Let's do the numbers

July, August, September, and October (to date), 2007

• Total days: 123.
  
• Days solo parenting: 39 (32%)
  
• Total weekends: 17
  
• Weekends solo parenting: 5 (29%)
  
• Weekends my in-laws visited (and stayed with us): 3 (18%)
  
• Weekends I had to work at least one full day: 5 (29%)
  
• Major freelance deadlines involved: 4
  
• Major freelance deadlines met so far: 2
  
• Out of town meetings requiring major driving and/or overnights: 5
  
• New medications I was prescribed: 3
  
• Medications giving me fucked-up side effects, including insomnia: 3
  
• Nights on less than 7 hours' sleep: upwards of 30 (~25%)
  
• Doctor, dentist, pediatrician, and therapy appointments: 13
  
• Pounds I gained through stress eating and lack of exercise: ~5
  
• Illnesses in immediate family: 2
  
• New teeth broken in by Squid, occasioning much unhappiness: 4
  
• Nights Squid got parented by Pixar: ~12
  
• Times I took solace in heavy drinking: 2
  
• Times I cried under desk at work: ~4
  
• Times I sobbed uncontrollably for more than half an hour, not at work: 2
  
• Times I sucked it up and asked other people for help: legion
  
• Remaining energy to cope with, well, anything at all: nonexistent

I have been on the verge of tears since sometime this morning. The thing is, it's not the stress, or it's not just the stress, though I think that accounting would probably justify at least a small breakdown. I'm just near the deep bottom low of the omnipresent roller coaster, and my thoughts are getting toxic and I can't bring myself back up. I hope I can stay functional enough to at least clear those last two deadlines this weekend. I have an ~iatrist appointment next week, so it will be the med-go-round again. God, I hope that this stops soon.

Pain, praise, community, and happiness - a selection of articles

Here's a scan of an article from the June 2005 Harper's (.pdf) that I have had lying around for yonks; I'm not usually a Harper's reader (the New Yorker is my reading preference) but I bought this specifically for this article, as it is compelling and thoughtful reading. I finally figured out how to use the auto-scan function of the copy machine at my work, and so I ran this off on my lunch break, because I keep wanting to reference it when I talk to people and not being able to. It's an interesting meditation on the 1-10 pain scale, and talks about how subjective and contextual pain is. I think this is fascinating, not only in the physical sense covered here, but as a larger look at the relativity of human suffering. Adrienne Rich once said, "Quantify suffering, you could rule the world" and that has really stuck with me; this is an article about literally trying to quantify suffering, and how that breaks down. The Situationist, one of my favorite "thinky" blogs (it's associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School), had an interesting related article last week on the relationship between happiness and emotional equilibrium.

A couple more random pieces of interest:

A fascinating article on praising children for being "smart" and what that actually accomplishes (hint: less than nothing).

The latest from Robert Putnam (.pdf file): greater levels of diversity decrease trust within and between groups and contribute to community breakdown. There are some holes in this argument, IMHO, but he's a very interesting social scientist who does compelling work, and it's worth reading. I really, really don't want to believe it, though.

And not to end on a grim note, here's an older Time magazine article on happiness studies (.pdf) - I no longer collect links to happiness research, as the field has grown tremendously over the past decade and there is too much to keep up with, but this is a good one-shot overview. I particularly like that they've confirmed the role of giving and gratitude - so many companies would like you to believe that to have more things is to be happier, when any happiness practitioner can tell you that to give more away and be more thankful for what you have is a surer route to contentment.

Of course, if I could get my meds balanced out, that would help too.

The Name of the Air

My old spaniel is winding down. She is fourteen or fifteen, at my best guess, which is toward the top of the expected lifespan for her breed, and she has slowed palpably in the last few months. She still follows me from room to room, but more slowly, now, and once she gets to the next room she immediately flops in a heap on the floor or the dog bed and doesn't move again until I do, at which point she heaves herself up again and follows me to my next destination, where she collapses again. She doesn't always finish her food; not that she ever did, but she leaves more in the bowl, more often. She no longer jumps up to greet me when I come to the door, and even her wonderful spanielly backside wiggle of a wag is subdued, these days.

