We cannot eat enough salad. With the greens we get each weekend from our community farm and the greens that have bolted in our garden, our refrigerator is looking as full as I am. This is not the proper way to store greens:

Last night I made chard with rice and lemon juice. I had a breakthrough moment a couple of weeks ago when I was cooking rice and spinach: they could go together. And maybe add some spices. Call it a dish. Lemon brightens the chard — adds a culinary high note where there’s a lot of sour. Rice is the base, the middle C. Plus some garlic for the lowest notes. I cut the ribs out of all the chard we gathered from our Community Farm (though we haven’t yet touched the rainbow chard from our garden). A large silver bowl-full wilted down in the cooking process to what looked like not enough. But there were enough vitamins in our dish last night that if we get sick, then nothing can save us. We ate it all.

June 19th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

When I was young and read a lot, wedged between my bed and the wall, I would not let myself look at the back of the books because I didn’t want to know what the plot was. It seemed to cheapen the story even then to sum it up as a plot. A book to me even then wasn’t about that — it was about falling into another space, getting inside another person’s head, being filled with language.

When I’m on long car rides with Rosie and Steve, we get books on tape that tend to be mysteries with a plotline that makes time scurry: quick to the end to see who did it, quick Illinois, Iowa, disappear Ohio. But I need Rosie and Steve to tell me what’s happening: I can’t follow plot very well. I get caught up in the cornfields, then pulled into the language, tone, the funny voice of the narrator and what accent he uses per character and whether or not he sticks to it. I wonder where the paragraphs are, I think about kinds of clouds, I wonder when the next McDonald’s is and what the name is of the river we’ve just passed.

I read Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss twice. The first time I read it, I didn’t know who any of the characters were. I got to the end and truly had no idea what had happened, though I didn’t care, I just loved to read the book: I would read passages, stop to think about poetry, read some more, get absorbed into the details of the house and the land. There is so, so much detail in this book — it made me feel sometimes like it could be poetry, and that I was wasting my time with line breaks. I did often have to stop to write, I felt overcome with the beauty of the language. –And there are also a lot of characters and time shifts — too many for my sorry plotless brain. I confess that even on the second read I finished not quite knowing the relation of everyone to everyone else (this is my fault, not the book’s).

I finished last night at one in the morning and I felt that feeling that the best literature gives: sort-of tearful, full, sad for this crazy world, in love with language and, truly, its near-omnipotence, in love with humans and our potential.

(Here’s a passage.)

The cook sat with a letter in front of him, blue ink waves lapped the paper and every word had vanished, as so often happined in the monsoon season.

He opened the second letter to find the same basic fact reiterated: there was literally an ocean between him and his son. Then, once again, he shifted the burden of hope from this day to the next and got into his bed, hooked onto his pillow — he had recently had the cotton replaced — and he mistook its softness for serenity.

In the spare room, Gyan was wondering what he had done — had he done the right thing or the wrong, what courage had entered his foolish heart and enticed him beyond the boundaries of propriety? It was the bit of rum he had drunk, it was the strange food. It couldn’t be real, but incredibly, it was. He felt frightened but also a little proud. “Ai yai yai ai yai yai,” he said to himself.

All four inhabitants lay awake as outside the rain and wind whooshed and banged, the trees heaved and sighed, and the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky over Cho Oyu.

June 18th, 2009 | Category: inward, overheard | Leave a comment

I remember once when I was seven or eight years old coming in from a long summer day of running around outside. All that running, sweating, it was dark out by the time I made it inside. Then being at the bathroom sink with a cup and filling it up with the coldest water and drinking it all, the whole cup in a few sips, then doing it again, then trying to do it again. Water when you really need it tastes like nothing else. Not a taste, a feeling: all my cells stinging with gratitude.

One of the best parts of being pregnant is that I get that feeling every day, every glass of water I drink. Each glass is the best water I’ve ever tasted.

June 17th, 2009 | Category: inward | Leave a comment

June 16th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

We took a four-day trip to Illinois this weekend to celebrate Steve’s grandmother’s 80th birthday. This, I realized, is the heart of our food industry. Pesticides make all that wheat and corn look perfect. It’s really beautiful, and a lot of work.

June 16th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

I haven’t had one of these fake-backdrop photos done since I was graduting from high school. We had to do them for the photo directory for our church. It was way more fun than it should have been to have some dorky photographer in polyester waving a squeaky toy above the camera to try to get Rosie to smile. This photo is so timeless, it spooks me. Who are these people?

