Growing up

For the first five months that BB was in kindergarten, every single drawing that she brought home was labeled, “BB AND MAMA.” It didn’t seem to matter what the subject of the drawing was: landscapes (a house with a door and windows), portraits (BB in neon pink and yellow, with enormous eyes), hearts and flowers, oddly appealing bits of geometric abstraction — all of them bore somewhere, “BB AND MAMA.” It was her compass rose, pointing always toward home.

Now, at the end of April, when I empty BB’s backpack at the end of the school day, I find drawings that are carefully labeled in a firm, controlled hand. Just her name, a simple signature in clear capitals and lower-case letters in their proper order. Just BB, standing alone.

I would like to say that it’s been a smooth transition from there to here, but of course it hasn’t been. There were complications, contradictions, an avalanche of notes typed or written to the finest specifications for heartbreak: “DeaR MAMA I DoNT wANt to Go To scHool plEAsE cAN I stAY HoME wiTH You.” When the heartbreak failed to have the desired effect, there was rigorous scientific experimentation to see if some combination of willfulness, piteousness, and flat-out misbehavior would do the job. The testing has eased now, but I don’t expect it to end. She is a stubborn and gifted investigator into the ways by which one may affect the actions of other human beings, and it is clear that she will never stop probing until she has determined exactly which of the laws governing the operation of the universe are susceptible to her control. It is awe-inspiring to watch. It is often exhausting to supervise. There is no respite to the process of growing up. Not for any one of us.


There was some discussion on the blogs awhile ago as to whether it was easier or harder to parent children once they reached school age. People I respect made arguments in support of both positions; and I nodded in agreement to points made by both sides. They’re both right, after all. Parenting is never simple: There are things that get much, much easier as the kids get older. There are things that get much, much harder. For myself, though, I’d have to say that it has gotten easier, if for no other reason than that my work week is now thirty hours shorter than it used to be. Well. Between half-days, holidays, school vacations, sick days, and volunteer requests, it is never a full thirty hours per week that I get off from the immediacies of parenting. I do say no to almost everything that’s asked of me during those hours — after eight long years of having to ask for every single moment I ever got to myself, I don’t feel any shame at all about turning down volunteer requests. The volunteers in our school do good work, of course. But I can’t help but notice how many of their activities are about busy work and tending to social connections. I don’t have the patience for such things anymore. Each hour I have to myself seems too precious to squander. After eight years of being on call to my family 24/7, I have earned the right, I think, to know my own strengths and play to them for as long as I can.

So I spend my hours as intelligently as possible. I take long walks, because walking is the only exercise I’ve ever liked. I tend to my closest relationships. I read. And I write. I hope to have, by sometime this summer, a completed first draft of a novel. Not something I ever intend to circulate or publish, but something I did entirely for myself, to see what the skills are that one must develop to accomplish such a thing, and to see whether or not it is fun. It is fun, actually — that’s surprised me, how much fun it is. It’s surprised me how much I enjoy submerging myself in something that isn’t for the benefit of anyone at all, except possibly myself. Whether I have managed to acquire novel-writing skills in the process, I have no idea. But I have acquired the skill of being for myself when I can, the skill of standing alone, just myself and my own brain getting down to work at something. It surprises me, how much I enjoy it all. It surprises me, how rewarding it is to go on growing up.

For the convenience of the government of the state of Utah...

... I hereby present a short risk of things that are currently thought to increase one's risk of miscarriage. Pregnant women of Utah, play it safe and keep careful track of your actions. If you miscarry you could be considered "reckless" if you've engaged in any of these:

• The woman's age at time of pregnancy. Is it a reckless act to get pregnant after the age of 40? I guess the state of Utah will decide. I should hope, though, that the state recognizes that getting pregnant by a man over the age of 40 is also a reckless act.



• Previous miscarriages. Do you have a history of miscarriage? Getting pregnant again could be a reckless act.



• Being too skinny. That's right: this study found that low pre-pregnancy body mass index was a risk factor for first-trimester miscarriage.



• Coffee. Do they even have Starbucks in Utah? Anyway, stay away from coffee if you want to avoid the long arm of the law in the aftermath of a miscarriage. Because caffeine consumption ups your risk of miscarriage. Unless, of course, it doesn't.



