Hugo says it really well: he thanks his mom for having a life.
…my mother also gave a great gift to my brother and me: she always made it clear that she wasn’t sacrificing her life for us.
and
my mother’s greatest feminist lesson was this: she made it clear that we could not expect women to drop everything for us.
Right on, Hugo.
Caption on wall, by day care staff / aspiring museum curator:
4th & 5th Grade MASTERPIECES
On May 16 and 18 the children created these wonderful works of art, complete with creative names.
I admire the teacher who accepted this masterpiece title with good grace and let it go up on the wall! Every parent who went in there gazed at the wall, perhaps vaguely remembering their own fingerpainting and color-mixing experiments, and then came to J.E.’s masterpiece and busted out laughing at the nerve of the kid to claim “Turd” as the title of his painting, and at the nerve of the school to stick it right up with the others instead of getting him in trouble and making him rename it.
Sancho’s is in a struggling strip mall in Emerald Hills, an unincorporated bit of Redwood City that’s up in the hilly bit — where houses get mega expensive and there’s no sidewalks. In that context Sancho’s is a miraculous piece of real life and public social possibilities, across the street from the gas station and the skeevy Canyon Inn; next to the defunct Emerald City Market (under construction for the last 5 years); next to a nail parlor and a tiny cafe and a corner store.
The fish tacos are humonguous. I remembered them as being delish, and it’s Squid’s favorite taco joint, so, was prepared for heaven.
It was more like fish taco limbo. The tortillas were reasonable, but were flour ones from a package. The fish was dense, heavy, chewy – and I’ve come to prefer light flaky fish. It was good, andn plentiful, but maybe a tiny bit too fishy. The spicy cream sauce … not spicy. Limes! (A huge plus.) Three kinds of salsa in a side bar, and free chips in a basket. The cabbage was okay.
Somehow, it fell short of Al’s. It didn’t have the caribbeanness that I associate with a good fish taco – spicy and citrus. It has the perfectness of a good thai spring roll.
So, Sancho’s was good and has a *great* atmosphere. There’s always hunky cops and firemen and construction workers in there, somehow, chatting. (CANDY.) There’s cool art on the walls, including some retablos that I like a lot. They have free Sancho’s fridge magnets. It has a hang-out feel to it, with regular customers. Coca-Cola in oldstyle glass bottles, bottled in Mexico, which tastes different. Soccer was on the flat screen TV, but we sat out at a sidewalk table. (I saw Italy score a point against Ghana.) Close to heavy traffic, and yet pleasant in the way of feeling that we were part of our neighborhood!
Squid’s baby, Mali, read to us from the ABC Seuss book. I swear to god she was saying “F F F” on the correct page. When I sneezed, she blessed me. (How old is she, like 18 months? WTF!) And then she demanded that I walk up and down the sidewalk with her. “I walk! I walk! I walk!” Usually kids that small don’t use pronouns correctly. Ep’s son entertained us by counting the seconds that would make up 10 minutes. I swear to god if his energy could be harnessed, we would solve a lot of the world’s problems – he’s like a wind farm or magma. I wish I had some of that. In between teasing the grownups, he did something mysterious in a mind-meld with his Pokemon Gameboy Thingie, which perhaps is an alien conspiracy to harness that very energy in a little-kid-exploiting SETI@Home project.
What did the cat say to the hamster in the library when they were about to read a book? “Hey, would you like to read my TALE?!”
Moomin made this up today at the library and told it to the librarian, who took 20 points of instant psychic damage from the cuteness. Her eyes rolled back in her head, chthonic beings rumbled deep underground near the San Andreas and Hayward faults, and geese all over the Bay Area turned upside down.
Political organizing, religion, books, feminism, writing, blogging, history, alternate history, poker hands, more books, the conversation went on for hours at my friend Deb’s house, swirling over Moomin’s head as he lay on the floor reading comic books, eating grapes, cookies, and hunks of cheese.
“He’s so good!” (I have no explanation for this. I think by good they mean quiet.)
“Isn’t this boring for him?”
