Away

The girls and I spent last week in Chicago with my parents and sister.  We are home now, enjoying our first snow day of the year.

I will write soon.

Mother’s Day

I am breaking my own “no faces on the blog” rule because I can’t think of a better Mother’s Day post than this photo of Grace and my mom, taken a few years back during one of our winter(!) trips to Colorado.

The girl who made me a mama and the woman who taught me how to be a good one.

My love and gratitude for both of them is higher than the sky is high.  (apologies to Edna St.Vincent Millay)

Welcome Baby

On Tuesday night around 9:30 my sister-in-love gave birth to her second son.  My brother’s second son.  My mother called early Tuesday morning to tell me that Sara’s labor had started and that she and my dad were on their way to Denver to catch a flight to Edmonton.  They arrived mid-afternoon, with the plan to just go to a hotel until the baby was born so that my brother and Sara could have some space. (Sara likes to have her babies at home, in a tub of water in her dining room.  She’s kind of a rock star that way.)  Anyway, DB (my brother) told my parents they should come on over so that they could watch their two-year-old, and so they did.  Which meant that my parents were in the house for most of Sara’s labor and that they heard their fourth grandchild take his first yelping breath.  Which means that I’m going to have to buy them a house in the Seychelles if I have any hope of trumping what DB and Sara just gave them.

There are few things better than spending a day going about your own lovely and boringish life knowing that someone you love is, at that very moment, working on getting a baby you also love out into this world.  There I was, dropping off the girls, going for a run, taking a shower, drinking a bit of coffee, writing a few words, and all the while Sara was contracting and huffing and trying to get comfortable and trying not to have the baby before the midwife arrived.  Throughout the day I would think of her and send her every bit of good energy I could muster and then I would get wrapped up in something and forget for a while, only to have the thought pop back in my head: “Sara!  Is! In! Labor!”  and I would feel the thrill again.  I would feel her close by, even though she is so many miles away.

There is nothing like having a baby.  It is our one chance to leave this world for a little while, to abandon all habit and routine, to forget everything we know about ourselves and what we are capable of, to forget everything we think about our bodies and what they can endure.  Like Sara, I did not have an epidural when I delivered Grace and June.  It’s a loaded topic, this drugs for labor and no drugs for labor, and I have no desire to add stones to either side of the scale, but I am grateful that things turned out the way they did for me.  I was way way out on some wild and gory and glorious edge with them (especially with June) and I won’t be there again.

But enough about me.  It’s not about me right now.  It’s about Sara, and a job well done.  And, most of all, it is about baby Max.  Welcome, little one.  We’re so glad you’re here.

There Are Always Cookies in Marmie’s Kitchen

The Election Day Diaries

8:00 a.m:  Before Chris and Grace leave for the polls we take a picture of the girls in front of our Obama yard sign.  Grace is her usual photogenic self; June seems unsure of why she is sitting on the lawn in her snowsuit at this early hour.    Later Chris calls from work to tell me that Grace marked the ballot for Obama herself.

10:00 a.m.:  My mom calls.  She is chopping 4 dozen leeks because she is making soup for all the Democrats in the neighborhood.  My parents have hosted an Election Night party for the last five elections, although I think the last two were more like group therapy sessions.  I haven’t spoken to her in more than three weeks– she and my dad have just returned from riding their tandem bike from Vienna to Budapest.  “I’m going to miss drinking hot chocolate three times a day,”  she says.  (Hot chocolate is a recurring theme in my parents’ annual overseas bike trips.  They seem to only travel to countries which are famous for its availability and quality.)  “I’m also going to miss the way Austrian’s greet each other,” she continues.  “They say ‘ Gott Gute.’  It means ‘Praise God.’”

2:45 p.m.:  I pick Grace up from school.  She is tired.  I tell her we’re going to vote, and that she can make the X next to Obama’s name again, just like she did this morning.  She leans back in her booster, looks out the window and asks if she can wait in the car.

5:00 p.m.:  I am making dinner when the phone rings.  I don’t recognize the name on the caller ID, but I answer anyway.  “Is this voter information?”  a man asks.

“No,” I say.

“But you called me yesterday, and told me where to vote.”

I realize that this is someone from my Pennsylvania Get Out the Vote phone list.

“I voted,” he tells me, “but my friend doesn’t know where to vote or when the polls close.  Can you tell me?”

