Or, no, what I mean is, please be gentle and forebearing, reader. Because in the maw of the absent husband and having watched too many TEDTalks yesterday my brain is near-to-bursting with needing to talk and sort out five or six different ideas that may have nothing at all to do with each other, but lying side by side set each other off so prettily.

First I woke this morning to the second-hand drama of the unreliable narrator’s domain name being swiped out from under her, and, while I’m not trying to say that everyone else’s problems are all about ME, I still got lots of musing on “To Blog or not To Blog.” Lots I cannot generalize from: the blogs I love I love better than anything else I read, and even so, what keeping my blog gives me is not symmetrical with what I get from reading blogs. It has made me more comfortable with the terrifying idea of people seeing/reading/judging what I write. That having a blog has allowed for deeper connection than I might get from small-talk: my hypothetical reader is given, yes, a self-selected, picture of who I am, but I imagine it’s still one with more depth than I am capable of in most social situations and it gives me a glimpse of light outside of the imprisoning box of the idea that, subsumed in roles, no one ever really sees me, no one will ever really know me. Unable to see beyond the footlights, I cannot see who exactly is out there and whether or how they are responding except for the hints of site stats and comments, but having it just a little murky is so inexplicably liberating.

And still, for me, blogging has its dark side. I don’t like living my life looking for blog fodder, it feels unnatural, like I am looking past the inherent value of an experience for the secondary value of “and I can write about it!” even if I have principles about not writing exploitatively about people and relationships in my life. I worry that it takes some of the time and energy that I ought to be putting into relationships with the people around me or other sorts of writing. Sometimes I feel like what I need to write, and what is going to bring hits to the site, and what is going to generate an interesting conversation in the comments can be so divergent that I am not sure that blogging is always good for me, or I toy with breaking it into different blogs, only I am worried about what I would learn about myself by which one of those I favored.

Which loosely ties in to another set of ideas bothering me. I get very nervous about the notion of “competing interests.” In recent conversations there has been the idea that the institutions we grew up trusting (medicine, education, law enforcement, and the media primarily, but I can think of countless smaller ones) have become harder to trust when you first have the glimpse of how the interests of the institution are different from your own individual interests. It doesn’t mean you can throw them out wholly, but the experience of realizing that the obstetrician I talked to when I was pregnant the third time was going to do things that might not be in my interests or my baby’s was sort of shocking to me in the way loss of religion could be for someone else. And noticing the damage that our school systems have wrought in people I love, warping their self-images, their value, their self-worth, I have started wondering whose interests schools serve. I grew up with some idealistic notion of schools being identical with universal education and thus the prerequisite of democracy, and I still sort of believe that, but in a tempered “why isn’t it working as well as it could way?” I would no more close all schools than I would go back to trying to deal with a headache with leeches, and yet, I am not sure that either education or medicine always starts with the right question.

So yesterday I watched Susan Blackmore’s TEDTalk entitled Memes and “Temes” and I don’t know if it had much in the way of revolutionary and new ideas, but her main point is that evolution is inevitable in any system where there is replication, selection and variation. These three things will always form a sort of algorithm, design out of chaos without mind (interestingly two days ago I watched Torsten Reil’s TED presentation on using AI to simulate humans in video game design where what they did was really set up replication, selection and variation and let the model evolve on its own). Her notion is that memes, and her coinage of “teme” for a technological meme, are as “selfish” as Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I browsed the comments and on Blackmore’s presentation and there was lots of fuss about anthropomorphizing and will, but the message I got was that the non-personal, the non-willed, can still have an interest, a self-perpetuation and growth. Which would apply to institutions as well as ideas. (I also wonder about how this fits in with Clay Shirky’s TED presentation on Institutions vs. collaboration).

