In which I realize it’s more than merely a biological function, but since I’ve been left out of the whole thing I want to chew on it around the edges a little.
If you’ve been reading this site for any amount of time, you know something of my fertility history. (If you haven’t, here’s the article about my Worst Miscarriage Ever – I’ve had many – and this one is about how the hospital tried to sue me for writing about it on the Internet, and here’s one about what I now believe was actually the last window of baby opportunity in my whole entire life.)
I’m now not only too old to have children (PRAISE THE LAWRD!) but I’ve had my uterus RotoRootered (AGAIN WITH THE PUH-RAYSE!) so I couldn’t even if I tried (HALLELUJAH!).
But there was a pretty long stretch of years during which it could have happened, the whole parenthood thing, at pretty much any moment. I was sexually active, half-assed about the birth control, and ovulating regularly. There was always a bit of expectancy, if you’ll pardon the lame pun, a feeling that it could be me next… but it never was.
I’ve had me some bad bouts of Baby Hots, sure, but they never lasted long and I never really could visualize myself in the role as someone’s mother. I remain pretty much convinced that I never wanted kids, not really, and I think I always believed that I never would manage to have any.
From the far side of the fertility gamut, though, the fact is that not having had any children is weird. It’s weird like being left-handed and gay and a math genius and having Tourrette’s all at once: you’re a statistical anomaly.
I can count on my fingers the number of friends in my age bracket who haven’t managed to pass along their genetic information in some form or another. Everyone else floods their Facebook and Flickr accounts with pictures of their offspring, and posts updates about number of centimeters dilated and La Leche League meetings and potty training and first day of kindergarten/first grade/middle school/high school and first steps and first bras and first trips to the DMV. There are entire galleries of geek babies in t-shirts at thinkgeek.com, and Twitpic pictures of children, and that’s just online. In real life there’s an entire cultural bias toward the impossibly gigantic value of young and new humans. It’s a club I never got to join; I just stand on the sidewalk and look in the windows feeling like a tourist.
I can relate to parents about as much as I can relate to, say, Marines.
All of which serves to make me feel like an alien observer because I’ve only been through some of those things, and only as the child, and I find children themselves to be short, strange, incomplete adults. I realize that if no one had babies the species would die out, yeah, but the whole thing is foreign to me. I can’t relate.
People define themselves by what they do and child rearing is, apparently, a fairly immersive procedure. You have to sublimate most of your own desires for about twenty years in order to fulfill society’s expectations of you and the only way to do that is to believe you’re really digging it.
And maybe you do, I don’t know. Maybe it’s awesome to have some meaning to your life beyond yourself. But from the outside, it basically looks like a pain in the ass, and most of the time your kid really isn’t that cute/clever/intelligent. What I see from the outside looking in is a small thing genetically engineered to be so cute that you’ll love it instead of kill it, morphing over time into yet another not-that-terrifically-special human being. Yawn. The parents seem to be more deeply in love than the offspring do, and they devote most of their time and energy toward the child’s growth and development and deny themselves habitually.
It looks, to be honest, like a totally crap deal, and at the end what do you have? More consumers, consuming a finite number of resources, who, no matter what you did, think you fucked up anyway.
But everyone’s so gung-ho about it that I keep finding myself building hypotheses: maybe something neato happens when you meet the child of your body? Maybe some pheromonal thing that makes you really happy about the fact that you’ll have no life of your own for twenty years, and it’s sooooo awesome and magical and special and I’ve utterly missed out on the most transcendent experience humans can have and that’s why I’m cynical and bitter.
Except I’m not cynical and bitter. I just think parenthood looks like a crap deal. Cars wear out, leases can be broken, but once you’ve given birth there’s just no backing out of the thing. It’s permanent.
And permanent stuff, now that really does scare me.
They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
– Confucius, Analects
Chinese philosopher & reformer (551 BC – 479 BC)
I have another hypothesis: child rearing is spiritual, an object lesson in sacrifice, self-discipline, and surrender. Its permanence is built-in to keep the students from walking out of class.
If that’s the case, I’m all for it! But I repeat: you can totally learn all that shit and use a condom. Just sayin’.
I’m pretty sure that if I’d had a kid, I would not be at all the person I am today. I would not have learned TM, or lived in the Midwest, or traveled, or met my Sat-guru, or learned yoga, or stayed vegetarian. I would probably be, quite frankly, an ignorant fucking conehead.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it works for billions of people.
I wouldn’t say I’m happier because of my childlessness; I’ll even generously say that it might be just the opposite. But I get to do the things that matter to me, and the woman I am is far more nuanced and encompassing than the creature I would have been had I succumbed to my biological imperatives.
Lately, everyone I know is hip-deep in the whole kid thing: they’re either rearing children, letting grown children go, or gearing up to have their first children. The entire process is utterly off my list and I just end up scrolling past Facebook posts about going #2 and videos of baby’s first steps and standing back by the fence at barbeques and covering my ears in the check-out line at Walmart feeling strangely left out of a club I don’t even want to join.
I think I know now why there’s a cultural symbol called The Old Maid. She really is weird, compared to the majority.
In which we talk about breakfast! Yum! Because while I read a lot of involved, uplifting, active, and self-referential blogs, personally I’m just not that interesting. Plus: there’s a bunch of food porn!
Yesterday I was craving a big old bowl of the Egyptian breakfast food known as ful medames. The stuff is just so delicious I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Since my shift today didn’t start until one o’clock, I got up and took myself to the grocery store this morning. I didn’t go to Loney’s because they don’t carry fava beans and I never can find any pita bread there. Instead, I took my brother’s truck and went over to Super 1. It was gigantic:
There, I spent about two million years fifteen minutes looking for fava beans and pita bread. They were there, but not where I thought they would be, and I must have covered two thirds of the store’s square footage before I located them.
