Posts from — September 2010

An ex-boyfriend, who shall remain nameless, once told me that my entire problem was that I had expectations.  If I could get rid of all expectations, I could lead a happy life because I would be able to simply accept all that came my way (a case in point in his favour: Dreaming of Quiet Places and the Case of the Raise).

Which isn’t true, you know, I mean, if I wasn’t expecting someone to smack me and then someone gut punched me, it wouldn’t hurt less.  “Accept” is the sticking point of his advice.

There was a story in the Washington Post last week about two sharks found in the Potomac River.  And after the nervous laughter subsided, after we had gazed at photographs of the eight-foot-long shark’s enormously sharp teeth, I felt completely out of sorts.  Sharks in a river?  Who would ever expect a shark in a river?  A shark in an ocean, yes.  I mean, I’d still be in shock if I ever saw a shark swimming by me in Chincoteague, but at least it would be within the frame of where I expected to see sharks.

Googling opened up a whole new world of fears.  We have long searched for Chessie as we cross the Bay Bridge, but had never realized that there were 12 species of shark in the waters below.  Or rays.  Rays that have “the ability to fly out of the water to a height of 30 feet and soar an additional 100 feet due to its areodynamic shape.”

I am imagining my blissful face, scanning the water as we boat out to Smith Island next summer, being thwacked unconscious by a cow-nosed ray sailing that 100 feet straight into my head.

See, it’s good to have expectations.  Now I won’t be surprised when I’m knocked unconscious by a sting ray.

On a more serious note, the events at the Discover Building were equally unsettling, both in light of the incident itself and its awful reminder.  We have certain expectations as we go to work, certain expectations as we go through our day.  And then something like this happens and we are terrified by how many strange dangers we never stopped to consider lurk in the most benign of places.  It is hard not to start looking at your day as a minefield; to keep statistics in mind and realize that you can’t control everything.

I think the reason the HSG hurt so badly was because I didn’t know how I ended up on that radiologist’s table.  I mean, yes, I rationally knew that I made the appointment and got myself to her office, but I didn’t know how life had strayed so far from my expectations.  My eighth grade sex ed teacher told us that all we had to do was consider for one second not putting on a condom (yes, the universe punishes kids for hesitation) and we would be PREGNANT!  A TEENAGER AND PREGNANT!  WITH A SCREAMING, CRYING BABY BECAUSE WE WERE PREGNANT!

So you can imagine how unsettling it is to use birth control for years and come to realize in adulthood that birth control was perhaps … unnecessary.  It’s just unexpected.  You put part A into slot B and you expect to end up with a live child in nine months or so.

When that doesn’t happen, you end up on the radiologist’s table, wondering how things could have strayed so far from expectations, and you are thrust into this world where you see numerous possibilities, numerous dangers, who had never stopped to consider prior to reading about them on the Web, hearing about them in the waiting room of the clinic.

It is a scary thing when that door creaks open, when you glimpse the other possibilities, the expectations you hadn’t … expected.

I have a friend who always comes at the right time.

She lives in Atlanta where she works to ensure that — around the world — women don’t die in childbirth.  Doesn’t she already sound like an amazing person, just based on that small sliver of information?  She protects women’s lives.

She is physically very beautiful, but she also has this gorgeous and quiet personality.  She is very smart — both in the grand sense of the word, and in self-knowledge.  She is funny and self-effacing and has this tiny Southern lilt in her voice.  And she has this habit of always coming at the right time.

This trip to D.C. was for a wedding and a birthday party and a general vacation, coming off a trip to Nepal, where she was … you know … just saving women’s lives.  And during the week that is emotionally tumultuous, where I feel like I’m made out of plastic on the outside and glass on the inside, she was the perfect person to meet for lunch and tea (oh! and I get to reorganize her computer this weekend.  There is nothing that gets me wetter than the idea of creating new online filing systems!)

It doesn’t matter how much time has passed since we’ve last seen each other — we can jump right back to where we were before.  So we unpacked our lives, and from my end, it was all of the obvious things you’d think I’d cover from this week, and then also, we paused on the topic of jealousy.