I don’t doubt that as a model, the analysis of competing interests works. But when I start doing it something funny happens to me, I cannot stop and it occurs to me that I have to weigh the interests of my family against my individual interests, and that if every being, institution, creation, meme, idea, teme, and gene has its own separate interest, that is a lot of divergent interests, a lot of competition. And through these lenses I start seeing us all just using each other and altruism as a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to face harsh meme-eat-meme world we live in… the systems we have built, banking and schools, advertising and publishing, are above everything else, self-perpetuating and the problem isn’t capitalism or socialism or fundamentalism, its the illusion of scarcity and struggle for survival, of our deep separateness (yes I did also watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, too, the number one most emailed TED Talk where she talks about how we can choose to see the universe as one where we are all connected, why do you ask?) I even wonder what happens when the notion of our connectedness, our unity, our in-fact-more-convergent-than-divergent interests is introduced into the system of memes.

And of course, one of my long-standing themes, is to wonder about the need to model and metaphorize everything, how much choice we have in models and metaphors. What do convergent interests look like? What if there were a dialectic of memetics, that the variation, replication and selection were somehow not just synthetic but — if I say synergistic, does that mean my Santa Fe is showing? Has anybody talked about synergy since 1980? That the success of one could not compete with but inspire and strengthen another? Whenever I find myself with a sort of zero-sum model of how the universe is working, I suspect I have over-simplified, that with two children it’s not that each gets half of the love available, or that when a third sibling is born each must surrender one third of the share he had been getting heretofore. This is a crude metaphor, I guess, for suggesting that when I am happily blogging, I find I have deeper reserves for other writing as well.

Ok, so back to blogging. I haven’t tied all this together as well as I should have liked. I don’t pretend that my blog is some David fighting the Goliath of the institution of traditional publishing, or that I have figured out what moral/aesthetic value “replicability” of the ideas that survive, thrive, become popular has, when history is littered with brilliance faded to obscurity, genius unrecognized in its own lifetime and commercially successful schlock, or whether I think that our native cultural valuing of individuals over institutions means anything at all. I may have to briefly wean myself from TED which seems to have taken the place of the attention span to read a book entire (I do have Holt’s How Children Learn waiting for me!) Actually, when I think about my blog, what pops into my head is one of my favorite picture books that I read with my children, David McPhail’s Mole Music, . The story told by the illustrations is totally different from the story in the text, but the basic story is that a mole realizes his underground life is missing something, and then he sees a violinist on television and decides to send away for his own violin and spends years practicing and playing at the end of each day’s tunneling, and one day he’s a little sad that he should never have had the chance to share his music, but laughs it off because of the joy the playing itself gives him. In the illustrations we see his music going up into the world around a tree growing over his hole, and a war stopped and kings and presidents sitting down to listen to the beautiful music.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. ~Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

I have a game I play with myself I call perspective: when a problem is bothering me I try to remind myself that five years from now I probably won’t even remember the details of it. That’s a nice, self-help-y sounding start, right? Only, this week I suddenly realized that I don’t get to live five years from now, I get to live right now, and sometimes stuff right now stinks.

So much of parenting in my family right now seems to be meeting my kids melt-downs. They feed and dress themselves and even help out with household chores, and go about the world so autonomously, that the real work of parenting now seems mainly to be catching them when the cannot cope and helping them find means of coping. Sometimes the melt-downs are unexpected or seem disproportionate, and my first instinct is to play the perspective game with them — ‘That? That’s a small problem!’ But there’s a violence in that, a dismissal, a telling them that their feelings are somehow less real, less meaningful.

One of the gifts my kids give me is the un-self-conscious experiencing of what they experience, both their bright eagerness and the seriousness with which they take their problems. And this means acknowledging that their problems are as real as mine, whether they are problems of handling frustration or difficulty in sharing, needing the discipline to get things done or finding quiet space and time for themselves, that I realize that they are developing the same skills to deal that I wish I consistently had in my toolbox. One could pretend adult problems, in perspective, are more serious because the consequences of adult mistakes seems so much more life-altering, but no matter what size we are, we all seem to be struggling for our sense of autonomy and proficiency and self-sufficiency and connection and dignity and the need for loving attention. Those stakes are much more what motivates me than worrying I’ll make a mistake that results in homelessness or destitution.