I don't think she's in pain. I don't even think she's unhappy. She's got me, and a soft place to sleep, and she and the baby have come to a standoff in which they sort of mutually ignore one another. She's just old. She smells old, too, that ripe old greasy funk a really old dog exudes; within a day after a bath, she is pungent again. She went blind a few years ago, from glaucoma, and it's gotten harder and harder for her to navigate the house as time has gone on; I think her other senses are dulling a bit, and the way things (furniture, toys, whathaveyou) move around with a toddler in the house is hard on a blind dog, even if we do try really hard to put everything away as soon as we can and in the same places. I lay down on the wrong side of the bed two days ago and she tried to jump up, collided with me, and fell down in a heap - it's hard to remember that even such small patterns are essential to how she moves through the world, and I fail a lot of the time.

The thing is, I don't think there's going to be any way out of my regrets when she goes. I try to spend some time with her every day, petting her and telling her what a good dog she is, but it comes down to about five minutes, if that, between work and baby and partner and the time I take for myself. I could be petting her right now, and instead I am typing about how I don't pet her enough. I want her to know she is loved, which is just such a ridiculous human conceit; she's a dog, and she knows her place in the pack, and she knows I'm her person, and I'm not sure "loved" is a concept that even comes into her worldview. Approval, maybe, and she knows I approve of her. She isn't fretting about not being able to see, or how she's not as spry as she used to be; dogs don't really have "regret" or "nostalgia", I don't think. But I fret about it. I've loved her longer than I've loved my husband. I've loved her longer than I've loved my kid. Not better, not more, but longer, and that's important too.

I'm not going to know how to say goodbye. I keep thinking I should do more while she's here, like that will make it better, but it will never be enough. I just...I wish I could fix it for her, but I can't.

The Name Of The Air

It could be like that then the beloved
old dog finding it harder and harder
to breathe and understanding but coming
to ask whether there is something that can
be done about it coming again to
ask and then standing there without asking

— W.S. Merwin

Me versus You; all of us versus The Man.

Merlin Mann, of 43 Folders, is about to have a kid, so a contributor to the site asked the other productivity geeks who have progeny about how they manage their work/life balance.

At least two wrote in to say, "Have your wife stay home!" "My wife is a plain housewife," one said. "There's nothing like mother care."

It's a really good thing you can't kill people through the internets, you know?

I'm sure you can all guess my take on this as far as the men go. Jesus fuck, guys, why don't you stay home? Be a "plain" househusband! There's nothing like father care! Oh, you don't want to? Why not? Do you like your job? Like the money? Like the respect you get? Don't want to be spit up on all day? Don't want to lose your career momentum? Maybe your wife feels that way too. And even if you've made that decision between you and everyone's totally happy with it, who the hell are you to suggest it to someone else's wife?! Or even worse, to her husband, because everyone knows that men make the real decisions in families. I tell you, at least half the people I spoke to when I was pregnant asked if I was going to quit my job or stay home. You want to know how many people asked my husband if he was going to do that? Go on, guess.

It's not just men, though. I've been thinking about the work/home mothering split commonly known as the "Mommy Wars" a lot lately. The "wars" basically consist of mothers who work heaping scorn on mothers who stay home (hi, Linda Hirschman!) and mothers who stay home heaping scorn on mothers who work (hi, Phyllis Schlafly!) It's all pretty ugly, but it's also hard to avoid; these things cut to the quick of who we are as people - workers, mothers, partners, women - and even the smallest slight can feel like a vicious attack. I think the real issue is that we want to make our own choices, all of us, without being shoved into them by external pressures. And as things stand, the only people who get to do that at all with regard to work and parenting are men.

Other women's choices are threatening. They are. You can't really "live and let live" about it, because every time another mother chooses differently than you have, it negatively impacts your own ability to make your personal choices. The split gets framed in terms of judgment a lot - what is the "right" thing to do, for yourself, your kids, your family, women in general, etc. But when you get right down to it, it's less about what is the "right" thing to do and more about fear of having your own choice taken away or made more difficult.

Mothers who work outside the home threaten mothers who stay home with their children by creating an economic standard in which a two-income family is the norm, thereby making it increasingly difficult for families to be able to afford to have a stay-at-home parent. They also create an expectation that women can do "real" work (read: work valued by men), thereby contributing to the devaluation of the very real work that full-time parenting entails.

