Back in college, I worked for the National Endowment of the Humanities.  Part of my job was to take apart the grants and put them into this special format to aid the selection committee with quick cross-comparisons.

One day, my boss came into my office and asked if she could talk to me about P-Satch.  All of our files began with the letter P and were followed by a number (for example P-34), but I had never seen one followed by letters so I told her I didn’t know what it was and she walked out of my office.

She came back in a few minutes later and said, “I really think you know about P-Satch.”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I have P-67 through P-71 right now.”

She left my office only to return again, equally insistent that I must know about this missing file.  She finally asked if she could show me something in her office and she brought me to her calendar where in faint print at the bottom of the square said the word “Pesach.”

“Oh,” I said, a little surprised that someone working for a major Humanities organization didn’t know it was a major Jewish holiday.  Or…at least think to come into my office and ask if I could list any upcoming Jewish holidays as the one token Jew on staff.  But I explained that Pesach was just the Hebrew word for “Passover” and it was that Last Supper holiday she probably knew about through Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Since that day, I’ve always pronounced the holiday P-Satch, creating a new generation of people mispronouncing the holiday name.

The point of all of this is that P-Satch begins tonight.

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I know the focus on everyone’s mind with the census was the adoption question, but all I could think about were the people I should have had to count.  Isn’t it strange?  They weren’t there for the last census, and they certainly weren’t here for this census, and for all accounts and purposes, they didn’t exist in the grand sense of the census-taking world.  But they existed for me and it is strange that they’re tucked into the last decade, just a few notes in a diary rather than a number on a form.  Today is the anniversary of an early loss.  We did the math in the car last night and realized I was at the hospital seven years ago.

I remember once reading an article when I was younger about an eight-year-old girl who had died.  She was born a year or two after the census and she wasn’t here for the census that came months after she died.  I know the census doesn’t count actual humans–we have birth certificates and death certificates (though too many parents who have lost a child will tell you that death certificates are not a given) for that.  She obviously existed.  But it is such a strange idea, the concept of counting populations in ten year intervals and all the people who fall through the cracks.

*******

We have to buy a new car or we have to put a lot of money into an existing car–more money than the car is probably worth.  This fact sucks, but I’m trying not to focus on the money issue.  Instead, I am driving myself crazy by thinking about the size issue.

I always pictured myself the type who would drive around a gaggle of children, some my own and some their loud-mouth friends who will teach my children all sorts of non-socialist crap that I will need to spend my nights deprogramming (what?  Did I say that aloud?).  It turns out that in order to drive around three or more kids, you need a car that seats more than 5.  This math probably doesn’t sound quite right, but you need to subtract the two front seats for safety reasons, and most bench backseats cannot take more than two booster seats at a time.  Which means that if I want to have this scenario, I need to buy a car with 6 or 7 seats.

I would have never made this scenario happen if we weren’t in a place where we needed to buy a new car.  But still, am I buying more car than I need to fulfill another person’s needs?  After all, why are said loud-mouth children in the car other than the fact that I am doing their parents a favour by shlepping around their non-bleeding-heart-socialist beasts?

Still, I can’t get this idea out of my head, and the reality is that we need a larger car if we have another child because we’re not going to buy another new car (hopefully) in the five years or more after we purchase this one.  But aren’t you supposed to make major purchases based on what you know right now?  What I know right now is that we only have two kids.  Are you seeing the circular thoughts yet?  It’s like the Windmills of Your Mind in here.

Oh–and compounding the problem is the fact that I hate to drive large cars.  I’m a small car sort of person.  So a mini-van, no matter how useful, is out.  We’re now looking at a few cars like the KIA Rondo or the Mazda 5 which have third row seating, but are on a car frame.