One of my pet theories is that while reading lots of fiction is great for developing empathy, you risk starting to think of yourself as a literary character, and one aspect of that is that to give books sufficient drama, real heft the stakes characters face are ones of standing in a community or the ability to make a living, love versus alienation, the outcome of nations. So stakes less than that — finding you’re out some essential ingredient for the meal you planned to make, a stain on a new shirt, toys strewn across a room you just straightened — how can they seem so dramatic, how can they throw me so? They arise like symbols of futility and incompetence and unworthiness instead of just being what they are.

The trick with the perspective game is not to use it to invalidate experience. If you’re comforting a friend, the first thing you do is acknowledge her feelings, not try and tell her that her problems are a hill of beans compared with the mountainous real problems out there. Misapplied, the comfort of perspective is a second flogging for feeling bad about something you somehow believe you shouldn’t. When you’re suffering you’re not in any position to figure out the fine line between acknowledging feelings and wallowing in them, and that’s when you need outside perspective.

With little time for shopping or planning, and as I think I’ve mentioned, not being a big fan of elaborate children’s birthday parties, or more, not believing I quite possess the skills required to make it a happy event for birthday child, guests, and parents, even though other people seem to pull it off, I had to find other ways to make the day special for Rainer. We’ve evolved our own tradition of the birthday treasure hunt, and I was inspired watching Rainer and Søren announce themselves future paleontologists after visiting OMSI’s dinosaur exhibit (and also, the previous week the New Mexico Museum of Natural History) so I decided that Rainer’s pre-reading scavenger hunt would be something completely new for us: a dinosaur dig! It took a lot of patience with searching because there are dinosaur pages out there with all sorts of interesting homeschooling-for-religious-reason slants, but I found the cool “dig up dinosaurs” PDF on this page and after the boys went to bed Friday night stayed up until 2 a.m. cutting out cardboard dinosaur bones.

So when he woke up yesterday morning he was handed a bowl of sand and sent outside with it:

In this bowl he carefully searched for “bones”

which were laid out carefully

and he, of course had lots of loving assistance,

but watching I was proud of how his brothers were excited for him and involved but willing to sit back and let him do it himself. I loved how the final assembled dinosaur looked.

And written on its bones were directions for where to look for his gift, a BBC video DVD set entitled “The Ultimate Dinosaur Collection.”

To utterly flog a theme, we then planned on then taking all the boys to the Oregon zoo where they have a dinosaur exhibit. But on arrival at the zoo all of the parking lots were full. The hardest part of zoos for me is people at the zoo, and more of them seemed too much, so we decided to try something else and drove across town to the small Oaks Amusement Park on the banks of the Willamette where, not only was parking impossible, but we could see really long lines waiting for each and every ride. Less fun. And this is where Raven’s genius pokes through — he came up with indoor miniature golf which we had completely to ourselves until the last five minutes or so, because on a beautiful day in Portland there is an unofficial law that people be outside enjoying themselves. And thus no one minded when it took me 11 or 12 strokes to get the ridiculous little ball into the hole. And being downtown, we then walked five blocks to Portland’s best toystore - Finnegan’s, and let Rainer pick out a Playmobil dinosaur set (also: found the very cool Schylling metal potholder weaving loom

that my father had been nostalgically recalling last week!) Then, since Rainer had requested “mango lassi” for his birthday dinner we went to an Indian restuarant for an early dinner so we could race home to set up for the monthly family-friendly werewolf game that we have committed to doing for Aodán and Xander since they love the game so and cannot come to the one held in a bar. And even though I didn’t feel stressed about hosting a “birthday party” it was wonderful to be able to sing “Happy Birthday” to Rainer with some of my favorite people in Portland and have them cheering him on as he blew out the candles

And best of all, our family friends the Burchams stuck around afterwards, and we got to watch the kids play Rock Band.

So by the time Rainer fell asleep hours after any orthodox bedtime, he was a pretty happy child, and we were a happy family.

Apparently this is a lesson I have to get over and over. My kids will do what they need to do when they are ready to do it. It was true two years ago when Aodán got on a bike without training wheels for the first time ever at the shameful-to-me-age of nine, and just started riding. Because he was ready and he wanted to do it. Also? There’s this difference between when it feels like play and when it feels like diligent striving, that contrary to my Puritan goggles, the learning by playing just seems to be more effective. Finally, I seem to slam into this lesson whenever I am paying more attention to what, in my head, a good mother would be doing for her kids, and less attention to, you know, my kids.

