Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for November, 2007

I only blog when I’m busy because that’s when everything is popping and flowing all at once.  Right now I’m writing an abstract, shopping for Christmas presents online (thank you Cloudscome for the great links on responsible shopping!), reading email, and listening for danger noises from the next room.  ADHD is funny because sometimes lots of things at once are overwhelming and sometimes I need to have five things going at once to get that energy.  Everybody’s tipping point is different and mine is different every day.  I prefer this craziness to the scatteredness that I’m often plagued with.

Being alone last week was really good for me.  I was dreading it for the weeks leading up to the boys’ departure, so much so that I almost felt sick.  I have a hard time being alone.  Besides feeling that motherly pull toward my child and the gut-level feeling of responsibility for his every need (despite the fact that he was in very capable hands), I just get energy from being with people, my family especially.  I was not looking forward to spending Thanksgiving without them.  I was not looking forward to the quiet.  On top of it all I had to board the dogs because of my work schedule, and by the time I dropped them off at the vet’s on Wednesday afternoon I was a bit of a wreck.  I could have accomplished a lot in the two whole free days I had before Thanksgiving in Madison and then work, and it’s true that I did knock out a bunch of nonsense errands (hurrah for not having to haul a small one around for that!), but some of it I just kind of spaced out.  I suppose I deserved the break.  I dunno.  But I was not having a good go of it.

Then on the way to Madison when I had three whole hours to myself with nothing but the radio, and even more time on the way back (see “Thankful”) something nice happened.  I started to keep myself company.  I haven’t done that in a really long time.  I noticed that I had been censoring my radio choices (oh, THAT’S lame!  not Classical–husband doesn’t care for it–this is 80′s and I love it but I should be looking for the Grateful Dead Hour–) and as soon as I did I looked for the lamest music I could find and started having a blast.  I think there was something about pina coladas and something else about the rains down in Africa.

I started surfing (seeking, I suppose…how our language has changed) more and to my delight I found some Beethoven. Initially I was just trying to remember which symphony it was and before I knew it I was totally gone. I was lost inside the sixth symphony and I didn’t want to find my way out of it, ever.  It’s been awhile since I’ve allowed Beethoven to do that to me.  I heard it twice, and on the way back I was so into it I completely missed my exit and didn’t notice it for miles and miles.

I also missed my exit because I was thinking about how I’ve slowly been losing parts of myself over the last decade.  I’ve been reading The Feminine Mystique and while I’m not a housewife and we’re forty years later, I have been learning about what’s been handed down to me.  Now my mother wasn’t a housewife per se–she stayed home with us until I, the youngest, was in third grade–she had a career of her own.  Her mother wasn’t solely a housewife either, though I believe she gave up a prestigious secretarial position at the Pentagon when she married.  But the cultural attitudes and pieces of pathology that come with being a woman in my family, in this social class, in this country are part of what make me who I am.  In this particular case I’ve come to realize that I have always, from my very first real boyfriend as a pre-teen, tended to latch onto the boy or man in my life and take on his interests.  R played the saxophone so for five years I loved the saxophone and listened to all the saxophone music I could get my hands on.  G’s interests were more closely aligned with mine and I found myself less prone to getting into the ones that weren’t (I just couldn’t get into fly-fishing, though I did come to love A River Runs Through It, and still do), but I did start to really rely on him for direction for how to think and feel about things.  It was a matter of admiration and I think it’s one of the things that ultimately cost me the relationship.

It’s been better with Attic Man.  Unlike the women in the F.M. I did not give up my career interests and goals.  But on the music front I have been giving too much ground.  AM just doesn’t appreciate what is commercially known as Classical, so I never listen to it.  Nevermind that I played the violin in orchestras through college or that Brahms makes my heart break in the best way possible.  Now I’m grateful to him, more than he knows, for introducing me to the blues, the Allman Brothers Band (which I had to listen to first before I understood the blues), and Phish, and for reminding me that I had always love Bluegrass, too.  I need to listen to my stuff, too: the Indigo Girls, Ella Fitzgerald, Steve Reich, Dar Williams.

I think that the music thing is just an overt thing, though.  I think I have subconsciously been sublimating my own thoughts and opinions, too.  Attic Man was a debater in college and while not my intellectual superior knows his way over, under, around and through an argument so sometimes I have to fight to keep my head above water when we’re talking politics or social issues.  He’s a hell of a maverick, too, and reads like ten online magazines and newspapers a day, at least.  Instead of learning from him I’ve been busy letting his talents make me feel inadequate, not recognizing that I know different things and think differently.  I need to put energy back into holding my own in those conversations.  Anyway it’s been playing into my career angst of late.  I think I’ve been holding back in part because I haven’t let my life be my own.

