the modernity ward

What to Say

You can say I'm sorry it didn't work out the way you wanted it to. You can say I think you're right, you do need a liver transplant.

You can't say The lead doctor has a point: the meds might help, you might improve; more important, you do have to demonstrate your willingness to go to therapy, AA, whatever. You can say I wish things were different, but you can't say but I understand why they aren't.

You can say I'm sorry you're feeling so awful; I hope it gets better. I know on top of everything that hernia is making things so much worse. You can't say I spent how many summers in Kansas to help you recuperate from hernia surgery you never had, that you canceled again and again? You can't say I knew that even ten years ago you didn't want anyone to get a look at that liver of yours. You can't say There were hundreds of chances to fix it before it got to be the size of a fucking volleyball, you had people lined up to take care of you. And you chose alcohol over those people.

You can say You're tired but you can't sleep, I know. It's hard to eat, I know. You can't say  The torment in your body is probably nothing compared to what's roiling in your head.

You can say I know it's hard to get out to AA meetings but you can't say because you're embarrassed or because you still can't admit you have a problem? Why did I have to badger you even today to get you to tell me about the counseling requirement? And why wouldn't you say that it was alcohol counseling until I asked you point blank? You can say six months until reevaluation, that isn't too long.
 
You can't say you brought this on yourself. It's your fault. It's your fault. I hate that you are suffering but my expectations for you are no less than those I have for my four-year-old -- that you will experience the consequences of your choices and learn from them. I won't make excuses for you. It is hard to get up off the recliner and choke down a hamburger when you feel miserable but if you want to live this is what you have to do. It sucks to admit you have a problem but trust me, everybody else in the world is well aware. It doesn't diminish our love for you or our admiration of your better qualities, but believe me, you ain't foolin' nobody but yourself.

You can say It's tough work. You can't say but if you put half the effort into survival that you put into covering up your drinking you'll make it okay. You can say I love you.

You can't say I can't do this for you. You threw yourself down that hole, and I'll reach down as far as I can, but you have to scrabble your way on up. I can't haul you out on my own. I won't even try.

Oh My God, Breastmilk Will Give Your Baby Cancer!

Wait, no. No, that's not it at all. Although I'm sure that's the headline I'll read in the paper tomorrow, revealing that 1) most "science" writing is either left to, or filtered by, oatmeal-brained executives who wouldn't know a p-value if it ran down their legs, and 2) it is possible to completely bury the thrust of a study such that the general public comes away with the completely wrong idea. Even my beloved Jezebel is guilty of this practice, with the headline "Breast Maybe Not Best for Babies' Balls."

Yeah, I get the hilarious alliteration, but really, really missing the point here.

Here, a sensible rundown of the new study. While there is a link between exposure of the breastfeeding mother to hazardous chemicals such as PCBs and testicular cancer in the child, the answer is not "well, how about formula then." NO NO NO.

The answer is NO MORE PCBs. The answer is NO MORE HAZARDOUS PESTICIDES. God, it seems like such a no-brainer to me -- why focus on the poisoned milk when we should focus on the FUCKING POISON?

I'll tell you why. Patriarchy. No, really.

It is so much easier, so much more profitable to the powers that be, to aim the blame at women -- mothers breastfeeding their children! The world goes into a tizzy about "breast or bottle?" and meanwhile, nobody is talking about the wholesale poisoning of the world! It's the old divide-and-conquer: if we're all too busy getting butthurt about baby feeding, maybe we won't notice the guys with the 55-gallon drum glupping glow-in-the-dark goo into the river.

Even better is the idea that mothers are poisoning their baby boys. Oh, you evil women! Will you stop at nothing?

The whole argument places all the agency, all the responsibility, upon women, who, last I checked, did not have a whole lot of choice as to the quantity of PCB and hormone mimickers stored in their body fat. It's a sham, a lie, a straw-woman. The mothers have nothing to do with it. The breastmilk is not the problem.