A pair of old friends gave birth this week and I am so jealous of their new son.  It’s not even my normal jealousy where they can easily have a child (they were only married a few months when they conceived), but simply the fact that they have all this time in front of them.  They are at the start of the path, and I am deep on the path — in the tall grasses that are difficult to navigate.  And I want to be back at the start of the path again with the twins.  It’s not even wanting another baby.  It’s simply being jealous of other people’s time.  I am thrilled for them — they should only have happiness and warm cuddles — but I am so jealous of the time that’s on their side right now.

I revisited an old post I wrote about jealousy many years ago (for the love, is this blog really that old?):

Anyway, the paragraph in Lamott’s essay that helped me tonight falls close to the end when Anne is setting out the pieces of the puzzle that helped her rein in her jealousy when a fellow writer was calling her daily to tell her about her literary success while Anne seethed on the other end of the phone.

…My friend Judy said that the problem was trying to stop the jealousy and competitiveness, and that the main thing was not to let it fuel my self-loathing. She said it was nuts for me to try to be happy for this other writer. I cannot tell you how much this helped. I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else’s turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.

I think that first line–the idea of stopping the jealousy–spoke to me. I’m not a fan of this idea that we need to be happy 100% of the time. We were given this enormous palette of emotions for a reason. I don’t think it’s our job to always try to realign towards happiness. I think it’s okay to remain for a while in sadness and explore it as long as we don’t allow ourselves to inadvertently board up all the exits out of the emotion.

There is a part of me that recognizes that these are all emotions I just have to feel.  To tell myself not to feel them is only to push myself deeper into self-loathing because I feel so small being jealous of something that is outside of their control.  They are probably jealous that I’m farther along and actually know my childrens’ personalities rather than holding a lump of warm baby.  Don’t we all want what other people have?

And then there is a part of me that still feels as if I need to admit this to my friend, to spill out to her that I am so hopelessly jealous of that time.  That needs to admit this to you in order to absolve myself of this jealousy.

Damn … this really wasn’t where I saw this opening going.  I just wanted to virtually introduce you to my friend.  Who is really this lovely, wonderful person.  Did I mention that she saves women’s lives?

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Rather Than a Weekly What If: When was the last time you felt jealous and what was it about?

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And now, the blogs …

Serenity Now has a post about how hard she is on herself and how she is learning to let go.  She admits, “I put so much fucking pressure on myself. To be a better person, a better friend, a better parent. To manage this life I’ve got; to make sure the dishes are done, the house is clean, O is fed and bathed and happy. To run a half marathon in under 2 hours. To please my boss and do an amazing job at work.” It’s a beautiful post about finding peace with the idea of not reaching goals.  And yes, I think it’s a damn important read.

Finding a Family has a post about being with her family.  She writes, “being with family always reminds us how important it is to build a family of our own.” I love this post because — unlike me — she is able to find that place where she can set aside her jealousy and simply feel enormous happiness for another person.  And I want to learn that.

Reproductive Jeans has a new project called Thoughtful Tuesdays.  She says, “Each Tuesday, I’m going to tell you about something I am either: a) thankful for, b) something I witnessed that was an act of kindness, or c) something I did to ‘pay it forward‘.”  I expect nothing less from the lady who brought the world the Braces Bunch.

Lastly, Getting There has a post about the public’s reaction to a government minister’s public admittance of their infertility.  When the public sputters, “too much information!” in regards to discussion on miscarriage, Getting There responds that this is exactly the type of information that people need to hear; that we need more people giving too much information.  She says, “And I’d love to think that we could stop people thinking that they are alone; that there are many, many people out there who have been through what they are going through.”

The roundup to the Roundup: I am a jealous person, but my friend is lovely.  When was the last time you felt jealous and why?  And lots of great posts to read.

I followed a thread yesterday on Twitter about whether or not to call teachers by their first names.  I’m a firm believer in first names for everyone — kids and adults alike, with the exception to that rule being “call the person what they wish to be called.”

