Posts from — December 2011

Back when Josh and I first started dating, there was a television show that we liked in Israel called Florentine.  This was back in the olden days, when we had to walk to school uphill both ways and the only Israeli television you could get in the States was Rechov Sum-Sum which was inexplicably aired at 3 am for nocturnal preschoolers.  The way you could see Florentine in America was via screenings where they’d show six back-to-back episodes in a theater.

Whoever made the films simply put all six episodes back-to-back sans commercials but with the opening and closing credits.  Which meant that if you went to see the television show, you sat in the theater and heard the opening theme song six times.  And if you went the next week to see the next six episodes, you heard the theme song another six times.  And if you happened to see all of season one and season two in a one-month period of time, you heard the theme song a total of 26 times.

It was a very catchy theme song performed by the band Monika Sex, which was sort of the Soul Asylum of Israel.  By the fourth episode or so, the repetitive theme song portion of evening turned into a Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque version with everyone singing along and pretending to be Tutti spraying her chocolate milk (er… that was chocolate milk… right?)  And then we’d all settle down, watch the episode, and then go back to singing along with the theme song at the next section break.

I was thinking about the song — “Maka Afora” — this week, and I decided to buy it on iTunes as a reward after completing a very difficult scene in the sequel of Life from Scratch.  And Josh made it into our ring tones for each other.  Which replaces my old ring tone for Josh which was Jon Ronson reading from his book, The Psychopath Test.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/psycho.mp3]

Which, you know, raised some eyebrows when the phone went off in the food store.

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We are so in love with our new ring tone that we have taken to calling each other from inside the house.  When one of our phones goes off, we rush to be in the same room and dance to the song while the children look on in horror.  I love it because it reminds me of those first awkward months when you’re dating and you don’t really know each other well and you’re making up all these private jokes with one another that you hope you’ll still be able to repeat ten years later and have the other person around to hear them.  And then one day it happens: you marry the person and realize that all the inside jokes you created years earlier while watching an Israeli tv show are still accessible and you can dance around the kitchen, pretending to be Tutti spraying her chocolate milk.  And the other person gets it.

Plus, this song is so much better than Jon Ronson listing off predatory animals, nu?

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/03-Maka-Afora.mp3]

I know the words aren’t exactly happy, but it sounds like such a happy song.  And it reminds us of such a happy, giddy time.  What is your happy song, and why the hell isn’t it your ring tone (if it isn’t)?

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The Wolvog showed us how to switch to typing in Hebrew in Gmail (I believe it only works on Macs), which is supremely unhelpful because you have no idea which button on the keyboard corresponds with which letter.  I commented that back in graduate school, I had a paper template that slipped over the keyboard that told me where everything was if I was using my Hebrew program. (I had to type in Hebrew for the translation portion of my degree.)  Josh said, “I bet it would be much easier on the iPad because it has a pop-up keyboard.”

The Wolvog went upstairs and got the iPad, and lo and behold, he set it up so that it now has two keyboards — one Hebrew and one English — and I can switch between the two with a click of one button.  I really don’t have an enormous need to write in Hebrew anymore, and I’m fairly certain that if I started posting tweets in Hebrew, I’d confuse all but maybe two followers.

But the Wolvog is so smitten with being able to write in Hebrew that he has begun typing up long manifestos of gibberish with the program since he can’t really write anything more than his name at this point.  Which means that random people have received said gibberish manifestos since the iPad is tied to my email account.  Which is a long way of saying that if you get a long string of random Hebrew letters emailed to you, it is just the Wolvog.  Though we’ve been telling people that it’s our orangutan banging on the iPad.

When they were little, it was so hard.  It was so hard to have someone need you so much.  We all want to be needed, a little bit.  But then we are faced with caring for someone elderly, someone ill, someone newborn, and we get overwhelmed by being needed so much.  And that was what it was like in the beginning.  The quiet nights when it was just me and a single baby, rocking in the glider with a bottle, were sweet.  Were baby shampoo and crusty formula sweet.  The louder nights when it was two babies and two parents awake, swinging them in a side hold with our mouths constantly echoing Dr. Karp’s lesson of “shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” those nights were hard and it felt like it would never end, that we would forever be sleep deprived and guessing at their needs.

People would tell us that we had no idea what was coming next; that we didn’t know how easy we had it.  And they were frankly wrong.  It is not necessarily harder, but it is different.

Perhaps it feels harder because the problems now grow roots down into the tender places of our psyche, into the dirt of our souls.  When they are hurt by friends, it is not just about their hurt.  It also makes you question whether you gave your child the right emotional tools to cope with other people.  And if you trace that path back far enough, you finally ask yourself quite simply, “am I doing a good enough job as a parent.”  When they are struggling in school, it’s not just about their grades.  It’s about whether you are spending enough time working on the core skills needed to get through all the onion layers of education.  And again, if you trace that path back far enough too, it ends up at the same question of whether you are doing a good enough job as a parent.