I don’t know how much this has to do with the way I grew up, but I do know that in a Baptist minister’s family the whole family is centered around the church and the pastor’s work.  I have to give my mother a lot of credit because she very firmly believed that her job was not “pastor’s wife” (she wouldn’t entertain anytime day or night and she didn’t go to every church ladies’ meeting like most of her pastor’s wife friends).  Nevertheless there’s a certain inescapable hegemony to church life when your father’s the minister, at least in a Baptist church, so I was used to the whole of family life, even my mother’s life, being directed toward making the church work.  There was also the “calling” aspect of it, so we moved to follow his career around and she found work wherever we went.

When I figured that all out I was happy to have a few days to myself. I’m working on reclaiming some of the things I’ve lost over the course of my marriage.  For the record Attic Man is just about the perfect husband for this kind of re-awakening because he really does see me as an equal partner and not a wife that he expects to cater to his every wish.  He’s been trying for years to get me to contribute to the music for trips.

Speaking of having my own life–my kid needs me.

Read Full Post »

birthday

Read Full Post »

This time last year…

…I was fifteen hours into my labor with the Snapper.  My water had broken that morning and after a leisurely getting-ready at home and walk down by the river, we’d spent the afternoon walking the halls of St. Luke’s, trying to get those cramps to turn into real contractions.  By this time, 9:30, they were real and they hurt like hell.  But I thought, hey! it’ll be over soon and I’ll be holding our baby.  “Soon” came 24 hard hours later.

I didn’t like being pregnant and didn’t like my labor–it broke my heart and my spirit–but I loved being in that state of waitfulness, of holding a vigil for a life about to emerge.  I remember that the trees outside the hospital were full of lights gently twinkling in the breeze.  The Steelers were playing that night, like tonight (they lost).  I remember that there was a thunderstorm the next night, the night he was born.  I remember that for all the warring in my body, the room, my husband, the nurses, the doctors, the world was quietly waiting.

When he came he was still and tinged blue.  He flopped out of my body and straight onto the table.  Soon, though, he was breathing this halting, sighing kind of breath.  They brought him to my chest and he started to breathe better, though still with the little tiny moans.  He nuzzled me, not quite ready to suckle.

I thought, when you are older and we are warring through your teen years, I will say to you, this is nothing.  If we could get through your labor we can get through anything.

Happy labor day, love.

Read Full Post »

Thankful

that when I was on the way home to Cedar Rapids from Madison, WI, listening to Beethoven’s Sixth and thinking about my life, and saw a sign that said “Welcome to Davenport” (!) I

a) knew where I was and how to get home from there,

b) had enough money to buy more gas,

c) didn’t have a hungry baby in the backseat,

d) was close enough to the World’s Largest Truckstop to fulfill all automotive and nutritional (well, caloric) needs in bright-light and big-rig safety at a very late hour,

e) remembered the Family restroom at same and could pump a nice three ounces therein,

f) could reflect on a lovely, lovely Thanksgiving dinner with my sister-in-law’s lovely, lovely family,

g) during which I was able to share some of my pumped bounty with my niece,

h) and also that I chose an amazing father for my child, who is happily romping with his cousins in Pennsylvania,

i) and then was able to come home to a warm house in a safe neighborhood with enough food in a time without domestic war.

More to come re: thinking about my life in the car. It has a lot to do with Beethoven.

Read Full Post »

Weird. Appropriate.

No husband.

No baby.

No dogs.

Reading The Feminine Mystique.

Read Full Post »

Quiz

Which is more embarrassing?

a) having mice

or

b) finding their nest in a box of cleaning supplies?

Hint: we have had the mice for a month.

The first correct responder gets a cardboard box with a hole chewed in the bottom.

Read Full Post »

Not Ready

 

How tiny…

Attic Man’s grandmother is ailing and hasn’t yet met the Snapper, so I’m going to see them off on Tuesday morning and not see them again until Sunday. Sigh. I didn’t have enough warning to pump enough milk for the whole trip, and even if I had, the daily ritual of exploration followed by happy nursing reunion, and back and forth, will have to be suspended. I still feel, after nearly a year, the need to nurse. I never anticipated that–I assumed that it was the baby that did all the needing. At the beginning it was a physical relief to nurse; now it’s a way to reconnect with my very active baby. I’m going to go five days without him and it and I’m dreading it. He and I are sick, too, and I’m wishing I could give him a few more days of those antibodies.

Read Full Post »

Good enough

I’m working on a letter of application for a job for next year and I’m in the middle of a section where I talk about all the cool stuff I did when I taught adjudicated teenaged boys at one of those crappy outdoor-adventure, really boot-campy-type places.  I am surprising myself with how much passion I remember having, how much fun I am starting to realize that I had, and how good at it I was.  The teaching end of things was tailor made for me: completely, totally, wide open.  I could do whatever the hell I wanted as long as the boys were occupied and completing the work their schools sent for them.  So I did lots of cool innovative things that you’d never have the time or consent for in a traditional public school.

