ElementalMom

My friend Pilar sent me a link to this blog, and I found myself nodding, grinning, and really just identifying with, oh I dunno, pretty much everything in the whole blog. On the one hand, it’s paperwork everywhere I look. On the other hand… bring on the crows.

Grandpa Gagan’s birthday is today.

He died when I was 17. And never a year goes by that I do not make my way to the sea on this day. On years where I’m pressed for time, I throw in flowers. In years where I can, I bake his favorite cake, the truly ghastly applesauce spice cake with chocolate icing, and I heave it ceremoniously into the sea for him.

This year is hitting me hard. There are so very many things I want to talk to him about. I think he would have adored his grandchildren, especially Aurora, who is the first female child in the family since me. I think he would have loved the boat, and I think he would have been pleased to know that I was taking my kids back to the place where he took me when I was their age, to learn to freedive in the warm, clear waters of Baja. I think he’d like Jason, and I’m pretty sure Jason would have thought the world of him.

I think about him every single time we sail out under the Golden Gate Bridge. When I was 9 or 10, I don’t remember really which, he brought me to San Francisco with him, to watch five operas in four days at the San Francisco Opera. I learned a lot of things on that trip, but the highlight for me (other than the moment where I discovered that he’d fallen asleep in Boris Gudnov) was the point where he proposed that we walk across the bridge and back. I thought it was fantastic. He later told me that I was the only girl in his life who had ever been willing to do that with him (Grandpa had abysmal taste in women). I think he’d be proud to know that I’ve taken his little foray into being intrepid and gone a few steps further. I think he’d be pleased that “Che gelida manina” still makes me sob like a baby every time I hear it.

I‘m sad that he won’t be in the boys’ life. Due to age and circumstance, I think they were shorted in the grandfather department. My biological father is long dead, Jason’s died right before Rowan turned 1. The Bear is very sick and thoroughly crabby, which basically leaves the ball in Grandpa Allen and Grandpa Charlie’s courts, and they’re in Oregon and Mississippi, respectively. It makes me sad that my kids aren’t going to have the experience I did, of knowing that no matter what, there was someone indomitable popping into your life every few days to check in.

I miss his advice. He only ever gave one piece, no matter what you asked him about. It could be money, food, love, whatever, and he would look at you seriously and say “First, decide what makes you happy. And then, do it.” The older I get, the more wise that seems. I use it a lot, and I have started giving it a lot too. And the youth I use it on are as annoyed with me as I was with him, thinking him glib and nonspecific. I wish he was alive, so that I could say “Grandpa… I finally get it.”

He established the tradition of enchiladas on St. Patrick’s Day, waldorf salad at Thanksgiving, and lasagne on Christmas Eve. He was very much a “food is love” guy, and twenty-three years later, longer gone to me than he was here with me, I still think of him, and still follow his traditions. Including the immediate making of the bed every morning. He had a thing about unmade beds, and right up until I started getting out of bed and leaving small sleeping children behind me, I’d get up, make the bed, and say “Good morning, Grandpa!”

I‘ve lost track of how old he’d have been. I like to think of him as somehow immortal and beneficent, sitting in the afterworld with a soupbowl sized cup of coffee and a newspaper, comfortable as he always was, with the smell of something bubbling away in the oven surrounding him always. That’s the picture that I paint of him, to my boys.

So happy birthday, Grandpa. And as many more as I’m alive to mark them for you.

I received a lovely pep-talk from Christine. We have history — she hired me to do DTP contracting at Borland, years ago. She also hired Jenny, who left Borland, hired me at Sun, then hired Christine as a contractor, and now Jenny and I are gone from Sun, and Christine is doing ubergiggery there.

