Keepsake

When Gracie was a toddler Chris’s mother gave us a small bag of clothes that had been Chris’s when she was young.  The clothes were vintage turn of the 70’s–lots of terry cloth and smocking, short hems and mickey mouse decals.  The clothes were delicate and girlish and from what I know of Chris’s childhood, of her preference for jeans and baseball jerseys and spitting through her teeth, and her mother’s disdain for all three, it is no surprise that these are the clothes that became keepsakes.    Some dreams die hard.

There was a dress in the bag, a simple peach-colored shift that Chris’s grandmother made for her.  It is a beautiful dress made from a material that must have its own name but I do not know what it is, a material of large-petaled flowers edged and sewn together with white thread.  It has a high neck and no sleeves:  it is a perfectly made late-sixties shift.

I think that Chris loves to see Grace in the dress.  I don’t think that she has many fond memories of wearing it herself (if she remembers wearing it at all), but she does have enormous fondness for her grandmother, whom I am certain she remembers daily.

I didn’t really know Chris’s grandmother.  I met her at a few family gatherings, but she thought of me only as a friend, if she thought of me at all.  I was a secret then, as all Chris’s girlfriends had been.  She died one summer and we were married the next:  two summers later Grace was born.

The order of those events is part gift, part heartache.  I do not know what might have happened if we had married and had a child while Chris’s grandmother was still alive.  I like to think it would have been a profound opportunity for everyone, but I can’t be sure of that.  What I can be sure of is that Chris’s grandmother, whoever and wherever she is now, adores this golden-haired child in the peach dress.  I know that she is happy to see Grace in the dress; I know that she would agree with me when I say that our Grace is the child she made this dress for, those many many years ago.

The photo above is of Grace, I just played around with it here.  

Goodbye, Old Friend

The cover of the August 2004 issue of Gourmet is a photograph of a mason jar filled with jam.  The jar’s lid is off and its sides are shellacked with jam and seeds and gooey bits of berry.  The handle of a wooden spoon sticks out just above the jar’s lip.  I know this because the magazine is on the desk next to me, but I also know this because I read that issue cover to cover and back again while I sat in bed holding a sleeping newborn.  I can remember September’s cover too, and  also October’s.  I read those while Grace slept on me in the rocking chair, long deep sleeps that would only be long and deep if she slept on me and I did not move.  I kept the magazine on a table next to the rocker and sometimes I didn’t turn the page for fear of disturbing her so I read the same recipes over and over, the same beautiful articles about shrimp and tiered cakes and Corsica.

When Grace was three and I was pregnant for the second time, I let my subscription lapse.  I didn’t have time to read the essays; the photographs that usually fed my soul were making me nauseous; and my characteristic first trimester lack of all perspective and abandonment of all hope led me to believe that I would never have the time and energy to care about food again.  A friend suggested I try Cooking Light instead, that the recipes were fresh and healthy and easy.  So I tried it, and during my pregnancy and the first few months of June’s life I cooked lots of fresh and healthy and easy recipes.  But it didn’t take long before I grew tired of the magazine’s life-coachy tone, and of dinner recipes that called for 1/4 teaspoon of butter and recipes for brownies baked in a 8×8 inch pan with a yield of 24 squares.  It wasn’t Cooking Light so much as Cooking Little and it was getting on my nerves.

So I went back to Gourmet.  The truth was the even before Grace was born I was never cooking more than a handful of recipes from each issue.  I was reading smart and lyrical writing and losing myself in stunning photographs.  I was learning about street food and Polynesia and cocktails with names like Jealous Marys and The Waldorf.  I was learning how to toast seeds and cook custard in a water bath.   I was tearing out recipes for Christmas cookies to make with my yet-to-be-conceived children, and reviews for restaurants three states away.  But I didn’t care when I used those recipes and reviews.  I just thought it all looked delicious and exciting.  I thought they looked like things worth saving.