Maybe it’s boring for him… I take him to poetry readings, grown-up parties, conferences, dinners, meetings, and role-playing games. He thinks, probably, that grownups habitually sit around talking about Stuff, with endless boringness. My feeling is that it’s good for him, even though he might not be at all interested – ever – in the kind of thing I enjoy. It seems okay for him to be around it. Plenty of other times, we do something for him, that he enjoys, but our lives don’t revolve around constantly providing perfectly age-appropriate educational experiences.
In other words, hanging out across generations, for kids, means that sometimes the focus is not on them… and that’s okay.
As a bonus, sometimes people read him cool books in restaurants! Deb got into reading “The Cartoon History of the Universe”, the chapter on dinosaurs and evolution. He really appreciates attention. Other grownups tend to give a lot of attention to the louder, more outgoing, demanding kids.
So, I wonder… if you always have your kid in Gymboree and Hobee’s, then they will only know that context of behaving. If you bring them to other contexts, then they learn other ways of being.
Um, in theory. But possibly I’m only saying that because I lucked out to have Moomin who is extremely portable, and will play with books and legos quietly for hours in a corner while I yammer about cultural appropriation and feminist science fiction. But isn’t he at least partly that way because his parents have made it so? And one enjoys reading quietly for hours because of the benign neglect of being hauled to grownup events where amusement has to happen in one’s own brain?
If he grows up and says “God, that was soooo boring,” well, it’s not so bad. He’ll find more interesting things to do soon enough!
I’m at SuperT‘s kid’s birthday party, and the kids are making animal masks out of paper plates. It’s Hamster’s 6th birthday and he’s still pretending to be a cheetah every day.
A party well prepared for and executed by a marvellous creative mom!
Meanwhile, I’m having fancy imported-from-Texas Andersen’s coffee, the kind they serve at Kerbey Lane, and SuperT admonishes her husband to “quit fondling the ice cream scoop”. She turned her back, I grabbed the scoop and gave it a sexy 5-second blow job, nearly making Hamster’s dad pee his pants with laughter. SuperT missed the whole thing.
Then as the Hillsburgh (fancypants! rich!) moms filtered in… I turned to one and was like, “Man, look at this, don’t these glue sticks look weirdly like… tampons?” She looked at me blankly, gasped, and finally said, “Um! Yes! I guess they … Do!”
I’m just way too punchy for this party! I don’t know what hit me. It’s SuperT’s bad influence, she’s the most potty mouthed armpit-farting mom I know.
Moomin just told me, almost too excited to talk, that at recess today he “made up a new movie, called Speed Demon vs. Spiderman, kind of like Daredevil vs. Spiderman, but with a new villain.”
I asked him more about it and got the answer,
“I made up the MOVIE… but not what HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE…”
That sounds like all the novels I’ve never written! Good thing he’s only six. He has plenty of time to make up what happens in his movies.
Warning: sappy.
We used to have it every day: All sitting together watching our kids swirl around like little cartoons of brownian motion on lawns, in sandpits, sidewalks. Now that I don’t have a baby or a toddler, my pace of life is different; our kids are all in different schools, and I’m not such a strong part of that Hive. But once in a while it’s still there for me.
I think the feeling comes back when our kids do something kind for each other. Here, Moomin and Iz were riding herd on baby Mali, to bring her back from her explorations across the park. It’s sort of… a moment you realize is what you were hoping for and visualizing years ago when they were standing around in diapers drooling and throwing sand in each other’s faces while we tried to pretend they were “playing”. This sort of picture, or Eliz. picking up Mali and carrying her like something off Cute Overload. It’s that we are all looking together and there is a muted, and mutual, awareness of “Awwwwwwwwww.” Even though we bribed them with quarters and ice cream to watch the baby, we could pretend it was altruism and filial feeling blossoming in the hearts of our young sprogs!
Another nice moment that was collective – Leelo shocked me by *smiling* at me. He’s autistic, and for years now he’s known to say “Hi Badger” when prompted (sometimes unprompted!) which always is a bit of an honor, and, well, yesterday was the first time I’ve really seen him smile. He smiled at me, he smiled at his mom, he smiled when his dad showed up. It was just a flash, but it had his eyes in it, you know? I nearly burst into tears. And then he sat down and leaned up against me, and just sat there, quietly, hanging out and looking around. That’s surely new. I was wrapped up in half the picnic blanket, and smoothed part of it around his shoulders, and he didn’t squirm away. There was a sort of pause as the moms contemplated this as a group. We didn’t need to go into it, but… a shared meaningful moment.