Maybe this is what I get for going to bed trying to figure out fear. I was reading Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and couldn’t decide which parts I most needed to underline because it all seemed so relevant to the conversation going on here and over at the Unreliable Narrator’s about self-improvement and suffering. Epstein is a Buddhist psychotherapist and he points out that the profession of western mental health has pathologized the feeling of emptiness that it turns out almost all human beings are prone to, and this has led to a tendency to try to analyze it and think it away, and, in fact our fear of this feeling of emptiness causes more suffering than the feeling of emptiness itself.

Does everyone periodically make a list of their fears?
I’ve got the obvious, loss of those I love, loss of health and/or faculties for myself/those I love. Loss that I am responsible for: failing to attend to some detail that turns out not to be inconsequential, mold and leaks and cars from nowhere and letters from insurance companies and lumps where lumps ought not to be.
Fear of being the bull in the china shop and helplessly trampling on feelings because of my own inability to do better.
Fear of getting so clench-jawed angry teeth start popping from my head and I scare my children.
Fear of love withdrawn.
Fear of being seen through, of being found out as a fraud.
Fear of being inconsequential.
Fear of being just like everyone else, nothing special.
Fear of being freakishly different from everybody else and never being understood.
Fear of deluding myself.

Is that a map of my vulnerabilities? I am not trying to play word games, but I don’t want to be ruled by fears, and yet acknowledging vulnerability, that feels ok.

I think I finally decided of everything I read last night that I most wanted to highlight the story of when Epstein’s teacher was doing a sesshin and struggling with dismissive responses from the master he was working with to his answers to the koans he was given, and finally he was given a relatively simple koan “How do you manifest the Buddha while chanting a sutra?” which boiled down to being asked to chant/sing a sutra. Only, Epstein’s teacher had spent a lifetime not singing after being told by a teacher in elementary school to just mouth the words, and so he struggled, was anxious, practiced nervously, went before the master and mangled the singing, got words wrong. And the master was delighted, he opened up, “to be: open and vulnerable and insecure, not confident, controlled and coherent.”

Confidence is so sexy. How much of my life have I spent thinking I would be happy if I were just more confident, if I could just speak up for myself. How many times have I been sure I was the only insecure person in the room, my insecurity blinding me to the possibility anyone else feeling insecure. I joke with Jenny that when I don’t call her it’s something wrong with me, and when she doesn’t call me it’s something wrong with me, and I love her because I know she is capable of thinking the same thing and so we’re both responsible for calling each other regularly. It just never occurs to me that other people should have gaping insecurities because I have this model in my head that accomplishment breeds confidence breeds further accomplishment, and it’s easy to see other people’s accomplishments. In fact, the only people who seem to advertise their insecurities are those who are unkind or arrogant — listen to a woman criticizing another woman’s body, particularly a celebrity’s body and I feel an achey compassion for her.

So, playing with the notion that insecurity is not something to be eliminated or covered up, but used as a channel to greater compassion or authenticity?

Maybe where I’ve ended up watching the progression of this discussion on self-improvement is agreeing that the myths of ‘I used to suck and now I’m great,’ of the self-made man, of Cinderella, of the all-better club are no more useful than the myth that everything used to be so great and now it’s all going to Hades in a handbasket. And still I am not going to deny the truths of growth, development and learning, or of recovery — and the profound gratitude I feel for getting to witness my best friend struggling up into sobriety and honesty with herself, how inspired I am by her courage and willingness to do stuff that is just hard. But being essential to her survival, it seems to belong to a category outside of self-improvement. But who among us still fits into a world-view we had ten years ago.