Over the years, whenever I had serious questions about the big picture of working in tech, I brought them to Christine, who never failed to be a fount of knowledge. Here’s the latest tidbit:

If you can, first take a couple of week of “vacation,” where you truly just debrief and don’t even try to think of why’s and plans. Just breathe. Then, and only then, think about what you loved about working at Sun and go after THAT. I stopped trying to understand why I was laid off, versus X, Y, or Z, after the third time. It will seem dark now, but there will always be something different and better in a different way, ok? Trust your own wonderful self! The good things that you brought with you to Sun that made the good parts of your job are still in YOU, and you can unleash them in your next venture.
Kiss the babies and your hubby, and trust the universe. Love, Christine

What I love about this was the X, Y, or Z part. Not only are the commas correct, even in a quick, personal note, but the idea that The Mighty Christine could ever have been laid off was tremendous. If someone in HR could have willingly let such a fount of wisdom, perspective, insight, and vicious wicked humor go, then clearly sometimes it’s just about the randomness of friendly fire. And that, while not reassuring for the economy, is personally gratifying.

Everyone knows you never pick up hitchhikers.

We were driving home from Christmas in Nevada, at my parents’ place. We’d had a white christmas, the boys’ first ever, and ours too. It was cold cold cold, snowy, and perfectly wintry. We’d had a lovely time (which I’ll talk about in another post). And as we drove past the truck stop and onto the onramp of the I-80, a hitchhiker caught our eye.

He looked young. He looked familiar. And he was holding a sign that said “Sacramento, CA. Any help would be appreciated, thank you!” It was the exclamation and the small smiley face next to it that got me. We drove past him, made it a few hundred yards down the road, looked at each other, and turned around at the next off ramp to circle back and pick him up.

And thus began our journey with “Chip”. That’s not his name, it’s just what he goes by, because someone a long time ago noticed his chipmunk cheeks. It’s a name that suits him.

The boys were instantly thrilled to have someone in back with them. They chatted with him about their bionicles, about the snow, and the cold. They were entranced. He told them about sleeping under the freeway overpass, and they compared that to the warm beds they’d been in. There were some thoughtful looks. They asked him about the feathers dangling off his backpack, and he promptly untied them and gave each boy a feather.

As we chatted, he warmed up considerably. We talked about books, about politics, about world situations, about the state of things. He was stunned that a family in a minivan could hold world views so close to his own. And eventually, we asked the question, “How did you start traveling?”

Tired of the drugs and the chaos in his family of origin, he ran away from home at 14, and hit the road as a Traveler. Apparently, when your expectations are minimal, the world is your oyster. You’d think a kid with a start like that would be rough around the edges, wary, cynical. But not Chip. He was absolutely fabulous. He talked to the boys like they were people, he talked to Jason and I like we were still trustworthy, he talked about the world like he was grateful to be in it. Having slept under the freeway overpass for four days I knew for a fact to have been below 20 degrees, Chip only talked about the beautiful snow, his most excellent sleeping bag, and the kindness of the folks running the truck stop across the street where he got hot coffee in the mornings.

As we drove on, we decided that largesse was in order, so we offered that Chip could come with us, have a hot meal, a shower, and a warm bed, and then head on his way in the morning. So that’s what he did. And a nicer, more colorful, more engaging houseguest, we could not have imagined. He told us tales of his adventures, we told him about our plans for the boat. There was a great deal of mutual admiration on both sides.

So what’s the lesson here? Depends on you, really. The lesson I chose to take from this is that it’s possible to be a whole lot happier with almost nothing than it might be with a whole lot of something. It’d be easy to be a whiner, were you to find yourself in Chip’s circumstances, without anything more in this world than the pack you carry. But that’s overly simplistic. He had friends all over the world, he had places to see, and adventures strung out in front of him as far as he could see. Tomorrow was going to be spectacular, as far as Chip was concerned. And I think a lot of us could try that.

A few days ago, I received this email from a coworker of mine. Ed is an amazing guy; a seriously positive human being, despite being from the Bronx and threatening to break kneecaps sometimes. Ed has a tendency to drop these little gems of wisdom around and not even realize he’s done it. I’m not sure if it isn’t just a case of “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”, but Ed’s unconscious commentary on life and how to live it has helped me out more than once.