What I mean is: we’re not the point anymore. They are. They are so much more their own people. We can’t throw them together and expect them to work because they’re around the same ages. Our own friendships are about us – but over time, also about them. So it’s amazing to feel so connected to all of my friends’ children and to worry over them, and to be proud of their triumphs.
Anyway. I wasn’t feeling super healthy and so, when Rook got there, I stayed just a bit longer to watch him run up and down the field with all the kids in a crazy soccer game. & then limped off to drive home and go to bed early!
I hope this summer has a ton of hanging-out and watching our kids do amazing things!
Jo Spanglemonkey and I made a pact to eat fish tacos at every possible place in Deadwood City, and to blog it thoroughly. We started with her favorite one, Al’s Fish and Chips, on Roosevelt near Alameda de las Pulgas, in a humble neighborhood strip mall alongside a liquor store, a decrepit Ace Hardware, the cafe that used to be Nancee’s Coffee (entertainingly run by Nancee who liked to tell you all about how she only had one lung), and the Italian deli.
Al’s is unique in being a fish taco place with a “fish and chips” slant to it. There’s vinegar on the tables along with four flavors of bottled hot sauce, but the fish tacos come with rice and very home-style Cuban black beans.
So! I took notes, but they’re in HER notebook. What I can remember is this: The fish is delicate and bland, battered with excellent crunchiness. The cabbage is nice and fresh, the creamy fish-taco-sauce creamy yet pleasantly spicy. There was a dab of salsa in there, separate from the creamy sauce. Al’s used to have limes – AS IT SHOULD BE – and yet on this visit, looked at me like I was insane for asking, and could only provide extra lemon slices.
The rice is spanish rice, unspectacular but good, and the black beans extremely good, kind of like soup, with large chunks of green chile pepper and lots of cumin.
Unfortunately, the corn tortillas were somewhat… stiff and stale. I love, love, love a tender corn tortilla. As I bit into my otherwise delish fish taco, I thought with longing of Las Manitas restaurant in Austin, where the tortillas are always superfresh – they’re like melting snowflakes.
But back to Al’s. I enjoy their unpretentious, yet not squalid, atmosphere. Soda is in cans. Tacos neatly wrapped in foil. The radio is always tuned to 91.something, which is the funk/soul station. Big windows look out into the scenic strip mall parking lot, which baked and shimmered in the sun, and if you go in the afternoon for a teatime taco, you are entertained by loitering teenagers who come to get ice cream from the Baskin Robbins.
Our conversation was of meds and moods, friends and partners, novels, poems, conferences, and blogs. We took photos of each other looking very full of fish.
A couple of weeks ago we got back from vacation and I went to report to Moomin’s school that I had forgotten to pick up the Independent Study packet. He only missed one, maybe 2 days of school. But I’d forgotten to call in and formally report that we’d be gone. The front office ladies rolled their eyes disdainfully at me. Then they said that they appreciated my being a Responsible Mom.
Well, last week it happened again. This time I reported beforehand! We were only going to miss one day of school! But then our flight was cancelled, and I had bronchitis and was lying around on the floor in various airports, and then the next day it was cancelled and delayed again and so we were two days late.
Scene in front office of school:
“So… our flight was delayed…”
“For TWO DAYS?” (Disbelief from both Office Ladies.)
“Yes… first it was delayed, then cancelled, then the next day it was delayed again so that we missed our connection…”
“Surely not for TWO days. I’m sure that… So what was the “reason” that so many flights were messed up?”
“Horrible thunderstorms, all over the Midwest.”
“Well. Good thing you let us know AFTERWARD. Why didn’t you call?”
“I was in airports… I was sick… it was all kind of horrible…”
“Thanks for letting us know now.”
“You’re welcome. Glad it’s possible to straighten it out.”
“You’re such a good, responsible mom!” (condescendingly, but not with sarcasm)
OMG, it was so nasty. It was clear that they said I was a responsible mom because they were trying to use a Technique to make me be more of one. Like praising your bratty kid for the one minute that they behave.
