Housekeeping
Lots of food for thought but probably I won’t have time to sort through it, so just posting to let everyone know that we are going on a plane (!) out west (!) and then driving through the Rockies (!) and then coming back, all in a week, and I will not likely be posting. But we should be fine.
Then we come back, Noah starts at Montessori, I go to an all-day meeting, and start my new job the next week. CRAZY I tell you!
Forensic toxicology
Well, this morning I contemplated writing a line like this:
I feel sure my mother will have to take me apart in some way for going back to full-time work, since that’s the choice she didn’t make.
I thought it might be unfair.
This afternoon she called me to ask me if I didn’t think that perhaps V. is abusing Noah.
Like that.
Her reasons: 1) he wanted me to soothe him after yesterday’s pinch (true) and not V. and 2) she says he had “fingerprint bruises” on his arm 2 weeks ago, which I did not see. (My mother says she pointed them out to me. I do remember talking about bruises, but I thought we were looking at his shins, where he does have some impressive “I’m a toddler, and it’s summer” bruises.)
The way that she asked was creepy and abrupt. That she asked was kind of creepy and abrupt.
On one level, people should ask these questions, if they have concerns. I, of course, wonder this every week (is the person I leave my child with hurting my child), because I have no trust whatsoever.
The problem for me is separating that base level of fear and mistrust from my real instincts and from real evidence or reason for concern. My first reaction really was to wonder if I’d missed something, especially these fingerprint bruises. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Carl doesn’t remember them either, and we both gave baths and did lots of changes during that time.
I won’t eliminate the possibility but I think at this point the evidence that I have seen and my own gut (under the fear) say no, my mother is fucked. So let us proceed on that basis…
Godamned fucking shit this kind of drama makes me mad. I realize that it was the 1970s & 80s, but a) she missed a lot of abuse b) she was abusive herself and c) I am reasonably sure that with my grandfather it definitely was starting around this age (2). Given all that, she might not just call up at 2pm out of the blue and drop this kind of baseless concern on me.
Except I am sure there is something twisted and Jungian going on on one level.
On another level, I think this is the lashing out about going back to work and honestly? It was a good one. I had to get Noah’s school forms in this afternoon and it made it much more difficult to do the fairly basic task of just taking them there and dropping off. It made me feel like I can’t protect him at all no matter what and I should just not work and stay inside all day.
She really found a button to press. It’s been a long time since a simple phone call caused a meltdown in my head, with me totally upset, Lyr totally upset and wanting not to work outside our house, Lynn spouting off, and general mayhem and chaos and borderline non-functionality, like missing the deadline for the forms (technically Thurs) and all these things.
And it is this kind of thing that kept causing problems growing up: if there was something going on, what happened instead of looking at that and dealing with it, my mother made something else into a crisis instead. Which had the dual effect of ignoring the real, and causing a lot of fear about other things. And the sad thing is that occasionally, like today, it still works.
Mommy wars
I think I want to talk about my mother a bit.
My mother mostly stayed home with us: that is, she did daycare for extra money; she worked PT teaching one school year between my sister and I (from which I have horrid memories of being left with a neighbour); she got a real estate license and sold houses for a few years during a boom; she eventually started her own 4-hr-a-day business which was a school cafeteria, which she saw as a kind of adjunct to teaching.
Prior to having me she was a teacher and for my entire life I have heard how she was the best teacher ever; her students adored her and the parents wept when she went on maternity leave, never to return. But after moving up here (Canada) she never actually became credentialled to teach again. She was a non-teaching teacher in a lot of ways and my sister and I sort of became her success stories, which may explain why my academic history is so spotty.
It took me until my mid-20s to consider that maybe she was a Great Teacher and maybe… she wasn’t, since so many things she remembers as fantabulous about my life were total disasters. But that remains the family mythology: my mother was a great teacher who chose to stay home with us, doing odd jobs for money here and there when it was needed, but mostly choosing to be a great parent instead.
I suspect that no matter what choices she made, many of the problems we had growing up would have been the same. Some even more so, because it may well be that the stress of juggling work and home would have made her even more controlling and strange. On the other hand, turning her intelligence and drive outward and being around interesting adults might have made all the difference there.
I never want to make the opposite choice from her out of a purely reactionary urge: I’m not going back to full-time work because she didn’t and it! ruined! us! or anything like that. And yet sometimes when I’m feeling my way through this transition period, I do feel a bit like I may be dodging that particular bullet: the one of confusing my ego as a productive adult with Noah’s need for parenting.