What reading Epstein has reminded me of is that attacking the problem of ‘how can I live my life better?’ from an analytical point of view alone can lead to being trapped into my own cleverness or devolution into blame and fault-finding. And sometimes I have used my morning pages as a tool to attack a problem and then I start to wonder why write? when I can’t identify a problem with myself, my life. I am actually embarrassed that maybe all the times I have asked myself “Am I happy?” if I wasn’t asking the wrong question… not that I have a definite pin on what the right question is, but sometimes it could be “Am I useful?” “Am I eliminating suffering?” or “Am I in harmony with the things going on around me?” Or maybe there is no question to answer?

Our metaphors tend to reflect our preoccupations and the things we are doing and working on. As I knit more, I see the ability to pick up dropped stitches without freaking out as a positive development both literally and metaphorically. Practicing with the kids and seeing the patterns of development and maintenance is giving me a surprising patience and willingness to enjoy the present moment. But it’s true for my kids, too, how their preoccupations will shape their interactions. I am asked to “pause” or “rewind” while reading aloud because they are used to the Tivo. And it is funny to hear my smaller children playing with legos or on the playground and using video game terminology: Ok, now we’re on the next level, let’s play the cut scene (a pre-scripted part of a plotted video game where you cannot control your character). And as much as I have misgivings about how video games can crowd out other, more developmentally appropriate activities in my children’s lives without some thoughtful limits on them, I like the idea of video game metaphor for self-improvement type ideas… Oh, I’m stuck on level 2 with that one, but I think I just need to keep trying. Much more satisfactory than leaks in the roof.

Do I have too much faith in the power of words? Is it, in the end, really just the actions that matter? I turned in a thesis on metaphors in philosophy twelve years ago and am surprised how it continues to hang around my neck. I think about Kepler and his beautiful theory about the platonic solids describing the different orbits of the planets and how he had the courage to throw away the whole theory when it just didn’t work with the most accurate measurements he could get, and wonder if I have such courage. I think I find a metaphor I like and try to make the facts fit the metaphor rather than the other way around.

Of course, the marketing forces telling me how many things are wrong with me, and all the things I need to buy in order to at least pass as ok are perhaps more intimidating and pervasive than King George and all of his Red-coats. Those marketing forces wouldn’t have a foothold, of course, but for my long history of being complicit, worrying that I needed to be more critical of myself than anyone else could be, so I could be prepared, could steel myself, before anyone else could point out everything that was wrong with me. My ancient fear that everything that goes wrong in my life can be traced to something wrong with me that everyone else can perceive that I cannot. My history of using commiseration over flaws as a way of bonding, the way women do.

It’s a scary thing to write: done with self-improvement. If I refuse to reinforce the idea there is something wrong with us with my sisters-in-misery, over the size of our butts, the need to have cleaner, more organized houses, or the need to be more patient with our children, will I get stuck with the label of stuck-up that killed my social life in middle school? This arrogance, this chutzpah could end in resentment and alienation, and yet, I want to treat myself with the same gentleness and generosity that I would a friend — there is nothing wrong with you. And there is nothing wrong with me. (Please, listen carefully: I am not saying I am perfect, but I don’t worry about whether you are perfect, I spend a lot more time thinking about the things I love about you. )

I want to declare war on everything telling us we’re not enough. I had thought initially that this was about the body-image struggle that is so on-going, the waters recently stirred by the unreliable narrator’s lovely blog entry revisiting cultural orthorexia and by this stabbing identification when a friend mentioned that looking at photos of a happy time didn’t make her feel happy because all she could see was her body not looking the way she thought her body should look. We got a Wii fit, which exceeded my expectations as something that makes body awareness and exercises with instant feedback fun, and yet when it tells me “visualize your ideal body when you’re exercising” I have to shout back at it “I quite like the body I have, thank you!” which must mean I am making slow progress in this struggle.

It goes deeper. It’s summer guilt at relaxing and reading fluff and just hanging out when I could be filling my own perceived deficits (getting the kids and myself really fluent in a second language! Plant identification! Learning the names of all the stars and constellations! Being able to identify chord progressions in music!) And I finally had this realization that while there is nothing wrong with those things as goals, I am done with perceiving these things as deficits. I have decided I am whole, I am complete, that I have racked up enough small, personal successes in thirty-five years, that setting goals for myself, challenging myself — that’s extra. I am going to acquire virtues rather than eliminate sins.