I feel sure that they don’t treat Rook this way when he deals with them. No, it is criticism reserved for women, to socialize them into behaving a certain way. If I’m not doing that job properly, they see it as their job to fix me. But if Rook’s not doing that job properly, it is also my failure, and it’s their job to tell me either to fix him or to do it myself. Blah.
I’m still sick, but took Moomin to the park. It was summery, hot but with a cool breeze, and I put the blanket in the shade so I could lie down.
Moomin was skeptical as we waited 5 minutes for the water to turn on. (It comes on at particular times every day.)
“You can take off your shoes and feel the cool grass between your toes.”
“Um, but what if there’s dirt? Or sticks? My feet will get dirty.”
“It’s okay to get dirt on feet. That’s what feet are for. Seriously it’s okay.”
“Um, yeah right. I don’t think so. I would rather put on my sandals.”
Oooookay. And then he was super scared of the water fountains. Magic! As soon as they came on and he stuck his toes in, he got excited and ran — barefooted — back to the blanket to put on his bathing suit! Ran back to the water! Ran, yelled, splashed, and got wet all over. That’s never happened before.
After a while the big kids descended, play got a little rougher, and he came back shivering in the breeze. I was so happy to see him all frisky and daring!
We missed Squid, but a bunch of other bad moms were there on the blankets, chatting & watching the kids run around. Sophie was modest about running around in underwear. “No! I just want to go in the water in my jeans!!” I lent her Moomin’s shorts, but she was still embarrassed. “Don’t look at me! Don’t even THINK about me!” she screamed from behind a tree while putting on the shorts. I tried to persuade her that no one cares if it’s your underwear as long as you’re still a little kid, and also told her the horrible story about a girl who went in a pool in her jeans and fell asleep and woke up with the jeans shrunk and no circulation. “They had to cut off her legs,” added Jo helpfully. (We were trying to avoid having to deal with wet jeans in the car.) “You’ll have no legs, and you’ll never get married!” someone else said. There was a pause as we all considered the completely wrong implications of that statement… “Oh. Hmm. No. I had not considered… I take that back especially considering the company I’m in.” “Yeah. Don’t get married.” *gales of inappropriate laughter from moms” I think we succeeded in embarrassing her over this more than the underwear-embarrassment, because she finally ran off to play in the water.
We had popsicles, ring pops, and realistic candy cigarettes with powdered sugar and filter tips. Jo shared watermelon and potato chips.
Before the crowd descended, Moomin cuddled up to me. We looked up at the trees, where two kites were stuck. “If I had a brontosaurus, it could get those kites. Or if I had a robotic telescoping arm. That would be useful! Or, maybe just a very stretchy arm.” He’s been reading Plastic Man comic books. I lay there feeling very sentimental about his dreamy imagination. I’m glad his imaginary-friend brontosaurus is still around.
It was summery in every possible way!
But I still have bronchitis, and I’m in bed again, ready for a nap.
I had a great weekend at Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention in Madison. There’s too many stories to tell, and I came back with bronchitis!
But here’s a cute photo of “the Goat”, obafugakum and drakenfly‘s baby, asleep at Wiscon. Ellen Klages, Nalo Hopkinson, and Naomi Kritzer autographed her outfit!
The conference had good day care and a kids’ track for programming. I was so grateful! For nighttime, I found a great babysitter off craigslist. some people looked at me strangely when I said this, but… what can I say. I web-stalked her, found the newspaper articles she wrote for the student newspaper… looked on Facebook… and then talked to her on the phone. It’s funny to think what makes us comfortable with a caretaker. She turned up with a laptop and several DVDs which she made sure I was okay with Moomin watching, and construction paper and crayons and tape, and I think more supplies! Another mom I met in the Láadan and Klingon language session brought her son, and our intrepid caretaker was unfazed. In fact she took the kids outside to run around the entire Capitol building. Their knight names were Sir Porcupine and Sir Stinky, and they slayed every tree-dragon at the Capitol. The next night, she took them out for ice cream! If you want her email and number and live in Madison, I’d be happy to pass it on!
Saw Kira with her baby, and Matt and Janet with theirs, and wished I could help more. They were heroes of the revolution! It’s hard work to have a baby in that kind of super exciting environment.
I confess I gushed at Lois McMaster Bujold in the elevator. I couldn’t help it.
Fighting words from Nancy Mitford’s character Fanny, heroine of The Pursuit of Love:
So we worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without Nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.
