Barely tenured

Day 3 got complicated

"We won't break the baby. You have to break the baby."

I'm starting to wonder if some sort of cold turkey—cry-it-out, but for food, rather than for sleep—might be less cruel to all of us in the long run. But they won't do it, I suspect; see quote above, from one of the teachers.

[Who, in the same conversation, told me I was nursing too slowly (Tabby had been at the boob for about 40 minutes, bobbing back and forth between eating and watching the other babies; she was dozing off by the time the criticism came), that I'd have to stop letting her sleep on me at home or else she wouldn't be able to nap at the center.]

To be fair, they'd be the ones dealing with the crying hungry baby if we went cold turkey.

But it's also not clear to me whether she'd take a bottle from them, even if she does take one from Beaker. So far I'm the only one to have gotten her to drink; about half an ounce from a bottle that was about to get tossed, just before we left the center on day 2. And babies aren't supposed to take that from mama, ever!

So: the wheels were spinning on all this stuff. She's only spent about an hour without a parent at the center, the last two days. We're all sort of flipping out. And then Beaker got summoned on a business trip. Leaving for California tomorrow, coming back Tuesday.

I AM GOING TO FUCKING DIE. It's forecast to snow every day between now and then. EVERY DAY. And how are we supposed to keep working on this bottle shit if he's not here?

So we check plane tickets and, amazingly, they're not so bad. Should I go too, and hang out with all our fantabulous California friends? Hysterical IMs trade back and forth. It's promised that I'll be met at the airport, and provided with a car seat and a Pump-n-style for the duration.

Are I running away from my problems, or seizing the opportunity for a little vacation in the sun while I still have a chance? Will it break the process of adjusting to day care, or will it not matter, since we'll be taking a long Christmas break anyway? What about the candidates interviewing at my department? The ones very close to my area? FUCK 'EM.

We eat dinner. We go back to actually buy the ticket and it's gone to, well, what you'd expect a nonstop plane ticket to California bought on 14 hours' notice to be. And again I'm facing 5 days of cold lonesome gray grimness, punctuated with baby tears that are ALL MY FAULT, and I cry.

[I don't think I told you how, when I picked Tabby up on day 1, she'd cried so hard that, for the first time, her tears had stuffed up her nose. As she nursed, she had to stop and pull back for great gasping sniffles, just like the aftermath of a toddler tantrum.]

P.S. Thank you, thank you, thank all of you for your kind words. Hearing from those who have been there/done that/have undamaged children is so, so, so helpful. Below the fold: answers to some questions that sort of got asked in comments... or maybe it's mostly just a rant about my personal pumping experiences.

Our last California party

It's a fecund group. I'm not the only pregnant woman in an ugly salmon pink maternity T-shirt. Two babies, three toddlers, two preschoolers, several others under 10. The older kids run for the backyard swing set. Later, they're the first to colonize the hot tub (yes! of course there's a hot tub!), and are only coaxed out by the cutting of the birthday cake.

The old, old frat boys (some back to the class of '79) collect in the kitchen; the women, in the living room with the babies. Everyone talks about local real estate, all the time. Everyone comments on Beaker's apparent health, too: there are several people present who haven't seen him in a decade or so, and yes, it's very good that he's still alive, but he and I know what it's taking him on a daily basis now. One commenter has an obvious hand tremor, but volunteers no information, and we don't ask.

One sweet woman with a sharp sense of humor, whose children are the oldest present, offers sage advice to the tense mothers and mothers-to-be. We last saw her and her husband back in January, when they were overjoyed that, despite several early losses, her pregnancy seemed to be sticking; she was about three weeks ahead of me. She is very thin now, and her husband confides that they terminated at 19 weeks: Down syndrome. The other kids don't know there was a decision to be made. She's only 3 years older than I am.

One of the oldest and shaggiest of the frat boys has finally married; he and his wife have two children, both adopted from South America. ("You know, once you've got the family, it's just harder to find time to work on the motorcycles.") They are the ringleaders in the back yard, but the adults whisper along rumors that they've been difficult to raise.

The grill is shut down. The meat runs out, although there are still plenty of veggie dogs. The frat boys settle down to bridge. (Bridge!) The babies are carried out, howling, by their parents. The remaining women settle in for the Desperate Housewives finale. None of us has seen more than 3 or 4 episodes, but together we've seen enough to be able to piece most of it together. After that bit of spotting, I'm keeping my feet up and mainlining club soda.

It's the last time we'll see most of these folks for a while. California doesn't feel like home, at all, and it never will, but we have so many friends here—and so many more old and good friends than back in Ohindinois— that there's real sadness in leaving.