Mothers who stay home with their children threaten mothers who work outside the home by reinforcing a patriarchal status quo that continues to make it difficult for mothers to get and keep jobs or to move up in their fields. Employers often believe that women will get pregnant and leave the workplace, making them less likely to hire/promote women into crucial positions; every woman who does this reinforces the stereotype. And the fact that it is consistently mothers, rather than fathers, who stay home reinforces the cultural conception of childcare as the woman's role, contributing to the pressure on working mothers to be both good employees and primary caretakers.

It's not that I give a rat's ass what other mothers choose to do, in theory. Work! Stay home! I don't care! But it impacts me. There was a palpable loss of professional respect at my last position when I got pregnant, a sort of auto-assumption that I would no longer be as invested in or dedicated to my job. I hid the fact that I had a family in all my job interviews, because I knew that it biases employers. I fought with my partner over the division of child care labor, and was informed that he does more than any other father he knows; I had to point out to him that this was likely because the fathers he knows all have wives who stay home. I had trouble finding a preschool we could work with because so many didn't offer full-day care and/or required significant amounts of parent volunteer time during working hours. And I have a relatively supportive partner and work in a relatively family-friendly industry, so what I'm dealing with is the (very) mild end of it. I have heard stories from other working mothers that would make your hair curl.

And the fact that so many mothers work has equally threatening and negative impacts on mothers who stay home; I'm just less familiar with them, because I didn't make that choice. It's very easy to say, as "Mommy Wars" protesters often do, that mothers should work together against the larger societal ills that make motherhood so fraught. That's not wrong; there are great organizations like Moms Rising that do just that, and I support them. But it's hard to band together when our choices aren't just personal, when they interact with the ways of the wider world to create adverse conditions for people who choose differently.

I don't know what to do about it. I don't know that this hasn't been said before, by other people, people much wiser and more eloquent than I am. It was just a lightbulb moment for me, the other day - this isn't about judgment, this is about fear - and so I thought I'd write it out.

Squidbits (belated)

On my to-do list this week: "Shoot man in Reno; watch die."

It's been that sort of month. My misanthropy has reached unprecedented levels, seriously.


Awesome toy laptop courtesy Burch and Daughters

It started out so well. Himself was gone for the first week, but the Squid and I took the long weekend and went up to Washington (state) to visit my much-loved college housemate and her partner. She was quite pregnant at the time and I figured that between her infant and my toddler, it was going to be a few years before that kind of visit became feasible again. (I say "was" - as of today, she is about two weeks unpregnant - welcome, young Oliver!)


The Squid got to play with a ukelele in Washington and fell in love

We had a blast up there. Long days of warm weather and good people and laughter and music and tasty food and lots of sleep. Bliss. (Why do so many of my friends live so far away? Two of our last remaining local friends have relocated in just the past few months, woe.) Even the flights to and from, which I had been dreading, were good; toddler on a plane can be worse than snakes, but he was not snaky at all - not even too squirrelly - just listened to my iPod and played with his toys and ran up and down the aisle a lot.


The Squid walking Tater Tot, my friends' bulldog, at the dog park

The rest of the week was fine. We had a good time! And then it all kind of fell inexorably apart. I scrambled for deadlines and data and dropped things (both professional and personal) through the cracks because there was just too much to do. Throughout this, I was having my medication adjusted, and the resulting insomnia, dizziness, and gamut of other side effects was compounding everything else. Eventually I stopped taking the meds, without tapering them properly, and went into a tailspin that coincided with another two weeks of solo parenting.

Which was the most grueling stretch we've had in a while, too. The Squid was inconsolably howly for a lot of it, and I was completely unable to cope. I babysat him with Disney movies for at least four evenings and fed him a steady diet of convenient starchy foods (tater tots for breakfast! cheerios for dinner!), relying on the daycare lady to ensure he got his daily nutritional needs met. I mean, he lived through it, and according to the doctor's visit we had last week, he is perfectly healthy and right on track for all developmental and physical whatnots. But I pretty much managed nothing more than subsistence parenting.


