Barely promoted

Let's not mention the Lewis Carroll obsession

2012-08-28T13:57:00-04:00

I am supposed to write something for an "homage" that Ray's sister is sending out -- in place of a memorial, or anything like that.

I am totally blocked. It's not really clear who this is for. His siblings, the one co-worker who's still alive? His life proceeded in disjoint episodes, and so little followed from one to the next. I was one of them. My mother was perhaps three.

His sister and I spent two days at his bedside, talking while he gasped, apparently unconscious. She's an ancestry.com fiend. She located both his ex-wives almost trivially; figured out that the four-year-old son who drowned had been in Santa Monica, not New York; and so on.

While procrastinating I have poked around enough to be moderately certain that one of my great-great-great-grandfathers died about 10 mines north of Granolaton, in 1852 -- about a year after he'd arrived from Ireland. And my grandmother's aunt, from whom she'd been estranged for forever? Buried in the same Catholic cemetery in the New York suburbs. Oh, and the patents on early (I am not making this up) toilet bowls -- joint between a great-great-grandfather and a great-great-uncle. It feels like there's a lot more on line than there was the last time I tried, probably two years ago.

I haven't joined Ancestry yet. It's horribly tempting. But then I hit the: I can only ever know half, right? wall.

I've also been thinking about 23 and me. Beaker sent in samples a few years ago (why yes, he is a delta f 508!). Are there any third cousins I don't know about? Is there a wide enough sweep yet? Both my mother's parents were only children, and ended up cut off from their cousins. Again, not to mention the brick wall on the other side.

The contrast with the death of my mother has been hard. Then near strangers were overcome with sympathy -- it was my mother, after all. And all that word carries. But when I tell people my foster father died? What must that mean to me? No one can guess. (Of course, I don't really know myself.) The condolences are minimal. I change the subject.

Miss T. is the same age now as I was when I went to live with Ray. That's overwhelming.

I have not cried over Ray. (I think his sister disapproved.) But I have been vague and spacey, and been getting choked up over some painfully obvious pop culture artifacts: the end of, and the epilogue to, Knuffle Bunny Free. A Music Together song about how the people who take care of you (they are scrupulous not to limit that to parents -- I think that may be the precise element that makes the cheer so sinister) will come back, "because they always do." Good Christ, I am getting choked up even running the lyrics through my head now.

Stretched

2012-07-14T22:51:45-04:00

My foster father Ray is dying. In a nursing home in a small city in northern California. He is demented and cancer-ridden. He started hospice yesterday.

I am planning to fly out there on Wednesday. His (much younger, half) sister Colleen is discouraging the trip. He probably sexually abused her two daughters -- certainly took pictures of them in their panties when they were in elementary school, which some would already consider abuse. I think Colleen was present, though. (Fuck the seventies.)

Marina left Ricky a few weeks ago -- and good for her, but he is falling apart. She waited until he'd paid off his multiyear debt consolidation loan, then disappeared, with all her stuff, while he was at work. She's living in Queens, presumably with friends. I have refused to give him money to pay his rent. I am sort of seriously considering going to New York and breaking into the apartment while he's out driving his taxi (70 hours per week) to save -- no, to take, they're his according to the will -- the family pictures: little miniatures on porcelain of my grandmother's grandparents, and of her as an infant; photo albums from when her family was rich.

It's that life-sucks-now-I'm-back-at-work post, oh yeah

2010-02-10T11:38:34-05:00

It's all, you know, enough.

The snow (every day).

The stomach flu (me and Miss T.: Sunday. Beaker: Monday. Miss V.? Not, uh, yet.)

The cold (Miss V.: ongoing and worsening. Beaker: ditto. Me: ditto. Miss T.? Not, uh, yet.)

The lack of sleep (see last two items).

Percentage of anticipated child care hours actually used, since classes started: approximately 33.

Percentage of pumped milk Miss T. is actually drinking: maybe 8? Only from Dada, though.

Percentage of students registered for my seminar who actually showed up: approximately 42.

SOB.

testing ... testing...

2010-01-03T11:23:59-05:00

Ahem?

Geez! It felt like I had to break into my own account! What the &^%* is all this new Typepad %$#&?

We are well.

Viola Jane Maple was born on May 24, at a stunning 8 pounds 11 ounces. A smooth and fairly rapid unmedicated and midwife-managed hospital birth -- with a moment of shoulder dystocia, rapidly resolved, for extra excitement.

She is now a solid little chunk of muscle who wants only two things in life: MORE NUM, and to learn to walk.