Attachment dogwalking

Yesterday I passed the following little group as I walked through a pleasant residential neighborhood:

—A middle-aged woman, quite butch, whose roots needed to be touched up, whose spikes needed to be regelled, and who needed about 40 hours of sleep, pronto.

—The small dog she was walking, sort of a Chihuahua-plus-frilly-tail, if you know what I mean.

—An older woman in a shabby rain coat, whose Upper West Side accent was thick enough to stand a spoon in.

As I approached, the older woman, who was walking about 10 feet behind the other two, barked, "She's not done yet! You don't have to pull her like that, she'll let you know when she's done!"

Ah, a doggy-drive by, I thought. Yeah, people around here might be that pushy. The dog found another tree to investigate, and the older woman erupted, "See, now let her be! Take your time!"

I passed all three, noting that the older woman was staying a fixed distance behind the other two. Soon after I heard in the distance, "Look at how she's all itchy now! She's stepped on, I don't know, a splinter or something!... See how she's biting at it? You have to stop and pull it out!"

Was this a poor mother-daughter relationship in its late stages? An interview for a job which, if offered and accepted, will provide a great deal of the most unhealthy kind of stress? Or some sort of "humiliation" precursor to activities I really don't want to imagine?

Saturated

The local Girl Scouts were out today, selling cookies from a card table in front of the local coffee shop. But they weren't selling official Girl Scout cookies. "We thought the normal ones were too unhealthy," said one scout, as she gestured towards the little cellophane bags of scorched lemon bars and flat macaroons. "So we baked these ourselves. Using pure butter."

Questions

ITEM: Wouldn't everything we think about raising infants be different, wouldn't all the arguments be different, wouldn't all the dogmas be different, if even a few people were able to remember back then? (Without, like, hypnosis.)

And wouldn't everything be even more different if everyone were able to remember back then?

ITEM: Should I be more annoyed that my employer broadcast my forthcoming maternity leave to the entire faculty (in the middle of a long list of personnel actions that contained, sadly, no other worthwhile gossip), or that no one on campus wrote afterwards? Hmmmmmm.

ITEM: Our sublet features a couple of houseplants which outweigh us by a fair margin. I don't mind them; Beaker hates them. Yet it is Beaker who waters them every week, ranting all the while about the mold festering under the pots. Recently he spent all morning on a ladder polishing the leaves of the largest, which has a little scale problem. (He did let himself prune the dangling roots that get caught in his hair.)

What does this bode for future dependents of ours?

ITEM: Don't unicyclists have to follow the rules of the road? Even when they're, like, really late to yoga class? (I saw a guy with a purple mat under his arm blow through a stop sign this morning. Chee!)

ITEM: Why won't the damn blue (but dark blue, really it's almost black) helicopter out there stop circling overhead?

I've never wanted to live in California

I haven't written much about my foster father, Ray. On the one hard, the three or so years I lived with him (mid-second-grade through mid-fifth-grade), and the faith he always had that I wouldn't turn into my mother, were both life-saving. On the other hand, he's an alcoholic pedophile who's turned into a kind of creepy bitter loner as he gets old. We don't talk very often now, and it's mostly about birds when we do.^*

I think my mother more or less stalked Ray for as long as she knew him. He's ten years older than she. They were clearly friends, and probably lovers, before I was born (simple blood typing suffices to prove he's not my biological father; eye color, too, for that matter). When she moved to the city with me, in 1976, after my grandfather went bankrupt, the only apartment she could afford was in an extremely scummy part of Manhattan. Ray let her use his address to get me into one of the good public elementary schools. And when she cracked up hard (walking up and down the middle of 14th St. naked, apparently, while I was locked into the apartment), she signed custody over to him. (Yes, it pissed off her parents but good.)

Ray grew up in San Francisco and Marin County. His father died very young, and his mother remarried. He has three much younger half-siblings who live out here still. In 1978, and again in 1982^**, he flew me out for a summer vacation. Big TWA widebodies, leaving from the Saarinen terminal at JFK: the only way to fly, baby.

We stayed with his mother and stepfather, in a lovely little mobile home park in San Rafael. No, really, it was very nice, carefully landscaped and all double-wides on foundations. I don't know if it was intentionally a retirement community, or whether that was just who-all ended up living there. There were little lakes, and a pool and a hot tub. I walked barefoot in the (ouch!) spiky grass and sunbathed by the pool.

As I lay baking, I tried to figure out which way was east, and I thought about how far three thousand miles really was. And I wondered if Ray was planning for us to just stay in California, like my grandmother kept saying he was^***.