The chemicals are the problem. The collusion of government and industry to ensure that this evil stuff gets into our water, our soil, our bodies, our babies -- that's the problem. And it's not a breastfeeding mother's problem, it's not a women's problem -- it's everyone's problem. That shit doesn't just go straight into breastmilk and stay there.

I'll know we're improving the second that someone looks at a study like that, and the first thing out of that person's mouth is "How can we stop the chemical contamination?" And not "is breast really best?"

What to do in the meantime? I'm taking suggestions. In the personal sphere, buy as organic or integrated pest management as you can (not for the health benefits, and that's another post in itself, the so-called "takedown" of the "organic myth", but because every organic strawberry you buy is that much less fungicide into the waterways, as well as into your mouth), especially the high-contamination foods. Don't use personal care products with phthalates and other endocrine disruptors. (How can you tell when they're not on the label? Avoid anything with "fragrance," for one. And yeah, that includes air freshener and Glade). Here's a nice starter list of things to do.

But what about the subject of the study -- the effect of geographical location? That's a hairy one, and even more tied up with privilege than the stuff I listed above. I don't know the answer, and I hope someone comments who does. I do know there are a lot of locally based groups who work on this kind of thing -- like BURNT here, and MOMS (Make Our Milk Safe) in California. There's also Moms Rising.  Pay attention to the local news, because this stuff, it happens locally. It happens in your backyard, in your town, in your watershed. That's where you can fight it.

And on that note, I'm off to order my No Spray Nashville sign.

Sealed in the Book of Life

If you didn't know, Yom Kippur is Monday after next. And if you didn't know, it's the Day of Atonement.

And I know you didn't know it's the day my father will find out whether, in the eyes of the transplant center, he merits a spot in the liver transplant pool.

When I wrote about him last he was "recuperating" at home; now, after a brief stint at his brother's house a couple of hours away, he's in the hospital, back in his hometown. He's in a bed in a building he's worked in since before I was born; caring for him are people who have known him as long as I've been alive. I reckon they're as much family to him as we are, at this point.

His house is packed up, what remains of his personal belongings (and those few things that are rightfully ours -- the giant box of family photographs, the odd surviving toy) boxed in the garage. Goodwill came for most of the furniture. His brother -- his seventy-plus-year-old brother -- did all this for him; the "angel" of a real estate agent helped coordinate things. The house goes on the market as soon as all the papers get signed. If he gets on the list, he'll have to stay in a hospital in another city; if not, I don't like to think about it. Hospice.

He won't be going back to that house, ever.

It was our house, all of ours; we all lived there before my parents got divorced, then my sisters and I and our mother after. When we left for the East Coast my dad moved in, and while our familiar furniture was mostly replaced with the crappy divorced-dad-apartment stuff, a few things stayed completely untouched: on my old bedroom wall, for example, a pencil rendering of John Lennon, a copied illustration from Faeries. Under the sink in the bathroom, last summer, I found a box of hair dye. I hadn't used Balsam Color (the cheapest! the cancer-iest!) since I was fourteen.

It used to be so beautiful, that house. It was sunny and bright and full of nooks and crannies for hide and seek; it had a beautiful yard and a treehouse/chicken coop and tire swings. There was a half-size tennis court in the backyard where we would rollerskate, bike, set off firecrackers, and where once, at my own birthday party, I gave myself a bona fide concussion during an ill-conceived relay race. It turned into a mausoleum as my dad left rooms untouched, let papers pile up in others, tidied -- or maybe just didn't have any stuff -- but never cleaned. It got so dusty I couldn't breathe, on my later visits back, and the curtains were always drawn. The glass got broken out of the lamp in the front yard, and three years later, it's still broken.

* * * *

I don't have a lot of patience with addicts. Having departed from the familial strategy of denial with a side of enabling, I find myself looking hard-hearted, mean even, when I say don't let him stay with you "just two weeks," don't give her money, don't bail that one out of jail again (yes, we've got quite a family history, and that's not even on my dad's side). I never believed any of the crap my dad said -- that he bought airline tickets to visit us and then had to cancel at the last minute because of "the flu", that he just had to taper off the steroids and then things would be "just like old times."