And otherwise? We are all well -- although the end of my leave is coming up. First re-engagement with the world: a conference in California, mid-January, that may involve seeing both my doctoral advisor and my frail and fading foster father.

Appropriate units of measurement

2009-05-13T13:57:49-04:00

Height of stack of remaining grading: inches.

Dilation: centimeters.

Time until grades are due: days.

Time until birth: days (I hope).

Folks: don't try this at home, no matter how much you'd like to really max out your institution's parental leave policy.

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I do feel a bit of (survivor's?) guilt with respect to how it all looks to outside observers, most especially junior female ones. Look, I wasn't trying to do this. Really.

It's on my list to update here

2009-01-29T00:17:14-05:00

So, past midnight, let me tell you: I am well.

Huge. Intimidated by the new semester. Snowed in. Craving chocolate and vegetable puree soups.

Nesting like crazy. (When a pregnant woman asks for a label machine for Christmas? Worry.)

I had my 20-week ultrasound just before Christmas. All is well; the wee beastie is a little on the small side (which may bode well for my making it through finals), and appears to be another girl. Yay!

P.S. I want a Kindle! For nursing, y'know! And this made me feel really bad about kind of wanting one of these, even though I've gotten my by-now-quintuply-used Pump-In-Style Advanced back, and even though I'm going to have, effectively, the longest maternity leave ever -- like, nearly 8 months.

Picking at scabs

2008-11-30T15:14:12-05:00

I have a terrible problem with scratching open mosquito bites until they bleed. I also chew either nails or cuticles -- one or the other, typically, for months. My nails are grooved from the cumulative damage.

(Miss T. already is getting hangnails -- perhaps there is some built-in tendency for the skin to split, especially on the thumbs -- and she chews on them. I don't know if she's seen me do it, or if it's just the obvious thing to do. I can't bring myself to criticize her for it, so I offer sympathy when she complains, trim down what I can, and try to get thick lotion on them before bed.)

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Now, I'm reading the comments to the big Alex Kuczynski piece on the birth of her child through surrogacy. The editors certainly stirred the pot through their choice of photographs! and the author is as honest about her classism (and that of the surrogacy "industry" -- they don't want surrogates who are, you, know, actually poor) as she is about her grief and later her joy.

(How different would reading getupgrrl have been, if there had been pictures? She was so careful in the details she chose to include.)

On the one hand: we spent our money and took our chances for exactly the same sorts of selfish reasons: to have a child who is genetically Beaker's. And there are a lot of (mostly appalling ignorant) people over at the Times who are saying "SCREW YOU, SELFISH BITCH!"

On the other hand: every time I sat in that Cornell waiting room (where Kuczynski starts her journey) I knew I didn't fit -- we could only fake it enough to be there by living off two incomes in a cheap damn state. So each comment that picks up another detail of the outrageous presumption of privilege tickles a little -- and I keep reading.
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During our peaceful Thanksgiving dinner at home, there was a blizzard of kicks.

Since then, nearly none -- and definitely none so distinctively kick-y. I know it's still early, but I can't help panicking. Were those death throes? It's so easy to slip back to the disoriented sadness of October.

Eleven days until my next midife appointment. I'd rent a Doppler, but if I didn't find a heartbeat it would kill me.

Maybe -- presuming it goes well -- I'll get one after the next appointment.

14 weeks

2008-11-19T16:58:33-05:00

I'm here. It's still here. Nuchal scan was entirely normal; ultrascreen came back with 1/4000 chance of Down's, 1/2000 of trisomy 13/18.

I keep saying I'm trying to decide whether to get an amnio or not. But then I keep not calling to make an appointment to talk to someone appropriate, and the weeks are slipping away.

I don't want one.

Even though I have at least 3 good reasons for getting one: my age, my R.E.'s recommendation that all ICSI pregnancies get one, and that damn 7 week ultrasound.
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After the nuchal I started telling people (not like my belly wasn't already doing the talking for me!). Applied for my maternty leave -- yes, this early, so that my poor department has a chance of replacing me.

We told Miss T. last weekend. She doesn't seem to care much, yet. That seems fine.
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There is still not much joy.

My exhaustion has burned out, thank goodness.

But Beaker is sick, coughing and short of breath, and has not been getting better, and we don't know why (not specifically -- of course we know it's lung inflammation, but from what source and for how long?) -- and that's deeply frightening, in context, for both of us.