It’s near the end of the book, where the sisters all have to move to a big freezing cold country house with a lot of small children because of the air raids on London during the war.
I notice in reading this sort of book how several generations of a family will call the nanny “Nanny”… you never know all through a book or a biography what the woman’s name is. It’s *so* bizarre to imagine having someone be part of your family but always be lower class and be treated like dirt.
Or is it bizarre? I can certainly imagine a society organized differently than mine, where my role as housewife and mother seems just as odd and uncomfortable.
I’m really unclear, too, on why the lower-status person (the nanny, or in our case, the mother/housewife/homeschooler) is supposed to be the natural and proper person to do the “civilizing” and to transmit upper class behavior. So according to Mitford’s character’s philosophy, the more aristocratic you were, the more important it was for you to be raised by someone who was *not* part of that aristocracy and who was basically a slave, someone with no status or power of their own. I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. Why would that be?
Nannies in these sort of books are always the comic relief… they are mindless, silly, maddening, and fussy. They love to complain about nothing. They’re essentially childish in that they fuss about trivial things and they are fit only for the company of children and each other. I’m just noticing that their role still exists and is now the role of any mother in the U.S. (For the stay at home dads… yes, it applies to you too. it’s the role that’s important, and you’re in it, but it’s strongly gender-linked.) Anyway, nannies are silly and annoying to real grownups who do important things. Nannies are always affectionate and motivated by love, and any urge for power can be satisfied by petty tyranny over “the nursery”. The loyal nanny stays in the family for several generations but as she gets older she doesn’t get wiser; she just gets more silly and annoying although always unconsciously and instinctively good at heart. She never wants or needs a life of her own.
(Until Mary Poppins who was completely cool… read the real book, which is not at all like the movie. Mary Poppins was a goddess, or really The Goddess, as well as being a trash-talking young woman with a red nose and a fondness for cheap hats, surreptitiously looking at her reflection in shop windows.)
Now that I think of it, Elsie Dinsmore’s “Mammy” fits right into the same picture. And she actually had been a slave but was freed by Elsie’s family (who were anti-slavery during the civil war and whose house was attacked by the KKK afterwards.) So, she was a slave (I think from New Orleans originally) and then of course continued in her role as nameless, silly, fussy, annoying, unthinking, heart-of-gold, never-needing-anything-of-her-own nanny to Elsie and then to Elsie’s children.
I’m trying to take an uncomfortable look at what happened to this (percieved… mythological…) role and this attitude towards it. Obviously the myth is still with us. . . do you see it?
Well, that’s it for my digression on nannies.
It is comforting when I arrive at the day care center and find Moomin playing rambunctiously with a squirming mass of children. Usually he hangs back from roughhousing or active play, so the rare times when I see him in the thick of things, laughing and yelling, it makes me weirdly happy for him.
I like it that his temper is quiet and his usual spot is on the floor or pillows, reading or dithering around with little animals and action figures . . . I was also that way as a kid, and so I understand it. And yet I want to know that he’s not missing out on rough and tumble play. Today I saw that he trusts the other kids enough not to kick him in the head! He wasn’t afraid, and they were all nice to him, and he was nice to them. Beautiful! Possibly I also worry a little that he is so low-key in a crowd that he misses out on basic exuberance.
I think the kid in this photo is his new friend Nadiel, who “borrowed” his lego dinosaur a few weeks ago. So that’s also nice to know, that he’s not holding grudges the way he often does.
I think he’ll have fun there this summer!
If anyone wants to live across the street from my parents in ass-end-of-nowhere, Houston, there’s 2900 square feet of house for sale for $215,000.
HAHAHAHA!
At 6am we woke up to a call from Rook’s work, so he spent the day in emergency debugging mode. I worked on my school stuff, the very last of the paperwork and “self-assessment” and “goals”, and then right as I was about to leave, Moomin’s school called. He was crying and feeling sick to his stomach. He got home without barfing and even calmed down in the car; then went to sleep within about 10 minutes with a microwaveable pillow on his belly.
Off to school with my printouts! Everything was super smooth and in fact I did way more than I needed to. My advisor chatted with me for a while. I want to stay in touch… I told him my summer goal: 50 rejection slips. It was cool to see him have an epiphany – good payback from all the teaching and advising! I was all dressed up for dinner out, and he was in shorts and a scruffy tshirt when usually he is all prepped out.