He gives me his friend’s address and I go online to find his polling location and its hours.  Suddenly I understand what Obama is saying when he says that this election isn’t about him, it’s about us.

8:00 p.m.:  The girls are asleep and Chris and I are watching the returns and eating everything in the kitchen that isn’t nailed down.  When I see the Phoenix Boys Choir performing at McCain headquarters and then the crowd of 70,000 and growing at Grant Park I realize that we are going to win.

11:00 p.m.:  Obama takes Virginia and I hear a child crying in the back of the house.  I walk down the hall, unsnapping my bra as I go.  As I get to the door of the girls’ room, I realize it is Grace, not June, who is crying.   She’s had a bad dream, and while I am smoothing her hair from her face I can hear Chris yelling and clapping in the other room.  “Why is Mati clapping?’  Grace asks.  She is barely awake.

I pull her covers back over her little chest.  “Because Obama is winning,” I whisper. “When you wake up, he will be our President.”

I get back out to the living room and it is over.  They have called the race for Obama.  I can’t believe I missed it.

The phone rings and it is my mom.  She has more than fifty people in her house, Obama has just won, and she has stepped away to call her children.  Perhaps this tending to offspring in the midst of historic moments is in my blood.  We speak for less than thirty seconds.  Gott Gute, she says before we hang up.  Praise God.

While we wait for Obama I periodically hit refresh on the map showing early returns on California’s Proposition 8. Things do not look good; it seems that soon California’s constitution will be amended to insure that same-sex couples are second-class citizens.

Midnight:  Obama is on stage now.  I see him and I think of how truly lucky we are that no state was ever given the chance to vote on the civil rights of African Americans.  Because if they had, I just don’t think we would be where we are today.  And where we are today is amazing.  But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?  You’re here, too.   We are, finally, here together.

Mothers, Day and Night

During June’s first month of life she woke every night to nurse and when she was finished she would not go back to sleep. This was the part of life with a newborn that I had forgotten which, let me tell you , is lucky for June because had I remembered it she might not be here today. I had forgotten that a newborn is an equal opportunity fusser– just as pissed to be alive at midnight as she is at 9 a.m.

Sometime between the hours of 10 and 4, when it was clear that June was not going to accept my nipple as the sleep aid I was insisting it could be, I would surrender to her cries and take her into the bathroom (the fan makes the kind of white noise only a being with an unfinished nervous system could love) and bounce her on the exercise ball until she fell asleep.

I hated getting up. It was so cold and so dark and I was so tired. I hated sitting in that bathroom where I couldn’t help but spend my mental energy committing all the details of the decor to memory– the color-block design in the South African tiles hanging above the toilet, the turn of the metal handles on the bathroom cabinet that I meant to replace before I had the baby and now won’t have time to change until the baby is in kindergarten, the label on the window screen warning me that it will not prevent my child from falling out the window.

Every night, usually just as I was snapping up June’s little sleeper after changing her diaper, my mother would appear in the doorway, a wool sweater buttoned over her polka-dotted flannel pajamas. “How are we doing?” she asked, every single night.

And every single night I would offer some variation of the same report: she just pooped, or she needs to poop; she just ate, or needs to eat, or needs to eat but is too fussy to eat; she just burped, or she needs to burp, or she won’t stop burping, can a baby burp itself to death?

Then, after getting some reassurance from my mother that the baby could not poop, burp, or cry herself to death, I would assume my position on the ball, if bouncing was what she needed, or on the closed toilet seat, if nursing was what she needed. And my mother would assume her position on the other, ready to switch with me at any given moment.

My mother rarely did anything during those nights together in the bathroom. A few times I was too tired to even hold the baby, and so she would take her and swaddle her, and bounce her to sleep while I slept on the couch. And she always brought me a glass of water, and held it for me between sips. But other than that she just kept me company while I nursed and bounced and shushed.

I imagine that my mother wanted to take June more often than she did, or that she wanted to say, maybe she’s hungry, maybe you should nurse her. I imagine that she wanted to redo the baby’s unraveling swaddle, or pull a hat over her tiny head. It’s hard to listen to a crying baby and not get the chance to try something new, something that might bring an end to all the crying. But she never did ask to do any of those things. She just sat in the semi-darkness with me, holding my glass of water while June and I tried to figure each other out. And eventually, when the hard work of calming my fragile baby was done and I was ready to go back to bed, my mother walked through the kitchen and down the hallway behind me, turning out the lights as she went so that I would not have to make my way in the dark.