June 16th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

When I was in undergrad I used to think that when I became a parent my kids would be artistic sidekicks. I pictured listening to them, believing everything they said, and they would grow up naturally without too many rules.

But the first kid I was given positively thrives under structure. Maybe because she has a mother who can listen and cuddle, but with Rosie I have had to stay strict. Jack doesn’t need quite so much steering, but with Rosie, especially when I met her, if we didn’t keep a rigid schedule she’d crumble. Every transition every shift every minute past her bedtime caused exponential chaos.

I was not so good at this at first. I wanted to be a poet, not a cruise ship director. There was a period of six months where we couldn’t afford a vacuum cleaner and so I didn’t ever sweep or vacuum. We never knew what we were having for dinner or when — especially because I was in graduate school and there wasn’t money to buy food. We couldn’t afford diapers and so we’d wrap Jack in towels and plastic bags at night. We couldn’t afford heat so we’d pile blankets on top of Rosie at night. I was in graduate school and trying to be a poet and also trying to help Steve keep his family afloat: often that meant I graded papers instead of going on family walks, or I read books instead of cooking dinner. I just couldn’t balance a kid who needed so much order out of me when I was 23 and my whole life was a mess, I’d never learned to cook or do laundry and I had a whole lot of schoolwork to do. But if there wasn’t dinner on the table at 6, she’d get anxious, hover; I’d watch her eyes fill with worry, expectation and disappointment.

Right now the house is clean, I know where Rosie is, I know what’s for dinner, I know when dinner will be, I know that the pets are healthy and contained. There’s still so much chaos inside, and so much that needs to be done, oh Lord so much more I have to work on in myself, but this house is the kind of place where a kid can enter and there is enough under control that a kid is free to be a kid.

I wonder what it will be like this time. Once my sister and I were in a rest stop in Ohio; we saw a girl with a long braid, a red sweater, polka-dot skirt, and striped stockings. She was quietly leaned up against a wall, reading a book, waiting for her family to come back from the bathroom. That’s what your kid will be like, my sister told me. No, that will be Meghan’s kid — my sister Meghan was born inherently more organized than I am, and she was born with a compass inside while I was most definitely not. I’ll have the organized kid who tells me what to do. And maybe that was true then, maybe a kid would have had to counteract my chaos. There’s just no telling who we will be given, but I do believe that we are given the creatures who help us learn the most we can. To me that’s a little scary but mostly reassuring.

June 16th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

When I came along, Rosie was in an elementary school that didn’t have grades, but it was clear that she had trouble with the most general organization, focusing on homework, remembering what was due, and caring about her work. A couple of years later, the school was warning that they might have to hold her back.

We transitioned her in eighth gade to a school that had grades and could help her with her organization — some kids thrive in Rudolph Steiner-like schools, especially if they’re self-motivated, but some kids flounder. Rosie tested early on in the top 5% for intelligence, but her life had been hard enough and her depression heavy enough that she couldn’t find it in herself to care. Eighth grade was her hardest year. The transition to a new school is probably never easy, and she was seeing that, compared to other students, she was less capable of focusing, remembering her homework, or staying organized enough to turn things in. All of our efforts to help her just made her angry, more resistant, less logical and more emotional. Twice I sat in parent-teacher meetings that year where they told me they might have to hold her back.

By the end of that year, we all convened and tried to figure out how to help her make it through ninth grade. At that point, Steve and I decided that we had to give her up at night — trying to remember her homework AND transitioning her belongings from one house to another from week to week was not helping her stay on par with other students. We created a schedule where Steve and I pick her up from school, help her with her homework, take her to her tutor, make her dinner, and socialize — at bedtime we drop her off at her mother’s, every night. We spent $2,500 this year on a tutor that has helped her stay organized — she’s a tough lady who demands a lot from Rosie and doesn’t care if Rosie’s not feeling well or not feeling in the mood. It’s amazing, or maybe it isn’t, how much Rosie loves her after all that barking.

At the beginning of the year we weren’t sure if it was working: there were some D’s, some C’s, and one A. Then Rosie learned that she had to do her homework — she had to learn it for herself as a truth, not just as something people told her. Then there were C’s, B’s, and A’s. Then she learned that studying helped her do better on tests.

On Friday she finished her first year of high school with all A’s and B’s. She’s on the swimteam without anyone pushing her but herself, and she has a whole group of friends who swim and keep her out of trouble, and she even had a boyfriend. It has been the most amazing year to watch her earnestly push aside all the weight of pain and confusion. This is the first time I’ve seen her really thrive; it is beautiful to watch.

