe that I am jumping to conclusions and believe that perhaps my father-in-law was merely implying that South Africa was receiving aid because a Democrat was occupying the White House, I have sat at this man's table at various meals for 14+ years listening such coded statements. This is the man, who upon meeting me for the first time and learning about my ambition to attend graduate school, felt it necessary to illustrate how enlightened he had become by telling me about the events that precipitated his agreement to send his daughter to college. In the late 1980's. (2)

I left the table. I tried to walk out the front door, but it was locked and I could not get it unlocked. After what felt like several minutes of me trying to unlock the damn door, I went out through the garage instead. Once in the backyard, I sat down at a table and cried.

Meanwhile, inside, J was defending my blowup by informing his family that I had spent the last 14+ years politely holding my tongue as his family enthusiastically demonized the people and beliefs that held dear and that whether I had misinterpreted his father's words or not I had reached my limit of tolerance.

Then he came outside, brushed aside my apology for making a scene and ruining lunch and told me that it was braver to stand up for what I believed in then sitting silently and that I had no reason to apologize.

I also apologized to J's father for making a scene and silently endured the humiliation of having another sister-in-law pat my sore abdomen.

(1) The use of anything other than code words for organs used in bodily waste evacuation and reproduction is verboten in front of children in J's extended family, no matter the age of the child. Thus his 23 year old cousin and almost 18 year old nephew hear the same terminology as his 5 year old niece. I know that everyone does it, especially with young children but listening to grown adults use inaccurate biology with children makes me cringe and want to grind my teeth. I blame this on my parents, both nurses, who used biological and medical terms in an indifferent, matter-of-fact manner at the dinner table. The sneaky, snarky, subversive side of me is looking forward to the expressions of horror on the faces of my in-laws when the alien begins using real terms, as I fully intend to pass on the correct terminology, fragile sensibilities of cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, in-laws and the parents of the alien's classmates be damned.
(2) And less you wonder why I would marry into such a family, J is definitely the anomaly.

The Wrath of the Crossing Guard

2009-09-12T09:59:00.001-04:00

One of the less savory aspects of living and working in Pittsburgh is the adversarial relationship drivers have with any one other than another person in a four wheeled, gas powered, moving machine. Pedestrians and cyclists are considered fair game to be run down at any moment.

This has lead to more than a few incidents of drivers obscenely gesturing, yelling (“fat ass” remains a personal favorite) and nudging me as I legally cross the byways of Pittsburgh city streets.

The intersection of Forbes and Murray is an especially bad location to be a pedestrian at any time of the day. Because of the high volume of both vehicular and foot traffic and the close proximity of half the schools in Pittsburgh, the city has deemed it necessary to put in a four way stop to allow pedestrians a sporting chance at getting across the street without getting maimed.

Not that this discourages the most aggressive of Pittsburgh's drivers, fond as they are of running the red light to make an illegal right turn, thus accomplishing the task of mowing down walkers from two directions instead of one.

Enter the crossing guard, posted at the intersection in the mornings and mid-afternoons during the school year to add an extra visual element of safety to perilous street crossings. They can't stop a speeding SUV with a single bound or write tickets. But they can and will stop drivers breaking traffic laws and yell at them. Loudly. For extended periods of time.

As I mentioned above, the intersection of Forbes and Murray is not the safest in the city, in spite of the four way stop. Earlier this summer a truck missed hitting me by inches when it ran the red light on Murray to turn right onto Forbes while I was crossing Forbes. He never slowed down and never saw me. The only reason he did not hit me was that I saw him first. The only satisfaction I could get from the incident was knowing how much of a world of trouble he would have been in once he learned he hit a pregnant woman.

So it was a wonderful sight to witness the man in the black SUV get caught attempting the same maneuver on Thursday morning. Never did the sound of a whistle sound so sweet to my ears.

Not only did the crossing guard stop the driver, she approached his SUV and yelled at him. Sternly, loudly and unreasonably. She made such a scene that the driver began to back the SUV up to get away from her. And made his second mistake of the morning.

He did not look behind him before he started backing up. Because he did not look behind him, he did not see me crossing behind his SUV* and nearly hit me. Which provoked the crossing guard into yelling at him some more, accompanied chorus of citizens, including a city employee collecting change out of the meters. A mass of humanity descended upon this man in a SUV at 7:55 on a Thursday morning.

*Yes, I know, I should have walked in front of the SUV. Past experience has taught me that is safer to go behind the vehicle instead of in front of it, since drivers have been known to “nudge” pedestrians along with their vehicles.

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To...

2009-09-05T11:05:00.000-04:00

In my current state of abstention, going out for dinner with friends, while fun, does not have quite the same adult sense of elan as it did when it was permissible (and non-guilt inducing) to order a glass of wine with my overcooked steak.

In an attempt to bring back a little bit of the sense that I am an adult and not just a giant, gestating, foul tempered vessel, I've taken several dining occasions as permission to order that goofy mainstay of childhood, the Shirley Temple.

The Shirley Temple of my childhood looked like a vodka and cranberry topped with a maraschino cherry, served in the double highball glass that the bartender used for my mother's Old Fashioned. The combination of grenadine and seltzer water made it cold, sweet and not very fizzy. There was only one place in my little town where I drank these concoctions as a child, the Flaming Hearth. I never had to actually order one – we were such frequent eaters at this establishment that the hostess would automatically bring one to the table, along with a Roy Rogers for my brother, my mother's Old Fashioned and my father's favorite beer. Then she would put in an order of my favorite dish, lasagna, and take my younger brother in her arms for a tour of the kitchen.

The modern Shirley Temple comes in a 16oz plastic soda glass packed with ice, Sprite/7Up, far too much grenadine and a herd of maraschino cherries. Some bartenders, in a moment of creativity, add a quarter of lime to the glass to counteract the sickly sweet combination of soda and grenadine. It still has the same color as a vodka and cranberry, but the sense of nostalgia is completely missing from the drink. I felt more like a grown-up drinking it when I was a kid.

It is like candy cigarettes. Candy cigarettes were everywhere when I was a kid. They were a common Halloween treat. Since I was always more of a chocolate girl, I usually “smoked” (but never inhaled) one or two, and traded the rest away for mini Hersey bars and Reese's peanut butter cups.

Then one day they were gone from the candy aisle, a victim of concerned organizations who believed that eating a candy cigarette would lead kids down the path of smoking. Thus goes the Shirley Temple of my childhood, the kiddie cocktail stripped of all its adult feel for fear of over-glamorizing drinking.

Because It Is Almost Friday and I Have Not Done This In A While

2009-09-03T20:08:00.002-04:00

I present "Bookends"...

Priorities

2009-09-02T22:51:00.003-04:00

J and I have begun the process of amassing the furniture we will need in the coming months, since my womb is going to be considered tight quarters in late December and having easily accessible and destroyable electronic equipment lying around the living room is a bad idea. To aid in that goal, I have been reading Craigslist ads seeking various used household items and attempting to pillage every second hand store in the area, hoping to score some decent, safe pieces of nursery and other home furnishings.

Looking for furniture on Craigslist makes me mean. As I scroll and click through the posted ads, I can not help but make fun of the spelling errors and mentally harangue sellers asking full price for used goods, based on the theory that the goods in question were barely used. One of the more fascinating threads is the number of people selling convertible cribs, using the ability to convert the crib to a bed as a selling point, then stating that they have only had the crib a year or two. If you don't intend to convert the crib to full use, why are you using that as a selling point?

It was in this frame of mind that J and set out to find a crib this past Saturday. Previous scouting visits to price new cribs had left us both with severe sticker shock, as some places would only sell the full suite (crib, dresser, changing table, etc) and others were charging as much money for a crib as we paid for our entire bedroom suite, sans mattress.

Because of the sticker shock, J and I have decided to set aside the repeated exhortations that we only purchase a new crib and that anything less means we want to kill our alien, reasoning that somewhere in the city there exists a respectable, decently priced, safe, used crib.

Not so far. Our first stop, which we mistakenly assumed was a warehouse of used children's furniture, turned out to be a thrift store raising money for children's charities, no crib was to be found. This did not stop a volunteer from spending an excessive amount of time trying to convince us to purchase one of two incredibly ugly, completely unnecessary changing tables. Polite attempts to shake this individual were meet with an increasingly hard sell, akin to an encounter we experienced with a used car salesman last summer.

A jaunt across the street to a second, charity-related, thrift store produced two cribs. The first was leftover from a daycare center, as it came with plexiglass panels and a mirrored back, better to observe an alien without causing a disturbance. J recognized it immediately, as it was the same type of crib used in the center the alien will be attending when I return to work. The second one appeared to be missing several pieces. J was perfectly comfortable with buying the plexiglass model and calling it day. I, on the other hand, reasoned that if the crib was in poor enough shape to be banished from a daycare center it probably had no place in our home.

Our third stop was at a used furniture warehouse down the street from home. Although there were no cribs available, the furniture was beautiful and J found an entertainment center to home all of the aforementioned electronic equipment in a manner that is not kid accessible. Four days later and he is still pondering purchasing the unit.

Our final stop on Saturday was at the Shadyside Arts festival, to look at the work of an artist and children's book illustrator named Kana Handel.

Kana Handel creates beautiful, fanciful paintings of teapots and mermaids, children and anthropomorphic animals such as cats and rabbits. She works with a mix of media including watercolor, ink washes and sumi on Washi. After seeing her work at the Three Rivers Arts festival in early June, I spent the rest of the summer mulling over her work. And I decided that one of her paintings was an ideal addition to the nursery walls.

I ended up purchasing two paintings. Terrible of me, I know. I hear the chorus singing about my skewed priorities. I hear them chanting about how I'm putting the alien at risk of very bad things happening, because I spent money on art instead of a new crib. I hear them scolding my response that my brother and myself slept in dresser drawers as infants (my parents were not expecting twins) and many babies sleep in vibrating bouncy chairs, moses baskets, in the parents bed and in co-sleepers – anywhere they will actually sleep.

I purchased the paintings anyway. When the alien is ready to return to the mothership in twenty something years, the paintings will go as well. If the alien decides that they are not alien-worthy, then I'll hang them in our bedroom instead.

J and continued the hunt while hanging out on Sunday morning. As I wandered through the furniture and appliance section of Craigslist I stumbled across an item on our ongoing wish list – a year old chest freezer of just the right small size for an obscenely low amount of money. As our visits to large box stores have increasingly included a stop in the large appliance section to ogle the chest freezers and compare prices, before moving on to the over-the-stove convection microwaves (to replace our current model, which is dying key-by-key) and flat screen televisions. (1)

Sensing an opportunity, I pointed the add out to J, wrote down the phone number and suggested he call to see if it was still available.

It was. The problem of how to get the freezer from the seller's house miles away to our home was quickly resolved with a phone call to J's parents, who happened to reside in the same town as the seller. Off J roared in his beloved Porsche (2) to borrow the caravan and pick up the freezer.

Hours later, two vehicles return. J's father in the caravan and J and his mother (who apparently spent most of the drive pressing down hard on the imaginary passenger brake and telling J not to waste that money he just saved, because his parents purchased the freezer for us as an early Christmas gift, on a speeding ticket) in the Porsche.

The freezer was not completely free. It came complete with a lecture about cleaning it thoroughly to get the cat smell off of it (which neither J nor myself could detect) and commentary on the small ding on the top (its used, dings are expected). J's father finished with a guilt trip about not coming to Sunday dinner, J's mother with the application of pressure to be allowed to hold the freshly newborn alien via a story of how wonderful it was to hold one of the other grandchildren at only an hour old.