When I was a teacher, I went by my first name because I believed that it sent the message to the students that I saw us as equal partners in their education.  I was there to guide them towards knowledge, but it was their job to pick it up.  Which didn’t mean that we were best buddies and on equal ground in all facets of life.  But in the role we played in each other’s world — student and teacher — we needed to be working together towards a common goal, rather than me pushing them along, or dragging them, or forcing them to learn 5-part essay format (for the love of G-d, could they please just learn the fucking essay format?)

And that meant first names unless we were both going to go by last names.

With the twins, we’ve always used the adult’s first name unless we’ve been specifically asked to use the person’s last name (for instance, if the person introduced themselves as Dr. So-and-So, we call them Dr. So-and-So.  If there is no introduction, we go with the first name).  We’ve also taught them to show respect to all people, but especially to show different types of respect to different types of ages.  Not that one age receives more or less respect, but instead, we concentrate on different types of respect for peers, adults, and super-adults (great-grandparents, for instance, or the lovely old ladies who walk slowly through the food store).

Did you call your teachers by their first names?  Would you want to?  Where do you stand on the first name/last name issue?

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We survived the first day of kindergarten.

They were excited to get to the building, but when we walked up to the door for drop-off, the Wolvog became wide-eyed and quiet, saying goodbye to us in a daze while he allowed himself to be led inside.  The ChickieNob burst into tears and screamed, “I’m scared!  I’m overwhelmed!  I’m overwhelmed!” and begged us not to make her go to kindergarten because “there are too many kids!  Too much noise!”  But she too allowed herself to be led inside.

I walked back to the car with Josh and drove home in tears, and once he left for work, cried like an animal.  I sat on the sofa and did one of those screaming cries, not caring if the neighbours heard.  I literally felt as if my skin was being yanked inside out, with all my organs spilling to the floor and rolling away to the far-reaches of the room.

And after I was done crying that animalistic cry, I moved to just lightly crying while I boxed up hundreds of books to donate, and cleaned the front hallway, and Googled how to fix my dishwasher, and emailed Josh about how I wanted to take apart the dishwasher when he came home that night, and started trying to take it apart without him because I felt as if he might give me some resistance to this idea.

I baked cinnamon challah for the Wolvog’s breakfast.  I baked nutella cookies.  I looked through what little I wrote in their baby books and promised I would take the time to backpedal and fill them out.  I looked at beach pictures.  I went to the food store and the drugstore.  I looked at the clock and realized I still had four more hours to go until pick up.

It was a long day.

I got to the school 20 minutes early for pick up and sweated inside my car rather than be the first one at the door and admit how desperate I was to get my kids back.  They left the room excitedly chirping about their day and the new kids they played with.  And all was well.

Until nighttime came and I realized yet again (because this realization comes at me in waves) that we no longer had our days to ourselves.  That our days belonged to the school — at least until next summer.  Every time I realize this, it fills me with the same grief I felt the first time I realized it.  Some things, perhaps, don’t lessen with time.  Such as … well … waves.  Even if 20 have smacked you down, it doesn’t mean the 21st is any gentler.

Being the stupidest parents in the world, we took the kids to the beach the weekend before school began.  We played mini-golf and lazed about on the sand and jumped in the water and gazed at wild horses and picked up whelks and ate ice cream every night.  We got home an hour or two before bedtime, about 14 hours before the first day of school.  Josh and I commented on how there was literally no traffic on the Bay Bridge in either direction, and we reasoned that most intelligent parents wouldn’t throw their kids in the car and drive to the beach right before the first day of school.

But we all needed the distraction.

As I drove home from the second day of drop-off, still crying and my heart hurting, I was both thankful and regretful that we had that beach time.  The thankful part is easy to understand.  The regretful part is that if I hadn’t tasted such happiness right before letting them go, it perhaps wouldn’t be such a contrast.

Who am I kidding?  There wasn’t any way to set up a scenario where I would be okay seeing them go.

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I got my period on the first day of kindergarten.  It was 21 days — yes, my norm — but I was still surprised when the cramps came mid-day and I saw blood in the bathroom.  It was like a sign from the universe, delivered like the Soup Nazi, “no kids for you!”

They’re my firsts.  They are also most likely my lasts.  And that is the strange thing about having twins, you have double, but you only get to go through each stage once.  So everything is a first.  And a last.