He wasn't drinking by that point, but the behavior was still in full effect. "Just like old times," as he was quite clearly in decompensated liver failure. As he was sitting there with yellow-gray skin, no longer eating.  "Sure, Dad," I told him, and hung up. And then called up his brother and told him the truth -- what my sisters and I had figured out and confirmed with my dad's doctors -- that things could go downhill, fast. That he was not competent to care for himself, even as he told us he had it "all under control."

Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is what happens when the liver craps out and stops removing toxins from the blood, poisoning your brain. (Okay, that's the Highlights Magazine version.) You get slurred speech, fuzzy thinking, clumsiness, disturbed sleep. You might, say, forget to eat (which you don't feel like doing anyway). You might forget to take your medication, and you might get really grouchy with the people trying to help.

It's hard to know where ingrained addict behavior, even independent of the addicting substance, leaves off and hepatic encephalopathy begins. For that matter, it's hard to know how much of it is just personality. But how much of an addict's personality is truly his own? How much of that person is the one you love, and how much of it is the net of mechanisms designed to protect the drinking and push away those meddlin' kids? Who wasn't interested in the new babies, the drinking Dad or the "real" one? I'd get calls from him that were morose, nonsensical, argued in a circle. Then I'd catch him sober and he'd sound like the Dad I remembered, telling funny stories, asking after the babies. Then he stopped sounding drunk and stared sounding...addled. Somewhere else. That was the HE.

So what's there? What's left of Dad? How much of it is him in the first place?

And how much longer do we have with what there is?

* * * *

Would it be easier if I didn't love him so danged much? Would it be any better if he were an awful person? He is human, and like most of us, boy, is he damaged, but he is also fundamentally good. Even when he wasn't together enough to remember our birthdays, he was providing, providing, providing. At his best he's hilarious, affectionate, silly, kind. Generous. Patient with small children.

That's the person I want back, just for a little bit; that's who I want my girls and niece and nephew to know. He played tea party with Sophia last summer, Sophia who was so overwhelmed with all the new people and he was so patient, he just waited for her to come to him and then -- wonders! -- she crawled up in his lap. They sipped imaginary tea. She remembers him, she wants to talk to him on the phone, but he can barely even talk to me for two minutes. If he stays in the hospital -- oh, if he never leaves it -- she won't get to see him again.

I'm going out to see him, as soon as I can manage it. As soon as I know where he'll be in two weeks (if he gets on the transplant list, he'll move to another city to wait for a new liver; if he doesn't he'll move to a facility of some sort near his brother).

So say a prayer, if you're the praying type. Think a healing thought, light a candle. Me, I pray that I get a chance to tell my dad, in person, so I can see he understands, that we know, we know all about it, we've always known everything -- and we have always loved him anyway.

You've Been On This Shift Too Long

Freedom was buckling two crankypants kids into my dinged-up car and heading out Charlotte Pike on a hazy day, REM on as loud as the kids would allow. It was Driver 8 and drive-through fries, late-summer sweat, and being able to afford the stuff we wanted with the cash in my wallet. That was a good time, y'all. Even if Krystal is fucking nasty.

* * * *

Lessee, what else -- had a consult with the Mouf Surgeon today. If he's anywhere near as particular about the titanium screws in my face as he is about his haircut and office organization, I'm in good hands. He did inspire confidence, and promised me the spring break of my life, involving liquid Lortab and facial swelling. You know, just like 1997.

If you want to get technical, and I know you do, I'll be getting a LeFort I osteotomy, plus they're, um, going to spread my palate. So that would be this, except with a few fancy things on the inside too. Imagine that ridge down the middle of your palate is a fault line, and it gets kee-racked and stays that way until new bone fills in the gap.

Anyhoodle, it'll be a rollicking good time, I'm sure. I was able to impress Dr. Surgeon with my tales of YouTube videos (because, come on, half the people getting this surgery are like 17 and of COURSE it is going to be on YouTube) of before, during, and after surgery. Kids today.