It was easier when we had all the power.  When we controlled the situation.  Our child would take a toy from another child, and we would be right beside them, teaching a lesson in real time, making them give the toy back.  But it was also hard to always be on, always be working, always be teaching.  They knew nothing.  This was the time to lay all of the groundwork.  But laying groundwork is hard.  It is tedious to try to teach someone who can’t really comprehend anything beyond this exact moment in time why it is good to share.  It is like watching a cooking show in a foreign language.  You get that it has something to do with food, but beyond that, it is gibberish.

It is harder now when we need to place control in their hands.  By which I mean that on one hand, our lives are easier; we no longer need to take care of every small thing.  They have stepped in and made the decisions we used to make, and by default, we can step back and do other things — I can take a shower in the morning and pour myself a cup of coffee; tasks that seemed impossible to get to when they were babies.  But I send them off to various places — to school, to parties, to playdates, to classes — and they now have the control.  They need to suddenly remember watching that foreign cooking show and translate it into a meal.

They have all the tools, but now it is their choice to decide whether or not to use them.  They can choose to ignore everything I tell them when we’re in front of one another, and the person that reflects on is not just them but me.  Think of every story about a misbehaving child and the question always asked is, “where were her parents?” or “what sort of parent raises a child like that?”  You would think that we would stop asking that question knowing full well that our parents are currently no more in control of our behaviour than we are of the next generation.  But we can’t help ourselves, even though we know that autonomy is a lot more complicated than simply regurgitating what our parents tried to teach us.

The twins make 1000 choices every moment of every day.  We talk about our choices constantly, reducing this entire concept to a single letter “Y” that I sometimes leave on a note in their lunchbox or written on their hand in Sharpie or simply say one last time before they leave my car.  It is shorthand for the idea that every single person on this earth has two possible lives — the one she leads and the unfulfilled life that isn’t accessed because of choices she makes.  Each decision takes us to a fork, and I want them to take the path that is going to bring them what they desire in life: friends, success in school, a thriving computer company.  I make them sit and think about that other fork; that road not taken.  The one that takes them far away from everything they think they want, like some secular version of A Christmas Carol.

Sometimes I use the last five minutes before pick-up worrying about what they’ve done while we’ve been apart, even though the worrying is meaningless.  The minutes have already occurred, the decisions have already been made.  Maybe it’s just the anticipation of waiting to hear how they used that control, how they processed those lessons.

I believe that it will get harder than this.  By which I mean that it will be easier than those first two years when they needed me so deeply, and it will be harder than those first two years when their entire world fit inside my world.  So when I use the term harder, I mean that it will be more painful to have my heart tugged out of my chest, dragged away from me as the twins grow up and become entirely separate beings from us; from each other.  A long time ago, I had the physical pain of sleep deprivation; and now I have the emotional pain of watching someone process and internalize my words; internalize my lessons.  And I need to face how well I’ve taught them.  And I need to let go and understand that even if I delivered the information perfectly, the knowledge can still be lost in translation.  And I need to own the times that we all do take the right fork in the Y, and put ourselves closer to the place we want to be.

One morning, I wake up and have this really funny story that would probably only be amusing to me, Josh, and these two other men that we know.  So I log onto Facebook so I can write this man and tell him the story (knowing that he is going to crack up as much as we are), and I discover that at some point, he unfriended me.  He also unfriended Josh.  Though Josh is still connected to his husband.  Which makes me think that we only offended one person in the couple (I was never connected to his husband on Facebook).  Unless we didn’t offend him at all and this is all a tech glitch.  Or a misunderstanding.  Or a button inadvertently hit.  Because the man has several thousand friends, so it can’t be that he’s paring back his account to just those who know his middle name.  So it either has to be a mistake or I have to be an enormous bitch.  It’s one or the other.

Except I can’t really ask.  I mean, if it was a good friend, of course I could say something without looking too strange (though I might not).  But for someone who is just an acquaintance who may even need help having his memory jogged since it has been five years since we last saw each other, I can’t really write him a needy email asking why we’re no longer Facebook friends.  In those cases, you just need to slink away and wonder what the hell you did.  Or didn’t do.

And these are the times when I hate Facebook.  Because if it didn’t exist, I would have just emailed the man and told him the story, and we both would have had a chuckle over email.  But Facebook took what should have been a mindless, amusing exchange and turned it into this great big drama of what-the-hell-did-I-say-to-make-him-unfriend-me.  And now the story isn’t quite so funny anymore.

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And the winner of the #2 slot on the Creme de la Creme is…

Drum roll, please.

