Test update
The test went fine and no one ran around screaming about the state of my uterus. From reading the tea leaves of the technician’s face, I’m guessing she found something but it was not urgent and I’ll have the results in about a week, which is how non-urgent things go here. :)
The elephant on the blog
Tomorrow I’m having an ultrasound of my abdomen - “everything” - on the orders of two doctors: My own, and the ER doctor. About a month ago I had the worst pain I’ve ever had in my life* (I include labour in that) and went into (mild, but visible) shock and ended up in the ER, but by the time they really got to me beyond treating for shock and sticking a blood pressure monitor on me (6 hrs; this is unusual even here in socialized medicine-land but my small ER had been overwhelmed by a three-vehicle accident) the pain had gone away.
Completely.
Said ER doctor said to follow up with mine, but mine was in Egypt until last week. Unfortunately just as I was about to call her to make an appointment I had another round of pain. I think it’s in my girly bits, and not on the gall bladder/appendix side, but pain can be referred and so on. So I was in last week and got the requisition for the ultrasound, and being me I scheduled it around work so tomorrow it is.
However, it’s a bit scary ’cause remember last year I had a big thyroid cancer scare and my lymph nodes were all swollen up? Well, they’ve never entirely gone down. So of course, I’m a little worried that we just didn’t look low down enough and there’s like, massive cancer in there.
This also just highlights the love-hate relationship I have with my girly bits. They have delivered two children, but sadly strangled one of them. Also, miscarriages. Also, I’m almost 39 and haven’t gotten pregnant for the last year, not that we seem to manage to have sex at the right time. (See above re: work times: two adults plus: preternaturally aware preschooler who manages to sleep soundly any night his parents are not on another floor rolling in the hay. Ahem. Do you have enough information yet?)
Even though my bits have been subjected to imaging many many times while pregnant, I still sort of wait for the day that someone looks at them and goes OH MY GOD. THESE ARE AWFUL.
I just have this deep survivor shame and certainty that written in them somewhere in scar tissue are the runes for INCEST or perhaps BORN FOR WEIRDNESS. This is, in fact, sort of one of the reasons I’ve never really pursued fertility treatment in any serious way: I just don’t want that much scrutiny.** And having Noah at this point, I sort of honestly feel like my GOD the LARGESS is so huge that really another child — a third! a second breathing, but still — would be beyond the bounty of the universe to provide.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m a bit worried (ovarian cancer! uterine cancer! cervical cancer! My god, you could even have bladder cancer did you know? Google says so!), a bit nervous, and pretty much halfway convinced that there will be some kind of emergency hysterectomy as a result of my scarlet letter.***
* Were Carl here he would immediately jump in to explain how bad it was, because he has every other time I’ve mentioned it to anyone. It freaked him out. And he was there for the labours!
** After losing Emily the ob offered me, at the 6-wk post-partum grief-fest and checkup, Clomid, like it was so much candy, because “the only risk is twins, ha ha.” While I realize this was already demonstrably not the best ob clinic in town, since this ob had my entire history on being able to GET pregnant and not being able to STAY pregnant, this really put me off further intervention at the one time in my life I have desperately felt that if I could not have a baby within a reasonable timeframe I would actually just lie down and die. Which is not really that relevant to the why not? question but I had to rant anyway.
*** Actually we’re guessing garden variety cysts. But I was expressing my FEELINGS. :)
Parenting: Time machine to your past
So, I toured the Montessori. Carl didn’t, ’cause Noah had a cough and was tired and so we decided they would stay home and I would check it out.
This particular school seemed to be half-Montessori, half-lycée. Which is a totally odd mix. Concrete up to about grade 3 and then desks in rows after that. There were things I liked a lot about it: The kids seemed happy and engaged, the teachers reasonably ditto; the language instruction blew. my. mind. in both French and English. They also do double math (in the morning in french, with textbooks from France, and in the afternoon in english with Saxon math, so that they learn to think mathematically in both languages. They don’t even worry about whether this is confusing. To quote the directress, “if learning two different maths is confusing, the child has not understood a concept, so as teachers we must re-teach that area in any case. If students read two different books by two different authors in the same day, no one worries.” What? You want them to understand math? Crazy talk, man.)