As I drove off I had this wistful feeling as I passed the mall. I could get new converse sneakers… all my old ones have holes… maybe they have some good colors and I could be fancy for Wiscon. Instead I bought some mac lipstick and a ridiculous, ridiculous belt from Hot Topic with rainbow colored metal studs. OMG! It’s silly! The Hot Topic cashier asked for my ID, just in case I was stealing my mom’s credit card, and then did a double take as she saw the age and I was a little embarrassed.
To dinner with A. and Chula to celebrate Chula’s novel. We had an extremely delicious fancy dinner at Delfina. The guy next to us was listening, totally, as we talked about raunchy incidents from our pasts (“And then the prof was snorting lines off her butt!” “Oh yeah well my old prof was making his girlfriend shoot ping pong balls out of her coochie for the whole class over at his house!” such was academia during the culture wars, early 90s) and all kinds of gossip about science fiction writers and whether Mars is closer than Venus. I said Mars’s orbit is closer. (Obviously which planet is closer at any given time depends…) We made fun of many writers and of the idea of “hard” science fiction. We speculated on who we were going to hit on at Wiscon. Then we tried to think of all all possible stories about Mars.
OMG the food. We had some sort of pureed mullet crostini with not-caviar on it… you know… sort of almost caviar… And arugula… and some sort of other fish puree thing with cod, ahi with the fanciest most perfect lemon aeoli, and perfectly cooked medium rare… capers and lentils and “fennel-glazed baked fennel” which, damn. And polenta, and wine, and other stuff. Really good. The chocolate dessert thing was warm and gooey with creme anglaise.
Afterwards a little bit of messing about with blog code, but what we tried didn’t work and would clearly take a couple more hours at least of messing around and testing. It became clear that we need to do a complete site redesign (not this blog – a different group one) along with the upgrade. Then we read all about “neuticles” and laughed hysterically!
Half my weekend was spent here at Elia’s 10th birthday party. It felt like the kids are on the edge of being teenagers. Instead of a bounce house and formless running-around and a piñata, they played board games, video games, bocce ball, Dance Dance Revolution, sang karaoke, and danced campily. I don’t think I would have had the wits to dance with irony until I was 14…. wait… is that true?
No. I remember the 6th grade dance at which I slow danced with Derek Shotwell and then, in between long, sleazy, gossipy curling iron and joan-jett-raccoony-eyeliner sessions in the bathroom, I danced with a group of girls led by the queen of the Christian side-of-the-head ponytail girls, the wholesomely lipglossed Cherie Thrasher. I put in their real names for comic effect in case they google themselves. Hi y’all! Cherie and her sister did bizarre 60s dance moves, perhaps out of Elvis movies, like fake swimming, where you hold your nose and pretend to be going underwater… and other go-go dancing things that seemed hilarious and campy to me and yet it seemed everyone else was doing them with deadly serious intent to be cool.
This weekend, the adults hovered at this party, watching and feeling out of place, clearly all realizing the train was hurtling down the tracks and what if these kids all start dating each other, my god!? All Jo and Manny’s friends reminisced about the first times they met – at around age 12. Not so far off. Clearly they were thinking about the acid they dropped and the things they lit on fire at 3am after sneaking out of the house, and the spray paint administered — or whatever their equivalent delinquency. There was a feeling of appalled “steeling ourselves”. At 11, I was sneaking out to wrap houses in toilet paper, smoke clove cigarettes, and skinny dip in neighborhood pools, and I was particularly nerdy and uncool… it was only because of my exciting delinquent friend down the block, really.
We hope Elia will enter her double digits more gracefully and will find excitement in something much cooler than huffing glue out of paper bags. Perhaps a more idealistic delinquency like political activism. I just read Jessica Mitford’s “Hons and Rebels” and it was amazing because it was exactly the sort of life that my dad predicted for me. When I was only a little older than Elia, my family had yelling matches about how I was absolutely forbidden to do any sort of “study abroad” program because my dad was convinced I would run off into the mountains with Maoist guerillas. He was entirely correct, and that was my plan, and I would have ended up like Mitford, pregnant and not being revolutionary at all but working stupid odd jobs in order to survive, which is not far from my eventual fate, minus the machine gun repair lessons and mud.