Here’s an excerpt from a note he sent our team:

You’re all probably wondering why my continuing series of South America travelogue reports ended after my first dispatch from Buenos Aires. I thought that the cruise ship we were on would allow me to send you daily emails through my laptop. The ship had a number of wireless hotspots, but they weren’t all that hot. In fact, I was only able to start a wireless session one time and for just a few minutes at that. Initially, I thought this was a physics issue — perhaps the electrons got perturbed on their way to and from the antipodes — but the wired desktop machines on the cruise ship worked well. However, even though the desktop machines worked, I couldn’t get connected to our Sun mail system.

I’m sure sometime over the last two weeks most of you thought that indeed the world is flat and that I fell off the edge as I neared Cape Horn. But try as I might, I could not find the edge (BTW, I still haven’t found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow either).

The reason I can now contact you is that the cruise ended this morning in Santos Brazil and once again I’m sitting in a hotel room that has a reliable Internet service. To get here, Rita and I took a long taxi ride through traffic-choked Sao Paolo. Unfortunately, Sao Paolo lives up to its reputation as sprawling, ugly, and chaotic. I’m sure there are nice areas of this city, but much of what we saw today in this city was favela (shantytown) upon favela.

But let’s get to the positive. Our cruise was simply wonderful. Rita and I have done quite a bit of cruising. I think this is our tenth. But we’ve never been aboard a ship with such an international set of passengers. We met folks from everywhere — even a young couple from Swaziland. We also saw some memorable places: from the the Alpine beauty of Ushuaia Argentina to the talcum-fine sands of the beaches in Punta Del Este Uruguay. And yes Christine, I did have a Pisco Sour in Chile — it went straight to my head!

I think as Americans we tend be a bit parochial and see the entire world fitting into the area between New York and California . But the world is a much bigger place with a multitude of extremely interesting people and sights. If you have a chance to travel beyond our borders, I strongly encourage you to do it.

And there you have it. Positive, positive, positive. Ed is a citizen of the world, and at 60+ years of age, he’s still throwing himself into new experiences all over the world, and encouraging the rest of us to jump in, the water’s fine.

I honestly don’t know which comes first; the fascination with the world that creates the personal vibrancy, or a certain vitality that allows one to be so incredibly eager to have new experiences in new places with other people. All I know is that in a world where people are ruled by fear and negativity, where bigotry and hatred are standard items on the nightly news, where travel is largely considered to be dangerous and where the world is portrayed as a scary place full of foreigners that hate us, Ed’s ability to do his own thing and wave back at the rest of us is a constant inspiration to me. He’s a breathing example of the idea that you create your own reality, and attract to you that which you put out.

As I’ve mentioned a time or two before, Aurora is growing fast. Way faster than her brothers did, mostly because she has them to look up to, and an intense motivation to catch up to them. I didn’t post the other day when she started crawling, but she is. It’s still not super-organized; more like, she moves with purpose in several disorganized ways. But move with purpose, she does.

This morning, the kids were cuddled up in the salon. It’s cold here, and the salon, being the highest part of the boat, stays warmest, so the boys have been sleeping up there, in the “spare bunk”. It’s a neat space for kids, and they’re really loving being up there, not only for the heat, but for the novelty. So as soon as Aurora wakes up, I take her up there to hang with her brothers.

You can see from the first photo to this one, she’s definitely making progress towards Rowan and his Bionicles. Yet another advantage of being a little girl with two older brothers is that she’s never going to have to have the discussion with people that yes, despite being a girl, she’d like LEGOs, thank you. Her brothers have huge collections already, (you can see the bags behind the couch there) and are really interested in sharing with her. Both of them have gotten clear on the idea that the small ones can be swallowed, but that the big ones can be played with, so they’re both making big block creations for her to play with and gnaw upon.