We will probably not go to Weatherwood for Thanksgiving -- long drives are a known strain for him. Marina's daughter will be there, along with several friends, and Marina called a few days ago to make sure we wouldn't be getting in the way too much -- well, more delicately than that, of course.

Needing sleep

2008-10-30T23:16:38-04:00

I am still pregnant. So far as I know. Another ultrasound, nominally for nuchal translucency purposes, in a week.

Cornell told me to start tapering off the PIO after the 9w1d ultrasound, but wanted a level check before I went off entirely. I went in live (well, to Mount Kisco at least), since I was in New York anyway. Came back at only 16, but they told me to stop. I did.

I am having a lot of trouble keeping up with life. Midterms! Advisees! Recommendations! I am too tired to knit, or to read anything more taxing than Agatha Christie or Talking Points Memo. I'm getting a lot of mild migraines, which I didn't at all last time. With each one I wonder if there's been a sudden homone drop.

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I had trouble keeping up with life when I went back to Weatherwood, too. No panic attack on the Whitestone Bridge (last time I drove myself over it was... well, it was 11 years ago, and that's a whole 'nother entry)! But I didn't even start to cope with replacing the marker (the fucking cemetery needs two rounds of notarized correspondence, from my uncle, not me, before we can do anything) or with tracking down a moving company for the furniture that's coming back to Ohiodinois. Nor have I made much progress on figuring out what I owe my uncle, after all.

I did get him up to the right county office for the paperwork to get into Nana's tiny bank account. And I packed up, or brought to professionals, a lot of small objects. We brought in an appraiser; nothing is worth anything, of course. (All the furniture, all the things on the walls, had been Nana's mother's -- they came to New York from Ohiodinois in 1954.)

So: I'm giving Ricky $1000 a month for a year, nominally for six or seven pieces of furniture I want (the will leaves all "tangible" property to me -- and the funeral expenses, which I paid, can be taken out of the estate -- and the cash is about three times the value of the pieces, which are both unfashionably dark and heavy and in poor condition -- so legally, legalistically, I really don't owe him a fucking thing), but mostly because I can't see any way for them to stay in the apartment long-term. I tell myself it's to help make the transition out easier -- or at least a bit later and more predictable. I worry that he'll think that this is setting some kind of precedent. But I want to feel like I've done enough for them that I can say "no" next time with a clear conscience.

There's a china cabinet that I want, that Beaker loves, that Marina says my grandmother told her she should get. There's no way to know if that's true; my uncle had thought my grandmother meant one set of dishes in the cabinet. There's an edge of true bitterness as Marina talks about it. I don't want to make her truly bitter. I am leaning towards letting her keep it -- so that I can say "no" when I need to.

The will leaves Ricky all family pictures and records. Does he give a flying fuck? It's hard to tell. They are still in deep grief. Marina told me to take two oil portraits -- both ripped -- because "your uncle will never have any children, but you, you have a legacy."

I went through what papers I could find, photocopied a bunch of birth certificates and old newspaper clippings, and scanned in about a third of the photographs from the only remaining album. I'll do more at Thanksgiving.
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Am I sad? Yes. But it is hard for me to catch myself at it. It is going to take time to sink in. There is too much. My mother's death was, in many senses, a liberation. But Nana? It was her time, God knows -- but she carried so much more with her. And that's gone for me now.

We took Miss T. apple picking that Saturday, the weekend I didn't go to New York. The light in the orchard was exquisite. It's really hard to get pictures of Miss T. smiling, but I did -- and there are also several gorgeous ones of her pensive, with luminous gray eyes focused out of the frame. Nana would have loved them.

This and this made me cry. There are just a lot of parallels, even dumb little ones -- like going back to an apartment his grandmother has been in for decades.

So did this. I go over and over my two final decisions to stay. I didn't know how sick she'd gotten on Friday night. I didn't talk to Ricky between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning. Then I didn't drop everything and fly out on Tuesday because by the time he called, the doctors said she'd be dead in a couple of hours -- no time. But she hung on for another day -- but I wasn't there.
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This is one of the first pictures I scanned:

My grandmother and me, in the yard at the House, presumably in the winter of 1970-71. Notice that it's been torn in half, right between the two of us, then taped back together. There were several like that.

I'm guessing that my mother tore them up, and my grandmother saved the pieces.

Normal

2008-10-16T19:28:36-04:00

The ultrasound today was normal. Normal growth, normal placement, normal gestational sac, etc. -- and a normal heartbeat pounding away 182 times a minute.

I went straight to my first midwife appointment afterwards.

I am going to lie down for a little while now.