I gently explained, for the umpteenth time, that I would only be in a hospital if something goes wrong in the next 17 weeks. If I remain healthy, I will be at the birthing center and no one would be informed of the birth until I was released and back home, as the last thing I want while trying to bring the alien in the world sans drugs was my in-laws anywhere near me.

(1) J and I have a philosophy about electronics and home features we dislike. We do nothing and hope that the object in question will eventually die. This philosophy would work well if it did not take us years to replace dead items, as we also have a rule that home purchases must have the agreement of both parties to be legitimate. Because of this, the hideous dining room light/ceiling fan which died the summer after we moved into our house is still attached to the ceiling, we have yet to order the other sconces to match the one we like in the living room and it was almost eight years into our marriage before we got around to purchasing a bedroom suite.

Regretfully, our current television refuses to die and has somehow managed to survive through several electrical storms unscathed. We thought the last storm, which occurred right over our house would finally put us out of our techno-lust misery, but no such luck. The set works perfectly, shows no indication of giving up anytime in the near future and will continue to work even after public mention just to spite me.

(2) In one of life's finer ironies, J purchased his much longed for two seater convertible (a 1998 Boxter in exquisite, almost-new condition) in late December. Less than four months later I was pregnant. Did you know that Porsche can install a special switch to disable the passenger side airbags and sells custom fitted infant and toddler car seats? As the first thing J offered to do after he stopped laughing over my pregnancy announcement was to offer to sell the car, one of the responses I'm considering giving when people ask what they can get for the baby is “Money towards the disable switch and infant/toddler seats for the Porsche”. Because J is that spectacularly awesome and deserves, at all possible, to keep his dream car. And for those who have commented on how nice it is for me to “let J keep his car” – how insulting can you get?

Thoughts on Edward Kennedy

2009-08-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

When I was twelve, my parents packed my brothers and myself up and took us to Martha's Vineyard, to spend two weeks on the island.

We stayed, as we always stayed during our visits, in the funky, catawampus home of my aunt and uncle, standing on a hill above Oak Bluffs. Slapped together from the partial remains of two smaller homes, you had to step down to get into two of the bedrooms, step up to move from the small living room into the larger dining room and kitchen. You could see the ocean and watch the activities in Oak Bluffs from the front porch. If you were feeling especially mischievous, you could spy on guests utilizing the outdoor shower from one of the bedrooms.

One day my dad decided to take a walk from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown Wharf, six miles away. I went with him, sporting a pair of shoes unsuitable for a six mile hike.

We walked along Seaview Avenue and Beach Road, through the state park, a salt pond on our left and the ocean on our right. It was a bright, beautiful day full of the sounds of the moving ocean, the screaming of the gulls and the scent of salt and wild roses.

As we entered Edgartown my father started talking about Senator Edward Kennedy and the incident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969. He pointed out the island to me, told me where the pond was located, described how the car went into the pond on that night, how Kennedy swam to Edgartown. My father was very clear that he believed that Kennedy was responsible for Mary Jo Kopechne's death.

Imagine a man who had to bear witness to the mental illness and deterioration of a sister and the death of all three of his brothers, the first in war, the second and third publicly murdered, assassinated. Who barely survived a plane crash, who believed himself to be cursed like his brothers. On the night he drove that car into a pond he was drunk, he was driving, and he abandoned the scene of the accident.

My father left me with the impression of an Edward Kennedy who was an incredibly flawed human being in a lot of physical and emotional pain before the accident. Of a man who paid and repaid the consequences of every single bad decision he made on the night his car went over the bridge. He was an alcoholic, he was a womanizer, he destroyed his first marriage, he set a bad example for the younger men in his family.

I don't remember if we talked about forgiveness during that conversation. I like to think that I asked my father if Mary Jo Kopechene's family forgave him for causing her death, if my father forgave him for his mistakes. But my memory of 24 years ago is faulty, I'm not sure if my twelve year old self was that precocious. If my memory is correct, my father left me with the impression that it was not his role or my role to forgive Edward Kennedy for his myriad of sins. That was a job better left to the people he directly harmed and his god.

But out of that conversation was planted the idea that any individual could be terribly flawed, could make terrible mistakes and still find a way to redemption. This is the Edward Kennedy my father taught me to see, a man on a constant quest for redemption, who fought for the rights of those who did not have the privileges of his gender, his money, his stature or family name.

Rest In Peace Senator. My you be granted the redemption that you spent your lifetime seeking.

R.I.P

2009-08-26T06:29:00.000-04:00

Senator Edward Kennedy.

Muddlng Through

2009-08-25T21:03:00.000-04:00

I hate being pregnant.

There are the biological and physical changes. Weight gain. Tiredness.(1) The increase in my (already substantial) bra size coupled with a serious lack in supportive lingerie to offset the increases, topped off with the sickly sour, rotten cherry of far too many lectures on why pregnant-women-should-not-wear-underwire-because-it-is-bad-for-you.(2) The complete absence of anything resembling sexual desire.(3) The occasional episodes of public dry heaving in restaurants and on the bus. The constant aching.

There are the emotional changes, which can be summed up as me having the most spectacular episodes of depression I have ever experienced. Too many days spent having to call up every ounce of will power I posses to get out of bed, get on the bus, carry on with my day. Flashes of anger so intense that I don't recognize myself. Random fits of crying. My first ever episodes of hysterics, which lasted well over 15 minutes and was spent on the bed, J sitting next to me not saying anything, just stroking my hair, telling me to breathe and cracking highly inappropriate (but truly funny) jokes.

At the end of the hysterics, J confessed that washed the kitchen floor earlier in the week because he had smashed an orange in a fit of anger. He suggested that I try it and volunteered to wash the floor again.

I said no thanks, a smashed chair was enough for my lifetime.(4)

There are all the tests, the sodding tests that I have to go through. As of this date, two ultrasounds, a first trimester blood draw (nine vials), an urinalysis, a repeat blood draw because the lab screwed up and lost my blood type/antibody results(5) and the doppler at every checkup. Upcoming I have a third trimester blood draw, including the infamous 1 hour glucose tolerance test. Followed, most likely, by the even more infamous 3 hour, multiple draw, blood glucose test, since 15-23% of the women who take the 1 hour test fail it, since it is only a screening, not a diagnostic. Out of the 15-23% that take the 3 hour test, only 2-5% actually have gestational diabetes.

A digression – why am I taking a screening test which such a high false failure rate?

I hate the clichés. At a recent family gathering, I managed to score BINGO on my mental “pregnancy cliché BINGO card” in under three minutes just by listening ONE person, the mother of one of my in-laws.

All of this is intensified by the awful feeling that all those well intentioned offers to help are nothing more than hot air.

In spite of my repeated requests, J has yet to visit any of the daycares that I asked him to check out several months ago, leaving me the inevitable feeling that I will be forced to take yet more time off, in between doctor appointments and lab tests, to tour centers. The longer J puts it off, the more difficult it will be to find a decent placement. The current budget impasse in PA state legislature has lead to cuts in funding, causing over 100 centers statewide to close. Those that have managed to stay open have limited availability and it is very difficult to find an infant care placement. Which means that staying at home may go from an option to a necessity.

I resent the hell out of the fact that J has yet to do the one thing I specifically asked him to do. I resent having to ask him over and over again. I resent listening to him say that he'll take care of it, but then doing nothing. I resent being angry at him about it. I don't want to feel this way. I'm tired of hearing that if it is that important, I should do it myself. He is the father. He is equally responsible. Not “should be”. Not “could be”. IS.(6)

I still have no idea how much maternity leave I will have. The feelers I have put out to see which of our friends and family would be interested in helping us out after the alien is born have been met with a lukewarm reception. So lukewarm that I almost feel compelled to send out a mass email apologizing for the inconvenience I am causing by delivering the alien at Christmas, thus keeping people from their orgy of shopping, cooking, gift wrapping, gift unwrapping and eating.

But mostly, right now, I hate the fact that I will have to wait at least 17 weeks, 6 days for a shot of tequila.

(1)I have not seen the inside of a gym in months and probably will not see the inside of one for at least six more. Common sense would dictate that I cancel my gym membership. J insists that I maintain it, even if I'm too tired to go right now, and is helping me to figure out a way to get there 2-3 days a week once I'm cleared for exercise.
(2)There is absolutely no such thing as a wire-free supportive size [enter my ridiculously large size here] bra. It does not exist. Stop telling me that it does. ESPECIALLY if your breasts could be described as “lemon sized” on a good day, as almost every sales clerk I spoken with possesses. You have no idea what you are talking about.
(3)All those websites and books that claim that I would get happy hormones at some point? They lied.
(4)A long ago incident provoked by a run in with a misogynistic attorney while negotiating the sale of our first house.
(5)This turned out to be a surprise. For years I was under the impression that I was B+. As it turns out, I'm not. I'm A+.
(6)As I was writing this, J asked for time off to go tour the centers.

2009-08-19T10:10:00.003-04:00

The blogger formerly known as PittGirl, Ginny Montanez has returned!

Bad Manners

2009-08-09T21:51:00.003-04:00

If I had any sense at all, I would have realized that my encounter with the elderly lady on the corner of Forbes and Murray on Friday afternoon was a predictor of the sudden and wild change in weather from the temperate (albeit slightly rainy) summer that has made sleeping under a down comforter a comfortable necessity to the sudden and unexpected 80+ degree temperatures the city will swelter under for most of the upcoming week.

On Friday afternoon I sat on a seat in shelter, quietly waiting for a bus to take me back downtown. The stop was completely empty when I arrived, the passel of teenagers missing from the church steps, both the shelters devoid of humanity. I took a book (J. Martaan Troost's Lost on Planet China) out of my bag and commenced quietly reading.

The bus stop began to fill up with people. A woman sat down next to me. As we were sitting there, I quietly reading my book, she looking around, an older woman walked up to the shelter.

What transpired next was one of those moments in which I, humbly reading my book and minding my own business, suddenly become the target of an absolute stranger's ire because I lack the ability to read minds.

The woman beside me (WBM) offered the older woman (OW) her seat. OW refused offer of seat with expected comment about “age before beauty” and WBM needing the seat more than she does. OW then segued into an indirect harangue of indeterminate length (I really should time these things) about my rudeness in not offering her my seat first, before WBM.

I tried, very hard, to keep my mouth shut, my head down, my face expressionless, my eyes focused on the text of my book as OW expressed how “[her] children were raised better than that” and how disrespectful “the youth” of today were towards their superiors. But something inside me snapped at hearing OW snidely say “Here comes someone who really needs a seat. I wonder if she'll have one offered to her”.

I looked up from my book. I wished I had been calm enough to look OW straight in the eye, but I could not. I know it would have been more effective, but it took a lot of will to get the words out.

“Ma'am, I'm 20 weeks pregnant, I'm tired and I'm not moving”.

There was a momentarily pause as OW digested this information, suddenly aware that perhaps I was not the teenager she assumed me to be. Then she snapped back “Be quiet, I wasn't talking to you”, moved closer to WBM and lowered her voice to a mummer. I put my eyes back on my book. When the bus pulled up I waited as OW cut to the front of the line, boarded the bus and sat in one of the seats near the front.

Then I got up, hauled my tired, pregnant self onto the bus, walked to the back and sat down.

J's response when I told him this story: “What are you doing to attract these people?”