June 16th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

I am going to start by cutting the suspense right out and saying that everything at the doctor’s office went really well today: the fetus (do I dare call it a baby yet?) looked awesome.

But it wasn’t easy. I went in a ball of nerves. Poor Steve. When I get nervous I get easily irritated and somewhat claustrophobic and definitely touchy. Especially now? Especially now. We waited in a windowless room for a long time, maybe half an hour. Every magazine made my stomach literally turn. Did I want to read about babies? No! Don’t jinx me. How about Cosmopolitan? Ew! Did I want to read Country Living? No way. It had an ugly muffin on the cover.

The midwife came in and didn’t recognize me. (The midwife: that’s the cool part, as long as we remain low-risk: we get a midwife in a birthing center at the hospital, which means we get a noninvasive delivery in a facility that could cut me open and pull a baby out in three minutes if it absolutely needed to.) I wanted her to remember me. She’s the one who I initially went to who referred me to reproductive endocrinology. I had liked her then. Today I was too nervous to like anyone probably. But I wanted her to connect with me, to at least look in my chart and pretend that she remembered me. She started off by asking if we had any questions. We had so many questions, but I didn’t want to start that way. My questions were too specific and looked silly scribbled in my dying cursive in a notebook on my lap. Steve started it by saying, Wine, Cystic Fibrosis, and decaf. I didn’t want to talk about wine first. Did I mention I felt cranky with anxiety? But here we were, and so the midwife gave her stock response: no amount of alcohol has been considered safe. But what about non-alcoholic wine, which has as much alcohol as orange juice? She repeated that no amount of alcohol is considered safe, then she said that I shouldn’t drink too much juice, either.  I asked her about kombucha. She didn’t know what kombucha was. I asked her if she’d ever heard of Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions, but she hadn’t. I wanted to cry. After all this confusion about what to do, what to eat, I wanted to talk with someone who I trusted. I asked about cod liver oil but she’d never heard of that. I said that it’s only controversial because it contains a natural form of vitamin A, but she said she saw a woman who took vitamin A supplements and her child was born with all sorts of birth defects, so she didn’t recommend I took cod liver oil. I asked about decaf, and she said I could have as much as I wanted. I said I’d read several studies that it increased the miscarriage rate by 2.5 times, but she said she hadn’t heard that. I felt as if I were talking to the most un-Ann Arbor midwife I could find. I asked if we should test for cystic fibrosis, and she said I should have done that before I got pregnant. Okay, that’s when I wanted to cry.

She stepped out for a minute and I hopped up on the table undressed. She came back with the doppler machine that detects the baby’s heartbeat. She asked how long we’d been trying if this was through IVF. I told her. Oh, that sounds so exciting, she said. No it wasn’t, Steve said. It totally sucked. But here we are. This midwife was on autopilot, but we were the storm. Maybe she’s used to talking to new mothers-to-be who haven’t just been through a war. Everything had gone wrong for us infertility-wise for two years, I had been poked in every spot and injected with pounds of hormones, I had been in E.R. and cried myself to sleep after a failed IVF and a twin A miscarriage. I wasn’t in the doctor’s office with new hope. I was here just hoping not to hear bad news, hoping to get someone to say that it looked like it was going to be okay and that this, I, was not failing again.

She listened for the heart for five long minutes but the room was quiet. She couldn’t push too hard because half of me down there is cysts. Static sound without a rhythm. More static sounds without a rhythm. She told me she’d be back with the ultrasound machine, with that probe that can get inside and then we can see the baby and hear the heartbeat with a more accurate device. Steve was nervous, but I was mostly numb. I felt chatty now, not wanting to create any more suspense than was already in the moment.

She came back too long later and inserted the probe. All you could see were cysts. She remarked upon them, how big they were and how many. Many minutes of searching, black balloons all over the screen. Everyone was quiet. I saw for a moment what the rest of my day, month, might be like. I saw my bed.

But then there in the corner of the screen you could see that one of the black balloons had something gray-white moving inside of it, and that was the baby. You could tell right away because its arms were moving. Steve pointed out its head and its legs, but what was so crazy was how fast it was moving — it was bouncing all around in the black balloon. Last we saw it, it didn’t even have arms: it had been shaped exactly like a piece of shrimp. This time it was waving furiously, Hey you guys! I’m over here! You could see its heartbeat and it looked normal: a furry gray rhythmic beating in between its arms.

All that motion is happening inside of me right now. There’s a party inside that I’m hosting.

June 10th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (5)