This thought helps me a bit when I get comments. Pride goes before a fall, and I had been so smug that the mommy wars don’t actually exist in my neighbourhood, but it appears that choosing to put Noah in daycare was like crossing a border. One of my previous mom-friends actually said “and I guess it’ll be ok with you when he puts you in a nursing home.” (Actually, yes, but it had better have field trips!!! And hence, the previous in the sentence above.)
I still am experiencing a deep ambivalence about whether this will work best for our family. I am really worried about the rush and what things will fall by the wayside.
But the closer I get to starting my new job the less ambivalence I have about me. I am very very happy to be getting back into the kind of focus you get from working full-time and my head is filling with ideas for the new place. I feel more alive and less stuck. I sort of feel like I am winning my own personal war, whatever that is.
Harry Potter (mild spoilers for book; thou hast been warned)
It’s the Harry Potter weekend here: Carl and I are going to see the movie (gasp) in a couple hrs (gasp) on a date (gasp) without babe (gasp). First movie I’ve seen in a theatre since Noah outgrew Movies for Mommies shortly before he turned 8 mos.
And yes I read the book - speed read, so will want to reread later, but I wanted to get through it.
I found it very satisfying overall. I’m not a rabid fan but I think the books are great and the characters and world amazing, and I hoped for a good conclusion and got it. That there were obvious nods to what I will vaguely call the “basic Anglo-Saxon epics” doesn’t bother me in the slightest; it fits the genre wonderfully.
Most amusing thing I have read: that Rowling is a big fat heteronormative nasty and should have at least allowed for a gay Sirius/Lupin or something relationship. As a non-heteronormative writer, I have to shout out to you people: no one is required to write gay storylines into their books any more than I am required to write ones about say, post-partum depression. Write your own goddamn books.
The last sentence is actually also a shout out to anyone who is going to say “X should have happened.” I do think that as in a lot of the HP books, there was a bit more exposition than there had to be, and the way she kept the point of view tight around Harry and didn’t do something spiffy with communicating to Hogwarts or something really weakened the Snape development - but these are overall understandable choices, especially given the rush she’s had to finish the series in the amount of time she had. (Creative ways to show rather than tell can take years to appear in the brain.) I’m fine with discussing the technical aspects of the book.
But I hate the fan tendency (in myself as well, which I have had in the past) to get fussed about what the characters did, etc. That’s non-writing writer talk; if you want to have the privilege of deciding what characters will do you have to write your own books.
As an editor this has been a hard lesson for me but I have come to learn it - there is a world of difference between saying “this wasn’t written in a way that I understood where this character decision was coming from” - fair - and saying “this character would never do that!” - unfair. Okay I don’t edit fiction, but the point is you can question the writer on clarity, structure, etc. - but if you are starting to rewrite the whole thing, something is not on.
~~
I also read a kind of amusing/annoying discussion of whether the HP books are “good” for adults. They are not adult literature exactly - in today’s marketing/audience-driven classification they are solidly YA, I’d say. So evaluating them against Robertson Davies’s coming of age tales is really stupid. But really I think they’re actually an epic, and I don’t see any reason to make epic an age-specific category. It’s just that you can’t find “epic” as a shelf category at Borders/Chapters.*
So I thought it was funny that people were trying to defend them as adult literature or denigrate them as a children’s stuff. And sad too.
This was going on under a discussion about Michael Moore’s truthfulness as a film maker and how he lies and George Bush lies too! And I thought - how crazy our/American culture is, that the difference between lying in a film (or exaggerating) and lying in order to go to war and kill people is erased into some kind of moral blank like: Liars are bad neener neener!
Maybe we need more epics around, I dunno.
* As a side note of interest, up here Raincoast Books, which was a small press until it happened to buy the rights for this little book out of Britain called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (we still have philosophers and queues up here in Canada, you see), publishes the HP books in two covers - the regular ones and the “adult” ones that are more somber.
Pieces of me
I’m digging out my office a bit - yes I work there already, 15-20 hrs a week, 10 of which are nannied and therefore I am pretty much locked in there. And yet there is always a heap of things in there related to Noah - toys I am taking out of rotation for a bit, toys he’s not yet ready for (the Playmobile fiasco from the garage sale, random gifts), presents I have picked up for other people, and anything I sweep out of the house if someone calls to be just “dropping over,” like half-read books.