Role Reversal

2009-07-31T13:11:00.000-04:00

I fully expected to receive some push back on my declaration that this will be the one and only child J and I will be having. Surprisingly, there has been far less than I had anticipated, although that may very well change this weekend as we are attending a family picnic hosted by J's cousin, none of who are shy about expressing their opinion on how we should be conducting our life.

I did not expect J to receive as much push back as he seems to be getting right now, and it surprised me. J is irritated, he has had far too many conversations in the past several weeks with co-workers who absolutely refuse to accept that maybe the two of us have a pretty good grasp, after nine and a half years of marriage, of where our collective limitations end. To wit, they end with one child.

The pattern of the conversation is always the same. J mentions an alien is gestating, coworker responds with an exposition on the joys of parenthood. This is followed up by an interrogation on our current parental status, continued with statements on how eager the two of us will be to have another once the first is past the helpless alien stage. J responds that we intend to have one child. Coworker counters with the classic “you will change your mind”. J, unable to make himself walk away at this point, proceeds to explain all the logical reasons (time, money, resources, overpopulated planet, I don't want another child and hate being pregnant). Coworker dismisses explanations as the lunatic ravings of a nervous, first time father. The fact that I have no desire or intention to go through the experience again does not enter into the coworkers consciousness as a legitimate reason.. After all, once married, ownership of my reproductive organs passes onto my husband. I'm just the safe holding the goods. J gets to decide how the goods are used.

J shuts these conversations down by explaining that I have a history of depression, pregnancy has been far more difficult on me than he had anticipated and that he has no intention of putting me through such an experience again. Coworker shuts up.

Not wanting to be pregnant again? Not a reason. Not wanting your already crazy wife to become even crazier. Perfectly acceptable, after all there are children involved.

2009-07-27T21:07:00.000-04:00

My parents were in the city over the weekend, to see Til Death Do Us Part: Late Nite Catechism 3. J and I met them at Six Penn Kitchen (home of a killer lobster macaroni and cheese dish that I have yet to try with the lobster) for brunch on Sunday morning.

Brunch began as the breezy and fun meal it is supposed to be late on a Sunday morning. Dad ordered an espresso and a green pepper stuffed with various meats, mom an iced tea and cheesecake stuffed french toast. J voted for coffee and an omelet stuffed with various meats while I opted for decaffeinated tea (served loose in a press pot), fresh orange juice, huevos rancheros and a side order of the macaroni and cheese*.

Remarks were made on my very gradual weight gain (I'm still in most of my regular clothing and only appear pregnant to those in the know), as gaining weight gradually is supposed to be less stressful on the body, lead to less weight gain overall, easier loss of weight post-pregnancy and, as told to me by my father-the-expert on such things, fewer and lighter stretch marks. Oohs and aahs were expressed over the twelve week ultrasound photos. An update on the Perkins restaurant that burned down several weeks ago was given.

This discomfort began once the details of the meal had been settled. J's mom wants to throw me a baby shower, an announcement that the majority of my female friends, knowing and sharing my deep aversion to showers bridal, baby and otherwise, greeted with much hilarity and the promise to present me with some highly inappropriate gifts to keep my spirits up during the execution of the event**.

As the alien I will be expelling is number six in a line of grandchildren on J's side and the first for my parents, it felt only appropriate and correct that my mom get first crack at torturing her daughter in the fashion of a baby shower. Except that, as carefully as I phrased the question, I could not find a way of explaining myself without sounding mercenary and made my mother very uncomfortable, as it had not occurred to her to think about hosting a baby shower.

As J and I have been trolling Craigslist in recent weeks for gently used infant clothing, a second hand crib made within the past three years, a second hand stroller and other baby related items, it was frustrating to come across as an individual who was begging for stuff. The only new items we intend to purchase are the breast pump, the infant car seat and the mattress for the crib. We are not assuming that anyone will providing us with anything.

After mom made it clear that she was more than willing to pass the shower honor on to J's mom, the conversation turned to our future plans.

J has a very bad habit of asking, in an audible undertone, if we should share information in front of the very people that I may want to withhold information from, at least in the short term. Over the years, I have gotten better at explicitly telling J to avoid certain topics of conversation, but once in a while an item will slip and he has never caught onto the concept

Such as the fact that I am seriously considering staying home.

My mom, who quit working when I was twelve to stay at home, did not approve. At all. And argued against it. My explanation, that out of the two choices, living with less money stressed me out less than the thought of the getting the alien bathed, fed and to/from daycare while holding down a full-time job, did little to appease her. J's explanation that I would be doing unpaid work for a friend part-time appeased her a little, but not much. All the contingencies J insists on putting into place to ensure that I get out of the house did little to appease her.

I shrugged her objections off, only to have them come back to haunt me at 4:30 in the morning. By the time J got up I was in tears and anxious.

And J was he gentle blunt self. “When have you honestly felt like you mom really supported you?” he asked me in the kitchen, after my bout of histrionics.

“Rarely” I replied.

“There's your answer. Do what makes you happy”.

*The ability to order an enormous amount of food without commentary is one of the few remaining prerogatives a pregnant woman has these days, after being denied lunch meat (including roast beef), sushi, rare steak, various cheeses, most seafood, chocolate, beer/wine and caffeinated beverages. And it is a prerogative that is slipping away as the media becomes increasingly enamored in shaming pregnant women for completely natural weight gain.

I also feel compelled to go on record and state that I did not finish all that food and took the rest home. The rest of the huevos made an excellent Sunday evening dinner and the macaroni and cheese is tonight's meal.

**A flask was mentioned. A full one. With wine. As for why I am opting to go through this particular torture, I may not be mercenary, but I'm also not a fool.

Options

2009-07-25T07:53:00.000-04:00

J has been searching for a job for several months. Because of the gradually tightening economy, his success has been non-existent. Messages from recruiters have dropped to zero and his calls to them go either unanswered or offer no progress.

He received an email last week informing him that a product manager position has opened up at a company J left five years ago. The email came from an ex-coworker (and good friend) still employed at the company. He proposed J's name to management and received an enthusiastic response to the idea.

The job is ideal for J. Highly technical, with opportunities to interact with clients on a regular basis and attend major developer conferences, for a decent salary, working with individuals that J knows well and still maintains a good relationship with these many years later.

It is also highly stressful, with travel ranging from two to seven days every month and an average burn-out rate of a year. At a company that made J so miserable that I nearly moved out of our home near the end of his tenure there, rather than put up with one more day of his bad attitude. When he finally found new employment I threatened to leave him if ever went back *.

The interview went well, but he is only the first person interviewed and we think the company is balking at J's salary requirements.

J and I have both tried to live by the general rule of not stopping the other from doing something we really want to do, as long as it does not violate the boundaries of our very bourgeois marriage values. Ninety percent of the time it works out well. J is free to buy the Porsche, I am free to fly off to Paris for a week by myself.

But the thought of the amount of travel he will have to do every month, no matter how minimal, leaves me stressed, as it is becoming painfully clear, in spite of our best intentions, that if I continue working I will be overwhelmingly responsible, at least for the first year, for the care of our child. Feeding, watching over, getting to and from day care and doctors appointments. Even if he does not take this job, I feel an incredible amount of the burden falling on my shoulders. And I'm a little bit angry that the dictates of biology and culture make it this way.

So, I quit. Or am quitting. Maybe. Possibly. When I sit quietly and weigh the two options in my mind, being home makes more sense. J had put out feelers among his network of developer friends and one is interested in hiring me to test on a part time basis. I could work on the sketches for the children's story I wrote seven years ago. I could spend some time writing. And J insists that I keep my gym membership and figure out a budget for hiring a sitter, to get me out of the house alone a 2-3 days a week.

Then my common sense weighs in and tells me that I'm crazy to quit in this economy and need to tough it out. That we can get by on one income, but I need to be employed in case J becomes unemployed. That it is worth giving up 1/3 of my paycheck to childcare and my temporary sanity to ensure that we stay afloat in the long term.

This sucks.

*Obviously an empty threat.

Handmade Cutting Board Blues*

2009-07-14T22:26:00.000-04:00

J and I manged to escape our house over the weekend and spend a day in State College, at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. It has not been easy to escape, as of late. J has been working long hours and too many weekends, a situation that is causing both of us frustration and some anxiety, as attempts to plan some sort of last hurrah as a childless couple getaway-ish type weekend have been thwarted by his work responsibilities.

After an early lunch at the Deli, we spent a happy afternoon wandering the streets of State College and portions of Penn State University's campus, peering into booths filled with prints, painting, pottery, jewelry and woodwork.

Midway through our tour of the tents we stopped to admire the blockcut prints made by an artist named Thomas Bucci. As we were studying the prints, the thunder we had been hearing for the past twenty minutes became louder, the wind kicked up and it began to rain. Thomas invited us to shelter inside his tent during the storm, assuring us that it would be strong, but very brief.

As we stood inside his zipped up tent, he explained how he created the prints. He pulled out his Blackberry and showed us some of the sketches he created on his phone, done with a piece of software and a stylus.

I was amazed. I loved the mingling of art and technology. As the rain stopped, J and I purchased two prints to add to our collection, most likely to decorate the walls of the alien's room.

We saw the artisan who made the jewelry box J purchased at the Three Rivers Festival as a birthday gift for me two years ago. J was thrilled to find him, as we owed him money. When we originally purchased the box, we asked if he could change out one of the sections. Since it could not be done at the festival, we put a 50% down payment and he agreed to make the change and call us before sending the box so we could pay him the rest.

Except that he never called. He packed the box up and shipped to us, without asking for the rest of the money. By the time we received the box we had lost his business card and had no way of contacting him to pay up.

It took a while for J to convince him that we still owed him money and J was only able to pay him back half of what we actually owed. But it was something.

I also experienced something like homesickness while talking to a weaver from Greensboro, N.C, my home during graduate school. She was sunny and bouncy and fun and caught me up on some of my favorite places in the city. I walked away with a matching mohair hat, scarf and shaw, which I plan to use while cuddling the alien next winter. She walked away delighted at the thought that the shawl would be used to keep warm a new life.

* Title inspired by the antics of a customer at one booth who wanted to make sure that she was shipped a cutting board without any knots in it. She did not like any of the boards he had available because they were "knotty".

Things I'm Thinking of Rather Than Working

2009-07-10T15:58:00.000-04:00

Because I'm writing this on a sunny Friday afternoon when I should be working...

It is my general philosophy to not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but I suspect Robert Hanlon never had to deal with health insurance company.

Conversations with all involved parties have allowed me to piece together the factors that precipitated Coventry's determination that the Midwife Center is an out-of-network provider. A brief time line:

The Midwife Center faxes a standard letter to Coventry notifying the insurance company that the center will be providing my prenatal and birth care. The letter contains my name, group number and insurance number. The letter does not contain the Midwife Center's provider number, as the center is not billing Coventry for any services at this time.
Coventry sends me a letter stating that the Midwife Center is an out-of-network provider.
I call the Midwife Center and inform them of the letter. They call Coventry, verify that they are in-network and tell me that I need to call the insurance company and try to determine where the mistake happened.
I call Coventry and speak with a very nice CSR. She explains to me that the Midwife Center has two provider numbers, probably due to a change in the name of the center sometime in the past. One number is out-of-network and essentially defunct. The second is in-network. It appears that an employee assigned the fax to the out-of-network number. In order to change it, I need to get the Midwife Center to refax the information to Coventry, with the correct provider number. Once they receive the corrected information, they will send me confirmation.
I call the center back and explain the situation. The woman who handles the billing is completely bewildered as the center has never put the provider number on this type of notification. She also does not seem to understand why it is necessary to refax the information with the provider number included. She says the situation will resolve itself when the Midwife Center bills Coventry at the end of the pregnancy. She seems to have missed the simple fact that this company has pre-emptively refused to pay in-network for a service and will stick to that decision until told otherwise.
After hanging up, I remind myself that I paid a considerable sum of money for my older, but still highly functional CDMA/GSM hybrid phone, and breaking the phone by throwing it across the conference room is a bad idea.
I decide, instead, to spend my Sunday composing and filing an appeal with Coventry, using the information that the very nice CSR gave to me. Copies of this appeal will be sent to Coventry, the Midwife Center, the PA Department of Insurance and the PA Attorney General. Coventry will also be receiving a copy of the formal complaints I will be filing with the PA Department of Insurance and the PA Attorney General.