• Amniocentesis, particularly if done by a less experienced medical team. Ladies, now you know you are being reckless if you don't insist on having prenatal testing performed in a high-volume teaching hospital using highly skilled staff. What? Your insurance doesn't cover that? Hmmmm, that's not the law's problem, now is it?



• Get pregnant by an abusive partner. You didn't realize he was abusive until you became pregnant? You didn't have a choice, because he raped you and/or sabotaged your birth control? Excuses, excuses. If you were really deserving of the state's protection, why, that man would have treated you better.
  
  
• Eating at the deli. The good people of the state of Utah could choose to charge you with feticide for that turkey sandwich, you know.

Let's not forget the usual suspects: smoking, drinking, car accidents, falling. Don't do any of those, either. Because the loss of your pregnancy won't be enough punishment for you if you do. Oh, no. Just ask the wise men of the state of Utah.

Martin Luther King Jr. Believed In... a kindergarten primer

Okay, Martin Luther King, Jr., did not believe in plastic forks. That was just the first thing I had lying around to protect the pseudonymity of the innocent.










Yes, peace. Which is illustrated by white kids (check the hair) hugging each other. BB, as per the assignment, crossed out the picture that showed the opposite of peace: a black kid pushing a white kid. Um. This lesson on Martin Luther King, Jr., seems to be missing something. Like, I dunno... an anti-racist component? Historical context? Civil rights? Okay, I get that these are hard concepts to teach to five-year-olds. But not-so-subtle pictorial messages that black boys are nothing but trouble? That, apparently, is easy to teach to five-year-olds.





White boys! Don't tower over black girls and kick their toys! Get down on her level and help that poor girl. Lord knows she can't build with blocks by herself.










Martin Luther King, Jr., believed very strongly that white children should not litter. White folks! Use the trash cans!










After this important lesson, BB gives the obvious answer to the question of how she could be like Martin Luther King, Jr.: "black and white Guys can Drink the sam coffe." Because if there's one thing that BB has learned in her short life, it's that caffeine is the way to spread peace and happiness.

Random double-bullets of intemperate cranking

• Welcome back to the new, revisionist Phantom Scribbler. You know, the one with no comments on any of the posts. Years of the pixie party vanished, just like that. Thanks a lot, The Company Formerly Known As Haloscan.



• But I have to admit that I get some bizarre existential glee out of seeing it all wiped away and transformed into a years-long monomaniacal monologue.



• Except when I had to wipe away the "We'll always have Hogwarts" sidebar. That gave me no glee whatsoever. None. Stupid Haloscan.



• Also, in order to restore some comment function to this blog, I had to blunder around in my own code and royally screw things up. I think the only problem I still haven't figured out is the one currently on display in these double bullets. But if you find any other good ones, lemme know. Maybe I'll fix them someday. Or, you know, not.



• Because I have already thoroughly bored all of my FB friends (and, I know, that category includes most of you still reading), I'll say it here one more time: Partners In Health. There is no better place to put your aid dollars.



• If I might go on an intemperate rant for a moment, you know what I think is the second-best thing you can do for Haiti, after you make whatever donation you can afford? Turn off your fucking television. Why? Because every single person who has been flown into Haiti for any purpose other than to dig through rubble or treat patients or deliver aid is nothing but another example of the shameless exploitation of Haiti in particular and the endless profiteering on human suffering in general. Blah blah blah raising awareness blah blah blah. Our awareness has already been raised. And, besides which, our need to have our awareness raised is NOTHING compared to the need of the people who are suffering. Haitians don't need us to bear witness to their suffering -- they need relief for their suffering. Later, if and when the suffering is relieved, THEN will be the time to bear witness, if by that we mean "listening to Haitians tell their own stories, because they have determined that it helps them on their long road to healing if they can present those stories to others." NOT if it means, "CNN and other media organizations are using this compelling content to raise their audience numbers so that they can charge more money for their advertising slots." Really, if you spend more than a minute contemplating the fact that actual real money is changing hands so that one company can pay another company to advertise to you while you consume images of human suffering, your head will certainly explode.



• And on that note. Happy 2010, all you vanishing pixies.

The end of something

I got pinged by Haloscan today. They're rolling out the change blog by blog, and MB's blog had already been converted, so I knew it was coming. Haloscan has been taken over by another company, which wants to charge me $9.95 per year to continue hosting the comments. In fact, I voluntarily paid more than that to Haloscan per year -- but that was to keep the pixie party ad-free, not to keep it running at all.