This summer I cooked an entire menu from the August 2009 issue.  It took me three days, but I made every last bit of it, from the red pepper walnut spread with warm pita to the cumin-scented beef kabobs to the lemon ice cream sandwiches with swirled blueberry compote.  I made the ice cream sandwiches one night when Chris was in Washington for work.  I put June to bed and Grace sat at the counter while I made the two cookie crusts and mixed lemon juice and zest into soft ice cream.  Grace licked the beater while I stirred blueberries and lemon juice on the stove, careful not to let the thickening sugar burn.  The whole thing was taking longer than I would have hoped, but even as the night grew darker and the dishes piled up around me, I was happy.  The windows were open and the air was cool; the radio was on and my oh-so-not-newborn daughter was beside me, her lips stained blue from the berries, and she was chatting and mixing and sneaking spoonfuls of batter when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.  The next day Chris came home and our dear friends came over bearing wine and salad and together we ate the food that I had made while our girls slept in their beds down the hall.

Yesterday a friend emailed to tell me that after nearly 70 years in print, Gourmet magazine is folding.  I imagine that in the coming days the airways and internet will be filled with people’s stories of their deep love for the publication, stories of how Gourmet taught them to cook and taught them to love food and taught them how to bone a fish.  I also imagine that people will be talking about how it was too rich, too glamorous, too much about fancy food and fancy wine and privilege.  For me Gourmet will always be about that sleeping baby on my chest and what I wished for then, and what I have now.

Past Due

Every month we get a bill from the reproductive biology lab at the hospital in town.  It is a bill for storage:  they are housing five vials of sperm that belong to us.  We bought six vials shortly after Grace was born, hoping that six would be enough to grow a sibling.  It turned out to be enough and then some, hence the storage.

Storage is $35/month, although the bill is usually for $70, or $105, because I often forget to pay the bill.  Or just don’t pay the bill, because keeping that sperm cold is so very low on my list of priorities these days.

“We should do something about the sperm,” I say to Chris every few months.

“Already?”  she always asks.  (This is a woman who has unopened mail from 2003 and can’t bear the thought of throwing away her textbooks from Brandeis which she attended circa forever ago.   I know that she is going to be of no help to me here.)

I don’t want another child.  I value my sleep and my marriage (not to mention my pelvic floor) far too much to put that sperm to its intended use.  But I keep paying the bills.  Straight friends have asked me if letting the vials go is the equivalent of getting a vasectomy and it might be, although thawing the sperm doesn’t mean we can’t have more kids, it just means we can’t have them with this donor.

Perhaps it’s more like giving away the pram June used to sleep in, or the Petit Bateau kimono-style sleepers that we bought in New York the summer I was pregnant with Grace.  And while there was a time when I would have said that I wanted no reminders of all the uncertainty and stress, the tortured decisions we made about which bank and which donor and who is available and who is in quarantine and who is identity release and whose grandfather has Parkinson’s, much of my suffering has faded in the persistent glow of our daughters faces, and I find myself left only with my affection for #5437 and all his attending logistics and details.  Perhaps this affection is why I keep paying the bills.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I got a bill for $70 and instead of paying it I called the lab and asked them to send us a request for disposal form.

I would love to say that a deep feeling of calm came over me when I opened the bill, that a clear and true voice spoke to me when I saw the tell-tale blue envelope in the mail and  I knew that the time had come.  But the truth is that the bill came a few days after I bought an iphone and I had been trying to figure out what I could cut from the monthly budget to cover the $30 plan increase.

This is the truth:  when you buy sperm to make a child, when you read on-line profiles of potential donors and make phone calls to reserve vials and make phone calls to release said vials on ovulation day because you and the person you love want to grow a human being in your body and you can’t do that without the sperm, well then the sperm has both a preciousness beyond all known value and a fair market price.  And you must let it have both.  The sperm and its donor are the essential second half of your dream’s beating heart, but they are also a man you do not know and a frozen vial of jizz.  They just are.

This does not mean that I don’t adore our donor, or that when he comes to mind (conjured by a storage bill or bad habit that one of girls has developed that most certainly must be something they inherited from him) I don’t want to drop to my knees in gratitude for the alchemy of generosity and science and commerce that make our uncommon bond possible.  It means that in using his sperm to fertilize my eggs I have had to enter into one of the most absurd and holy and frustrating relationships I will ever have with another human.  It also means that I have to know when to think with my ovaries and when to think with my checkbook.