DSpence at Donating Hope, otherwise known as #71 (thank you, random number generator).  Congratulations, DSpence.

When the list goes up on January 1st in the morning, it will have — give or take — 222 blogs on it.  Doesn’t that sound delicious?  You can still submit to the Creme de la Creme, but your post will not be on the list when it first goes up.  It will be added during the month of January (the list it technically open for submissions until January 5th, though it will take me longer than that to write all the blurbs and get everything up).

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “My Big Announcement” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “This Damage Runs Deep, Real Deep” (Becoming Parents)
• “Why Writing a Book is Like a Dysfunctional Relationship” (My Fascinating Life)
• “Article ‘Looking for Closure in All the Wrong Places’” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “A Broken Compass” (Bodega Bliss)
• “Dark Passenger”  (MissConception)
• “Raising Human Beings and Life Lessons from the Duggars” (Millions of Miles)
• “Holiday Blues” (From IF to When)
• “Emotions Choc-a-Bloc” (My Lady of the Lantern)
• “400 Words” (Outlandish Notions)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Stumbling Gracefully has a beautiful, raw post this week about what it really means to meet on that common ground.  What she is mourning is the ease in which decisions are made.  She writes, “I’m jealous that their relationship is strong enough to withstand the turbulence of two young children, that they have such confidence in their own foundation so as to entrust it with such an incredible and precious weight. I’m incredulous that their addition didn’t require negotiation or anger or anxiety or resentment.”  It’s just such a powerful post.

A Little Blog about the Big Infertility has a post about the upcoming holidays.  She gives her rating system, explaining where she usually emotionally spends the holidays and where she is on the continuum this year.  Where do you rate on her scale?

No Kidding in NZ has a post about acceptance; what it means and what it doesn’t mean.  She explains: “For me, acceptance means the ability to live our lives the best way we can, within the constraints of our lives.  In other words, we can’t have kids (whether short term or permanently), but we can still have a good life, enjoy ourselves, and appreciate the parts of our life that we wouldn’t have if we have children.  That latter part is the hard bit often.  Acceptance doesn’t mean that we are rejoicing we don’t have children, and it doesn’t mean we didn’t really want them.”  Go read the post in full.

Lastly, Hannah Wept and Sarah Laughed has a great post about what she learned about living and taking risks.  It’s about how we try to hold onto control, and why we may sometimes want to let go and jump without knowing where we’ll land.  She has decided to leave the safe path, the small path, and go big or go home.  And it just made me smile to see someone grabbing at the brass ring.

The roundup to the Roundup: The problem with Facebook.  The winner of the second slot!  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 9th and December 16th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia, sit for a family portrait in the Oval Office, Dec. 11, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

I received a copy of the new White House portrait of the Obama family today from their social media office.

They took the new photograph because it has been two years since the last formal portrait and the girls have changed so much in the interim.  Frankly, we’ve all changed so much in the interim.  I looked back today on the post I wrote about the day we went to vote, and I’ve been thinking ahead about getting involved in campaigning for Obama, this time bringing the twins with me so they can be involved in every step of the democratic process.

The picture reminded me of why I like having my blog be one continual space, much as Gwinne said in her comment, “I’ve thought about writing a post-IF/baby blog and shutting down my current one, but I like the way one continuous blog reflects a LONG journey, with many twists and turns.”  Five and a half years ago when I first started writing this space, the twins were giving up their bottles.  Two years ago, I was crying over the fact that they were five.  And now they are programming computers and squeezing Cozy and reading poetry.  And two years from now, we will be in the middle of our elementary school years, and this blog will be driving a sports car as it struggles with the 7-year itch.

I love the picture above because they are our First Family, and we’ve seen their children grow over the years.  And because that picture reminds me that none of us are where we were two years ago, and none of us know where we’ll be two years from now — and that is both a scary and wonderful thought.  Anything could happen, and that is the thought that brings me through difficult times: that I will not always be in this emotional place forever.  And that is what makes me appreciate the good times: because I will not always be in this emotional place forever.

How have you changed in the last two years?  If you’ve been blogging for at least two years, post a link to your nearest blog post to two years ago today.  It’s quite fitting that the post I have is about the friendships I’ve gained from being online.

This is it.  The last day to submit your blog so that it is on the Creme de la Creme list when the list goes up on January 1st in the morning.  You will still be able to submit after today (up until January 5th) BUT your blog will not be on the list initially.  It will be added some time in January.

So, 11:59 pm EST is the final minute that blogs will be accepted if you want it on the list when it first goes up.  Consider this your final heads up.

Please take a moment to help spread word today so that no one who wants to be on the list is left out.  Tweet it, Facebook it, blog about it, email friends and poke them.  And then kick back and relax until January 1st.