I guess I’m telling you all of this because I’d love to hear from people who drive a 6 or 7 seat car-frame vehicle and can tell me their thoughts.  Especially those who moved from a 5-seat small car to a larger car and are happy they did so (or hey, I’d love to hear from people who are miserable so I don’t make the same mistake).  And anyone else who wants to weigh in with car thoughts (except making the suggestion of a mini van or SUV because we’ve ruled those out despite good arguments) because we didn’t expect to be in this space where we have to make a decision, but finding ourselves here, we want to make the decision well so we don’t have regrets down the road.

Get it?  Down the road?

We were driving to a friend’s house when the ChickieNob suggested that we move to the beach much in the same tone she uses to suggest that we have pizza for dinner or watch the Muppet Show before bed. Low-impact decisions. I explained about house sales and finding a new school and new doctors and new friends in this new location, and finally, she agreed that maybe it wasn’t very realistic. Especially because Josh’s job was back here in the city, three hours away.

A few moments later, she came to a new idea: Daddy could get a different job. He could work in a restaurant (when I pointed out that he doesn’t even cook at home, she assured me that “we could teach him” as if she is a mini Cat Cora). There are a lot of restaurants at the beach, I agreed, if the man first took a few cooking classes. “What would I do?” I questioned.

“You’d just be a mum!” she laughed, as if the idea of me working was as bizarre as eating sand. Her dad could easily become a chef with a few instructional lessons, but her graduate-school-educated mother was best at cooking, cleaning, and building Lego towers.

Um…by the way, I do work. As in, I have a job. Right now.

Though I’m aware that I downplay my work both to the twins and to my peers. I label myself a SAHM. On one hand, it’s more honest. I work mainly between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., after the twins are asleep. I have more in common schedulewise with SAHMs and am available to volunteer at their school or shuttle them around to activities. At the end of the day, almost every SAHM I know does some work, whether it’s running a small baby gift business on etsy or doing some freelance web design for a couple of dollars a month.

But I think I’m also squeamish about having the twins perceive that I’m not there for them 100%. I loved knowing that my mother could be at school to pick me up if I felt sick. I liked that she would volunteer to chaperone field trips or work on the PTA. It’s guilt that pulls two ways–I feel like I’m not contributing enough to my family because I’m not meeting my earning potential and I’d feel guilty if I went off and worked full time (hell, I feel guilty for the two afternoons a week they go to grandma and grandpa’s house so I can churn out a few articles and they are with their grandparents, having fun. By the way, thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!). I fear I may have done too good a job not only tucking my job timewise into the darkened nooks of their life, but tucking the very existence of my job into those same unconscious nooks.

I have no desire to work full-time. Our original plan was that I would continue to work and Josh would stay home with the kids, but once we started fertility treatments, that idea changed. One night, as I held a needle over my stomach, about to give myself an injection, I looked up at him and said, “by the way, you realize that this means that I’m going to be the stay-at-home?” I was not going to go through needle-sticks and have him get the daytime shnuzzles. He generously acquiesced without argument, and the rest is history–treatments worked, we had the twins, and I got to stay at home.

In all other facets of life, I have to behave within a workplace frame. No matter how much I love a job, there are expectations that I also despise. Loved lesson planning and teaching; hated grading and meetings with parents. Loved dishwashing the coffee cups; hated filling out the paperwork. Parenting has been the first thing I’ve done where I am 100% my own boss. Yes, I need to do certain things for a short period of time–for instance, as much as I don’t love wiping asses, it’s a finite task, unlike grading which was there year after year after year. The kids and I get to set the day, explore what we want to explore, read what we want to read. If I could get paid to be a parent, it’s the one job I could do where I wouldn’t also have half my mind focused on the point when I could retire.

A long time ago, when my sister’s first child was little, she told me that she was concerned that her daughter associated her with household tasks and her father with outside the home tasks, even though they both worked. More often than not, it was my sister who was cooking and cleaning and generally keeping house in addition to full-time employment. Her daughter mimicked her, following after her with a mini-Swifter or a pot from her kitchen set. We talked about the dangerous message we send to our daughters when they don’t see us in a multitude of positions.