If anyone had asked, I would have applauded such a plan. We were building towards an epic, nasty custody battle, and the side I was living with had me pretty thoroughly brainwashed already. And, let's face it: my mother was crazy, and my grandmother was extremely bitter—over losing her house, losing her daughter to illness, losing her granddaughter to an atheist of evil intent. Weekends with them sucked a whole lot.

But I've been left with a sense of double consciousness when I'm out here, ever since. I could have gone to grad school in California. I remember standing, looking out over the ocean, on a beautiful sunny March day (sun! March!), and realizing that, despite the weather, despite the beauty, despite the fabulous program I'd been admitted to, I didn't want to live someplace so alien. I'm always aware of the distance. There's a little undercurrent of betrayal that feeds my distaste for the brown hills, the dust, the traffic, the derelicts, the uninsulated houses, and the eucalyptus groves.

^*The last time I saw him, we walked around Central Park. We saw a green heron by the Beveldere, and some fancy ducks, and then watched the Pale Male powwow for a while... a chick was being fed. I didn't see him when I was in New York this fall. He didn't come to Annajane's funeral. And I haven't told him I'm pregnant.

^**Yes, the second trip was after the custody battle. I don't know how, or why, my grandparents agreed to it, and the tension was much higher than it was for the first trip. I also lived with Ray the summer after 9th grade—after that, I found academically-based ways to leave home whenever school wasn't in session.

^***Of course, it was ultimately my bloood relatives who kidnapped me, more or less. They got a court order one Christmas that blocked my going back to Ray's.

Self-criticism

So: I've been out in Nirvana for a few weeks now. How'm I doing?

WORK: Above average, for me at least. I am going in to an office and sitting still and thinking for a good part of each day, and that's a big change relative to anything since, oh, mid-October. I am going to talks and learning new things—well, I've substantially been under a rock for the last six years, so almost anything anyone gets up to talk about is new to me. (And it's such a luxury that other people are getting up and talking, and I can just sit and listen!)

However, I'm still working on the creepily idiosyncratic little sorts of things I seem to work on. Not on anything at all like the flashier stuff my proposal to come here was about.

PLAYING WITH OTHERS: Very, very bad. I have not had lunch with other people even once since arriving. I creep in and steal croissants after everyone else has come and gone for elevenses in the lounge. Several of the organizers have greeted me warmly, and said we must talk sometime—but I haven't followed up. Also, I am terrified of all the little post-doc boys running around. And somehow just about everyone else is either an old, famous organizer or a little post-doc. (Of course, in professional terms, I'm probably about level with the post-docs, in cumulative output: it took me five years, and them negative two, but who's counting? Well, I am, and they are, actually.)

If I were to tell anyone what I'm working on, they'd snort, or roll their eyes, or tell me how that vein of ideas was completely mined out in the early 60s, or... so I just don't tell them.

COPING WITH LIFE: Medium rare. The hunger=nausea thing is sort of disorienting, but a fruit shake in the late morning works wonders in keeping me at my desk and awake a little longer. Overall I think I've been doing pretty well with the weird shifts in bodily needs. (Beaker gets a demerit, though, for suddenly gasping "There's something in there!" after, um, bumping my newly-positioned cervix during an intimate moment...)

However, there are a couple of little issues. The Internet service thing, for example. Not gonna really happen for another 2 weeks (not entirely my fault, but largely so). And the driving thing. Beaker busted his butt getting our lovely little car out here, and I'm afraid to drive it. Manual transmission, Ohindinois is so beautifully flat, the 900 vertical foot climb to our current aerie, etc., etc. It's been at least 3 weeks since I was behind the wheel, and I learned to drive late enough that it's entirely possible for me to forget how.

So not here yet

So, we're not connected to the Internets (any of them) at home yet, and I'm mostly way too paranoid to dare post from work, or even from friends' houses. In the meantime, though, I'm grabbing a tiny chance to let you know how poorly I'm adapting to my new environment.

Yesterday, the library steps were powerwashed. At the end of the day, when I emerged blinking into the sunlight (after a long afternoon of wrestling with archaic terminology and shelving systems whose arrangement owed more to seismic safety considerations than to intellectual coherence), I noticed the brick pavement was wet.

And I automatically twisted my heel against the surface, to check for ice.

Can we improve the script here?

Hey, you up there, in charge: today was overdone. Do I really need four officemates? Just two would suffice for future personality contrast humor, I think. Also, did I need to pass 25 sushi places, all off limits?

And, when I was trying to track down my landlady. C'mon. So, I didn't have the car I'd hoped to borrow, and I had to take the bus. And her phone was continually busy, so I couldn't find out which stop. So of course I got off at the wrong stop, and then I got her on the phone, but she was about to be picked up by her auto mechanic (!) to be brought down the hill to her freshly repaired car (!). So she couldn't come pick me up, and I had to wander over the hill by myself. Way, way too many obstacles: just the busy phone would have provided enough tension, don't you think?