My week was rounded out, on Thursday, by my first official "pregancy scold" lecture from a co-worker who felt that I should not have indulged in a sushi dinner earlier in the week. She felt it was "too risky" as "you never know, with all the physical changes to your body, what might make you sick".* While I have experienced a significant aversions to some foods, such as the smell of peanut better and well done (overcooked) meat, I have not become suddenly and mysteriously allergic to raw fish.

The sushi was magnificent.

* The dinner consisted of spider rolls (cooked, soft-shell crab), sweet shrimp sushi (also cooked) and crazy tuna rolls (raw, ahi tuna mixed with wasabi served on warm, lightly fried rice rolls). The combined amount of seafood in the meal maybe reached 8oz total, most of the food was cooked and wasabi is used with sushi because of its anti-microbial qualities.

Insurance Battle Number 1

2009-07-06T21:47:00.001-04:00

I received a letter from Coventry Health Assurance today.

Coventry Health Assurance has decided, in spite of my diligent checking three months ago*, that the Midwife Center is an out-of-network provider and that I will be responsible for a $2,000.00 out-of-network deductible plus any overages above what Coventry Health Assurance feels like paying as reasonable cost to the Midwife Center.**

Oh, and I have a right to appeal, but it will not be considered an urgent appeal, so Coventry Health Assurance could, in theory, tie up the appeal past the point where I would be able and permitted to switch to an in-network OB.

The next person who tells me that nationalized health care will send the United States down the road to rationed care is getting punched in the nose.

* A phone call to the Midwife Center to confirm they were in-network and several hours digging through a provider search interface designed to create the maximum amount of aggravation with a minimum number of results. The search options are Find a Doctor, Find a Hospital, Find an Ancillary Service Provider, Find an Urgent Care Center or Find an Allied Health Professional. You can not search by clinic or practice name. You can not search by individual name if the provider is anything other than an MD, unless you try Ancillary Service Provider or Allied Health Professional and your guess about which category a CNM falls into is as good as mine. You can search by specialty, but the only names that come up are, once again, MD's.

** My interpretation.

Don't Panic - Episode I

2009-07-03T08:41:00.000-04:00

One of the more pleasant aspects of visiting the midwives is that I am handed my chart as I walk through the door for an appointment. Rather then endure the borderline humiliation of being weighed by a nurse, I go into the bathroom, weigh myself on the old fashioned scale and note it in the chart.

Task done, I took a few moments while waiting for the midwife to read through my chart, including the results from a very unpleasant procedure I had several years ago and the more recent reports from the ultrasound done earlier this month.

Noted in the ultrasound report - Placenta: previa (complete).

Oh. No.

I digress to openly admit that I read way to much sometimes. Once I accepted that this pregnancy was real I became acquainted with the Mayo Clinic's website and have become obsessive at learning about all the things that could possibly go wrong during a pregnancy. But in all my worries about birth defects, gestational diabetes (because I hate the idea of having to stick myself with needles multiple times a day) and pre-eclempsea (because I hate the idea of forced bed rest and possible stroke), that I might have the condition known as placenta previa never occurred to me.

In this, I have potentially hit, at once, all of things I fear with frightening pathology - forced bed rest, repeated ultrasounds, steroids, needles, knives, surgery and death.

Dana the midwife* calls me back to the office and we sit down to chat. She asks me if I have any questions. I ask her about the "previa (complete)" notation on the ultrasound report.

Dana explains to me that this condition is very common into the second trimester of pregnancy and that the placenta usually moves upwards as the uterus expands. If I had not had the ultrasound, I would not have known. They will check again at the 18-20 week ultrasound and take necessary action if the placenta has not moved by then.

This should have been enough to calm me down, at least until I have the next ultrasound. In the short term, defined as the sixteen hours between the end of my appointment and this morning, it was.

Then I had to look up the complications. I knew that previa meant c-section. It did not register in my first round of reading that it might also mean enforced hospital bed rest, steroids to speed up fetal lung development, premature delivery, excessive bleeding, hysterectomy and possibly death. Finding out the resolve rate for partial previa is 95%, complete previa 90%, did not help much, because there is that 10% to worry about. And 10% is a lot when you are not quite ready to shuffle off the mortal coil.

J is calm in contrast of my controlled panic. Calm, but irate, the way men become when they will not allow themselves to panic. He wanted to know why the doctor, who told us "everything was normal", failed to mention the previa.

I'm not as curious. He's a doctor. He sees a previa, note that I am just finishing the first trimester, assumes that it will resolve and moves on. Does not want to deal with giving an already stressed out woman potentially bad news about a life-threatening condition that usually resolves itself.

The bills from the first ultrasound and blood tests are starting to roll in. Almost $600.00 towards my $1000.00 deductible already reached. The insurance breakdown came first, followed by a bill from National Chain Lab who has not sent the results of my blood work two weeks ago to the midwives. They sit on the dining room table waiting for me to match up the statements, to ensure that I am not being overcharged for any service. The next ultrasound should eat up the rest of the deductible. Then the fun of explaining to multiple parties that I have fulfilled my deductible and that they need to take it up with the insurance company begins.

*There are five midwives in this practice. Patients are rotated through all five over the course of a pregnancy and receive labor and delivery care from whomever is on call at the time labor begins, whether at the center or in the hospital. Even if I go to the hospital, the midwife will be there for support.

My Pregnancy Letter

2009-06-24T21:36:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends, Family and Complete Strangers who will Feel Compelled to Accost me on the Street in the Next Nine Months,

Yes, I am pregnant.
No, it was not planned. But it does not follow that it is unwanted.
No, I was not thrilled when I found out. As a point of fact, I was rather pissed off. But it does not follow that I unhappy about it now.
No, I am not getting rid of the cats. End of discussion.
Yes, we are discussing names. No, we are not going to tell you what they are.
No I don't know what the gender of the alien is and I'm not interested in finding out.
And while we are on the subject, I don't care if the alien is a boy or a girl. Really. I. DON'T. CARE.
As a matter of fact, I do think it is funny to refer to the fetus as an alien. It certainly feels like one mentally and emotionally. Thanks for your concern.
No, we are not planning on trying for “another on”. We didn't try for this one. Which is not done yet, so why the rush?
No, I don't think I am being selfish by not giving the alien a sibling. I value my sanity far more than I value breeding a second alien to keep the first one company.
Since you insist on pressing the issue, I'm getting my tubes tied. TMI? TDB!
No, you may not touch me.
Do I know you? Have we been introduced? No? Then take your hands off me, n.o.w.
Yes, I intend to go back to work.
Yes, the alien will be in day care since I am going back to work.
Yes, I intend to bottle feed the alien at some point. Possibly with formula. Yes, I am aware that I am a horrible excuse for a mother and that the alien may turned out stupid, like me. With a Master's degree and a good job. If only all of us were so lucky.
Yes, I am using a nurse midwife instead of an obstetrician. Yes, I do think they are qualified to take care of me. Did you know that my father, mother, younger brother, his wife, her mother, one of my aunts and her daughter (my cousin) are all nurses? Now you do.
Yes, the alien will be vaccinated. Yes, I've heard about the autism study. Did you know that the results of that study have never been replicated and researchers have proven that some of data was manipulated? Manipulated as in falsified?
I'm sorry that my (currently non-existent) birth plan does not meet with your expectations. Perhaps you would like to discuss your concerns with my midwife?
No, I'm not giving up my study for the nursery. Have you seen how small the study is? Most walk-in closets are larger.
What about guests? Couch, air mattress or hotel.
No, I am not repainting the spare bedroom for the alien.
Yes, I agree that I'm a horrible person for not wanting to put a theme to the alien's room.

I'm sure this list will get longer...

Thirteen Weeks and Thirty Six Years

2009-06-24T20:25:00.000-04:00

The ultrasound and blood tests are complete. The hospital ignored my request for the quad screen and did the standard first trimester screening and took enough blood to fill seven vials. Naturally the tech had trouble finding the vein and spent several moments after sticking me moving the needle around, while it was in my arm. I closed my eyes, breathed very deeply and slowly and tried not to count the number of vials she will filling.*

I've decided, after a flush of irritation, not to push for the quad screen unless the midwives feel it is warranted. The ultrasound showed a healthy little alien with a fondness for moving it's hands and rolling over and over. The risk of Down's went from 1/150 to 1/1053 with the results of the blood tests. After weeks of saying to J, over and over, that whatever the outcome we will be OK, I have to start believing my own words.

Whatever the outcome, it will be OK. I said this to myself one morning, after dreaming about a labor that had gone wrong and that J and I were fighting over whose responsibility it was to raise the alien.

I'm amazed, maternity leave worries aside, at how supportive my employer and co-workers have been. One regularly asks me how I am feeling and passes on pieces of advice from his wife, a neonatal nurse. Others are planning on rotating out of their parking spots next winter, so I can ditch the bus and drive to work in late pregnancy without having to worry about finding a place to park. My supervisor tells me not to worry too much about work that I am missing for prenatal appointments – he knows I'll make it up.

I read about pregnancy, childbirth and child raising almost obsessively these days. Not about the mechanics, which I understand pretty well. I read about society's expectations of how pregnant women should behave. Irritating articles equating an occasional glass of wine during pregnancy and nursing with alcohol (and child) abuse. A compelling yet horrifying livejournal entry about an unassisted home birth, forwarded to me by a co-worker who was a friend of the writer. Compelling as the writer described the process of late labor vividly and beautifully. Horrifying as she hired an uncertified midwife who:

Did next to nothing to assist in the birth
Never checked to see if the writer was properly dilated for delivery
Told the writer to reach into herself and check if the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck
Mistook the sound of blood flowing through veins as a heartbeat on the doppler and told the writer she was going to deliver a twin

I found it very, very difficult to hold my judgement of the writer's choices. I've already has some backlash from a SIL over my decision to use certified nurse midwives instead of an OB. She had a considerable amount of trouble wrapping her head around the idea that doctors are not the only medical individuals qualified to deliver babies. And the fact that I intend to deliver in a birthing center confused her considerably.

But not knowing to check how far a laboring woman is dilating? An inability to tell the difference between a vein and a heartbeat? Really?

I turned thirty-six on Sunday. As far as birthdays go, it was not the most ideal day. J was sick and spent it sleeping. I spent it catching up on laundry, watching 80's movies on television and alternately feeling sorry for myself and telling myself to suck it up and be a grownup. J was sick, but friends left messages in my inbox and I received phone calls from both siblings, my parents and one friend living in Switzerland. The last was a special, completely unexpected and lovely treat.

*Seven and I have a lovely, streaky bruise on the inside of my right elbow to prove it.