How can we teach our daughters that having a career is important if they don’t perceive that we have a career?

My mother didn’t return to work until all of her children were in school full-time, which occurred when I was in 6th grade. She taught three mornings a week and was home around before 1 p.m., long before it was time for any of us to come home from school. She was damned good at what she did and people came to her for advice all the time. Even without seeing her work during my formative years, it was somehow instilled in me that it was not only a good idea to go to college, but that graduate school could come next and a career should probably follow. The message didn’t just come from teachers who constantly asked us in five-part essay form to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, but from my parents as well.

And that’s what I did–college, graduate school, teaching career ranging from middle school to the college level. I made finding a societal space of my own a priority just as much as I worked hard to find a partner and build a family. Somehow I absorbed the entire message, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to pass it along to my daughter. I didn’t want it to be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” and seriously, I have a job! I’ve just wiped invisible cream all over it.

“Am I just a mummy now?” I finally asked. “Or do I have a job.”

“You have a job,” she said, somewhat sullenly.

Good; I left something poking out of the shadows.

“What do I do?” I questioned.

“You’re a writer. People pay you to write things and talk about things.”

Which pretty much sums it up. I write articles, I write books, I go out and talk about the topics of said articles and read from said books.

So it has sunk in that a job exists and now I replace my old fears with new ones: what message am I sending by hiding my job, will my daughter embrace the idea of finding her own career, and how can I celebrate work while not missing out on time with them?

Another pause ensued and we were almost to her friend’s house when she chirped, “but luckily, you can do your job from the beach. You can write anywhere. So it looks like we’re moving!”

Break out the flip flops and sunscreen, the only thing holding us back now are those cooking lessons for Josh.

If you are currently parenting, do you have a career outside the home, and if so, how are you conveying that it’s okay to choose to stay home? Or, if you work in the home or not have a job, how are you conveying that it is an equally valid choice to choose a full-time career? How do we teach the other possibility from what our daughters see us do?  And if you are not yet parenting, how do you envision your work/home balance in the future? Apologies that these questions assume living children and doesn’t take into account the fact that so many in our community are without their children right now.

Cross-posted with BlogHer…

I loved Peggy Orenstein’s New York Times article on femivores.  Not just because I tried to bring a chicken home a few months before the twins were born.  There was a science fair at the school where I worked and one boy couldn’t bring home the chicken he had been raising so he offered it up to a good home.  And I have a good home.

So I called Josh and left a message about how I’ve fallen in love with a chicken, and it would live at our house, mostly outside, but inside when it needed to come inside.  And the chicken would give us eggs and we would give the chicken love and we’d be one big human-chicken family.

Then I reconsidered the idea after talking to a science teacher about diseases that chickens carry in regards to the newborn twins I was about to have in the house (apparently a chicken living in the house and preemies to not mix well) and I called back Josh and left another message telling him to scratch that idea.

But he didn’t listen to the second message.  He listened to the first message and then sucked enough air into his lungs to yell without pause into the phone: “under no circumstances should you bring a chicken into our house I swear Melissa that I am going to kill you if I come home tonight and there is a chicken in our house it is against our homeowners association rules and we cannot live with a fucking chicken in our house.”

So we don’t have a chicken in our house.

But I can definitely still see the beauty in making an omelette with eggs collected from your own backyard.  We’ve tried the garden, which really didn’t work both due to a lack of gardening skills and poor sunlight in our yard (oh, and my fear of crickets who like to live near plants).  But I definitely subscribe to the idea of “radical homemakers” or “tomato-canning feminism” (oooh, I have to read and write about this book.  It appeals to me so much more than Michael Pollan).

