the modernity ward

In Five Minutes

Sean will return with sandwiches, and we will eat them, and then I will pack up my computer. When will I unpack it? Why, that's a good question, Timmy! Sometime between Saturday and, um, two weeks from now.

But it's cool, man. Maybe I'll have some internet access on the road, and maybe I won't. Next post will be from beautiful Nashville, at which point I will beg my local soon-to-be friends to come by and introduce themselves.

You've been warned.

OH MY GOD, Y'ALL

The cat was urinating blood so we took her to the expensive-ass vet hospital in the neighborhood where they gave us a bottle of antibiotics that haven't made a difference so now after seven days of harassing the cat with a syringe of Clavamox we got to go to our regular vet who did x-rays and gave us new antibiotics and some probiotics and a bottle of herbal tincture, because he is the hippie midwife of vets. The cat has stones in her bladder, by the way, which may or may not be a problem. ALSO in the meantime Daphne had her first food ever, which was marinated bean salad with apple cider vinegar and olive oil, and no I am not kidding. I mashed up the beans and fed her little mush-balls and she LOVED that shit. Then I gave her pears from a little jar and she loved that too. Sweet potatoes not so much, but today I gave her banana and she loved it, and then I noticed she'd finally cut a tooth.

Also she weighs 22.5 pounds. And has plummeted down to the 95th percentile for height and weight. I lost a few pounds myself but am probably gaining it back because food is an adequate temporary substitute for sleep. Like a moron I decided to chaperone a preschool field trip to the aquarium in Camden, which entailed a ride on a school bus, disembarking at the ferry which turned out to be broken IN THE RAIN so then we got back on the bus and rode the rest of the way and walked around in roiling crowds for three hours, and by walked I mean got alternately dragged by and impeded by preschoolers attached to hands. All this with Giant Baby strapped to my chest.

It was actually a lot of fun; Sophia walked into the shark tunnel and declared it "eternal sharks." She also told me she is a "Permanent Fairy," which I think is a great name for the next album of the band "Mister Woman." Mister Woman is what she called Daphne one day, except it was "Mister Woman: Nom Queen!" with the punctuation and everything. She has forgotten this, sadly, but continues to adore her sister, who for her part is either replicating Sophia's shrill yelps or the dog's shrill yelps, but either way there is a lot of joyful shrill yelping going on.

I need to stop eating fast food but I just get so hungry. And unless I pack five or six bologna sandwiches with me at all times, there's no way I can keep myself fed. I don't understand how a person can eat 3000 calories a day, give or take, and slowly lose weight, but maybe the 23-pound baby strapped to my person and sucking calories directly out of my body has something to it. All I know is I can pick up packed dish crates like they're full of bubble wrap and clown farts. I'm a brick house.

And so very, very tired. Six days to go! Woooo!

I'm Sorry, I Didn't Mean to Leave that Glum Post Up There for So Long

But you know, the house is everting itself like a starfish having a snack, closets disgorging their collections of awesome t-shirts and rusty hedgeclippers only to be filled with orderly stacks of thoroughly labeled boxes, so.

Current hobbies include: Craigslist (why no, I don't mind if you call me at 10 p.m. on a barely intelligible cell phone, as long as you show up tomorrow with eighty bucks and a dolly!), total abdication of meal prep duties and grocery planning, and the late-night viewing of movies (rented to use up our prepaid card at the local arty video place) during Daphne's Wakey Time.

I kind of like packing. I like sorting my stuff and organizing it by type and subtype, and labeling the box, and putting it away. Yes, working in archives did suit me very well, why do you ask?

However, in the packing, I found all my nursing program application stuff. And thought how glad I am that I can start working on that again soon. Also how I need to do some serious shadowing before I pick a specialty. Because what if it turns out I really like, say, palliative care? It is, quite literally, the opposite of midwifery, but. Hm.

Speaking of midwifery: I had the following realization vis-a-vis Daphne's birth. The reason I insisted we decamp for the hospital, and not the close one but the 45-minutes-away one, was that I wanted to get away from my midwives (who were at the time engaged in harrassing my anterior cervical lip). To a lesser degree I wanted to get away from all my kind supportive people, but as they were neither poking around my bits nor insisting I drink a nightmarish concoction of orange juice and honey (seriously, in labor I hatehatehate sweet things) that concern was merely aesthetic.

And you know, in my life as of the past oh, four years, the most alone I ever get is in the car.

Even if someone else has to be there to drive, that person is engaged in that task; our eyes are forward. There's a minimum of interaction. There's also the illusion of escape, but the reality of being forced to sit very, very still.