Welcome Back...

2009-06-13T11:38:00.003-04:00

To Pittsburgh

Lord Stanley returns to the Steel City.

Ten Weeks

2009-06-10T06:37:00.001-04:00

Notes from June 4 Prenatal Exam

I am permitted (and encouraged) to read my chart on every visit. This was really surprising and gratifying.
I spent 50 of the 60 minutes of the exam in my own clothes, just talking to the midwife, KM.
I am permitted to do the following activities: ride my bike, swim, work out the ellipse and treadmill and work out with free weights and the weight machines.
When I told KM about my history or depression, she wrote out a list of names of counselors near my place of work and requested that I develop a relationship with a therapist to aid me with my pregnancy and postpartum depression issues. She does not expect me to go every week or even every other week, but wants me to have the appropriate interventions in place in case I become severely depressed at any point.
She found my friend B's suggestion that I take a prenatal yoga class as a tool for controlling the depression and anxiety “absolutely brilliant” and is almost requiring me to take the class.
I can't say that I had a flood of motherly emotion upon hearing the heartbeat via the Doppler. It just confirmed the “walking science experiment” feeling I have been experiencing the past few weeks.
My GP is the medical director of the center. As such, she will be routinely reviewing my chart. Talk about continuity of care.
I have ideal nipples for nursing. I'm acutely aware of how much information I am giving away with that statement, but I found this to be the most hilarious part of the visit.
I can ditch the foul prenatal vitamins and take one Flinstone's chewable a day instead. I can even ditch the chewable, but that would entail watching my diet more closely then I care to think about.
I have to be very careful about the fish I eat.
I felt 10 pounds lighter walking out of the office. The fact that I have been cleared for regular activity after being told I could not do any other exercise other than walk (by the nurse practitioner at my GP's office) has been a contributing factor to the depression and anxiety I am feeling. More so, I felt like they were caring for me as a person and not just as a vessel.

Genetic counseling, ultrasound and blood work (ugh) scheduled for June 15th. Which leads me into part 2 of this post.

I've been thinking a lot of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in the past ten days. I can't help thinking about it. The further I advance in this pregnancy, the more strenuously pro-choice I find myself coming. Primary because the decisions I am making are no longer in the abstract. I am no longer thinking about abortion as a theory, but as a necessary truth I may be forced to explore.

I find myself thinking in relentlessly, ruthlessly pragmatic tones, separating my emotions from what I might be seeing on the ultrasound and in test results in a couple of weeks. I find myself deeply examining my conscience, trying to parse out a complicated formula that will allow me to base decisions on what is instead of what might be.

On June 15th I will have a blood test called a Quad Screen and an nuchal fold ultrasound. The results of these tests will be used, along with my age and genetic history, to calculate the risk that the alien inside me is carrying markers for Trisomy 18 Syndrome, also known as Edward's Syndrome. Trisomy 18 causes severe developmental complications and 50% of the babies diagnosed carried to term are stillborn. Less than 10% survive past the first year.

These tests will not be able to tell me how specifically the alien will be affected, only the risk.

These tests are done between the 11th and 13th week of pregnancy. If the risk returns as high, I will be forced to make a painful decision.

[A] Wait until between the 15th and 18th week to have an amniocentesis to confirm whether the risk is real and learn the specific genetic abnormalities the alien may be manifesting. Test results take three weeks, which would put me in the 18th to 21st week range, right on the cusp of legality (24 weeks) for terminating a pregnancy. There is only 1 clinic in Pittsburgh who will terminate so late in the second trimester. Late termination is NOT the pleasant experience anti-choice paint it out to be. It takes multiple visits to a clinic and it painful. There are no clinics (to my knowledge) in Pennsylvania that will perform a third trimester termination, I would have to prove medical necessity and travel out of state to have the procedure done.

[B] Terminate early into the second trimester, without waiting to have the amnio done, taking the risk that I am terminating a healthy pregnancy. Still not a pleasant experience, but can be done in most clinics in a single visit. I'm also taking the risk of being disowned/ostracized by some family and friends for this decision.

[C] Do nothing and hope for the best. Risk the possibility of having no control over the medical decisions if the alien is born with defects that are incompatible with life.

The murder of George Tiller, the harassment of doctors, employees and patients at the clinics, all of these things have the cumulative affect of restricting women even further, and, ironically, putting women in the position of choosing [B] in situations where the fetus could be healthy as a way of avoiding making decision [A] further in pregnancy.

I think about these things. I think about how angry I get when I listen to someone who paints themselves as “pro-life” belittle women who have abortions because of mental health issues as women who just don't want to take care of a baby, as if the increased hormonal levels, the sickness, the bewildering sense that you are less than the fetus you are carrying, the fear of loss of job and support systems are a temporary state. Because that is ME they are talking about. That is ME who is trying so hard to get up every morning and get through the day.

Changing Parts I, II & III

2009-05-30T06:26:00.002-04:00

Changing - Part II

29 April 2009

I'm pregnant. By the time I am able to put this post up, I will have been pregnant for around 12 weeks. At the time I am writing this, at 7:04 PM on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, I've known definitely for less than 24 hours and have been “in the family way” for 2-3 weeks.

I can't say that I was happy, initially, to discover that I am incubating. Shocked. Disappointed. Pissed. I don't want to be pregnant. I want to eat raw oysters at the Outer Banks in May. I don't want to be pregnant. I want to go to Germany in the fall, to see my friends. I prayed for a change, but this is not the change I wanted.

For a moment, a flash of a moment, I wondered about an abortion. Bury the pregnancy tests in the trash with the cat litter, secretly get an abortion, never breathe a word. But the thought of carrying out this kind of subterfuge felt wrong, wrong at the core.

I called J instead, before I lost my courage. J laughed. I felt a tiny bit better, listening to him laugh, him sound happy. I asked him to pick up a second test, to make sure I had not screwed up the first. The second test was positive too.

We talked. I told J the truth. I told him that I was upset. That I was pissed. That I felt like I was going to have to start all over again, drawing boundaries. That I dreaded the battles with grandparents over faith, holidays, all the struggles, all over again.

From scratch.

J asked if I wanted an abortion.

No. Not an option.

I didn't sleep last night. Maybe an hour, hour and a half. I lay dazed, thinking, thinking, thinking. Moved from the bed upstairs to the couch down, opened the window, felt the cooler air on my skin. Sleep did not come. Felt sick, sicker then the slight sense of nausea I had felt in the past couple of weeks.

I finally got up, showered, dressed. 5:30 AM. My friend A was online, hours ahead, almost halfway through his day.

“I have news” I messaged.

“Your pregnant? Yay! He replied.

He was happy for me. “wow, you'll be a great mom”.

I felt a little bit better. Slowly, as the day wore on, as tired as I was, as sick as I felt, I felt better.

Changing – Part II

30 April 2009

Today:
1.The nurse practitioner at my GP confirmed the pregnancy.
2.I was obliquely told that a glass of wine every few weeks would be ignored.
3.Riding my bike was reluctantly approved, as long as I stayed on the trails. No mountain biking.
4.Walking was highly recommended and encouraged.
5.I had my first bout of real nausea, which left me close to feeling like I was going to pass out. Thankfully, I was in the bathroom when it happened. The bathroom has a cushy black armchair that I was able to sit in for a few minutes to collect myself.
6.J purchased ginger ale, ginger tea, tylenol and crackers.
7.I had to switch asthma inhalers. The new medication costs $41.53 for a 25 day supply. I don't even want to consider how much it would cost without insurance.
8.I can no longer take Imitrex for migraines. If they get bad enough, I can call the doctor and have them prescribe tylenol with codeine.

Changing – Part III

15 May 2009

Today I had repeat of the panic that has been plaguing me off and on since I initially stared at the digital readout of a positive pregnancy test.

There is a very real, very distinct possibility that I could lose my job because of this pregancy. The company I work is not bound by the FMLA because they employ less that 50 people. Any maternity leave that I am granted is at the discretion of the company.

In short, if they wanted to get rid of me, and I can name one person off the top of my head who would do it in a minute, all they would have to do is authorize less leave then medically necessary (the minimum suggested by most doctors is six weeks) and I'm out the door, because I will be physically incapable of working. And it will be framed in such a manner that collecting unemployment will be incredibly difficult.

I came home feeling ill, from the fatigue, from the nausea, and from the renewed realization that I could end up unemployed. I lay down on the couch and told J that I might only get six weeks of leave.

Silence. J absorbing the news. Shocked, as he thought I was overreacting two weeks ago when I sat on the couch and cried because I might lose my job.

J asked me if there was anything he could do for me. My first remark was “I can't say anything that you will not find highly offensive”.

J encouraged me to express the least offensive of my thoughts. After telling him that he needed to prepare to take six weeks off, to care for the alien while I went back to work, I concluded with this comment:

“This is a perfect example of why women have abortions”.

Irony Part II

2009-05-08T06:21:00.002-04:00

Attending one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country on funds earned by starring in gay porn.

Having walked the grounds of Grove City College and the town, it is a creepy, creepy place and I'm not surprised the he was suspended.

Irony

2009-05-08T06:17:00.001-04:00

Is writing an entry expressing gratitude for something, only to have it come a mere week later and bite you in the ass.

Disgusting

2009-04-21T22:03:00.000-04:00

I've been reading, with avid interest, the articles discussing the upcoming arguments in Stafford vs April Redding to the Supreme Court.

Reading the articles surrounding the case have actually made me incredibly grateful that I am not trying to raise a child, especially a female child, in today's society. Savana Redding (now 19) was 13 years old when school officials decided to strip search her, based on a classmate's tip that she had a contraband drug on her person.

Read again. School officials strip searched a 13 year old girl. Without first calling her mother. Without having anyone advocate for her.

She voluntarily consented? She is thirteen years old, with school officials breathing down her neck, with no idea that officials were going to request that she shake out her bra and jiggle her underwear. The imbalance of power makes consent impossible in this case. The imbalance of power alone makes consent difficult to accept.

The drug in question was a prescription strength dosage (400mg) of Ibuprofen.

If Slate's summary of the proceedings is an indication, it is going to get a hell of a lot more difficult for parents to send their children to school. The two page summary was infuriating to say the least and left me with the distinct impression that the majority of the Supreme Court justices regressed to the age of 13 year old boys, sniggering in the locker room.

In other words, they don't think strip searching a thirteen year old is a big deal, if it keeps the drugs away.

Photo Class - Part II

2009-04-19T22:20:00.001-04:00

Today was the second of the four class series I am taking at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. Today was all about practicing. Practicing how to sandblast the plates. Practicing how to transfer the image from the transparency to the resist. Practice transferring the resist to the glass plate. Practicing painting, with powders and beautiful, fast-drying paints. Practice sandblasting the resist off of the glass, leaving paint or a ghost image behind, to rub with paint or powder.

The sandblaster is an intimidating piece of equipment, a large box with a plexiglass window in which the user turns on the compressed air. places the glass plate into the unit, latches the door, flips two switches, places her hands into the attached rubber gloves, picks up a device that looks like a gun and presses down on a pedal to shoot air onto the plate.

Even though the unit is enclosed, dust goes everywhere. Which means wearing an itchy face to avoid inhaling the dust and lead-based paint particles. And because the unit is enclosed, the dust has etched into the window of the unit, leaving only a small section of clear window in which to work. This section is (naturally) in the most inconvenient location of the unit.