And I am not easily impressed that way, but the directress let me rifle through random children’s work all the way up to grade 7 and I saw, for example, essays with supporting quotes in grade 5 workbooks, correctly spelled, with varying sentences lengths with different types of clauses.
I guess this is what you can do when your classes, after grade 2, are about 9-12 students large.
But the facilities were very, very ehn. I would suspect the students come out with fantastic basics, including history and geography, but not necessarily a whole lot else. Small rooms in a church hall. There were no computers or labs, and although I kind of think they’re not necessary — and elementary teachers who print material off the Internet with no care as to source drive me up the wall blah blah — I did have to wonder at what it all means when a school is still using the same exact methods as they did in 1978, not uncoincidentally the year I had a teacher from France.
And that was kind of it - the handwriting, the textbooks, the progress chart on the wall, the sheets of dictées floating about, the choice of almost wildly inappropriate reading material (Zola in grade 6? Really?) - all hugely familiar.
I had a lot of feelings come up about that, since grade two was a year of infamy in my mind; I had a teacher who was brilliant and talented and able to move students at their own pace, and so by October of that year I’d finished grade two, and ended up somewhere in the middle of grade 5 by the end of it, and then spent the next several years more or less bored and in trouble and socially ostracized. (The charts on the wall, where my stickers had their own little piece of paper sticking off the right-hand side, did not endear me to my classmates, particularly since there was prize each week for most units completed.)
(Remember SRA reading?)
Which brings me to my navel-gazing point that man, why does parenting have to be such a trip to all the corners of one’s childhood? Why?
Anyways, so that just hit the educational buttons for me without really blowing me away in either direction. I feel sure one’s child would come out well educated; not so sure about happy. Imagine if you did not get along with the 9 kids in your tiny classroom.
Then yesterday I had a meeting with Noah’s current school’s owner/headmistress to get leads on other schools and also Discuss His Future. They of course want to keep him for his final year (which would be senior kindergarten) so she’d both prepared a sheet for me on the french he’s learned and how they could teach him way more. They newly have a teacher whose first language really is french and so that was a pretty generous offer. She also gave me some phone numbers of parents whose kids have gone from her SK to French Immersion directly, which I didn’t know could happen… and which frankly makes me weep a bit for the FI programme. Not that Noah’s teachers are not lovely, but he is in no way fluent.
But she also talked about the whole private school thing and a list of schools to look at and why she chose, with her four kids, to send them to (local) public elementary and save up her pennies for the real, vastly expensive, top-notch private high schools ($27k/yr for anyone wondering) and not bother with the mid-range (mid-range being $15k/year) schools for elementary.
And she talked about how Noah is such a social extroverted wriggly boy and that having a slightly larger class and good school teams and neighbourhood friends would be nice for him to have, and that his skills in learning-to-learn will already basically get him through elementary. Which is slightly overstating the case, I think, but I see what she means which is why actually I started looking at private.
So that was a nice counterpoint, and sort of our original plan. So lots to think about.
It’s not, by the way, that I think Noah is a super special snowflake (although of course, he IS, he’s my son! But only as much as anyone else’s son is. :)) in terms of profoundly gifted or anything like that; it’s more that school is so many hours of the day that I would like them to be good hours.
Bullet points o’doom
Educational angst, and angst
I have spent far too much time on Sandra Tsing Loh today, mentally and emotionally. I actually think this is progress, but ouch. One thing Anna, my therapist, said to me that has echoed in my mind oh, monthly, was that my mother was “a whole therapy” on her own. We never did get to that. But I am learning about me and us that while it is very tempting to blame everything wrong ever on incest, there were other forces shaping our life. Which, in turn, I imagine I will blame for a while and then move on with life itself.