I finally face the fear that not struggling and striving to improve myself could be the first step into a slow slide into complacency and then apathy. And yet, lately I have been arguing that one doesn’t really improve oneself out of shame and self-loathing or fear, that shame, self-loathing, fear will keep hiding, telling you that everything you have done isn’t enough. And so I am trying to slow down enough to be aware of the little thoughts that come out under stress, and in the stillness here, now, knowing that they will re-emerge, I am arming myself against them. (”One if by shame and two if by self-loathing and three if by fear…”?) But more: that sort of mindfulness? Don’t take it for self-improvement.

You want a Prague birth story?

I have given birth three times since then so that first time feels less coherently narrative like, and more an impression, the longest, greyest day… The one thing I remember clearly was what it was to finally and for the first time hold my son, to have that steady knowing gaze, so calm, his eyes holding my eyes, the exhaustion I had been feeling melted away in my transformation into a real, honest-to-God mother, and there was nothing I wanted to do so much as hold him, look at him.

But I can make a story out of it, I think.

I go back to the American obstetrician who ignored me at my appointments and wanted to ask Raven about this brand new internet thing, to get himself a webpage, his nurse lecturing me on weight gain, and how little those things mattered compared to hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, on my birthday, March 20, 1996, which started to make it all a little more real. But I think settling for that moron doctor and worrying about money and the fact that we were living in a city between his job in Los Alamos, 45 minutes away, and mine in Albuquerque, an hour away, and knowing I wasn’t really ready to have a baby and work full-time to pay for daycare added to a sense of not really having choices. And then on April Fool’s Day, Raven saw a posting for the Radio Free Europe job, and I couldn’t have found Prague on a map, but I willingly went along with him deciding to apply for it, though it felt a little like a joke. And then Raven was flying off for an interview and every objection seemed to melt away, there were people at RFE who had given birth in Prague, they could help us find an English-speaking o.b. and by the time it was July our apartment was packed and moved and we were on our way there.

We got in with the doctor fairly quickly after getting to Prague — early enough we didn’t navigate the public transportation very well, I remember it being very hot and walking and walking and realizing we had gone the wrong direction and then walking and walking and walking in the other direction looking for the Ústav pro Péci o Matku a Díte, the Institute for the Care of Mother and Child — where the doctor’s office was. He was a kind man, but clearly overworked, and he spent a lot of that first visit helping us fill out the endless paperwork that seemed to characterize every aspect of life in Kafka’s hometown. Subsequent visits were a little surreal, I’d enter a waiting room full of pregnant Czech women and be whisked in for labwork first because I was a paying customer and they were getting socialized medicine, and still my idea of things like a birth plan were alien enough to make me understand that medicine as a consumer commodity was not How Things Were Done. I remember the lab techs as slightly scary women in short skirts with impossibly long, painted fingernails, communicating with me by gesture and sign language and impatiently taking me by the wrist and leading me where they needed me to go because none of them spoke a word of English and my Czech was not even rudimentary yet.

At a certain point it was discovered that the baby was still breech, and that I would have to have a caesarean, which was terrifying and accentuated my general feeling of helplessness. I must have communicated my panic to my parents on the phone, because my mother went and researched homeopathic options and sent me a bottle of pulsatilla. I then spent hours resting with my hips up on several pillows and my head on the floor, hoping that would help him turn, and even though a week before he was born he was still breech, when I went into labor he was head down and ready to go, so something must have worked.

I think I moved to Prague confident that everything I needed to know I could get from reading the right books, and I chose Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin as my source for everything related to childbirth (though a friend had also given us the dreaded What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Worst)). I don’t know if that deafened me to the information given by the Australian midwife in what was Prague’s only English childbirth education available that summer. She held that childbirth hurt and one should get the epidural, gave us handouts of convenient Czech phrases to use in the hospital, and spent a lot of time showing us how to swaddle a newborn. Still, I went into childbirth convinced that they weren’t labor pains they were labor rushes, and that one just needed the proper attitude.