On the day that June was baptized, a older congregant approached me after the service to offer his congratulations.  “I am so lucky,” he said as he reached for my arm, “to be alive in a time when these girls could be born.”

I think I was holding onto those vials as a way of holding onto our bumper crop of luck, as a way of extending all the blessings that have been bestowed on us during these years of wishing and growing and  tending our children.  But I can see now that our luck and our blessings have traveled far from their icy origins and that those origins were never meant to be more than just that: beginnings.  And we are not beginning anymore.  We are on our way.

Gracie Verbatim (Even Though I Vowed No More Verbatim Because Now She is Five and Deserves Some Privacy)

In the car, on our way to Karen’s house to pick up June:

Grace:  I am going to live with you and Mati in our house forever.

Me: Wonderful!

Grace:  June and I are both going to live with you and Mati forever.

Me:  It will be great to have you.

Grace:  I think June and I will live in our house even after you and Mati die.

Me: Sure, that sounds fine.

Grace:  I think we’ll keep you with us.

Me:  After we die?

Grace: Yeah.  You’ll be like big stuffed animals.

Deciding to Run

Lately I have been running at Chesterfield Gorge.  A few weeks ago I started to grow weary of my normal running route, up and back on that same river road where I have been walking and wogging and running for nearly 6 years now.  I’ve been going to the Gorge for just as long, but only to hike and snowshoe and to see the mountain laurels in bloom, not to run.  The people I saw running at the Gorge were always wearing digital watches and teeny tiny shorts and those sunglasses that curve around your eyes like welding goggles.  Those people are not my people.

But I run there now.  Now, I am in love with running there.  I can’t really explain how beautiful it is.  Everything is somehow both ancient and completely new.  The old dirt road takes you into the woods but keeps you next to the river, so that on one side everything is green and smells of old leaves and moss while everything on the other side smells of water and warm rocks.  Right now the river is fast and loud and the fly-fishermen can hardly scramble over the boulders and into the current fast enough.  It is a pleasure to watch them cast, to watch their rods whip back and their lines spiral over the water.  It is a pleasure to watch them because you can tell, even from a distance, that they are having the time of their lives.

This morning I went straight to the Gorge after I dropped off the girls.  The parking lot was empty.  It was early, not yet 9 o’clock, and raining.  The car thermometer said 47 degrees.  I put my hair in a ponytail and fumbled with my ipod and tried to remember if they ever found the body of that woman who went missing on a mountain running path out west a few years ago.

I usually don’t worry about such things.  I don’t even worry about meeting up with bears, although it’s fairly likely to happen this time of year.  I just run with my car keys around one finger and let them jangle against my open palm to let the bears know I’m coming.  So far, so good.  But there was something about the emptiness of the Gorge today that frightened me.  I thought about what could happen to me down on that quiet road, what terrible violence could be done to me in those glorious and empty woods.  I thought about what that violence would do to the girls, and to Chris, but mostly I thought about what it would do to me.  I sat until the windshield was glazed over with rain, and then I decided to run.

I decided to run.  I decided that the Gorge was safe, and that I was safe.  I didn’t think in terms of risk; I did not hold the joy I feel when my heart and legs move me up those steep hills in one hand and the possibility of danger in the other, because no joy is worth that sort of danger.  I simply decided that I was not in danger.  I decided that I was safe.

While I ran I remembered that Andre Dubus story, “Out of the Snow,” and how in it, the protagonist LuAnn is attacked in her own kitchen by two men who have followed her home from the grocery store.  She fights back with a steel skillet and her fierce desire to live, and Dubus’s rendering of the scene is, as always, magnificent.  While I ran I remembered the last scene of the story, when LuAnn is sitting by the fire talking to her husband about what has just happened to her.  She tells him:

“I have to know this, and remember this, and tell it to the children:  I didn’t hit those men so I could be alive for the children, or for you.  I hit them so my blood would stay in my body; so I could keep breathing.”