So this is my year for generational outrage at the bad behaviour of my parents and their social set in the era of about 1976 - 1982. I do love my parents. In some ways as I get into the task of parenting a child (and not a baby) I get softer towards them. It is hard. I do screw up regularly. On the other hand, there are things I simply cannot fathom and the fact that my parents did, demonstrably, fathom them absolutely blows my mind every now and then. And I think what really set me off in the Atlantic piece was the thing about reading. Because I have been a strong reader all my life (started reading just shy of my third birthday, spontaneously, like something out of Harry Potter) and it has been a blessing, but it has also often been my drug of choice. My great aunt also did this, to the point that one time I was running around the Brussels airport seeking english language books or else my great aunt, whose knee was broken and in a cast, was going to refuse to get on a flight to the U.S.
So.
In total Jungian non-coincidence, Noah is starting to read. And I don’t mean the odd word like he was before, but really sit down with books in order to read them. Except, he sort of can’t yet. Actually he’s almost a case study in how phonics is helpful but not really the magic key. He decodes, and he has a sight vocabulary, but that hasn’t all come together yet to form an understanding of reading-reading.
I joke, but only half-way joke, that phonics are messing him up.
He’ll pick up a new book at the library, or *gasp* one of mine, grasp the meaning of a sentence (possibly from the illustrations in most cases, but in a few cases it wasn’t possible), talk about it, and then go and sound words out labouriously and get confused. Or he’ll bring home phonic readers, sound them all out sloooowly with reversals all over the place (d for b etc.) and then get so bored or distracted that he then has to compose his own song based on his riff on the pictures.
I have total faith that when he’s ready, the leap will come. My two years in the learning centre/reading lab give me a basis for this belief. But meanwhile it’s an odd twilight world, and I never went through that phase that I can remember.
Other than the phonics messing up the sight vocabulary, though, I’ve turned into a Montessori fan. I kind of have startled myself, actually, with how happy I am with Noah’s school right now. Noah’s happy. He’s engaged. He comes home with a lot of information, which is fine, and a lot of joy in that information. I’m starting to care about what he’s learning as he gets older, where before I just wanted him to be happy.
And I’m quite happy with what he’s learning. He can add and subtract and group and count by twos and tell you if numbers are odd or even and it seems to be fairly deep knowledge. He understands place value and seems to be grasping fractions a little. He can write letters and numbers and make attempts at spelling words that mostly go horribly awry but still are recognizable if you are paying attention. (Example: He leaves notes: momilfu. Translation: Mom, I love you.) He draws faces and the latest skill is that he is starting to read music.
He has no grasp of telling time on a clock with hands, tying his shoe, or pasting things straight, though. And he is a glue waster! (< — for Ramona fans)
For someone who turned four in August, this seems like a lot. And yet, some days he comes home from school and says he didn’t really want to work and he played in the sand and rolled in the pillows all day. Sometimes he brings home the same kind of work he did a year or so ago, and it all seems okay with the school, and I appreciate that. It doesn’t always have to be forward momentum.
So next year really is the make or break year where kindergarten and french are concerned. To recap: Noah is missing junior public kindergarten right now, which is generally english. French Immersion starts in senior kindergarten, so if we want that, it MUST be in September. He can enter english public school whenever, but most kids have entered already and the gentle transition of kindergarten gives way to seriousness in grade one, so that could be hard. He can stay in his current school to the end of senior kindergarten if we want, and this is also the ‘payoff’ year in the three-year cycle if he does.
Our local elementary school (walking distance) does not have a FI programme. The one to which he could be bussed is not in a good school; good authority has it they wanted the money to help with the gang problem. So our public school options, barring talking our way into the french board which didn’t happen last year and gets increasingly unlikely, pretty much come down to english public where he gets to WALK THERE (this I actually do care about) or move. In a fabulous new wrinkle, there is a movement to close under-populated schools in my area. In this local school none of the classes are full.