One watches the innocent karaoke and wants to grab them all and shake them… “Do you realize you could do anything? ANYTHING?”
Moomin greeted me this afternoon by demanding “Books about Linux”.
My baby! Growing up so soon! I’m so proud!
“Um… wow. Really? “
“Yes! I saw something in a book about Linuxes, and I want to know all about them. I want to find a picture of a Linux. And of a commando dragon. And did you know that male parrotfish can turn into female parrotfish?”
“Oh! Lynxes!”
*forehead smack*
One more time, I’ll fix errors and print this sucker out on the fancy 25% cotton paper. I have to go chasing my thesis readers all over town and then go to 2 offices to turn in forms, have the thing checked again, and then to stand in line at the bindery, I guess.
I’m so exhausted, and it was a day where my knee was bad. Not a good time to have to walk all over campus. Also, my pride was hurt when… as I stupidly tried to hide my limp… I was caught by my advisor as we went down the stairs. I was like, “Oh, maybe the elevator… uh… ” but it was just one floor. Anyway, it sucked and I was embarrassed.
I was almost giddy at holding the humonguous manuscript with signatures on it & the weight started to lift off me. I thought of how much harder I *could* have worked… and that I was dumb not to get extra child care back in February so that I could have had a way earlier completed rough draft of the whole manuscript, and more time for the revisions to “cook”… But instead I was dumb and put the extra childcare at the very end. Well, I needed that too. Then I went right into a nasty guilt-spiral, which I’m still in, about the huge amount of time I spend away from Moomin, and how much my doing all this school had an impact on him. All the things that go undone, and the times I am too busy or grouchy to play, and how I haven’t taken him to the dentist in a year, and he’s not signed up for any sort of fun activity or lessons. He doesn’t even bother to ask me to play anymore, he just goes off by himself.
Prof. DJ was super nice. And again, so meticulous and helpful. I had no idea what to expect… at all… from this whole process. Because of what this other kind of jerky prof in the CW dept. said, and how she acted, I thought that I was on my own, because they didn’t have time to help us really and didn’t get paid extra for it, and I’d just have to do the defense, produce a manuscript, and maybe if I was lucky they’d read it once, comment, and give me a chance to fix it, so I could pass and graduate. And that I’d be super lucky to have even one person read it all the way through more than once. Instead, they both read it multiple times despite it being over 200 pages long and in 2 languages, and gave me extensive comments and suggestions… That was amazing! I really didn’t know that was what it would be like, and I’m so grateful!
Prof. Worky was really extra nice today, and invited me for coffee sometime and told me all about the poetry journal she’s starting and her own work and when I asked her about this one thing she’d done in the past she was completely forthright about it. I wanted to know sort of “what was it like for you as a feminist to be in this position…” and it was exactly as I had thought. That was good to know, somehow, even if it was a bit depressing of a thought.
And yet on this whole other level I’m like, WTF, what am I doing this degree for? Is this whole thing not just dumb selfishness on my part? I’ve been a total parasite for over 3 years, aside from my attempts to work part time, where I was lucky to make 500 bucks a month. I’m not being a good student, a good mom, or making any money. It all seems kind of pointless. Is it really going to get me any sort of work? What should I be doing now? What should I have been doing all this time? I’ve spent money to do it, and haven’t been working to bring in money, and then on top of it I spend more on babysitting. It’s like anything I do for my own education comes directly out of my child’s education, present and future. There is no way to fix that. It’s just true.