But, the climactic scene. I'm walking disconsolately down a narrow road. No sidewalks, steep dropoff, map in front of me. I've just figured out that I'm nowhere near where I'd told my landlady I was when a beat-up black pickup passes me and I hear someone call, "Emma?" I look up the road, and there's a skinny blond woman in exquisite workout gear coming towards me. "Emma?"

Yes, the landlady (riding in her mechanic's truck) found me at the same moment as my nemesis from grad school, the one who married the hotshot and won a nice spousal appointment at his side, who now lives full-time the academic Nirvana I only get to visit. The landlady rapidly gave me keys and accurate directions and drove off, leaving me with Boopsie.

Cheap coincidence? Yet another small world ploy? Oh yeah. But there's more, oh dear, there's more.

Boopsie and I spoke of many useless little things. I hadn't seen her for four or five years (even though she's been steadily drifting towards my subfield). But eventually, I asked where she was walking.

"Oh, I'm on a big loop here. I'm only walking because my doctor told me not to run. [Pause.] Not for the next few months, anyway. [Pause.] Because in August, there will be some big changes coming." [Truly leaden pause.]

Director, up there, whoever you are, that was too damn much. Did you forget that I'm a hapless, sad-sack kind of heroine? Muddling my way through all things even remotely professional? I just wasn't capable of donning the necessary shit-eating grin and saying, "Me too!" I'm not that kind of girl.

So I told her quietly, "Congratulations!" And kicked myself, as I said my good-byes and finally found the damn house, 'cause at least I could have asked her who her OB is.

Into the void

I'm not sure when I'll be able to post again. But I need to rant.

We are deconstructing our lives for the move. Oh, and, have I mentioned? We're going to redo the back third of the house while we're away (and yes, we trust our contractor that much, actually, he's an old friend/neighbor/landlord/coworker), so that Beaker can avoid the dust. Changed layout, lots of windows, new kitchen, new bathroom, new heating system. So, in between the little clothing decisions, I've been taking everything out of the kitchen cabinets that are about to be destroyed. Oh, and the downstairs bathroom, which will also be demolished. Did I mention that the dishwasher is broken? And is starting to smell funny? And that this house, in which I've spent about 10 days since mid-November, doesn't feel at all like home, what with the massive piles of displaced crap and architectural salvage all over? And that Beaker and I and our dear friend the contractor all know full damn well that there's zero chance that the work will be done before we're back, but we all pretend anyway?

Let me go lie down for a bit. The queasiness, and the cramping I get if I'm a little too active. Plus it helps drain the phlegm back into my sinuses for a little while, so it doesn't just drip down my face. SNEEZE. Aaaaah.

I actually leave tomorrow. Ultrasound of potential doom the day after that (which will be 7w1d). Fly to California the day after that. Next Wednesday I get to: help feed and clothe the tiny children of the friend I'll be staying with, since her husband will be off on a ski trip. Then drive through two alien cities to the Institute. Then listen to a talk by, and have lunch with, an old friend who's having a rough time getting a real academic job: "You've been on lots of search committees, right, Emma? You'll be able to give me feedback." Then find my way into the hills to the sublet house, to pick up keys and learn which doors are locked and must NEVER EVER be opened, no matter what I hear coming from the other side (I think I'll move in next weekend; it'll be a pain to be up in the hills with no car, and there will be no car until Beaker braves the blizzards with ours). I'm not sure where the two-hour nap I need these days fits in, but I'm sure it will catch me at an inconvenient moment.

It's not clear when Beaker is leaving, since our plans for the house stuff are not in the shape they should be, and neither is the house. His mother called today to make clear that she'd be monitoring the Weather Channel for him as he drove, and callling to check that he was alive (and eating enough) every six hours or so. "I just worry about the same things as you do, Emma." Mmmmm-hmmm.

What strikes terror into my heart now (aside from the ultrasound): I'm going to California to do work. Remember work? I actually got into a bit of a groove, a few months ago, before the election, before the cycle, before my mother died. Was geting energized about some new projects. But that was a long time ago, and I haven't touched anything at all, except tragic departmental negotiations, since some desultory efforts mid-stim.

But I'm going to California to work, and I hope to hell I can manage to. I've often done badly when surrounded by too many brilliant famous people. I'm hoping that now, now that I have professional niche that can't be taken away, a niche that I'm comfortable in (even if some of those brilliant famous people won't have much respect for it—you try explaining what a liberal arts college is to a Russian), I can relax and: and work.