Then there are private options. Next Monday I have an appointment at a french Montessori that goes up to grade 12. It’s also four, count ‘em, four blocks from my work (representing a 45 minute commute for Noah where his current drive is 5 min; on the plus side he would only have to be at school for basically 8 hr. 20 min. and all I would add to my day would be the drop off/pick up minutes. We could even do something funky like park at my work and walk over, and I could walk over and get him and walk back to my work, thus giving me lots of exercise and Noah some. Given that we would be together and it would not be me rushing somewhere, it’s conceivable that we could even do it on public transit, although then it would take over an hour. And if we did it by car, we could listen to all the great works of children’s literature on audio books!)
I’m kind of leaning towards the Montessori but some things stop me. One, it is risky financially. I think it costs about $15k/yr and that doesn’t include the summer (we pay about $16k/yr now, but that includes summer). If Carl or I were laid off, we would have to switch schools fast. And if my work moved we’d be screwed. Our long-term financial planning generally has been with a view towards lowering our childcare costs, not increasing them.
Two, as someone who went to private school downtown in high school, I know that it changes your life fairly dramatically. It’s one thing in high school to have all your friends scattered about the city. It’s another thing in elementary school. This would mean no local school chums to go biking with and no self-sufficient walking to school alone in grade 4. It means him being trapped in a car with me 1.5 hrs a day, which doesn’t really seem natural or right or even healthy (I know I don’t find it healthy for me.)
The thing is, I don’t know whether those things will really truly happen if Noah’s in some kind of aftercare anyway. It sort of depends on whether Carl continues to work at home 3-4 days a week and whether that would be reliable enough for Noah to come home and hang out with him (working) after grade 1 or so, or what. In kindergarten, which is still half-day, obviously there has to be half-day daycare. If we can arrange the driving (see: Carl working from home some days; me working one; my parents pinch-hitting) Noah could even do half the day at public and half at his current school, for some crazy exorbitant fees.
We can’t move into my work neighbourhood, realistically. Houses similar to our current one cost about $700k and ours is worth about $375k, so it’s just out of reach. (Carl will never move into a condo and even the townhomes are $$$). We could move closer, I guess, if the school turns out to be wonderful and perfect.
[Real estate note: We could move and improve our education odds in a wide variety of ways: We could move into a FI neighbourhood. We could move closer to my work and this Montessori. However, we have a really good deal here in that our mortgage is very doable, our neighbourhood is lovely lovely and the lake - my god, the lake - and also, our neighbourhood is getting discovered. It's possible that in 5 years, we could make out like bandits. And the local school, if it stays open, is just fine - just not bilingual. Also, moving is so hard.]
Three, I really like Montessori right now. I’m not, however, convinced that it is the way to go for all of elementary. It depends on the teachers and the school.
Four, if Noah were reading fluently, I would be much more keen on French… and by September, he may be. I am keen on bilingual early education, and all of Noah’s other skills are solidly enough in place to take the rock to his world. But it would/will be a rough transition, and I would prefer if he were reading first.
So… I don’t know. This is what I’m thinking right now, but we have to tour the french school. If I adore the french school, perhaps we could try it for one year. One year of immersion at 5 years old wouldn’t make anyone bilingual, but it would lay a foundation for later study. If it worked brilliantly, we could talk about moving so as not to have a commuter lifestyle forever and ever and ever. If it fell in between, as most things do, we could either go on a year by year basis, or we could transition to public for grade one. If it were a disaster it would only be one year.
I don’t like the school hopping but that is what I’m thinking. Word from experienced parents at Noah’s school is that educationally kindergarten has mostly been a wasteland for their kids, after the work there.
We’ll know more Monday. I find this very hard. There are other private school options but I don’t really know if I want to pay for english private unless there is a problem with english public once we get into it.
Then of course there’s the quit my job, walk Noah to public kindergarten, supplement myself like crazy. Only problem is, I love my job.
Finally, I would like to get pregnant. If I ever manage that all bets are suddenly off because we can’t afford any of this for two kids… but wouldn’t that suck for Noah?