I just was staring at the marked-up front pages of the thing I thought today was the final thesis — but the horrible bureaucrats in the graduate division office told me that my abstract and title page had to be justified text which meant i had to go home and print it out again and get the signatures on those pages again — and I realized just now that I had no idea if this *other* page was correctly formatted or not — and I could hear Moomin arguing with Rook about getting in the bathtub, in the other room — and suddenly I just BROKE. I was like, damn, I cannot take this, I’m trying to be so strong about everything, and no one gets it about the pressure to be a Good Mom, everything, everything… the pressure to be everything at once… and how impossible it is. The weight of the responsibility and the certain knowledge that anything at all that goes wrong will be my fault, as a mother. I will have done something wrong… and I put the weight of it on my kid, like, if he is not perfect, somehow, it will destroy my whole concept of the point of my life… and that’s obviously not right! Not that I believe that at ALL, but I now understand how parents do it whether they mean to or not. People who aren’t in it don’t get it, and people who are, it’s too late, they’re in the same boat you are and you’re sitting there going “Oh. Crap. I guess I can’t smash the patriarchy all on my lone, after all, despite all these advantages…”
I thought of my conversation with a mom-acquaintance this morning as I got coffee on my way to campus, as we passed the baby back and forth and she rambled about her career… “Who’s going to hire me at 45? And even if they do, one of the kids gets sick and that’s it… I offered to go to no benefits and half time, but they said that wouldn’t work… all that training, for nothing now, it didn’t do them any good.” She has 4 more years till her youngest hits kindergarten and until then she is completely screwed and has to make the best of it all. It was just like, her hearing me say that I had done *anything* or had any goals… which I had been talking about to her… threw her into that same horrible tailspin of self-doubt. I told her how it was for me when I had a good job and a babysitter, (Just as much guilt and doubt, not any more money since it all went to the babysitter and ordering out food, and still just as much housework. With extra guilt for exploiting the babysitter.)
Anyway, I burst into tears at all this, and then cried more because of the guilt over feeling like I should not be crying. I went and got Rook to hear me out for a few minutes. Whatever I do, I should be doing something else. The pressure is so relentless.
Hell and damnation.
He nicely told me how pointless he felt his own thesis was, and that it was not even a brick in the wall of the castle of science, and at least mine was a solid brick in a castle and contributing to knowledge. He also said I was a good person and a good mom. It is hard to hold to those beliefs, knowing they are just beliefs, and irrational, and I really have no clue what I’m doing most of the time if ever, just like everyone else out there. I write this down not knowing if I should, and knowing that instead of bursting into tears I should be working on the very last bits of thesis or else helping to put Moomin to bed.
Is it strange that the only really comforting idea right now is that I will keep working on it all, and send out all the little bits of it, and keep working on it as a huge growing manuscript to become a book? That seems like another dumb illusion and I don’t see why it would be comforting or have any more point than anything else, and it certainly won’t make me a lick of money, ever, and buttloads of people are waiting to criticize me for how I do it , the flaws in it, the fact that I’m doing it at all, who I am, and what the work makes me become. So why do I care so much about it? Is this worth what it does to the rest of my life? Why am I doing all of this? Will I get any closer to independence, ever again? Why am I still crying?
Could this please be over, somehow, and something new begin?
“I’m so proud of you for keeping going on the trail even though your feet were wet from the snow and you were tired. Also, I was super proud of you for opening the gate in the cave. That was really brave!”
“Yup, I know.”
We totally shoved him forward when the park ranger asked for someone to help him open the gate. It was iron and shaped like an enormous spooky spiderweb! Dark, wet, spooky, batty-looking.
I told Moomin some other things offhand in the car and while hiking, like how to tell where north is from the moss on trees, how granite is made from cooling magma, and what to do when you meet a mountain lion. A day later I asked him about meeting a lion:
“Well, it’s very simple. You just stand up tall, and go like this with your arms, to look as big as you can, and try to look like a bear, and make a lot of noise. And if you are with a grownup, the grownup should pick you up, so you both look bigger. And don’t run. That way, the mountain lion will not think you are its prey.”
He was listening, you bet. Possibly he’s been reading those warning signs in the park all along and he’s been planning his response to mountain-lion-sighting since he was three.
I’m home now after successfully rescuing everyone I know from dreadful imaginary hiking accidents, anaphylactic shock, hangnails, and nuclear fallout. Also, as I drove past the San Luis Reservoir I tried to plan my escape strategies if the dam should start breaking slowly enough for a response to be possible. Where would I run, or drive, or climb? Would survival be possible? Would it be best to climb a pylon or a tree, if we pretended for a moment that I had upper body strength given to me by a surge of disaster adrenaline? What if there were a more moderate disaster and I had to survive for days with only the things in the cab of my truck?
It’s very simple, just like mountain lions. You let the imaginary disaster know you are not its prey! Standing up and roaring works great. Also, climb on top of the nearest grownup.