I've thought about it, and I've decided to let the comments come down. It's the money -- not the amount of it so much as the change in terms, really. But it's also the deeply personal nature of so many of the comments we left here over the years. These comments were always indexed by search engines, and may live on through the wayback machine or something, but I think it's probably not a bad thing if they eventually disappear from teh internet's semi-eternal memory.

I haven't decided what I'll do once the comments are gone. I may just revert back to Blogger comments and moderate them; I may move the site if Laura finds a way to import the old comments into a different format; I may not activate comments at all. It would be a bit weird, using this space for occasional monologues rather than conversations. But the conversations take place elsewhere these days, and I think many of us prefer to have the personal conversations in more private settings, anyway.

It was a wonderful party while it lasted. I want to thank you all for coming. You have enriched my life in ways I can't even begin to enumerate, and I'm very glad to count so many of you among my friends. Thank you.

Knit & whine

BB wasn’t thrilled to get up for school this morning. Okay, it was dark, it was pouring, it’s Friday, and, you know, while school is okay and all, it is (she informs me) not the best thing in the world. You know how that goes. I tried to talk her out of bed.

BB: “I wish I was too little to have to go to school.”

PS: “Yeah, I can understand that. But if you were too little to go to school, you’d also be too little to ride your scooter, or read books, or do all kinds of things that are fun.”

BB: “Fine. I wish I was too BIG to have to go to school, then.”

PS: “Okay, but then you’d have to get up to go to a job.”

BB: “Oh yeah? But what about MAMA?”

PS: “Er. Right. Well, then you’d have to get up to take care of your kids.”

BB [sighing]: “I wish I didn’t have to get up for a job OR kids.”

PS: “Then what would you do all day?”

BB: “Knit!”


Yeah. Since that first project I took on a couple of years ago, I have gone back to knitting with a vengeance. I’m a lot better at it than I used to be, but that’s mostly because I spend a lot more time on it than I used to. And the only downside I’ve found so far to my renewed knitting habit is that talking about it incessantly is a good way to bore non-knitters to tears.

So! With that in mind, fellow-knitter Jody and I have just started a Ravelry group for knitters, crocheters, and crafty kibbitzers from this corner of the blogosphere. If you’re a friend of mine on Ravelry, I’ve already invited you. If you’re not and you’re interested in joining, either friend one of us, or drop us a line and we’ll tell you where we are. Bonus points if you join this weekend, when I am planning to steek a sweater that I have just finished knitting for BB. That should be good for LOTS of whining. Also, I am planning to cast on for this lovely shawl — and I’ve never knit from a charted pattern before (in fact, I usually make up a pattern as I go along, with EXTREMELY mixed results), so that should also be good for lots of whining. So come along. It will be fun.

On pseudonymity

M. LeBlanc is trying to decide whether to shed her pseudonymity. (I’m not linking because 1. Y’all already read Bitch Ph.D., and 2. This is a post about me, not a conversation with relevance to whether M. LeBlanc should or should not continue with a pseudonym.) I’ve done most (though not all) of my writing on teh internets under this pseudonym, and it has mostly been a fine thing. Not because it has protected my privacy (when your in-laws and most of your friends know your pseudonym, qu'est-ce que c'est “privacy?”), but because it created a public space where I could play around onstage. I don’t expect to get taken seriously when I write under a silly pseudonym. And that, as it turns out, is the fun of it.

But that wasn’t the original reason why I chose to write under a pseudonym. I chose a pseudonym out of fear, though I knew then (not as well as I know now) that the pseudonym would never offer me fail-safe protection. A pseudonym is the condom of casual writing — it will protect you in most cases, but it’s got a high failure rate. It’s a house made of straw. If someone blows hard enough, they’ll get in, huffing and puffing and terribly pleased with their own efforts. Hey, if that’s what gets them through the tedium of their days, who am I to protest? Everyone needs a point of interest to get them out of bed in the mornings. Unmasking bloggers may be a sort of creepy and stalkerish hobby, but whatever. There are worse hobbies. It ain’t heroin. When it comes to someone like me, though, I’m just surprised that anyone would think it worth the effort. I’m nothing, no one. I’m a housewife in the suburbs, with two kids and an elaborate education I don’t do much with. There are a million of us, but the world already has more than enough volunteers to form the small regiment needed to conduct the Mommy Wars™ that seem to be our most prolific cultural production (and the New York Times’ most reliable revenue stream). Who on earth cares about the name of yet another member of the unproductive articulate chattering classes?