So. confused.
More Gen-X grump: Sandra Tsing Loh
First, you have to read this.
You will probably have to pause, breathless, a few times. The leaps are large in this piece, especially when she tries to explain the epiphanies she had about mothering when her SIL became vegetative and the time she spent creative narrative for her SIL’s kids. And a lot of details and the willingness to lay bare go pretty deep, on one level.
But on another level I’m experiencing generational rage all over again. It’s the looking to 70s feminism that does it. Hey, I’m all for feminism. I reap the fruits of its labour despite writing about beauty and fashion and I like being educated and I watch Mad Men in wonder at the whole secretarial pool.
And yet - I remember those days, from the fog of childhood, and I remember how everyone’s (except my parents’, maybe) marriages were falling apart and how someone’s mother was always “on strike” and there would be ashtrays lying near a shattered something - mirror, vase - with the shards still there in the carpet because picking up the pieces would be supporting the patriarchy. (And no, I don’t understand why the men didn’t pick them up.) I remember how several of us kids on the block got into fairly serious trouble setting alcohol - alcohol! - on fire in the basement while (I’m not even kidding) my friend’s mother and her friends looked at their vaginas in mirrors.
Yes, the women who changed their destinies did a great thing and it was hard and scary. But when it came to their kids, it sucked. It was not fun making pancakes with Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. Remember the scene where the kid is playing with his airplane and he spills the drink all over Dustin Hoffman’s work and there’s tons of crying and stress? It was like that, a lot. It. sucked.
Ass.
And when I read about Tsing Loh’s kids sitting in her car because she isn’t working her ass off to put a deposit on, yes, a crummy apartment where they can, say, store some toys and a toothbrush… it drives me nuts.
Look, I have incredible sympathy for the woman. I really do. It sounds like she burned out for good reasons (5 kids? hospital visits?) and I have a secret soft spot for people who long for more passion or whatever, I really do.
But - grow up. To her husband too. Find the cash between you both to get some kind of housing arrangement that actually works. Stop kidding yourself that the kids are fine. And for fuck’s sake stop reading Germaine Greer or whatever.
Look, I’m not saying we all have to be helicopter parents, but can we please, please, please stop pretending that following our bliss is inherently good for our kids? It’s not that I don’t think we should do some of that — hell, I work, and although it’s for money too it’s also for joy. But there are little, trapped people to consider. Carefully. Not drive around in a Volvo deciding it’s okay because they like to read.
I liked to read too. I looked very content. The sad thing was that a lot of the reading was compulsive because my life sucked. A love of books is not the same as security and family love.
So yes - I have to agree there is something to the Bad Mother title here.
High school confidential
First, updates: My parents stood in line for 3+ hrs and Noah and I joined them for the last one. So he’s immunized and it should take effect in another week. I hear the lines are shorter now, but it is a relief that it’s done. It’s not that my forebrain thinks it’s a zombie plague and death to all. It’s that my hindbrain is fully engaged all the time in not losing Noah.
I have booked an appointment to discuss the shiners. I do think it’s allergies; I’m just not clear on what they are or where the symptoms might appear.
Mr. Bada seems to have decamped lately, perhaps to serve for another family. I’m just enjoying sitting where I like.
~~
So tonight I went down to my old high school. I’d missed the 20th reunion but it was graduation there today. (They have a strange ritual of making all the grade 12s come back in November to get their diplomas, which is the same as it was the year I graduated.) One of my friends from high school died, and so we established a minor prize in her name, and every year the school asks our class to send someone to present the prize. So this year, on a whim, I said yes.
It was interesting; first of all I had to sit on the stage and look out at the audience, and that brought with it memories of failed auditions, successful musical performances, and a speech or two. But secondly the whole thing was very… kind. I would say, even warm. And when I went to this particular private school, it was many things but kind and warm were not among them.
In my day, kidlets, the phrase unconditional love was reserved for the therapy you had to do after the teachers nailed your ass to the wall. And I am not really kidding.