It was kind of perfect and beautiful, if also absolutely insane.

I was thinking about it because I was reading a stack of Midwifery Today that I found, and also because a recent visit with one of the midwives left me a tad chafed. Look, when you're doing a pelvic? And you see the absence of hair in what is bafflingly termed the "bikini area" accompanied by a smattering of red bumps? That might be a good time not to think "zebras," if you know what I mean. That might be an important time not to bother mentioning that finding, because razor burn as far as I know is not a symptom of many horrifying gynecological diseases, and unless we are doing the differential for scabies, why fucking bring it up?

"Ooooh, I see some red bumps! We been shaving?" in a saccharine tone. An icy "Yesss" did nothing to discourage the line of inquiry. Seriously, though, is this the first time a midwife can have seen what frankly was extremely mild razor burn in that area? Am I the first client to bother trimming enough so that nothing sticks out of my #2 leg swimsuit, or am I the first to have any body hair whatsoever beyond a delicate mist of gossamer blonde? WHICH IS IT?

Anyway. So back to nursing school. After a smattering of prereqs, I'll get to apply...provided I get in, I'll have to choose a specialty. My current skill profile includes being very awesome at giving medicine to recalcitrant cats, removing glass shards from foot of hysterical preschooler who also happens to be my daughter, and extracting a good inch of pencil-end from own foot, all performed calmly and with customary good humor. Maybe I need to look beyond women's health.

So. Yes. Okay. We are moving in nine days. I'll post when I can.

It Deepens Like a Coastal Shelf

Reading Philip Larkin's This Be the Verse as a parent is so very different from reading it as a college student. Instead of an brash indictment, it's a wry apology, hands palm-up, whaddayagonnado. Go tell it to your editor, kid, go tell your therapist.

I find that becoming a mother has both honed my criticism of my own parents, and softened my eyes. The latter mostly in the hope that as my own daughters reach their thirties, they might look with forgiveness upon me.

I can spend an entire day handling meltdowns with aplomb, providing vegetables and cut-up hot dogs, engineering pleasant activities, and then wreck it all in one fell swoop at the end of the day. Which counts for more? The successfully navigated wobbleboard of a day, or the devastating mishandling of an evening? I'm not sure if I get a sticker on my chart, or my name on the blackboard.

In any event, one of the links to the above-referenced poem contains a comments section. A comments section! On poetry! So very delightful! So rife with disapproval! So utterly hilarious and depressing!

P.S. The Germans are the funniest. The Americans are pompous.
P.P.S. Yes, I am aware that it is not very nice to make fun of innocent people on the internet. However 1) I was under the impression that that was what the internet was for, and 2) dude, people getting all up in arms, in writing, in a public space, about poetry they don't get is really fucking funny. And 3) I feel better already.

Like Cathy Said

ACK.

Sixteen days before we say So Long, Stinktown to Philadelphia, and godDAMN I have a serious case of the stupids. Remember that book The Stupids Die? Well, check it out if you don't. Kid's section. I think about that book ALL THE TIME.

Today was one of those days that was like getting kicked in the teeth, and then sent to Cirque du Soleil, and then getting kicked in the teeth again, and then back to the circus. In other words, probably a typical day spent parenting an almost-four-year-old, which by the way how the hell did that happen, and you can probably fill in the details of that yourself. And also I went to Target. For garbage bags and yoga pants. The latter because I had an unfortunate sitting-on-armrest ripping-giant-hole-in-assal-region moment on the LIRR a while back, and they were some good yoga pants. I went to H&M the other day because there is NOT one in Nashville, and you can't order it online, and I needed my fix of their consistently fantastic t-shirts and tanks, the ones that are 5% spandex and can accomodate both my lowest weight and the third trimester of pregnancy and still look awesome. Also they're maybe $8 each.

So there was that. The packing? Nah. Not time yet. In laundering all my H&M booty I also ran a couple loads of towels and dishtowels and oh my GOD it was a sad sight. Our stuff ranges from dingy grayed yellowed white to bleached-out aqua to pink-because-washed-with-red-item. One or two olive green things that are mostly orange splotches from bleach.

Truly pathetic. Truly. I am going to willingly forfeit a small chunk of savings to buy some new towels and dishrags when we get there. What I want to know is this: why do my towels look like they came directly out of a lint trap after ONLY nine years, and yet my dad's towels, which used to belong to my grandmother and are certainly from the 1960s, look dated but basically okay? Has towel craftsmanship gone so downhill? Or am I doing something really wrong?