Of course there are also hundreds of blogs about it. Hm.

So that's about it, except that I keep writing the date as "2008" and then not being entirely sure that it's wrong, and also I realized that Rosh Hashanah is THIS WEEK. And Daphne is eight months old tomorrow.

Also: would you guys want to see pictures of the inside of my face? Because I would do that. For you. But only if you reeeeally wanted it.

Metal in my Mouth

Grrarrrrr!@!

I took out all the ones where you can see how horrendously asymmetrical my nose is, and where I look like a cut-rate Rachel Maddow without adequate shine control.

These are what's left.

 

Thrift Score

Oh my god, y'all, I found the thrift store corridor! I found an ankle-length black silk skirt (Ann Taylor, new with tags) for seven bucks, a super-awesome vintage-look handmade dress for Sophia, some corduroy and velvet newsboy caps (so in other words, we're set for the High Holy Days) and a mirror for over the dresser. Sophia proved herself to have the thrifting gene, and from an unpromising heap extracted a black-and-white checked skirt and stripey dress, both in her size. I know. Anyway, there is clearly no reason to pay retail for your hot-roller sets and industrial-grade brassieres. The thrifting remains untouched by Philadelphia hipsters (scourge of the thrifting world), and the stores feature either an astonishing level of organization (sorted by size!) or very nice older ladies who will help carry things to the car and entertain your children.

So, my Nashville people: I have been so absorbed in the dailiness of child-maintaining, neighbor-getting-to-know, grocery-purchasing-turning-into-dinner-and-cleaning-up activities that I have neglected to get in touch with most of you. I was thinking about having some sort of belated housewarming, once it gets cool enough that you might actually wish to warm your house -- maybe October? November?

Only Outlaws Will Have Chickens. Or Foreskins.

Nashville Metro Planning Commission said Yea to the question of urban chickens, but the larger Metro Council said Nay. Jerkasses.

I'll do my part to make sure it comes up again as soon as possible. That right there is a chickenshit-bullshit swirl cone, and I'm not gonna have that.

* * *

In other news, I was reading this book, thank you Nashville library, bopping along to the pleasant reimaginings of Torah stories, and came across the passage excerpted below. And I was all, record scratch! Say huh?

“Since we have seen how blood offers expiation throughout the Torah, can those few drops of covenantal blood be seen as atonement for male control? As cleansing of violence in a patriarchal world?...The Jewish world has the potential to be a safe world…if it becomes a world of male sexuality defined by holiness, commitment, and responsibility.” (From ReVisions: Seeing Torah Through a Feminist Lens, 1998)

Because making innocent babies atone for patriarchy is totally the way to bring about the feminist revolution.

I mean really now. If you want to go around ritually circumcising forty-five-year-old men as an act of atonement for their participation in, and benefiting from, the patriarchy, well, you be my guest, and good luck with that. But of all the fucked-up justifications for maintaining the full periah (circumcision as it is currently performed, with total removal of the foreskin, practiced since about 140 CE), that is the most offensive to my eyes -- not just because of the ritual scapegoating of babies for what is truly the province of grown-ass men, but because it comes wearing a nominally feminist jacket. News flash: feminism is not to be confused with SCUM. Practiced correctly, it does not involve what is essentially revenge. Except, you know, on babies.

I wonder if the author realized she was invoking anti-Semitic arguments about Jews perpetuating circumcision through the population at large as revenge for the Holocaust. Or whatever. It's antifeminist and anti-Jewish. It made me want to puke on my shoes.

I will be first to admit that the bulk of anti-circumcision "literature" available on the internet at the very least borders on anti-Semitic. But there seem to be several thoughtful Jewish approaches to the issue. Look, I'm not asking  Judaism to abandon the practice. I just want some fucking discussion. (And many props to the rabbis on my beit din, an open-minded and discussion-friendly group, whatever their own views might have been.)