As I’m doing that (Noah is enjoying some of the Playmobile despite the small pieces while I am standing right there) lots of little things start to come back to me. I packed this office up alone, half before listing our house and half before moving, while Carl was almost a hundred per cent in Ottawa. This furniture, custom designed by Lyria, created by Carl, and painted by me - just after returning from my disencorporation - seems too small now and I’m considering using the months I will be freelance to buy new furniture, since some of the cost can be charged off. Although really I probably can’t afford much, but then, there’s Ikea.
And it occurs to me yet again that I haven’t actually worked full time in an office since Emily died. I went back part time after that, and then arranged that whole work from Ottawa thing that became work from home after having Noah. It will be a big adjustment. And at the same time I sort of feel like I am coming more online; more alive.
I think it’s a question of believing that I can handle it. After Emily died there were a few reasons for not going back full time. Wrote most of a novel (oh poor languishing novel) and then when Carl’s job in Ottawa became pretty permanent travelling up there - and packing, repairing, and painting the house to sell it mostly on my own - was my “other job.” Noah’s pregnancy was dreadful - I was depressed, sick, tired, and miserable, and during that time we moved into this house. Then all the newbown stuff, the negotiating with work, trying to work without a nanny. Getting into having a nanny. Taking on more work.
I think in many ways despite the family peace we have had since Noah has been hale and hearty, I have been “on pause” - waiting for life to start again.
Maybe this is it, despite the craziness that is going to ensue. I still have so many fears, most of all that Noah will lose out on some critical need. But at the same time I feel like I am regaining something pretty large. I hope. I hope this is not just the next chaos.
Zoo day
I took Noah to the zoo this morning, with that odd feeling I keep having that these are the Last Days of our little nirvana. Which is a bit silly, since it’s not nirvana, and the zoo is open on weekends (and afternoons off) but there’s still some truth there. We are cramming in the playdates too.
He careened around joyfully, played in the gravel, and oohed at the elephants. I tried an ice cream cone with him for the first time and he kept asking for a spoon, which I did not have.
He’s so amazing.
I keep wondering if I have just made a huge mistake, but I guess I won’t know until I try it. Being at home feeling stressed and unhappy (the other kind of day) or putting a Thomas DVD on for the second time is the other side of things, really.
Random bits
In line at the grocery store today my magazine was in the rack by the cash. I know enough about how this works to know that there are nefarious reasons, and yet, I had a little frisson of pleasure anyway.
~~~
I still tear up every time I think of specific losses with Noah. Like popping up to the zoo for an hour. I know much of it is kind of silly - nap time, for example, is not a huge loss. But still. Ah well, if it’s terrible, we can make changes.
~~~
I think we are going to try 4 full days at the Montessori, one day with V., if V. is amenable. That just seems stabler than having him picked up by different people on different days, like it would be if he were going half time, but still gives him a weekday on “his speed,” plus preserves that important relationship. And it’s the same hours for V. If she doesn’t go for it, though, it will probably be full time Montessori.
I hope he keeps loving vegetables. Their menu is pretty good - chick pea curry, etc. We have the option to pack lunch but she said all the other kids are on the plan, because they eventually bend to peer pressure, and it’s only an extra $65/mo to not have to pack any food at all with him, which is a huge convenience factor.
They do give juice though…. oh well, couldn’t hold the line on that much longer.
~~~
I have had only 4 nightmares that he dies there, so far. Ha.
~~~
Dear Montessori Staff,
I know every parent thinks his or her child is the most precious person ever to walk the earth. But you see, in my son’s case, it’s true. Please keep him safe. He loves the world and thinks it is all wonderful. Please try to keep some of it that way. He needs to be held to go to sleep and I know you will want to change this, but please be gentle. He likes to know what is going to happen before it happens, so please explain it to him. Don’t force him to eat or drink, but offer lots. I know you can’t buy love, but love him anyway!!!
Authenticity
And, while I’m on a roll…
Avril asks As a multiple, what does authenticity mean to you? I’m thinking beyond simply staying true to one viewpoint or one deeply held value. How can the system maintain authenticity to many different values and priorities? And says other neat stuff in her comment, and I’ll have to track that stuff down ’cause it sounds cool.
I think when I say authenticity I’m probably at a slightly different (earlier?) stage with it.