The other thing about moving to Prague was that Raven’s employer took care of all of the moving for us, hiring professional movers, we just needed to separate out a smaller, lighter quicker delivery by air from the slower, heavier delivery of freight. And nobody quite explaineed to us how these shipments wouldn’t even be leaving the United States until we signed a lease on an apartment, but that once we signed the lease on an apartment we would lose our fully furnished temporary housing. So this resulted in our staying in our apartment with the newly signed lease with nothing but the things we’d brought with us in our suitcase on the airplane — that is, no furniture or dishes or anything. We’d put all the baby stuff into the air shipment, which arrived a few weeks after we signed the lease, but we didn’t have a bed. A friend who worked at a real estate company was able to lend us some foam pads to sleep on, but they weren’t beds, which didn’t lend itself to a comfortable third trimester. All of our furniture and other belongings arrived the day after Aodán was born, and this was only ok, because so did my mother, and she spent the week I was in the hospital after the birth unpacking and putting together the apartment for me.

So the day of the birth? Our due date had come and gone, and finally I awoke one Sunday morning not with contractions but with a bit of bloody show, and I must not have read about that or been prepared for it, because we called the hospital, alarmed, and with nobody who spoke English there, our rough Czech and the word blood got them to ask us to come in right away. We took a taxi, and once there learned our doctor was hours away, there was nobody working at the hospital who spoke English, and there were long forms to be filled out (all in Czech) before I could be admitted. A woman in labor who did speak English, started helping Raven with the forms, and I was taken away from the one person who understood me. I don’t remember everything that followed, but it wasn’t a happy time.

The day was long and grey, a woman down the hall screamed operatically — or perhaps it was several women because the screaming came and went throughout the day. I was showered, put in an awful gown, shaved, had my waters broken, and an i.v. put in before I saw my husband again. Our doctor did show up in the afternoon. I was given demerol, something I don’t remember asking for or agreeing to, but I think some of fuzziness of the day has to do with that, I remember throwing up, being given oxygen. having my life flash before my eyes and when I was finally at the pushing stage having several people pushing on my abdomen (which worked to give me doubts about my own ability to push out a baby on my own in subsequent births). Raven was my only comfort that day, valiant with the back rubs and cheering me on. If I had wanted an epidural we would have had to have paid an anesthesiologist to be on call for the weekend, and anticipating rushes, rather than pains, we didn’t.

The standard of care was three or four nights in the hospital after a vaginal birth, and I might have made more of a fuss about that except for the fact that my mother was busy unpacking my apartment. Aodán had to stay in a nursery, which made him feel less like he was really mine, I felt like I was peeking to unwrap him from the swaddling and examine tiny fingers and toes, and some nurse was always trying to correct my hold when I was nursing him, again, using more sign language and rough gestures than English. The recovery room I stayed in had an electric pump or sanitizer or something on the toilet that was really noisy, so Raven unplugged it, and when my mom arrived and Raven brought her straight to the hospital, jet-lagged, from the airport, and used the toilet the room flooded.

You don’t think you will ever forget any of the details, of course, and then you do. Looking back we were so young and knew so little and still had all of this surprising confidence. I felt like motherhood made me so much stronger that I was willing to face challenges for my son that I would not have for myself alone, to face down calling the Czech pediatrician whose scheduler spoke no English in order to make an appointment, to face down the little old ladies who tried to tell me I was doing it all wrong. I was really fortunate, I think to have a mother and mother-in-law who believed I was capable of handling it all and doing a beautiful job, who built me up with their loving support. The births of Aodán’s younger brothers were, of course, marked by a much stronger sense of knowing what I was doing, of knowing what I wanted and still somehow being able to accept things as they came, especially once I found the world’s greatest midwife, in Dallas. And yet Aodán’s birth was a perfect one, it forged us into a family, a unit of three that didn’t exist before that day, and I remain profoundly grateful for the experience.

My first response to what it was to me to be in Prague (twelve years ago we went, next week, and ten years ago we came back, next week) is to reference the movie Lost in Translation. I saw that and was a little spooked at how it captured the girl with the newly minted philosophy degree come to a city where she doesn’t speak the language with a new husband who has a job and place to go every morning. That was me, minus Bill Murray and plus the six months along fetus in my belly.