We are also required to wear masks while handling the paints and powders, as the majority of them are lead based. The lead makes the color rich, but adds an element of danger to the creation process. The masks can be removed if no one is working with powders and while washing out the resist.

Bad idea, I discovered shortly after leaving the center. Not only were my clothes saturated with dust and powder but I had also inhaled enough to make the rest of this afternoon rather uncomfortable. I suspect the mask will have to remain on through the entire class next week.

Photo Class I

2009-04-15T22:31:00.000-04:00

In a search for further enlightenment, I am taking a four week class on Sunday mornings at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, learning how to transfer photographic images into glass.

It is intimidating, walking into a room with a group of strangers, no matter how small the group is. All the students are women and our ages range from twelve to to forty something. I am the only member of the class that has no experience working with glass. I am also the only member of the class with minimal photography experience.

The instructor gave us an overview of the techniques she would be teaching and gave a very brief lesson in converting images for use. She also talked about the different things we could create once the images were transferred to the glass – plates, jewelery, wind chimes...

It was good to get out of the house and do something challenging for a few hours.

Into the Fire - Part II

2009-04-10T01:09:00.003-04:00

I've never dealt with a personality like the individual I am dealing with now. I've never had the professional experience of sitting helplessly as my words are twisted and used as weapons against me. The last time I had a conversation with someone in which they asked me to explain myself, I explained myself, only to be informed that my explanation was “not an excuse and [unacceptable]” I was seven years old.

I don't understand this kind of management style. I don't understand what goes through the mind of an individual who indulges in this type of management style. It is not productive. It is not effective. It invalidates the legitimacy of any true criticism of my performance, as it is wrapped up on a series of implied statements, personal attacks and contradictory instructions about what I should be doing to improve the situation.

Anytime you preface or reinforce a statement by stating “I'm not saying you are [adjective of choice]”, you are, in fact, saying it. In the past 24 hours, over two meetings I have been called lazy, disorganized and told that I am not taking my responsibilities seriously. And I have a third meeting with this individual next Wednesday to discuss “next steps”. All indicators are that this meeting will be very much like the last two, in which suggestions on how I could improve the situation will be used to berate me about not implementing them to begin with.

This individual is not my immediate supervisor, but is in a position of serious authority. I have been informed that there is absolutely nothing I can do but to wait for their attention span to divert elsewhere, probably in two or three weeks, possibly several months, sometimes never. That no matter what I do or say, it will not be the right answer.

If this individual gives me instructions then decides on a different course of action, thus causing me to submit bad information, it is my fault for not reading their mind. If I send them something for review and do not send a reminder, I am the one who has dropped the ball. If I don't met unexpressed expectations, it is because I did not ask the right questions. This individual will never apologize, will never concede that anyone else's ideas are valid and will never take responsibility for their actions. Ever.

I've also been told, short of committing a sacrifice of small animals in the middle of the workspace floor, this individual can not fire me without going through both my immediate supervisor and his supervisor for approval. That there are multiple parties willing to step up and defend me if this individual decides that he wants to get rid of me. Additionally, since this specific duty I appear to be failing to perform falls outside my core responsibilities, the consequences would be minor* and there would be more than ample opportunity to work on other projects within the company.

The stress of this is making me ill. I am not sleeping. I am having trouble eating. The pit of nausea in my stomach is larger and I go to work each day praying that I can get to the end of it without triggering a migraine. I can not concentrate on my work, at a time when I need to be able to fully concentrate.

* Loss of stock options and bonuses that will not be paid out this year anyway.

Into the Fire

2009-04-05T23:43:00.000-04:00

I've been listening to a lot of David Grey concert recordings these past few weeks, thanks to the Live Music Archive*. The more I listen, the more I come to appreciate the mixture of dark and light in his music and lyrics. Especially the dark. David Grey's lyrics can be very, very dark. The One I Love? The man in the song dying of a gunshot wound.

I find a certain comfort in listening to someone sing about drugs, death and destruction in such a lyrical manner, as it fits my overall stressed mood, as I struggle to get testing completed on projects slated for release the first week of May.

The stress is taking its toll on my physically. I'm waking up every day feeling slightly nauseated** and eating seems to intensify the feeling for short periods of time. The last time I felt like this was near the end of my first year of college. My doctor put me on a short course of medicine and the semester ended.

But I can't get in to see my doctor until the end of May (that American healthcare system, the greatest in the world, don't you know), so I'm dealing by thrice weekly visits to the gym, increased workouts on the elliptical machine and as many pull ups and dips as my shoulders can tolerate. I may feel sick, but by the end of May the media will be shaming me over my biceps and triceps.

This is compounded by the fact that I must occasionally work with an individual who is difficult. Who has authority over me. Who does not communicate expectations and chastises me when I fail (naturally) to fulfill those unspoken, unknown, (occasionally) unreasonable expectations.

A bully. And I don't react well to bullies. My emotions overcome my intellect when I have to deal with any person with a bullying personality. I don't handle them well at all.

I came home Friday afternoon demoralized. Upset. Agitated. And bemused that a sixty second phone conversation could upset me so badly. J looked at me and gently suggested that I might want to consider looking for a different job, Acknowledging that as much as I really enjoy what I do (and I do), and like my coworkers, none of that is worth it to get so completely wound over a single individual.

But I don't feel as if I can look this time. I feel as if I need to face this is a challenge, learn how to deal with this individual's type of personality.

I'm at a loss as to where to begin.

*I also found a recording of Blues Traveler performing a cover of Superstition with Lenny Kravitz and Rusted Root at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in 1996. Only significant in that I was at that concert and that song remains clear in my memory thirteen years later.
**Most definitely NOT knocked up, in the family way or pregnant.
***Intentional, necessary misuse of grammar.

The Post

2009-03-20T13:12:00.000-04:00

I was going to title this entry "Going Postal" but I could not find it in myself to sink that low.

Normally, I don't mind going to the post office. The consumer demographic is interesting to observe*, the stamps are pretty to look at and I've never had an employer give me a hard time about coming back late from an errand when that errand is the post office.** I've never gotten bad directions from a mail carrier and the counter employees are cheerful and easygoing.

Except at the Squirrel Hill branch of the Pittsburgh post office. Conducting business there is an experience in aggravation akin to trying to navigate through Milan Malpensa airport.*** No amount of people watching can eliminate the bad taste of conducting business in this branch.

There exists a set of undefined, completely arbitrary and random rules as to how a customer is supposed to function while inside the confines of this particular office. The only order I have been able to determine is that if you are a middle aged, monied male you could get away with murdering all the patrons, piling their bodies into a pile and setting the corpses on fire and the staff would not blink an eye.

Or, in a less extreme example, bypass the line altogether, dump enormous package and bag of mail on the counter and demand a specific employee. Be sure to count off where your place in line would have been, if you were actually the type to participate in such a bourgeois custom. Manage to conveniently ignore the last woman in the line while counting, she must be invisible. Proceed to leave the lot in a pile on the counter in order to spend several moments banging on the heavy, wooden, "employee's only" door while yelling. Return to counter and hover over the postal employees, asserting

Be not young or female and step up to the empty station without first being called. You will be screamed at, then sent back to the line, where you watch while the screaming employee throws the packages from a prior customer into the waiting bin and storms off for a smoke.

Just as your turn comes, a third, yawning, employee will wander out, announce that she is tired but can't seem to nap and that she needs cash. Instead of going outside to the ATM across the street, she hands her debit card to her coworker, who swipes and hands her some bills.

I hate the place.

* Today there was an elderly man and a middle-aged woman holding the forms and various other paraphernalia necessary to obtain a passport. The elderly man was applying for his first passport. I wondered where he would be traveling. A son in the military? A cruise? A late-in-life desire to see the world? Or a casio junket to the Falls?
** I suspect that is a more a function of being successful at choosing more relaxed employers. My current boss, for example, happens to be a fan of packages and packing material, so he has a tendency to overlook long absences in the middle of the day when the employee in question has business to conduct at the neighborhood post office.
*** Minimal signage and what is posted is in direct contradiction with reality. Truly awful customs agents.

Nothing

2009-03-14T20:13:00.000-04:00

1. Defines stupefying like learning that the priest that taught me in high school, gave me a job when I returned from graduate school burned out and unemployed, and officiated at my wedding ceremony, has run off with the church secretary.

Learning that he may have been the catalyst for the secretary's divorce, finalized a mere six weeks before the two ran off together, is equally stupefying.

2. Defines momentarily terrifying like watching a tire, still attached to the rim, fall from the expressway above, bounce all over the road, somehow miss multiple vehicles (including mine, which I paid off last month) nearly run over a pedestrian on the sidewalk and roll down the street.

3. Nothing defines annoying as much as listening to the woman two seats away alternately tsk, sigh and comment (loud enough to be distracting, quiet enough that I could not eavesdrop) her way through the movie J and I were trying to watch this afternoon, at the Regent Square Theater. Running into her in the bathroom afterwards was also annoying, as I was still in the mood to give her a hard time.

I Have the Answers

2009-03-11T22:41:00.000-04:00

I was going to write a detailed entry about the number of strangers who walked up to me today and asked me seemingly random questions, but I can only remember two incidents. I know there were more. It feels as if there were more. But I can only remember two and only one really stands out.

Stranger One asked possibly the most random question I will ever get from any individual. Which is saying something, because I have fielded some really weird questions over the years.

We were standing near the front of the bus, waiting for it to stop, when she turned to me and asked “Is tomorrow Thursday or Friday?

Sadly, I had to pause and really think about what she was asking me. For a moment I found myself pondered the question about what day it was today and what day it would be tomorrow. And for a moment, I was not certain how to answer her question.

When I responded that tomorrow was a Thursday, she remarked that it was strange, because it felt like today was a Thursday. I found myself agreeing with her premise. A week in which one must pause to determine what day it is, is a long week indeed.

The Unwell Elevator

2009-03-02T22:20:00.000-05:00

The elevator at work is "not well". This is not my phrasing, this is how my boss decided to describe the series of events that lead to the malfunction of the elevator - while I was inside it.

Every morning I go through the front door, check the alarm system* and walk down the hall to take the elevator to the upper floor.

Every morning this winter I have stepped on the elevator, noticed how c.o.l.d it is inside, press the button for the second floor and wait for the machine to rise and the doors to open

This morning I followed the routine, except the machine most definitely did not rise and open. Instead it started up towards the second floor, dropped with a teeth-jarring shudder, paused for too long and began heading down. To the basement.

Slightly perturbed by this turn of events, I pulled out my cellular phone and called the only coworker I was certain would be in the building at that time**. He was rather amused when I explained to him that I was calling from the elevator and that I appeared to be stuck. As we were discussing my options, the doors open and I stepped out into the basement.

My coworker was kind enough to tell me which door I needed to go through to get out of the basement and was waiting for me at the office back door.

When informed that the elevator has decided to stop working in rather dramatic fashion, my boss printed up a sign and taped it to the front door. Part of the sign reads:

"The elevator is not well. We think it has a cold".

Which was accurate in its way. The hydraulic fluid froze.

*I have set off the alarm three times since I started this job, much to my embarrassment and the amusement of my boss. Now I review the code in my head before I enter the building, just in case.
**I work with night owls. It was almost 8:45 and only one coworker was there. Most of them show up between 9 and 9:15 and leave around 6:00 in the evening.

Around a Year Ago...

2009-02-26T19:44:00.003-05:00

...now, I walked out of the third floor satellite office of Lab Corp, having involuntarily offered up my blood in the continuing quest to determine why I was waking up in the middle of the night sweat-drenched and shivering.