Because like many women with graduate degrees who chose to become a stay-at-home (okay, more like a part-time work-at-home), I couldn’t just do the tasks–I had to turn it into a project with the same passion I brought to academia.  I read books about nutrition and I set up the house for minimal television watching and I think about the chicken-that-got-away.  My kids knew the term “sustainability” before they knew their ABCs.  Orenstein’s article outlines so much I have thought or experienced since leaving the traditional work force five years ago.

I read her article right on the heels of finishing Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.  Which was fine.  I wanted to be all gung-ho about it because he speaks to so many things we already believe and do (our home has a dearth of high fructose corn syrup, we make almost everything from scratch, and we eat a lot of fruit for dessert except when Lori is here and then it’s cake 24/7, baaaaaybeeeeeeeee!).  But he didn’t grab me by the ovaries.  I think his rules are sound, but it was sort of like watching Mr. Rogers.  You know how Mr. Rogers is comfortable and enjoyable, but he doesn’t make your heart race with happiness?  That’s sort of how I felt about reading his book.

I immediately followed his book with Kitchen Confidential.  I’m about a third of the way through it.  Anthony Bourdain is sort of like hanging out with a grumpy uncle.  One who tells you a lot of stories about how bad-ass he was in his past, which makes you wonder how bad-ass he could possibly be if he needs to tell you that he was bad-ass.  I’m enjoying the book and I’ll probably end up reading another one or two of his cooking memoirs because I’m on a food memoir kick, but like Pollan, I keep wanting to be grabbed by the ovaries and I haven’t been yet.

It occurred to me as I wrote this that maybe their lack of ovary grabbiness is due to their genitalia.  Maybe I need to be reading more books by women.  Women know how to grab the proverbial gonads and never let go.

*******

The Weekly What If: If you could follow one celebrity chef (and celebrity is a loose term–if you know them, they count.  They could be someone from a local restaurant; they don’t need to be someone with a television program or cook book) for the day, seeing what they do, receiving tips, and eating incredible meals who would it be?

*******

I love all the additional assvice people gave and I am toying with a new (extended remix?) version of Aunt Jane Knows More than My RE.  Will post when I start working on it.  At the very least, I want to clean up the images.  I learned so much about Microsoft Paint by the time I finished the fourth film.

*******

And now, the blogs…

A lot of people do an introductory post each month for IComLeavWe, but Partners in Crime had the best one I’ve read in a while.

Serenity Now has a post about eating cereal with her son that twisted my heart.  It’s exactly what you want to have happen; it’s exactly what you dread happening because it means that time has passed–and it usually comes with the accompanying feeling that time has gone way too quickly.

My heart is with Busted Babymaker this week as she remembers the Doodles, but she also wrote a scathingly honest post about a Facebook status meme that breaks her heart.

My Basic World has a post about not letting infertility control her life.  On one hand, it’s impossible to not have it consume you because of the numerous appointments or medications during a cycle (seriously, how do you not think about it if you have to remember to do an injection at 8 p.m.?).  She points out that an article from her clinic “suggested setting a specific time every day to deal with any concerns/questions you’re dealing with. This sounds good in theory, but take this weekend…I started spotting, am I really going to wait for my ‘allotted time’ before I started psycho googling breakthrough bleeding…hell no!”  So how does one focus on treating their infertility without thinking about it?

Lastly, Ezra’s Space has a post about gardening with one son while remembering how she always dreamed of gardening with her first son.  It is a bittersweet post that made me smile while making my throat catch.  Head over to read her brief thoughts.

The roundup to the Roundup: what are your thoughts on femivores, Pollan, and Bourdain?  Answer the Weekly What If.  Keep the assvice coming.  And lots of great posts to read.

Why yes, that is a human tooth inside a ring.  Isn’t that what everyone has on their desk?

Wait, let’s start over.

Last week, I noticed that the ChickieNob’s tooth was loose.  For whatever reason, this one milestone didn’t bother me at all.  I wondered if it was the milestone itself or the fact that it is the first one we’ve hit since giving away most of our baby things.  You would think I’d be more of  a wreck.  But I was really excited to play tooth fairy.