Why am I even thinking about this? We have two girls, don't anticipate having any more babies, at least not until Daphne is big enough for me to not be tired and Sophia is big enough to not argue and scream at every opportunity. Maybe I don't have a dog in this particular race, but you know, now I'm Jewish. And I get to talk about it. So there.

Spaced

For some reason I didn't have spacers before I got braces the first time, but for Bracin' Two: Electric Boogaloo, I am the proud recipient of a bunch of little blue rubber donuts jammed down between all my molars. It's a sensation akin to having a giant string of pot roast stuck between those teeth, or a piece of floss on its way out with a seriously funky payload: something mildly uncomfortable, but about to be satisfying. Except the satisfaction never comes. It's like the sneeze that never quite sneezes. Or that Coldplay song that never quite...gets there, if you know what I'm saying.

Flossus Interruptus. Anyhow.

So I have these rubbery things in my mouth, and all was well until I tried to chew a tough-skinned muscadine from the farmer's market and WHOO BOY that was not so much fun. Next week I get the serious metal mouth, and will totally show you pictures.

In other news, both kids fell asleep in the back of the car on the way home from Opry Mills, and you know what I did? I drove my ass to Starbucks drive-thru and got an iced coffee and listened to NPR. And! Speaking of which: I was bemoaning the lack of talk radio (the good kind, we've plenty of the other here), when I heard that NPR is dropping their all-classical, all-day programming in favor of Grownups Talking on the Radio. Seriously, my sanity depends on that shit; I'm like a Dust Bowl farm wife.

The reason we were at Opry Mills, by the way, is that Sophia learned how to tie. On Wednesday she asked for some "tyin' shoes" so I told her sure, when you learn how to tie. So we sat down together and...she learned. Right away.

And OH MY GOD! The baby is crawling RIGHT NOW! About two steps, but she finally JUST NOW figured out how to get back up from a sprawl!

Tempus fugit, huh?

Because You Cannot Sleep for Wondering about the Minutiae of My Life

Well. Two things.

First, Sophia awesomeness: I heard her tell Sean last night that "I love you and mama the same." (Pause) "But I love Daphne more." OH MY GOD the cute.

And then this, this morning: "Mama, is the Army a big building where all the soldiers go to fight in a war?"

Sigh. Stupid NPR.

Second, we are all of a sudden overflowing with friends and neighbors -- many of them in the same boat as we are, recent arrivals to the Nashville scene, small kids, Vandy-employed, stay-at-home moms. So there is a lot of getting together happening. It's wonderful, even though real-life-actual-people interaction drains my energy like that machine* in The Princess Bride.. And of all things, we seem to be liking the Conservative synagogue best so far -- I will report back after we go to adult services, but the kids' version was great. Also, there was a dad with an earring there, and a man whose kippah was a cowboy hat. I still haven't gotten over the delicious thrill of Jews having southern accents thick as sorghum molasses. Love it.

So yes. Good times. And Sean got paid so I'm not stressing out about being able to afford my fancy braces, and by "fancy" I mean "utilitarian and metal, not unlike Lisa Simpson's in the Dental Plan episode". I told the ortho I'd sleep in a football helmet if that was what it took, and he chuckled and gazed off into the middle distance for a minute, so we'll see. I promise you pictures, either way.

And I can kind of not think about how sick my dad is, and how his visit to the liver transplant board coincides exactly with one of Sean's big conferences, meaning I will need to fly two children halfway across the country and put them to bed in a hotel and bring them to the meeting with the board and then fly them back to my empty house because Sean is at the conference. When I get to thinking too hard about that, I just imagine somebody taking a bone saw to my face and then bolting it back together again, and think about drinking a lot of egg white protein and hemp protein shakes because whey makes me explode ass-wise, and soy is...also bad, I think. And having a face like a baseball mitt for a month or two.

Yeah. I just think about that, and the worry melts away. (No, really, it does!)

*I fully intended to link a picture of it, but they are ALL hosted on sites like, and I am not making this up, m@leb0ndageinm0vies.com.