(Also, all the kids were beautiful. What the hell? Is it the water? The love? I am sure we did not look that way.)
I really do think that Douglas Coupland nailed a few things about Generation X, and one of those things is the kind of rugged individualism + cynicism + quiet longing that came about during that time when parents seemed on the surface often not to give all that much of a shit about their kids’ inner lives and it seemed like every single week someone else’s parents were announcing their divorce and we were exchanging tales of what the media would eventually frame as “latchkey kids.”
I can pretty much guarantee that despite the strains of Marlo Thomas playing in the background somewhere in one’s hazy preschool days, 80 per cent of my graduating class would have been either mortified or deeply cynical if a principal had mentioned unconditional love.
I in fact instantly texted (take that, you Gen Y networkers!) one of my peers to confirm this hunch and she agreed. Things were not that touchy feely and it would have been mortifying.
It reminded me of reading the section in Buy Buy Baby about Gen X mothers because although I don’t think I’ve entirely drunk the Baby Einstein Kool-Aid, it is true that I see my job as basically being plugged into my child’s experience. And the part about popular culture being more “there” than the family and the love-hate relationship I have with it as a result is… yeah, ok, I would have to say there’s something there, although for me personally it would have been more popular fiction than television.
Anyways, the experience was kind of mindblowing, but it also makes me hope for Noah’s future, that schools perhaps also are populated with members of Gen X who are trying to make things, you know - better.
Not that I think the phrase “unconditional love” belongs in a graduation address. Ahem.
Also, I identified more with the parents than with the students at the thing. Welcome to midlife.
And now I want to make someone who’s about 19 read Ordinary People and see what they think of it.
Randomness
I suppose you can’t take your kid to the doctor and say “in many pictures, he looks like he’s consumptive.” Are the black-circled eyes allergies? Apnea? He does sleep; I haven’t noticed apnea. I dunno.
~~
How does one gauge whether one should stand in line for 6 hrs to get an H1N1 vaccine for one’s child?
~~
Lynn took Noah to a birthday party on Saturday, mostly. How she ended up fronting was, basically, because then she would get to wear what she wanted. (Goth mom!) She did fine and was really actually… social… with a group of mums I really like, and even put ice on a minor boo boo.
Despite the fact that nothing terrible happened, I still felt all weird and exposed and like we were ruining Noah’s social life by being an us rather than I.
~~
She liked that so much she took Noah to the museum today, which would also probably have turned out mostly fine had there not been someone bald and bearded extending Hallowe’en by also having pointed ears and horns in an excellent - I mean really excellent, no joins visible - devil costume, except for the rest of him being normally clothed. For all I know he really was a devil. However this ended up with the following conversation:
Noah: Why does that man have horns on his head?
Lynn: Because he’s a devil. He might even be a devil named Satan… sometimes Lucifer, or Old Scratch. But probably he is a lesser demon. (MUCH INTERNAL POKING until Lynn adds, a little reluctantly) It’s a Hallowe’en costume.
Noah: What is he doing here?
Lynn: Reading about evolution and dinosaurs. (Well… he was!)
Demon guy: (Looks at Lynn to see if she really said that.)
Lynn, to Demon guy, sweetly: Keep up the good work!*
~~
Yes, I suspect the system is busting out all over. It was bound to happen sometime.
~~
Watched an episode of Superfriends in the restaurant, without volume. Noah kept asking me what would happen next. I don’t think I’d ever seen this episode, but I told him all the grown-up superheroes would get distracted and at 5 minutes before the end the monkey would help the Wonder Twins get un-tied-up so they could activate their powers and save all the other superheroes.
At about 5 minutes to the hour the Wonder Twins actually activated their powers through the monkey’s nose (go to 7:20) and… yeah. It’s good to know all those Saturday mornings were not for naught.
* P.S. Yes, probably a brief correction about not commenting on people’s horns should have been delivered. But - horns!