I’m sure both of my parents were the tooth fairy at various times (um, I hope I didn’t ruin that for you), but one night, I woke up to find my father in my room.  He mumbled something about “just checking” on the tooth, but I remember opening my eyes and seeing him rooting around in the tooth fairy pillow and I knew that I had two choices–I could let him see that I was awake and that I knew the truth or I could close my eyes again and pretend fairies existed.  I went with the truth because it felt like the right thing at the time.  Which is not to say that I haven’t had regrets and wish that I still believed in fairies.

The ChickieNob’s tooth fell out while she was with my parents, a fitting ending to my tooth fairy story.  They were playing rummy and my mother asked her for a card and my daughter handed her a tooth.  She told me that it had been annoying her because it was wobbling about so she pushed it out–with her tongue? with her finger?  And we stepped over to the other side–the loss of baby teeth.  The start of her permanent adult teeth.

I was thinking about her tooth today in regards to blogging.  I have started and stopped various projects throughout the years.  Some have been on-going for years–the Roundup will be 4 years old this summer and IComLeavWe has been going on for almost 2 years.  And others have come and gone after a few months or years.  I let Barren Advice drift away a while back.  The Emoblopedia hasn’t been updated in ages.  Every once in a while, something disappears and then it strikes me to resurrect it.

The loss of the tooth made me realize that now was the right time to put Show and Tell to rest.  Not permanently, perhaps, but at least for a while.  I considered letting it go to 100 posts just to keep things even (it’s currently at 97), but I think that I would like the post about “Country Roads” and West Virginia and Lori to be my last Show and Tell for a bit (or, perhaps forever).  It is fitting to end with her because I got her into blogging so she should be my bookend to the project much in the same way my parent’s role as the tooth fairy has transferred to me.

I could let this project go quietly, but since others participate in it too, it felt like closure needed to be mentioned.  I’ll leave this last one open until Saturday night as always, and then close the participation box.

Baby teeth fall out to make room for new teeth, and I have to admit that part of me has felt that Show and Tell went from one of my favourite parts of the week to a bit of a drag to find something to show.  When her tooth fell out, my thought was to hold the picture another week instead of blogging it organically after it happened because I already had my Show and Tell chosen with Lori.  And that’s not what Show and Tell was ever about.  And so, for the sake of organic blogging, it’s time to let this project fall out to make space for the next idea (at least for the time being).  Because I’m sure there is one rattling around in there, something beyond the new space for the Mondegreens.  There always is.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Last Friday, Lori came for a visit (I thought I was being all clever in the Roundup but…er…everyone guessed it on the first try).  We’ve gotten together two other times, but this is the first time that we had almost five days just to relax and have fun without other things we need to attend.

Her online name is Lavender Luz (which, by the way, I have always pronounced as “luhz; rhymes with buzz” rather than “looz; rhymes with booze.”–Mondegreen!), and it perfectly describes the light that is apparent in her and around her.  Lori brings the peace into the room.  Being with her is like sitting in the sunshine with a slight breeze.

And that’s what we did: we sat in the sun and ate a shitload of cake and teased Josh and met up with other friends.  We had girl time every night and played with the twins and watched Jamie Oliver cry.  It was this amazing visit and I cried leaving the airport.

On Saturday, I took her out to West Virginia, which is one of my special places.  I shyly told her that I like to listen to John Denver as I drive there, and she told me that she likes him too.  Right as we crossed over the Potomac River into WV, with Harper’s Ferry peeking out on the right and the bridge over the Shenandoah in front of us, we got to Denver’s “Country Roads” on the CD.  It was literally a perfect moment of being in a happy place and hearing a happy song with a happy person (as in, she makes me happy–Lori is not perpetually in a state of giddy clappiness).  It was a convergence of three things that mean the world to me: West Virginia, this song, and Lori.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.