Barely promoted

How Ray, my foster father, is doing

So I hadn't talked with him in nearly a year. Not since I'd invited him to Annajane's funeral, given him detailed directions—complete with train times—and then he hadn't shown up. So of course he didn't know about the pregnancy, or about my having spent last spring out in California, where he's from, where he took me to meet his relatives long ago.

A couple of weeks ago the pressure from Beaker's mother about pictures had become too great to bear, so we'd put together an iPhoto book to send out. I sent one to Ray, too. I called him the evening after it had shown up. We were both embarrassed.

He really didn't want us to come up to his apartment; it was hard to tell why, but we didn't. We had and early dinner with him at a Chinese restaurant, just around the corner from my old elementary school. Tabby was cranky and needed the nurse the whole time; Beaker had a blood sugar crisis; but it was all right, in the end.

His hair is all white now, his face craggier, his walk slower. He worries about his bowels and his bladder, and New York is a cruel city for those worries. He cooed at the baby and made funny faces: everyone does, don't they? (Rumor has it that once upon a time he had a son who drowned at a city pool at the age of three. But I don't even know if that was with his first or second wife; I'm somehow convinced, though, that it was the Carmine Street pool, the one my daycare took me to every day all summer.)

He's stopped smoking and drinking. He says three years ago: I had no idea. He syays it's made him boring. It's true, in a way. He's quiet and a little paranoid. But my mother could only ever stand him drunk (and vice versa) so I only like him sober. He says he stopped both before his youngest brother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

At the end of the meal, we jousted over the check. I lost. It's not like him. But he needed to say that he's doing okay, what with Social Security and a little freelance editing and having lived in the same ratty walkup since 1977. Not about to starve.

Again it happens

We're at a faculty party with a somewhat different crowd than usual. More of the multiculti-oriented folks. All humanists of some sort or other. (Perhaps you've noticed that my graduate training didn't provide me with much in the way of a modern theoretical understanding of race, or class, or gender, or sexuality? Well, it didn't. Neither did Beaker's.)

Person A says something about Granolaton with at least reasonably honorable intent, but somehow sadly flawed: perhaps they justify it using something that's simply not true, perhaps it's more hurtful to some group they don't usually worry about (e.g., middle class townies) than they realize.

Beaker jumps in, perhaps a bit too directly. To correct the factual error. Or to explain why what they've just said could be painful.

But Person A won't back down. They feel their honorable intentions are what's under attack: why would someone try to correct the facts, or point out negative consequences, unless that person disagreed with the underlying statement?

Beaker, who almost certainly agrees with the underlying sentiment, feels that they're actually undercutting the case for it by getting details wrong and/or needlessly offending people. He won't back down either. The conversation degenerates.

What I find frustrating, aside from the awkwardness at the time and the presumably reduced number of invitations to that crowd's parties: that the content of this blog entry could be seized upon as evidence for the closed-mindedness of faculty on the left at liberal arts colleges. That sometimes, there are little hints that all those accusations might be true.

Also: it's because Beaker is more involved in the community outside the college that he generally knows more about whatever facet of town life is under discussion than Person A, the one with the critical stance. Who despite self-consciously maintaining a certain distance from the community, (often even more effectively in real life than in rhetoric), believes that he or she knows, and knows better than most, how to address whatever problem is under discussion.

It's all fine when we discuss, e.g., national politics; we all read the same papers, and the same blogs, and have about the same biases. But Lord help us when our kids all hit school age.

Fast forward

[Guaranteed typed with sleeping baby strapped to chest!]

Remember how I was so worried over whether we'd be able to find day-care for Tabby come January? Turns out there's been a "cancellation," so the good center has an opening in December.

Good news, right? There's space! There's space in January and February! But I'm spazzing about the December thing.

I need to get work done. We have sadly not been able to actually get Beaker to take Miss T for scheduled intervals; he's too stressed about work to consciously say, "I'm not going to touch my computer for two hours." Look, we've been trying for a while now, since she was a month old, and it just has not happened.

Any time I hand him the baby for a diaper change, he's game—and those often stretch to 20 minute interludes of play. He's spending a lot of time with the baby—remember that he works at home. I love the breaks, but, although the dishes and laundry and so forth can get done in little bits like that, real work can't, really. (Please don't get all Boice on my ass! I also use those breaks to, um, pee and eat and stuff.)

Weekends are actually worse; Beaker's working on the house, so usually buried in protective gear, hidden behind power tools, and covered in dust and grime that he's worried could be toxic. I'm pretty much on my own all day. (Not that working on the house is an intrinsically bad thing; both the toilet and the shower in the downstairs bathroom are functional now!)

In any case. There's a book I'm working on, with grumpy co-authors. I will need to prep next semester's teaching. And I'm starting to feel a bit restless: the brain wants to be doing something, too.

Yet I don't want to be someone who hands her baby off to others at the first possible opportunity. (Yes, everyone we know sends their babies this center, but most start later. Our friends with real jobs in real cities have sent their babies off even younger, but that tends not to happen around here.) I'm disappointed that sharing care at home is not working. I'm worried that she's stopped taking bottles. (Oh, and I might have thrush.)

I am of course glad to not be scrambling for alternate arrangements, and I'm glad that we're not going to have to plan a caregiver switch early on, as we would have had to do if there had really been no space at the center until March.

I think I'm going to call the center back today and sign up for 20 hours a week, starting December 12. She'll be 14 weeks then. View those first two weeks as pure transition; go in and nurse, if I have to, or if I want to. Take a break for Christmas and New Year's, then 20 hours a week through January, until classes start in earnest in February; then full time.

Yestrday I sat outside with Miss T asleep on my chest, trying not to spill a decaf mocha on her. It was warm but blustery, and the clouds rushed by above me so fast that I suddenly felt as if I were inside Koyaanisqatsi. Beautiful clear white clouds, though. Nothing dark on the horizon.

How did I end up here?

---The yenta-ish wife of a member of another department: From the picture on your web page, I assumed you were well past your childbearing years. But now look at this! How old is she?... You look great for eight weeks post-partum!

---The cabinetmaker, in his workshop: Are you sure you want to paint the cabinets? Look at this dovetail here. And the grain on the maple. Are you sure?

---One of my husband's geeky friends from high school, now a psychology postdoc who does too many drugs: Tell me -- what's the oxytocin like?

---The cabinetmaker, on the answering machine: Just wanted to let you know I'm hard at work painting the cabinets. They should be ready Tuesday. But I'm gonna get drunk tonight. You still sure you want to paint them?

---Our health insurance company, after refusing to pay for the hospital pediatricians' torturing us just after Tabby's birth: REASON FOR DENIAL: THE DEPENDENT LISTED ABOVE IS NOT ELIGIBLE FOR COVERAGE UNDER YOUR PLAN.

---The cabinetmaker, on the answering machine, again: You know what orange peel looks like? Well, there's a nice sheen on the paint, high gloss, but it's a little ripply. I finally figured out what solvents to mix in the sprayer, and the doors look real nice, but I'm gonna have to sand the paint off the face frames. For the fourth time. To get rid of that orange peel. Maybe Friday?