Sleeping Squid

This was compounded by his acceleration into full-on destructo-mode. Some time in that two-week period, it was like someone hit his fast-forward button. He went turbo! He can now make two or three messes in the time it takes me to clean up one, run and go up and down stairs at alarming speed, and reach all kinds of things he should not have and was once too short to access. To be frank, this is more what I expected from toddlerhood, but it was sort of a bad time for it to kick in. I kind of just wanted to faceplant into bed at the end of each day, not clean up the wreckage he had left in his wake, do my work, and prep for the next day, and faceplant won out a lot more often than it perhaps should have done, given my obligations.

And god, I still need more faceplant. I am looking longingly at November, when I can have my life back.


Greater love hath no Grandpa than this, that he risk his felt for his grandson

But the roller coaster is back on an upward swing - my review at work today went well (vindication! relief!) and I haven't burst into tears in at least four days. Although, when this is my measure of okayness, it occurs to me that perhaps something is not quite right - also, I almost just broke my dry streak when the hair appointment I had been looking forward to called and cancelled. So, you know, I'm still not really working with a wide margin here. I'm 1 for 4 on the deadlines, but I've made progress on all of them, and Himself is back as of late last night, so I'll have backup from now on. I've put off the medication readjustment again until I have the leeway to fall apart if I need to. I'm rickety but mostly functional.

It occurs to me that the Squidbits posts are losing their focus, becoming neither Squid nor Fish nor good red herring, as it were - my angst and life whatnot all mixed in with baby photos and commentary and random observations. The professional writer in me disapproves of this. Of course, if it weren't for the Squidbits posts, it would pretty much all be other people's grim poetry all the time, so I suppose they still serve a purpose.


At the zoo, the best part is the dirt, of course. Please note the "remember to wash your hands" sign in the background. Ahahahaha.

Still, this one is a few weeks late and totally all over the place. And oh, I left out so much!

Like the part where I am an aunt now, as Himself's sister just had a little girl. I have never been an aunt before, and I suspect it will be awesome. We get to meet the Nugget at Thanksgiving.

And like the part where the Squid has words now! "Fish" won out for first word, said repeatedly in context (it was my first word as well, go kidlet!) He now also has a consistent "yeah" and "no" and "bye" and I have heard "daddy," too. Of course, my mother swears he said "dishwash" at the dishwasher, and my friend S and I both distinctly heard him say "otter" twice at the otter exhibit of the Tacoma Zoo, which he has not repeated at all since, so I'm sure there's some amount of coincidence in operation, but mostly, hooray language!

Or like his most recent set of awesome new toddler tricks: stuffing food in your cheeks and holding it there until some more appealing food manifests itself (or until you get bored) and then spitting it out in a warm, slimy, half-chewed mess. Dumping out all the starter Legos on the floor and then making a windmilling motion through them, thereby spreading them out to evenly cover every square inch of floor. Deciding that what your parent is eating - even if the same thing is on your plate - is the only thing on earth worth having, and whining until you get it. If whining for attention/crackers/toys/up does not get you what you want, running headfirst into the wall so that your head audibly bonks, and then crying until you get what you wanted in the first place (this hardly ever works, as I am usually laughing too hard to feel properly concerned).

He was following me around the other day making baby talk - "Tikka tikka tikka oOoo! Bibble tikka bitsa bitsa bitsa" and I looked over at him at "bitsa bitsa bitsa" and he was making the hand motions for the Itsy Bitsy Spider song. Cognitive development is apparently on fast forward as well.



Now if only he had a "pause" button, so I could get some rest.

George Bush hates children, and "In Prison," by Jean Valentine.

CNN.com's coverage of the October 3rd Bush veto of the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill
Bitch, Ph.D's list of House reps who voted against SCHIP, with links to contact information
Moms Rising's petition to overturn the SCHIP veto


In Prison

In prison
without being accused

or reach your family
or have a family         You have

conscience
heart trouble

asthma
manic-depressive

(we lost the baby)
no meds

no one
no window

black water
nail-scratched walls

your pure face turned away
embarrassed

you
who the earth was for.

        — Jean Valentine
from The New Yorker, May 28, 2007

Vampires will never give you socialized medicine

I mentioned to my friend's partner that I had had a nightmare about zombies.

"Oh," he said. "I guess you know you've really made it, then!"

I looked at him in puzzlement.

"Zombies are the nightmares of the bourgeoisie," he explained. "You know, the filthy, rotting masses slavering at your door. Vampires, now, vampires are the nightmare of the working class."