At the same time, though, I was utterly miserable.  The camp where I taught turned out to be an awful place.  On the mild end of things, it was more of a way to warehouse kids nobody knew what to do with (and there were plenty of kids that didn’t commit any other crime but being too difficult for foster care) and the programs they had for them (like PT every morning) didn’t do anything to help or rehabilitate them.  I saw plenty of kids who actually got worse and more hardened during their time there.  At its worst, it was an incredibly sexist, misogynistic environment in which the only women who got respect were the ones who took on as aggressive an attitude as possible (and I’ll note that those women were NOT aggressive towards the kids, only the male staff).  My authority was never backed by a man the way the men backed for each other.  I had to stand on my own merits, which worked and was hard won, but the boys were getting confirmed what they were already learning in their own homes: women were shit and the world is based on power plays between men.  I saw kids get physically restrained for looking at a male staff the wrong way.  It was not a good place.  Over my time there I gained a bunch of weight and my face became weary and sad.  Attic Man and I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, either, and not much time, as the commute was an hour each way.  It was a hard time.

And yet here I was doing these great things with my teaching.  It dawned on me today as I started writing about what I had done that no matter what I can say about the present moment, I am almost always doing something valuable and important.  I am not pleased about my progress on the dissertation but it’s not because I’ve been sitting on a futon eating Chinese takeout and smoking doobies.  It’s because I’ve been raising a fabulous son.  Here is a boy that has grown, in  large part due to my almost constant nursing, into a healthy toddler.  He is a clean, fed, babbling, happy, walking, running boy.  I label everything we see, I take him to the park everyday to see the trees and pick up sticks and eat them, I rotate his toys, I wash his clothes, I draw his bath water, I take him to meet other kids, I nurse him when he’s hungry or sad or hurt, I tell him jokes, I laugh at his, I make him go to bed or take a nap even when he doesn’t want to.  I’m doing a good job at parenting this child and I need to remember that even as the dust bunnies play on the kitchen floor and the cursor on my dissertation blinks and blinks and blinks.

P.S. I did write something today…

Read Full Post »

OK. Now I have clean pants. But I did miss another day of NaBloPoMo. I could feel guilty about it or I could say, “oh, well, at least my kid is clean and fed and I paid my rent” and let it go. I choose the second.  I am posting more regularly now so that’s good.

Recently I had one of those conversations with Attic Man that sitcom couples have with each other about how I wanted more romance. Except it didn’t take a half an hour and I didn’t resort to all kinds of clever ruses to tell him. I just told him.

When he showed up at the door before heading off to study with a little box of very, very good fudge and two enormous truffles containing a shot of Bailey’s each (!) I (wiping the drool from my chin) started to think about the gendered aspects of ‘romance,’ how in some ways it’s a hollow compensation for the inherent inequality, historically, in heterosexual marriage. Clean my house and I will rub your back! Take care of my four children and I will take you to Maui for our 25th anniversary! I’m sorry you feel underappreciated. Here’s a little love note under your pillow.  I remember all of these little inserts in my family’s church bulletin about How to Keep the Love Alive in your marriage.  I remember learning that the man wants admiration and the woman wants romance.  The man wants s3x and the woman wants emotional intimacy.  The man needs the woman’s help to express emotions, and if he can’t figure it out he can rescue himself with a bouquet of flowers.  Because all women want flowers.

So I don’t know if I want this stuff because I want it or because I heard all my life that I should want it.  Is it a trained emotional response to feel your heart go all a-flutter when receiving a random love note in your sock drawer?  But I suppose what all people want is to be noticed, plain and simple, and to be told in as many ways as possible that they are loved.  People need other people to sacrifice their own time and resources for them.  My guys in the group home need it too–if I am tired and one of the guys wants me to sit in his room to keep him company for a few minutes before he nods off I do it anyway.  These guys don’t live in a traditional family setting.  They need love (obviously non-se3tual) just like everybody else, but they have to get it from paid staff.  I digress.  The point I’m trying to make is that I am trying to move from a gendered sense of romance to the idea that ALL people need love and attention and that wanting it is OK.  I can’t make myself not be happy with fudge and I can’t make Attic Man melt at the sight of roses.  But I can try hard to think of it as something he’s doing because I’m a nice person and he likes me rather than empty compensation for domestic work.  After all if that were the case I should be the one delivering fudge, as he spent all weekend caring for our child, shampooing carpets, doing laundry, cooking, and washing dishes.

Read Full Post »

I am drowning in my life right now.  I was really hoping that NaBloPoMo would get me writing well again and bring my readers back but then this sucky having-mice-and-living-in-chaos thing started (it’s not the mice.  they’re just a convenient target).  Working full time and trying to write a dissertation, despite the seemingly, on-paper-perfect schedule, is not exactly working out.  It exactly sucks, that’s what.  In the past my funks have inspired dark meaning-making.  I’m not so into that right now.

I have a post about expecting romance and being a new feminist in my head and I will write it when I have energy.  Actually, when I have energy I will wash pants.  Then I will post.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.