I have loved this LuAnn character (who appears in several of Dubus’s stories) for many years, and I have carried her and her stories with me (both literally and figuratively) for more than a decade now.   Ostensibly she came to mind because of what I feared this morning, but as I ran and ran I realized that actually she came to me because of what she tells her husband (and here I paraphrase):  I did not do this thing so I could be alive for you or the children.  I did this thing so that my blood would stay in my body; so that I could keep breathing.

And that, I realized, is why I decided to run.

Mother’s Milk

A few years ago, before  I was even pregnant with June, Chris and I took a trip to Rhinebeck, New York.  What I remember most about the trip was the size of the bed in our hotel room and this most amazing banana chocolate almond creme brulee cake-thing we had after dinner one night.  I also remember that we spent an afternoon at Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home, and that I cried when the tour guide showed us her desk.  I cried because I wasn’t working much then, and I wanted to be, and I didn’t know how to begin.  The tour guide showed us lots of things in that house and told us lots of stories about Eleanor’s life at Val-Kill and the people who came to visit her there.  One of the things she told us was that Eleanor never learned to cook, so when important people were in the house on the cook’s night off Eleanor fed them scrambled eggs.

Eleanor Roosevelt making scrambled eggs.  Great image, no?  It illustrates both her privilege (how lucky she was that she was never responsible for feeding herself and her husband and her children) and her intelligence (how smart she was never to learn a task that would keep her from her work).  It reminds me of that old women’s movement advice about how a woman should never know how much milk there is in the refrigerator.  To be the keeper of the milk is to be hopelessly tangled in the kudzu vine of domestic life.  Avert your eyes from the sell-by date, train yourself to ignore the extreme angle at which you must hold the carton as you fill that last cereal bowl, and you shall be free.

Suffice it to say that I know exactly how much milk we have.  As I write this I am sitting in a library 15 miles from my refrigerator, which I opened only once this morning.  And still I can tell you that we have about a quarter of a gallon of whole with another to replace it when it’s gone, and half a gallon of skim.  We are just one full sippy cup away from the end of the goat milk kefir, which is too bad considering it’s the only thing June drinks and I have to go to Whole Foods to buy it.  We also have some half-and-half that’s dangerously close to solidifying and some almond milk that I keep forgetting to take to the dump.

Chris–God love her half as much as I do– hasn’t a clue about the milk.

I try not to know about the milk.  I try to plead ignorance when Chris asks me if I know where the ketchup is or if we have any olives or an open container of hummus. I want her to know something about the inhabitants of that vast Nordic landscape called our fridge.  But more than that, I just desperately want not to know.  I want to free some real estate in this downtown Tokyo called my mind.

Yesterday a small satin rosette fell off of one of Grace’s doll dresses.  She was bereft.  “Can you fix it?  Can you sew it?”  she asked, over and over.

“I don’t really know how to sew,”  I told her.

“Then I’ll send it to Reboo.  She knows how to sew.”

“Good idea,”  I said.  “We’ll send it to Reboo.”

The truth is I do know how to sew, or at least I know how to sew well enough that I could get the rosette back on baby Bella’s romper.  But I can’t know how to sew.  I already know how to do too much.  And while I can never go all the way to scrambled egg dinner parties, I can draw the line somewhere.  So I’ve decided to draw it at sewing.  And even though it will take more time for me to package up that dress and drive it to the post office than it would for me to just sew it, at least it’s time I can spend thinking of other things.

Like the fact that I really should stop by the store and pick up some milk.

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.

Lost Paperwork and Other Luxuries of Marriage Equality

(This post is one of many entries in Write to Marry, a blog carnival organized to support marriage equality and the fight against California’s Proposition 8.)

Somewhere in Gracie’s box of baby things, amidst the “Congratulations on Your New Little Bundle!” cards and the yellowing plastic hospital bracelets, there is a Polaroid picture taken on the day that Chris’s second parent adoption was finalized.  If I remember it correctly, Chris is holding Grace and the judge and I are on either side of them.  Chris and I look like two people who thought they had entered a 5k Race for the Cure but somehow found themselves in a double Ironman.  Grace is barely three months old.