As a member of a multiple system so much of my life experience has been about disconnects… my favourite, true, example is that until I was in my late 20s I had never, ever, ever in my life experienced or remembered apologizing for something. As far as I was concerned, arguments/fights were something one either started or suddenly found one’s self in, and then after some unspecified and vague period of time things were okay again.
That’s because I never personally apologized; Teresa and others did, and I never even was aware of the process. So it was kind of a shock to me that this whole “apologizing” thing was something that I/we ever did. I kind of thought it was a sort of urban legend, that we trained our kids to say sorry but as teens/adults simply… implied it, or something.
So for me part of becoming authentic is not only being able to express that - to say hey! I was 28 before I ever apologized! And it has shaped my experience tremendously and actually I am most comfortable with people like asshole men who never apologize or accept apologies!
But also to learn how to do it myself and not just hang back and let someone else do it. And apologizing sort of breaks down as an example here, but the thing is that for me and us there are at least two modes of being. In one mode, we all do what we were “made” to do - so I fight, Lynn strikes, and JJ soothes. And that feels familiar and in some cases works quite well.
But in the other mode, the authentic mode, we seek out full experiences - I work, but I also apologize at work if need be, and so on and so forth. Co-consciousness goes a long way in being able to do that, like I can be there for Lyria’s gardening and she can be there for my meetings. But part of feeling authentic, for us, is feeling that not only are we there but we have gotten there in some coherent way - chosen to show up, as it were, for the day.
So that’s one sense in which I use it, that it kind of is exciting to be there, but then it sucks that say, Lynn’s showing up means she gets attached to her poetry group, but then we can’t often make it to their readings.
The values… is harder. I do value a work ethic, for example, and financial “independence” (I know we are not really independent from each other) fairly highly, and I’m willing to consume more fossil fuel to get there, and stress out my kid just a little. Lyria is already being driven mad by the lack of public transit to our work destination from here and she values a small footprint and time to be much more. And Lynn values artistic expression pretty highly; I suspect she is going along with the job because she thinks there will be some synergy and more ’scope’ and there is some truth in that. JJ values balance which is why she’s so helpful at times like these. I don’t really know yet what Dominic values, so we should ask him sometime.
It is a really good point that those are values to try to reach simultaneously, and some years we do and some we don’t. What I think has maybe surprised me the most the last two years is how crazy it is when we add a baby to the mix. I am so lucky to have all of you to muse about with and hear about Jamie’s great daycare and so on.
Consensus by waterfront
So at the meeting today my plan was to ask for the weekend to think it over, after making all my various demands.
They offered me a good salary: not superfantabulous! but it will cover all the expenses of working (this nascent budget includes cleaning service) and perhaps, a little more, and 8k more than I have ever made in my life. It’s freelance (I invoice & do all the HR stuff myself) until November and then I will be brought into the corporate fold; placed on the grid, signed up for benefits, and so on.
Then I brought up work hours, as the impression I had in the first interview was that there was a deep necessity to be onsite at business times. “Well we don’t have space for you yet exactly so you and I and the other new editor will be sharing the same desk, so you’ll have to work from home quite a bit, and really I don’t care if you work at 3 in the morning as long as its done… of course the magazine people will want to be able to see you, though, so you will have to set some kind of office hours, sometime.”
!
This was going well and I could feel Lyria, who was sort of planning, I think, to burst into tears and say no in the meeting, ease up a little. Obviously Noah still has to be in full time care, etc., but being able to swing hours is a huge deal. And then we were having a chat about my boss and where and how she works and it involves a rather long commute to an ocean coast and said boss was getting a dreamy eyed look at how she works by the ocean…
and I guess Lyria had the thought I did, which is that although I suspect this boss is actually a slave driver, she’s the best kind of slave driver - the kind that wants good work and you had better produce it, but if that involves gazing at the lake, err, ocean, then for fuck’s sake go gaze at the fucking lake, err, ocean!
So, we took it on the spot. Start Aug 13, but with a meeting on Aug 9. I have to resign from my current job tomorrow or Monday and I am really kind of looking forward to that… quite a bit.
Odd decision paths
One of the hardest things about all the therapy and work we have gone through is that it has been a lot about becoming our authentic selves. (Not a mommy- or daddy- pleasing self; not a living in fear of exposure self. This blog is a lot about that.)
And as it turns out, those authentic selves are sometimes in conflict, like right now.