Haircut: Check

Real job: not so much. Ah, not that the full-time mama gig isn't real, you know what I mean, it just doesn't come with life insurance and merit raises. There's hazard pay, but it's in the form of chocolate zucchini cake you eat by yourself whilst hunched over a keyboard when everyone is in bed.

The guy from the moving company was out here to look over our earthly possessions, and lo, he did describe a moving process that passes understanding, in which we don't have to do anything but get out of the house for a few hours while they pack everything but the beds, and then the next day just...go. It sounds wonderful, and it also sounds like they're trying to find out exactly how much moving benefit Vanderbilt gives its new hires before they hit us with a quote. At this point I'd sell my unwashed skivvies on the internet to cover the cost, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.

So, what else, what else...I got a haircut from Kateri today, a very short little acorn cap of a haircut, which I like, and my daughter has one to match, kind of. She got jiggy with the scissors (thanks, Grandma Janet, for finding those sharp scissors sized for tiny hands!) and ended up with a fashion mullet, which I thought was awesome, but she begged a pixie. I obliged, and she loved it for about three minutes, after which she HAAAAATED IT I HATE IT IT IS NOT BEAUTIFUL I WANT MY LONG HAIR.

Well, hair grows, kiddo. Come Hanukkah, I told her, it'll be to your chin. She went dancing away after that. Still, I like her little elfin cut, and am actually considering purchasing an overpriced fairy dress in green and silver, because she looks like a forest nymph.

You know what's creeping me out? Three-year-old self-hatred. That's a bit of an overstatement, but she told me the other day, "I DON'T LIKE SOPHIA! IT IS NOT A BEAUTIFUL NAME!" (She speaks only in capitals these days.) "Oh?" I said. "IT IS A VERY BORING NAME!" she said, with all the venom she could muster.

"Okay," I said. "Well, you have a middle name Hazel."

"NOOOOOOOO!"

Sigh. She's also obsessed with having "straight" hair, although it's unclear what she means by that. And now she scowls at herself in the mirror because of the hair. Argh. Is it too soon to move to a yurt in the forest?

NOW WITH PICS! 

Me:

These are just before and fashion mullet, of Sophia -- tomorrow I'll take some current pixie pics.

Before. Bindi, outfit, and pose of model's own device.

And then after.

So Long, It's Been Good to Know You

We drove across the Verrazano Bridge for the last time tonight. Well, unless we fly into Newark for some reason in the future, but why go to Newark when JFK's right there? We'll be here for about three more weeks, and after that we'll have to fly in to visit family.

I remember my first time on the bridge; Sean and I were driving from Charlottesville to Long Island so I could meet his parents for the first time. We were listening to the Talking Heads, or at least I think we were, it was pretty much all we listened to then, and we were in his little white Civic, edging its way from "crappy" to full-on "shitty" (it finally made the transition a year later when it died, mere blocks from our hotel, on our wedding night). The bridge was massive, soaring, impossibly cosmopolitan, as exotic as I found his parents, who allowed me to share a bedroom with their son. I mean, seriously. My grandma wouldn't let us sleep in the same room when we were engaged. Anyway I think they found me equally exotic, as I had emigrated from Dust Bowl-era Kansas and arrived wearing sparkly red pumps.

No, I kid, I kid, but if you've ever experienced the ass-backward exoticness of being a Midwesterner or a Southerner in the Northeast, you know what I'm talking about.

So. Last time across the Verrazano, last time down the Jersey Turnpike. A point of personal pride: I can get off at any exit from 10 down to 3 and find my way along the local roads. We stopped at Molly Pitcher for coffee (Sean) and milk (Sophia) and a diaper change (me) (ha)(Daphne) and there were fireworks, visible from our parking spot, and a huge bone-yellow moon above the treeline. It was a very Jersey moment -- somewhere between unanticipated joy and don't-let-the-door-hit-you. But with real affection, of course. A fitting farewell.

Oh, New Jersey, oh Philadelphia. I never figured I'd live here, but ended up spending almost a decade among your storied interstates, your heavily traveled commercial corridors. There's a lot of junk here, but even more buried treasure. I'm glad I got to know the hidden places, the weird corner stores and community gardens, the wild parkland in the middle of dicey industrial neighborhood, the organic farm surrounded by suburbia, the incredible Indian restaurant in the unassuming strip mall. Maybe a tree grows in Brooklyn, but an eighty-seven-year-old guerrilla gardener tends orange cosmos and roses by the number 42 bus stop.