I don’t think I have a coherent narrative of what those two years were, more these impressions of reading voraciously (I can still map routes to the two bookstores, U Knihomola and The Globe that sold overpriced English books) walking and writing, and throwing myself down canyon-like narrow streets of tall, gorgeously historic-looking buildings, taking random turns trying to see if I could get good and lost but inevitably arriving at a landmark I knew. Of the earnest attempts to learn Czech being dishearteningly not enough. The disapproving looks I got for strapping the baby to my chest and roaming instead of protecting his delicate spine and confining him to lying flat in a large prom, confining myself to where I could walk to with a bulky pram that one person could never get up or down stairs unassisted. Being told, always, that the baby was cold, and needed another layer of clothing, when he was in fact, quite happy and content and showing no signs of hypothermia.

We lived in two different attic apartments, and I spent lots of time staring out over the rooftops of Prague, horror struck about envisioning accidents where a child falls out these high windows, not yet quite trusting myself as the mother responsible for protecting him. I remember walking through a graveyard on all-saint’s day, my four week old son strapped to my chest, feeling so far from where my grandparents were buried, feeling this deep empathy for the graves not visited or decorated by any living family, wondering if there were no family or if they had emigrated, as my husband’s grandparents and great grandparents had. I remember marveling at the care taken of these graves by a supposedly atheist people, and feeling so displaced and mortal and just not rooted. An upstart, with little sense of my own history, and the whole new baby, who was a new generation displacing my generation, not quite responsible for the passing on of my grandparents six years earlier, but somehow connected to it, turning my parents into grandparents.

It’s very hard to separate out my state, newly wed to a man I had known exactly one year, and getting used to the idea of motherhood, giving up roles of student, employee, daughter and sister, from my experience of this alien city. It was my first experience of living in a big city — Albuquerque when I left was a city of about 600,000, Prague’s population was closer to 1.2 million. That so much of Prague for young, hip American ex-pats was about smoky bars and drinking, artistic experimentation or capitalist expansion, and the ex-pat mothers I got to know tended to have at least a decade on me and thus intimidate me. Some of the negatives were so vivid and are so much closer to hand than the great experiences, the one time I boarded a bus with the baby, following usual procedures of public transportation, sitting, and having the bus drive say something I didn’t understand over the public announcement system, having everyone turn and look at me, until, cheeks burning, I decided to get off the bus at the next stop, feeling helpless and teary. I don’t think I thought the hardness of all the adjustment was peculiar to being in Prague, it just did the pathetic fallacy thing of reflecting how hard things were inside me, the things given up, the being unsure if I was ready for this new life. It echoed the vertiginous free-fall feeling I experienced the weekend when my parents dropped me off at college for the first time with time for orientation before classes started and there were whole mornings and afternoons when not only did I not have to be anywhere in particular, nobody was asking me to account for myself or let them know where I was and the freedom was truly frightening, paralyzing.

I have said that it was probably the best thing that we could have done for our marriage, to move to a city where we had no one to turn to but each other, where phone calls to our parents or friends were costly and had to be carefully timed across the time zones, not to be made in fits of frustration. The internet was a primitive thing, the dial-up connections slow, email a new marvel, the digital pictures we put up of our new son cutting-edge, Amazon an expensive last resort for getting English reading material. My mother-in-law would video tape and send us American sit-coms which were this sweet relief. We had a pediatrician who spoke English, but her receptionist really didn’t so making an appointment was always a test in my understanding of time and date, and when the baby seemed sick, it was easier to thumb through Dr. Spock than call anyone, so we early on developed a sense of ourselves as the experts on our son, doing what worked for us without realizing that there were labels for different child-rearing philosophies. It’s easy to look back at our time in Prague and wonder at all the things we were almost blind to, just as I wish I could re-do my first year of college. I wish I could see the imprint that the experience left on me, it might have left me stronger and more independent, but, on the other hand, it might also have left me a little more tentative and doubtful.