And there’s the reach. Aurora has targeted the Bionicle… and you know what’s awesome? Rowan’s letting her. He’s specifically put one of the “big piece” Bionicles within her reach. Is that awesome big brotherness? Oh yeah…

Quite a few folks told me that having three kids was just spectacular, back when I was waffling about whether or not to increase our family size. Two was great, Rowan and Kestrel were awesome, and the boat is not huge, blah blah blah. And I’ll never know whether it’s the addition of the third, or whether it’s Aurora herself that makes it, but there’s something about the dynamic of the three that brings them together into a cohesive unit. I can’t wait to see how things go as they grow up. It’s entirely possible that this could change. But right now, I’m doing this post so that some day Rowan and Kestrel can look back at when Aurora wanted to be just like them.

Yesterday was my eighth wedding anniversary.

This is not the man I thought I was marrying. The guy I thought I was marrying was a rough, tough, hammer-swinging, tattooed-and-earringed bad boy. I thought the sun rose in his eyes, and wasn’t terribly concerned about the rest.

Things change, with time. If you’re lucky and you’ve chosen really, really well, you change for the better, together. Goodness knows I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last eight years. I’m certainly not the person he married either; that girl was not a mother, not a wife, not a lot of other things I consider myself to be, now.

It seems like no time has passed. It seems like it’s been far more than a scant 8 years. It’s had high highs and low lows and the only thing I can say with absolute, utter certainty, is that I am more madly in love with him than I was back then, and that’s saying a whole lot, since the smitten level was pretty high at the beginning.

So here’s to eight years, m’love, and another eight, and another, and another. Let’s see what happens next…

I‘m due to have this baby any time now.

It’s obvious if you know me and know my dates. I’ve been telling people “I’m having a Gemini”, so that’s a clear clue. And of course, I’m huge, so that’s a dead giveaway.

If even one more person asks me “haven’t you had that baby yet?” I’m gonna stick ‘em in the eye with a fork. Cause clearly, they aren’t actually using their eyes for, y’know, observation or anything. And that’s just the people I see in person. The oh-so-subtle “oh, I was just thinking of you and thought I’d call…” phone calls aren’t much better. I’ve put myself on self-imposed phone rest (like bed rest, but better), and made Jason answer the dratted thing.

I was pondering, this morning, as I awoke having yet again not gone into labor in the night, what it is that makes people get in such a hurry at the end of a pregnancy. It’s like at 36-37 weeks, the baby has to stay in, then at 38-39, everyone starts freaking out and being impatient. “Is it there yet? Is it there yet? Have you had it yet?” It sounds like little kids at Christmas. Or at the end of a road trip. Or… and it struck me… like people who are excited about an event, but have no actual work to perform to ensure said event comes off.

Think about it. Adults who are responsible for filling the gas tank, doing the auto maintenance, doing the trip planning, doing the driving, parceling out the snacks… they never ask “are we there yet?”… they just stare out the windows. Adults who are fully engaged with the holiday madness of shopping, party-having, cooking, planning, etc, always are startled by how fast the calendar moves, and wish for an additional week or two.

So here’s my solution. People who ask me if I’ve had that baby yet? Clearly, they haven’t enough to do. The next person who asks me that question gets invited to bring a casserole, do a load of dishes or laundry, handle the grocery shopping, or rub my feet (since helping actually gestate this little punkin is physiologically impossible). I figure if I start involving the rushers in the process, they’ll realize there’s so much going on, that clearly, they need to either pitch in fully, or maybe plan themselves a road trip.

I blogged a teeny bit about my July 31 miscarriage here. And until I was discussing the due date for the baby I’m carrying now with Mom2, I had forgotten that the baby I miscarried was due right around now.