It is indeed exactly like having the Mommy Wars inside your head. If you throw in sort of sibling wars too like remember when you all quit the job I was about to love? and remember that you said it would not always be all busy-busy!
War, too - today was a bit war-like just adrenaline wise. Lynn gets strange ideas about things and when we went to re-visit the Montessori today she scanned the place herself.
[Lynn's method of looking at space is completely different to most people's; where I just need not to have my back to a door, she basically looks at space the way you do in a video game (this is one reason I/we just can't play them; we sort of live aspects of them) - here's where you can hide, here's where people might pop out at you, here's what you can push over, here's where you could trap or be trapped, etc. However she also sort of assesses people and all the staff there passed as "uninteresting" which is, generally, one of the best pieces of news you can get. Interesting is bad.]
But it is certainly very trench-like to have her around. It’s sort of like having additional senses.
JJ is in on this one too and she really likes Montessori and thinks it is a really good match for Noah’s brain, so we sort of all agree on the method, it’s just more the hours.
Lyria is definitely really into the “mother” definition. I think she is able to let go of Noah appropriately but on the slow path, if you know what I mean. I’m encouraging her to post here later and she may, or she may not. But her main issue is that Noah is too little, and also what working full time will do to all of our home life, which is an important point.
She hates rush and thinks it is terrible for people, especially babies. She thinks the rat race is silly. She hates ordering food or eating pre-prepared stuff, unless it is made with love somewhere. And she thinks that our home should be a haven and for her that means her being here most of the time to kiss boo-boos.
And y’know I can’t entirely disagree with that, because if it were only her I would be very glad to have that happen. It’s just that it is also me, who ends up pacing around wondering how much longer it will be before I lose really important brain cells.
She thinks, really, that I am missing out on what could be my/our authentic, quiet life and getting busy monkey-mind. Which is a little true; I am not a zen contemplate the rock type; I am more the rock on! type.
~~
I think part of it too is that the idea originally was that we would have a child or two, slow down, and live more simply while they are small.
What I have discovered about myself right now at 36 years old is that I feel like I am missing out on something important while I do that. And god I love Noah. The thought of being far away from him is almost physically painful. But the thing is - I still, while enjoying him, while adoring who he is, end up worrying each day about how I am not ‘out there.’ And when I have good work to do, I sink into it and come up refreshed.
I guess I think that yes, if I were an ideal person, I would stay home longer. But I am me, and me really wants to work.
And see my mother made the opposite decision and she believes totally that she did the right thing, and who am I to argue really, since there was no alternate universe to test it in? Except that she was so unhappy for so long. And bounced around in pretty dead-end jobs. And I don’t really want to do that - I don’t think I would do it like that, but it sort of haunts me a little.
~~
I have to admit that in our negotiating (and we do try to do it on a long-range basis too) we throw everything in, oddly.
Like, if I get to work, Lyria gets to have more vegetarian meals. These are not easily related things, except that they involve people getting some say somewhere. There will be budget concessions in there too, if we ever get past the salary just covering costs.
The scariest one though is the baby question.
We are talking about a possible baby #3/2, too. I have mentioned I am 36? There is some slight urgency to the question.
Like this: I say that even the minimum one full year at this job would be the addition and contacts necessary to my resume, or ego, or both. Lyria really wants one more child, and part of the reason I am not sure I do is that it would mean being out of the workforce longer.
So we might do it like, start this job and give it at least 6 reproductively neutral months (i.e. before even thinking about conceiving), but then in exchange for taking this opportunity now, which should theoretically make me less stressed out about being able to get back in the workforce, consider throwing another maternity leave in there (err, and yes, another child - I am not negating that at all).
This sounds like a horrible way to decide to have a child so I should stress that this is not about having one, it’s about possibly having one - actually having one is a much bigger thing. And of course one should not take a job planning to get pregnant right away. I think 6 + 9 is reasonable and it’s only a half a year older, should it go that way.
(I still don’t know except that Noah is so great. Take that as you will.)
Then there’s the willingness to back out. Pretty much everyone in the system has pointed out that I have a hard time leaving things and that’s true to some extent. But we have agreed that if after three months Noah is not adjusting that I will back out, even though at that point we won’t have any job and it will make me look shitty.
But there is no question that if he were to stop being okay, he is immediately the top priority, given that we have the luxury of food and shelter already.
I have this meeting tomorrow, but so far I think we might try it out. Carl is very supportive about taking the job (or not, but he sort of favours trying it).