There were two stores on the first floor of the building, a Tomasina bridal salon and an art gallery called the Art Loft. With the rest of the day ahead of me and no place to be, I decided to step into the gallery take a look around.

The Art Loft had several cases of artisan jewelry, the kind of dear little pieces made out of "found objects" such as old typewriter keys. Funky, fun, occasionally moving, intentionally inspiring pieces.

What caught my eyes was a series of cuff bracelets and small pendants. Both the bracelets and the pendants were stamped with quotes or a single word. The intent was to impart the wearer with a sort of invisible armor to aid them in getting through the day.

As I looked at the pieces, I thought about the misery of the past weeks. About the worry I pushed down deep, in a desire not to be overly dramatic about the short gauntlet of tests various doctors were putting me through. About how nice it was to feel that I was at the end of the pass through the gauntlet, not any wiser, but reassured that I did not have TB, thyroid issues or, most frightening because of my family history, lymphoma.

I purchased two pieces that day. A thin, sterling sliver cuff bracelet stamped with a quote attributed to Socrates, "Wisdom begins with wonder", and a small pendant stamped with a single word, "STRENGTH".

I convinced myself that I needed these pieces, to remind me that I was fine and would remain fine. To remind myself that the emotional cost of gaining wisdom was worth the wondering.

As I walked out of the store, up towards my car, I thought about my friend Bill. I had not written to him in the past weeks, not wanting to add worry about my health to his all ready heavy load of burdens. I was looking forward to getting good results from this final round of blood tests, forward to writing an email telling him of my adventures in medicine, that I was not perfect, but I was as close to fine as my doctors could determine me to be.

I never got a chance to send that email. Between that day and March 12, my friend Bill put a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I know, distinctly, which gun he used to end his life. I saw it sitting in his apartment four months earlier.

Harsh, is it not, the way I describe my friend's death? Harsh of me to not gloss over his violent journey from life to death? To refuse to speak in code, to say that he "passed away suddenly" or "took his life" or "committed suicide".

My friend lied to me. For years. Lied about the reasons surrounding his divorce. Lied about the reasons he was no longer permitted to talk to his son. Lied about his mental health.

My friend suffered from bipolar disorder. Like J's cousin-in-law, he refused to take medication consistently. Refused to stay in therapy. Drank to much. Became violent and abusive during the lows. And was somehow successfully able to hid this from employers, friends and most family.

Like J's cousin, my friend's wife decided she had enough. Was tired of the violence and the abuse. Was tired of watching their child suffer. While he was away on a free lance assignment, she told him not to come home. She didn't love him any more.

J's cousin-in-law and my friend took their respective lives within three weeks of each other, using the same method, under similar life circumstances. The catalyst for J's cousin-in-law was receiving divorce papers. For Bill, it was learning that he was responsible for his ex-wife's legal bills.

I say catalyst, but really, the catalyst occurred long, long before those events. It was made when they refused to stay on their medication. Refused to continue with therapy. Brought into the ridiculous cultural notion of how men should behave. Men don't get depressed. Men don't go into therapy. Men don't take medications.

I have written of my own difficulties with depression. I know, intimately, what it feels like to be suicidal. I know the kind of toll it takes on the people I love, the ones who love me. I know the burden that J carries in loving me, even in my mad, hopeless, depressed states*, charges me to do the very best I can to keep myself healthy mentally.

I have been angry with Bill for almost a year. For lying to me. For making the people he was supposed to love and protect the most suffer. For killing himself.

Earlier this week, while searching for something else, I came across a couple of his emails. And I felt the loss of my friend, the way I could not feel it for the past year. This morning, while riding into work, I started talking to J about Bill, after refusing to say anything about his death for almost a year. I started to cry.

And the woman across the aisle, the one who I thought had a mean face, she handed me two tissues so I could wipe the tears from my eyes.

*Hyperbole, people. Coping mechanism.

Debate

2009-02-17T22:49:00.002-05:00

I've been following, with interest, the increasingly contentious debate over whether vaccinations cause autism. Last week's special court ruling denying three families compensation from the federal vaccine-injury fund is considered a significant victory by the pro-vaccination camp.

The ruling came on the heels of a February 8, 2009 article published in the Sunday Times Online, revealing that the leader of the never replicated, now discredited 1998 Lancet study concealed and falsified data to create the appearance of a link between autism and the MMR vaccination.

My interested in the debate is more than academic, as I am part of the 0.01% of the population who had a severe allergic reaction to the first dose of the MMR vaccination and, on the advice of the family doctor, never received the second booster shot. As such, I must rely on herd immunity to protect me from getting sick.

I can't say that my life has been complicated all that much by the fact that I have minimal to no immunity to these three diseases. But there have been several minor inconveniences over the years and the increasing number of otherwise educated and rational parents who have elected to not vaccinate their kids because they fail to understand the concept of risk, leaves me a little bit angry with them.

There has been the inconvenience of having blood drawn done my junior year of high school, after a classmate caught rubella* from a distant cousin. To protect the school population from a potential widespread outbreak, the members of my class were advised to get a booster shot.

Except I can't have the booster. Instead my brother** and I had our blood drawn and sent to the CDC to be tested for immunity. If our immunity fell below a specified level, we would be quarantined and not permitted to return to school for several weeks, as we were not only potential victims, we were also potential carriers.

The tests came back at the lowest acceptable level of immunity. We able to continue attending school.

A year later I had to submit a signed affidavit from my doctor attesting that I was allergic to the vaccination, in order to attend the college of my choice. Four years later I had to get a second affidavit in order to attend graduate school in a different state.

Minor inconveniences. As much as I would like to visit England, it is not an option right now because the rate of measles infections is steadily rising and herd immunity is falling, putting me at potential risk for infection. I have to commit to being more aware of the types of infectious diseases occurring in the places I would like to visit, in the United States and abroad.

Minor inconveniences. An outbreak in Pittsburgh would mean voluntary quarantine to protect myself and members of the immune suppressed population from exposure. Good thing I have the capability of working from home.

I understand and respect the arguments from those who elect to delay vaccinations until their children are a little bit older or spread out the shots in order to mitigate any potential reactions. I even agree with them. I might not have had such a bad reaction to the MMR if I had just had the M, then the other M, then the R.

I have near zero compassion for parents who outright refuse to vaccinate their kids. I believe them to be short-sighted and selfish with no sense of obligation to contributing to the greater good of the general public. Their demand for scientific absolutes is unreasonable. There is no such thing. In science or in life.

*Her vaccination failed. Which is rare, but does happen.
**My twin brother also had a severe allergic reaction to the first shot. Both of us had a high fever of several days duration and hives. He also had convulsions. Less you think a high fever is not a big deal, I must remind you that it lasted several days and we were 13 months old.

Under my Skin

2009-02-15T21:07:00.000-05:00

I started snowboarding again, after a six year hiatus from the activity. The hiatus was partly due to an increasingly distant and frankly irrational fear of ski lifts and partly due to a period of financial difficultly.

Because of the hiatus, I have had to relearn everything, from how to properly fit and strap in my boots to how to get on and off ski lifts, I spent the better part of the two hours I was out on Saturday practicing on a beginner's slope called School Haus.

I am a hyper conscientious beginning snowboarder. I am the type of individual who warns the party behind her on the ski lift that there is a 99.9%* chance I will fall coming off the lift. When I do fall, I don't dawdle, I get my partially strapped-in body out of the way as quickly as I can.

When riding, I go to the least populated parts of a slope, usually unpopulated because the terrain is icy, lacks a decent layer of powder or is otherwise not conducive to a successful run. If I should happen to fall (a given), I am not taking other skiers and snowboarders out with me.**

I cannot, however, control the actions of other people on the slopes. I cannot, for example, force the father who was so busy looking down at his un-helmeted daughter while teaching her to ski that he forgot to look in front of him, from nearly colliding with me.**

That we did not collide was a minor miracle, considering that he came into my left field of peripheral vision so suddenly that I had no other choice but to stop my board, as I am not fast or skilled enough to veer the board out of their way.

Near collisions on the beginner's slope are a given, since everyone on the slope is (theoretically) learning how to ski/snowboard/get down the slope without falling down, in one piece. The general etiqutte in such situations is to apologize, check for injuries and move on.

This individual, however, was disinterested in following the general etiqutte. Instead he informed me that New York state law dictates that skiers have the right-of-way*** and went on his way with his daughter , skiing underneath the curved edge of my board.

As no one was injured, I should have let the incident go. But I could not. Instead his comment left me angry and deflated and seriously considering whether I wanted to continue investing the time, effort and money into trying to learn, only to be picked.

I tried cutting him some slack, as he was a parent and could have been a little bit shook up. As I look seventeen years old, in my bright blue jacket and funky hat. As he could have been having a bad day. But I could not shake my anger at his absolute sense of entitlement, that those ahead of him, on the slopes or in life, will merely sense his presence and get out of his way.

After several minutes of sitting on the slope, thinking, listening to J rave about my improvement and rant about mean people sucking, I finished the run down the hill, unstrapped myself from the board and we headed for one of the intermediate slopes, with a faster moving quad lift.

I fell while getting off the lift. I fell once on the way down. I managed to keep the front of the board pointed forward and the edges parallel to the slope. It was the best run I've had in years.

* I actually successfully got off a lift once. Seven years ago.
** I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, that he did not see me, even though a small, petty part of me suspects that he did it intentionally.
*** The state law says no such thing. Skiers (including snowboarders) are required to look upslope when merging into a new trail and pay attention to what is in front of them. J, who was higher up on the slope watching me, confirmed that the man and his daughter came up from behind.

Job Fair

2009-02-11T21:17:00.001-05:00

Today it was my turn to participate in the “torture the new employee” at work. The new employee in question was myself and the task was to spend long hours in the student union of a local university collecting resumes from the soon-to-be-graduated-and-unemployed and the not-graduating-yet-seeking-internship students.

As we are not hiring, my company took a low-key approach to recruiting students, which meant a black and white, single page printout about the company, a stack of business cards and plenty of one-on-one interaction. Some of the recruiters went all out. Big displays. Interesting swag. The construction company to the left of me, specializing in big projects*, handed out thin, three sided rulers, each side marked using a different measurement system. There were pens, notepads, keychain flashlights and gym sacks. Miniature traffic cones. Popcorn.

I chatted with the students, gave out business cards, gathered resumes and tried to be reassuring. I wished them luck in their search. I referred one young woman, out of college for a year and struggling to find employment, to my former boss as a possible contact for employment. I gave a second woman a list of references to aid her in her search for an internship in QA. I even did a little of recruiting for one of our clients.

It was gratifying and frustrating. It was gratifying to the excitement and nervousness in the face of the students. It was frustrating to have to say over and over that we were not hiring, I did not know when we would be hiring, I'm really sorry that you are having so much trouble finding something but that will not change my answer.

And it was fun to have one student ask if the software would aid in fighting a “Cloverfield like monster attack? Or aliens? Will it help fight against aliens?”

*You know those giant earthmovers and dumptrucks you see along highways under construction? The kind with wheels the size of a small house? They did those kind of projects.

Poison

2009-02-08T20:25:00.001-05:00

The weekend started off auspiciously, with a Friday night Penguins game, complete with chicken fingers and fries with a side of barbecue and honey mustard dipping sauce. The hard lemonade was a nice compliment to the salt and grease. And my poor Penguins, (who will most likely miss the playoffs this year*), played a stellar, sixty minute game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.