I’d feel differently, of course, if my goal was to become more important or pursue professional ambitions. But I’m not planning to run for public office, nor to seek my fame and fortune. And there’s not much I’ve written that would disqualify me from getting any ordinary old job of the kind that pays the bills so that you can dream your impossible dreams in the absence of physical privation. I’ve worked in a bookstore; I’ve been other people’s administrative assistants. I could do that again, and no one on the hiring team would give a rat’s ass about anything I’ve written here, even if it were under my real name. I might cringe a little to hear me quoted back to myself by coworkers and acquaintances — any collection of words must contain things the author wishes she could erase and make as though they’d never been. But most of my real-life friends have known about the blog for a good long time, and I find in the end it doesn’t much matter if I say something I’m a little ashamed of afterwards. As I keep telling BB as she struggles with the (comparatively) vast stage of kindergarten, we all embarrass ourselves. It’s just part of life, and something that doesn’t register to anyone else half as strongly as it registers to you. I tell her it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t — unless someone you fear is paying attention.

I have always known that people I feared might be paying attention. I have an awful lot of privilege in my life, but there is one small privilege I have never had. I have never not been afraid. Fear was my birthright, and the names and faces of the people I fear have always been known to me. It was the faces of my family I pictured when I chose a pseudonym and hit enter. The thought of them peering into the contents of my head, even a public performance of the contents of my head, filled me with fear. They have never paid attention to me except in order to find more effective tools to shame and control me. I used a pseudonym in order to keep from getting flattened with weapons drawn from my own mind.

I bought myself a lot of time with that pseudonym. It’s been more than four and a half years — almost an eternity in internet time, and long enough to bury most of what I’ve said in the avalanche of verbiage that Google so meticulously tracks. (Oh, sure, you can still find everything I’ve ever had to say, but who has the patience to page through that many search results?) I bought myself so much time that having a blog is now as unremarkable as having a telephone. Everyone and their grandmother has a blog lying around here somewhere, gasping for updates. Hell, my dad talks about the people he’s met through blogging. I bought myself so much time that, really, having a blog turns out to be no big deal.

But I couldn’t buy myself forever. A few weeks ago, the wind blew through the place where the straw walls were weakest — Facebook, that mishmash of childhood friends, family, Lexulous buddies, PTA moms, bloggers. One of the people I have been protecting myself from noticed that I know someone she does, someone she works with. How is it, she demanded of the department secretary, that my SISTER knows that person? There was a chain of communication from the department secretary onward, like a junior high drama, culminating in a phone call. It’s just so FUNNY, she said to me, that you would know someone who’s an academic. (Only after I hung up the phone did I think of telling her that there’s now an equivalency exam one can take, such that, if one passes, one is certified to become friends with people in the hallowed halls of academia, even if one has not achieved such rarefied heights oneself.) We debated the merits of her method of trying to ferret out how I knew this person. That is to say, we yelled at each other for 20 minutes, while MB cheered me on in the background. After we hung up (or were hung up on), I shook for 40 minutes straight. But I was proud of myself. It turns out I really can feel the fear and do it anyway. I did it. I said my piece. I didn’t back down.

I don’t know for certain that she’s gone on to uncover my pseudonym, but I know there is a clear trail from the person she’s identified to this blog, if she digs enough to pursue it. The only reasonable course of action is to assume that I have already been discovered. I’ve come a long way, baby, from my most fearful early years, because I never considered pulling the whole blog down. (I did consider locking it, but only briefly.) I was relieved, though, that it’s been such a long time since I’ve used this space regularly, or for any personal ruminations.

But I have been thinking about it, and I have come to a decision: to hell with that. It’s a fine thing to not be blogging because I have nothing to say. It’s perfectly valid to set aside personal stories because I think the time for them in blogland has more or less passed. But to refrain from speaking because I’m afraid to be heard? Fuck that. This is still my space, whatever name I choose to call myself by. Audience matters, of course it does, but it isn’t everything. If I have something I need to say (which doesn’t happen often, these days, but I suppose remains possible), I’m still going to say it. Even if someone I used to fear is reading. Because, really, who gives a shit? I don’t. I’m nearly 40 years old. I’m done fearing my past. It’s time to move on.