We have no such picture of us with June.  Although she will be eight months old on Election Day, Chris has not yet adopted her.  In fact, we hadn’t even sent the preliminary paperwork to our lawyer until last week.   We kept meaning to get around to thinking about talking about finding that manila envelope that we knew was somewhere around here.  But then there was June’s baptism, and strawberry season.  There was the pond, and the river, and the peaches, and our trip to Colorado, and a new school.  There were naps that needed to be taken and weddings to go to and birthday parties and bike rides and long phone calls with old friends and wood to stack and tricycles to ride.  There was no time to fill out an affidavit explaining who lives in our house and how much money we make and how exactly we went about procuring this second child for ourselves.  We just kept putting it off.

Those of you who know us know that we are careful people.  We are cautious, we are thorough, we do not take many risks.  And where our children are concerned, we take no risks.  But we have been legally married now for over four years.   And while second-parent adoption is still advisable for legally married couples (our marriage is not recognized in states without marriage equality laws, but an adoption is), it just doesn’t feel that urgent.  We should do it and we will do it, eventually.  But life in a state where marriage is legal for all is a life in which parents think about things other than how they can prove to the world that their children belong to them.

If you read this blog, chances are you already support marriage equality.  But is there something else you can do in these last days before the election to make sure that California’s Proposition 8 does not pass?  Can you call friends and relatives in California and ask them to vote No?  Can you donate here to make sure that Vote No on 8 ads continue to run with the same frequency as the opposition’s ads, ads whose lies must be continually, tirelessly countered with the truth?  With only a few days left we need everyone we know to do everything they can.

Because everyone deserves to have absolutely no idea where they put that manila envelope from their lawyer.

Happy Birthday, Grace Mae

There is an old shed in our yard whose sash window frames have been stuck open from both the bottom and the top since the day we first saw this house five years ago. And four years ago today a bird flew into the space between those frames and could not get out.

Reboo, who was just Rebecca then, saw the bird first and then Chris and I saw it, and heard it—heard the strumming of its wings against the glass, saw it tossing between the panes, scooting itself a few inches up then sliding down, not able to make it to either opening. Rebecca tried to slide the swollen window frames away from each other, tried to keep them staggered so as not to crush the bird. “Up!’ we coached, “ the other one! “No, no, the other one!” It seemed like that bird was never going to get out and then all of the sudden it fluttered over the top of the splintered wood frame to a perch in the lilac bush a few feet away.

I had two contractions during the 10 minutes it took Rebecca to free that bird. I don’t remember who decided it was time to go to the hospital then, but we did. An hour later I was naked in a tub of water trying to make my way through contractions that were separated by less than a breath. And then, after 15 minutes of pushing, the frames of my body slid apart and our baby was born.

On Gracie’s first birthday I took her blueberry picking and when we got home I saw that there was a bird stuck between the sashes of that very same window. If this post were a piece of fiction I would not be able to tell this part of the story because it would seem too contrived. But it really happened. I set Gracie and the blueberries down on the grass and I freed the bird. There was probably a bird stuck in that window (why didn’t we ever close it?) many other days of that first year with Grace, but I never saw it. Maybe I saw that one because it had been a year since I saw the other, and I was looking. Maybe that is what birthdays are for.

Anniversary

On Sunday we took the girls to the lake. In the car on the way there I suddenly remembered something.

“It’s our anniversary!”

“It is?”

“It is!”

“I thought it was the 13th.”

“Today’s the 13th!”

“It’s our anniversary! Happy Anniversary.”

And then, in a worried voice from the back seat: “It’s your anniversary? Who’s going to babysit us?”

We got married on September 21st. We also got married on July 13th. September 21st was buckets of hydrangeas and champagne toasts and my 80 year-old grandmother having sushi for the first time. It was me in the most beautiful dress I will ever own and Chris in bare feet and everyone we love standing around us as we smiled and cried and promised and promised again. July 13th was Chris and me and our minister in our living room at dusk. It was Chris in shorts and me in bare feet and Chris’s hand on my stomach and our unborn baby as our witness. It was a poem and more promising, and then more still. September 21st was because we wanted to. July 13th was because we could. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to forget. Maybe that’s why it’s such a pleasure to remember.