It was a chunk out of a wheel of Giant Eagle double crème brie with herbs that nearly took me down for the rest of the weekend. With J at his parents for most of the day and I at loose ends, I decided that brie with cracked pepper crackers and black olives would be a perfectly respectable lunch.

I continued to believe this even after a close examination of the wheel of cheese showed a slightly brown coloring on its normally snowy white surface. I continued to believe this after slicing into the cheese revealed a slightly runny interior instead of the firm texture I've come to expect out of a wheel of Giant Eagle double crème brie with herbs. The odor was a little more brie-ish than usual, the flavor a little bit stronger.

Having eaten very smelly, very strong tasting cheeses before, I was not put off by the appearance and smell as much as I should have been. After all, there was still several weeks left before the passing of the sell by date.

Lunch finished, I continued enjoying my day of sloth (the only one available for the next several weekends) by watching home improvement shows (Eighteen THOUSAND dollars to renovate a bathroom?) and stretching out the folding of a basket of laundry over two hours. J and I see a play and go out for what turned out to be an infuriating dinner for reasons I shall not digress to discuss.

Almost immediately following the end of the the infuriating dinner I began to fill unwell. I should have known better. This is the third time in a year I have purchased brie from Giant Eagle, to find out that it was bad weeks before the sell-by date. Only this time I did not have enough sense to throw the cheese out. Instead I ate it, and spent half the night very uncomfortable, drinking as much chamomile and ginger tea as I could possibly stand.

J, penitent for being the cause of the infuriating dinner, made me the tea.

*That, in short, explains why I have not been writing about them this year. With their two of their top defensemen shelved due to injury for most of the season and the constant changing of lines and shuffling of WBS players in and out of the lineup, it has been frustrating.

Still Employed

2009-02-03T20:41:00.000-05:00

Exhibit 1: I receive an email from my former manager informing me of the impending closure of the lab at which I spent the past five+ years of my life working and left in July 2008 for a job with better pay, more responsibility and a fraction of the aggravation.

Exhibit 2: I message one of the former co-workers, who tells me that yes, all of them will be out of a job as of January 30. Former employer (owner) flies in on Sunday and sets up meeting with manager. Informs manager that he is shutting the lab down and that he will be making the announcement on Monday morning.

Employees gather in conference room on Monday morning, owner makes announcement. Employees leave lab in shock, go for coffee. Return to lab less than thirty minutes later, discover owner is gone. As in packed up and headed back to west coast office.

A happy hour is announced. Former employees are invited to join the newly unemployed at a South Side bar for conversation and commiseration.

All but one former employee appears for the happy hour. We are entertained with stories of the horror that was the final two weeks of the lab.

How the owner went AWOL after the announcement, refusing to return any emails, messages or phone calls until late into the second week, leaving the lab manager (who is also out of a job) to deal with the fallout.

It was the manager who determined that the laid off employees would not qualify for COBRA insurance*, figured out how to file for unemployment**, and ran resume improvement sessions. It was the manager who determined which equipment would be sent back to the west coast and which could be sold. It was the manager who had to endure, after two weeks of being completely ignored, a dressing down by the owner about not moving “fast enough” to get the equipment shipped and sold off.

They tell us about the sudden influx of work that forced most of the employees to test while packing up and shipping the most valuable equipment to back to the west coast and writing ads to sell the remaining equipment on craigslist. That, as late as Thursday, project managers on the west coast were requesting testers for projects.

There were also the passive aggressive attempts at revenge. The equipment put on craigslist was deliberately overpriced, to make it more difficult to sell, thus leaving the owner to deal with the removal any remaining pieces once the lease on the office space ran out. Instructions by the owner to remove sold pieces from the lab (which included a ping pong table and a full size refrigerator) were ignored. Because the demand for testers continued until the very last day, the lab manager was able to extend his employment for an additional two weeks, since he could not send any of the remaining equipment back.

As the account of common atrocities piled up, I was increasingly thankful that I left last July. I am acutely aware that the position I have might not last, that I may not get my contracted raises, that J might lose his job. But right now, I am very happy that I took a deep breath, sacrificed some of my time off and plunged into something new.

*Companies with less than 20 employees are not required to offer COBRA. What makes this detail interesting is the company had less that 20 employees when I left and I was offered COBRA. So not only did my former coworkers lose their job, my former employer elected to do the shitty thing and not offer them an opportunity to maintain their insurance coverage.

**I can't help but wonder if they will be screwed out of unemployment for the same reason they were screwed out of COBRA.

That Girl

2009-01-25T20:11:00.000-05:00

Calves are sore. Eyes are tired. Body is exhausted and reminding me that I am too old for a weekend of almost non stop, party type activity.

It was for a good reason. My brother was married in a very lovely, gaffe-filled Catholic ceremony on Saturday afternoon. The organist forgot that the Matron of Honor* would not be in the procession and kept playing for several minutes after the bridal party had finished walking down the aisle. The bride and her father began walking down the aisle too early. The priest (a last minute substitution as the pastor was ill) called the bride by the wrong name. Twice.

There were two second readings, as the cantor pointed out the incorrect passage the first time. The priest walked up to the podium at the conclusion of reading 2.1, flipped the pages to the correct passage and had the reader complete 2.2.

Due to the Matron of Honor's immobility, she was unable to get the bouquet back to the bride after the vows had been completed. She passed the flowers off to me and I dashed across the altar, behind the back of the priest giving communion, to hand them back to the bride.

And the priest forgot their last name while introducing the newly married couple.

I was “that girl” during the reception and ready to celebrate, not only my brother's marriage, but that I managed to escape (for the present) the economic downturn that lead my former employer to decide to close the Pittsburgh office at the end of this month. I danced, I flirted with the small children, I tricked couples into showing off some moves. I stole into the bridal sweet with my SIL, my aunt and two members of the bridal party to decorate the rooms.

Then J and I stumbled back to our room, where J made me drink several glasses of water before he would allow me to go to sleep. I woke up three hours earlier then intended, not in the best of shape, but in better shape then I deserved considering my excesses of the prior day.

* Matron of Honor broke her leg on New Year's Eve and is in a cast – not a traditional plaster cast but one of those wicked frame contraptions with pins extending from the frame into her leg, to hold the bones into place. The name of this type of cast escapes me.

To Offset the Mushiness of the Previous Post

2009-01-22T22:27:00.003-05:00

Dear Two Women ahead of me at the bus stop this morning,

I don't understand it, this irrational fear of moving to the back of the bus. This fear that makes you dump yourself and all your belongings (in the space clearly marked "No items may be put in this area") smack in front of the doors. Thus blocking the other six of us from getting on the bus in any semblance of an orderly fashion.

The back is a bit of a strange country. Those two steps up can be treacherous to navigate and the people who sit back there? Terrifying. Imagine, all those different races and genders sharing seats! Those headache inducing hair colors of black, brown and blonde! Those blinding wedding bands and hoop earrings! Those radical winter coats of black and brown.

If you are so dead set on standing at the front of the bus, for goodness sakes, get on last and save the rest of us the headache.

And to the young woman whose feet I stepped on whilst trying to maintain my balance - I apologize.

Happiness is a Purring Cat

2009-01-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

And a President for which I can be proud.

I received an email this morning from a non-American friend asking if I watched the inauguration of (my) new king, which made me laugh. I had to admit to him that it did seem a little bit like a coronation, with the chanting masses and mass celebrations. I also observed that it was very un-American, these mass displays.

I watched the inauguration at work, streaming CNN starting at 10:00 am Tuesday morning. As I worked on finishing up some test parameters I listened to the anchors chatting about the crowds and the weather. Occasionally I would switch to a different live stream, some of them without audio.

Work stopped at 11:30, as the majority of us watched the ceremonies take place. Watching Hilary Clinton walk the halls as a former first lady, I could not help but think how close she was to being the first woman POTUS.

But what struck me the most was how conscious and aware President Obama was in those moments, as he took the oath of office and made his speech. From all directions I hear “live in the moment”, but I had never see an example of what it is to do that, to live in the moment, until I saw him take the oath of office.

I did not exhale until the oath was complete. Then it was done and I recalled the words of my friend referenced above. “Well done. Lot of work ahead”.

Today – A Quick Study in Contrasts

2009-01-20T21:27:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I watched Barack Obama become the 44th President of the United States.

This evening I opened a letter from my dental insurance provider. The letter informed me that they would pay $280.00 towards my $1550.00 periodontal bill. This, I should note, is actually less than what I pay out yearly for the insurance.

I hope, really, that change has finally come.

The Problem with Deleting Photos from Flickr...

2009-01-15T21:32:00.000-05:00

Is that they got deleted off the blog as well.

At least I know what my weekend project will be.

The Privilege of the Bus Rider

2009-01-13T20:52:00.000-05:00

One of the blogs I frequent has a post up about the federal government investing in making cities more walkable and generally building up a public transportation infrastructure. The reasoning? More walkable cities reduce drunk driving incidents.

Reading the comments was a bit surreal. I was struck by the amount of push back by self-identified, progressive feminists resisting the idea of using public transportation in that a city with a decent, late night system and foot-accessible streets. There is legitimate criticism over the goals of MADD, as it has turned into a neo-prohibition organization, but that did little to undercut the tone of “rather drive drunk then ride the bus or hail a cab”.The unconscious privilege and downright social snobbery over riding the bus left me cold.

I'm not talking about the readers who have experienced harassment, including one who was mistaken for a prostitute and propositioned repeatedly while waiting for the bus. It is a legitimate fear and one incident would be enough, I think, to put me off riding the bus at night for some time.

Rather it is the classist comments about not wanting to wait, to share space on the bus/el/T/metro/subway late at night with dirty, crazy, homeless, or poor consumers of public transportation that were off putting. I've shared space with crazy in a lot of different settings. The crazy I've seen on the bus is not half as frightening as the crazy I've seen in my working life.

With respect that “the plural of anecdote is not data” for myself or any of the posters, aware of my own privilege that leaves a white, conservatively dressed, on the downside towards middle age woman reasonably safe on the mean streets of Pittsburgh, the worse that has happened to me after six years of taking public transportation is repeated falls on the sidewalk near my stop (never salted until after the weather stops), waiting in frigid weather for a bus that never showed, witnessing the ranting and rude behavior of angry motorized scooter guy and a verbal screaming match between a driver and a rider shortly after I started riding the bus.

The kindness I have witnessed outweighs all the falls on an icy sidewalk. From drivers who saw me coming down my street and waited for me. From one who, when forced to let us off in in the middle of a lane, stepped into traffic to ensure that we made it to the curb safely. From another who risked being reprimanded to get me near my destination – even though it was my fault for taking the incorrect bus. I have experienced fellow passengers retrieve my dropped gloves and offer me cough drops when I was sick. And offer to buy me a cup of hot tea at McDonald's on that frigid night when the bus never showed. And my personal favorite, fearless older women haranguing young men about their inappropriate behavior and lack of deportment towards other citizens on the street.

I've had to adapt. Remember to pack hat, gloves and scarf in my bag and wear my long coat in winter, so I am warm enough on cold nights. Remember to pack novel, notepad and pen for long waits and delays. Carry some cough drops and tissues. Say good morning and good night to the drivers. Relax.

To the Five People Who Read this Blog...

2009-01-11T21:49:00.004-05:00

I've lost my sense of adventure and I need to find it.

I'm seeking suggestions on things to do that will take me out of my comfort zone and make me curious about the world around me again.

Thoughts?