I miscarried between Rowan and Kestrel too. That one, an eight-weeker and so-called “silent” miscarriage, was horrible, because I still felt broken from the cesarean, and took the miscarriage as a sign that meant I could not do this birth thing that normal women could do. I was an emotional wreck for ages. And that Christmas was kinda sad, because that baby would have been due then. A Christmas baby.

This time, I knew that miscarriages are just a normal part of a breeder’s life, and I wasn’t so freaked out about that; I was just very very sad. This one was not at all “silent”, and therefore I was also physically wrecked for a while. And that baby was due around my birthday. A Birthday baby.

Instead, we caught this one, who is due smack in between Kestrel’s birthday and Rowan’s. There will be a nearly perfect three-year spacing between our kids, which is precisely what Jason was hoping for, but too wise to “plan” for, since we all know that biology does what it does when it cares to. My three kids (how weird is that to type! Much less to think!) will be May-June-July. Late spring/early summer birthdays, perfect for parties, far enough apart that they don’t collide unpleasantly with each other, close enough together that they will all always remember each other.

And that, right there? That says “hand of the Divine” all over it.

See, the two miscarriages? Nice due times and all, easy for me to remember. But as my parenting guru pal Valarie told me once (and it rocked my world)… my children will be in each other’s lives far longer than they’ll be in mine. It’s easy, as a parent, to constantly frame your kids in terms of their relationship with you, but that’s not the primary relationship considering the scope of their lives; the primary relationship is with each other. And somehow, this baby picked a time snuggled right in between its brothers. Jason and I are both winter birthdays, but our children are the bright lights of spring and summer, all clustered together.

It’s another reminder that they are each other’s family, long after Jason and I have moved on to whatever adventure comes next. I know that there are some who feel that trying to ascribe meaning to tragedy is simply the coping mechanism of a gullible brain, and that’s fine, they can think that. But for me, for the rest of my life, when “birthday season” rolls around, I’ll be reminded that pretty much even the most awful events can sometimes end up turning out perfectly.

So here I am, over halfway. In our culture, for the first baby, you spend all your time panicking about the unknown of it all. In my case, I spent my second pregnancy wholly focused on the event of the birth, which was a planned HBAC, and came with all the challenges inherent to that. But with this baby, I have achieved an odd sort of calm. People keep shaking their heads at me.

It’s uncool, apparently, to be pregnant and non-dramatic about it. Apparently, despite the fact that I feel great, that I’m gaining normally, that baby is kicking around in there, I’ve got my midwife and my birth plans (including a full emergency backup plan) all dialed in, I am supposed to be freaking out about something.

There’s plenty to freak out about, if I felt like it. Birth isn’t all that safe an event, no matter where it happens. I could worry about shoulder dystocia, I could worry about stillbirth, meconium in the water, aspiration, short cord, breech. Last time labor was 38 hours, this one might be longer. Or, it might be supershort! I could fret about the fact that I’m older, so birth defects of some kind are more likely than they were before (although according to the Powers That Be, I’ve been a geriatric mother for five years already, LOL!). It’s true; this baby could have autism, CP, spina bifida, or a whole host of other things that people are born with. We’ll face that if it becomes necessary.

But you know… there’s nothing wrong with a little hope, is there? Must it always be about impending disaster?

It makes me sad that the American Culture of Fear has so pervaded the American Culture of Birth, that the fact that my simple statements that I feel great, baby’s doing great, and the birth is gonna be great, have people thinking I’m somehow naive or oblivious.

I spent Kestrel’s pregnancy reading everything. I mean everything. I am under absolutely no illusions about what could happen. I know that babies die. I know that mothers die. I’ve faced it, internalized it, accepted it, and… here’s the kicker… I am now moving past it.

In 14 weeks or so, I’m having a baby. And like everything else in this life, there are factors I can control, and factors I cannot, and I am going to meet them with the most joy, and the most faith, and the most love, I possibly can. Everything else is a waste of my energy; energy I could put to use growing this baby. So that’s what I’m doing.