Then I went home and watched this video again on my iPod Touch, because it’s my favorite recipe for ful and I couldn’t remember how much lemon juice to use:
After that, I cooked up a big old batch of beans with garlic and lemon and garnished it with olive oil, parsley, tomato, radish, hard boiled egg, green onion, picked vegetables, and olives. It looked really pretty plated up:
And then?
And I eated it! With whole wheat pita bread! OMG teh yum!
(G’ma said the concoction “looked pretty, but didn’t taste all that good.” This is because I did not salt it per about ten recipes I’ve read which don’t call for salt. At all. Apparently you’re supposed to salt at the table. Which I did!)
The last time I had ful was in Brooklyn, in an Egyptian place around the corner from Deboka’s brownstone. It was freakin’ delicious there, too, and came with a giant squeeze bottle of tahini (!!!) and even had green peppers in it.
The time before that, I made a batch myself and packed it in a bento box with some falafel:
And here’s an entire gallery of fuul porn, just in case you doubted the status of my fandom for this dish! (Go look. Srsly. I’ll wait.)
Ful is the bestest, cheapest, fillingest breakfast ever. Bonus: it has the added benefit of giving you garlic breath first thing in the morning!
And yes, apparently I did just write an entire post about beans. Guess who needs to get laid?
In which I relate the story of my not-terribly-exciting Friday night.
Last night, I worked until ten and then went to see C- play drums over at Pub 21 (which is basically not a new venue, but just the name of the stage they’ve put in over at Merchant’s Deli).
I sat in on the band’s second-to-last song and belted out a blues chart. (S- got video of it that I’ll link to later.)
During the last song, I danced with a drunk guy. He fell down. He said, “Holy shit, dancin’ with the fuckin’ singer. Mlubblumbummurrph.” Then he spent 24 bars trying to chest bump with me. I said, “This is blues. Moshing isn’t really appropriate.” He said, “Mlubblumbummurrph.”
Then the gig was over and the joint cleared out quick and I stood in the parking lot and talked to L- about her obnoxious and painful ovarian cysts. Poor girl’s about to start major estrogen therapy next week, and she’s barely into her twenties.
Since it was only quarter after eleven, I drove over to Issacs street. The BK Lounge provided me with a Whopper with cheese, no meat (which apparently contains 600 calories even without the meat). The PnE provided me with companionship – there were maybe four people there, including the staff – and a couple of cocktails.
I was in bed by one in the morning… and boy I was pissed off when my alarm went off at nine o’clock this morning! Gah! (Not half as pissed as I’ll be when it goes off at SEVEN tomorrow, though.)
A- dropped by the office early this afternoon to print something, and called me sweetie and rubbed my shoulders. I could just eat that kid up with a spoon. Srsly.
In which my Friday was full of teh awesome!
First of all, I actually did manage to motivate this morning and get my ass over to the Many Waters Wellness Center for a vinyasa/hatha yoga class with this woman, whom I’d never met before but found to be a groovy person. I enjoyed her class very much.
Let me restate that, in case you missed it: I got up EARLY and went to a YOGA CLASS. In the MORNING. Someone give me an award, please?
My lower back is a mess, by the way. Not from the class or anything, just in general. (I always got called back a second time during public school scoliosis screenings because I’m swaybacked or something.) I need to figure out what it needs to be happy and then do whatever it is. A lot.
And I want a massage. Very much. Luckily, I found an LMT’s ad on the pin board at the center and cleverly wrote the number down. Yes!
And the studio’s yoga mats aren’t that cool, so I bought my own from Lotuspad because they replied to me on Twitter once. (Moral being: yes, Twitter can earn you money. If you’re not an obnoxious asshat, that is.)
My lunch turned out really cute today. Let’s look at it:
When I got to work, I still had two monitors, which made me geek-happy all over again:
And on my lunch hour, I walked up to the post office and discovered I had received a surprise package:
My friend Dave sent me homemade peanut butter cookies! For no reason whatsoever! (Or possibly for going to yoga, but that would require him to be able to SEE INTO THE FUTURE, which is improbable. But not impossible! After all, he didn’t say they weren’t for going to yoga.)
Mmm, cookies! Overall, I give the day an A+, even though at 4:30 it looked like this outside:
Damn this cold wet cloudy gray weather! Brr-rr-r-rr.
In which I bitch about my current work schedule, but find some stuff to be excited about.
I had yesterday off, which made it my Saturday. I have today off too, which means it’s my Sunday even though it’s your hump day.
I hate my new work schedule, I really do. Let’s look at the monstrosity again, shall we?
Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
It’s a horrifying mix of days, nights, and weekends. Last week I worked a respectable Monday-through-Friday daytime gig; now my schedule looks like I’m nineteen and working at a 7-Eleven in Compton.
Luckily I’m scheduled to meet with my boss tomorrow about adjusting it. Since the NOC1 is open 6am-10pm on weekdays and 8am-8pm on weekends and there are only six bodies to cover all those hours, it’s hard for anyone to get a decent schedule (but especially if you’re me and have mad experience but no seniority).
I told them at my interview that I love working swing shift but need weekends off to be a rockstar, and they said they understood. I agreed to work the Awful Schedule for a few weeks as needed, but basically no one else wants to work weekends or nights so someone has to get stuck with a shit schedule.
I’m going to make an adult compromise and ask for the weekday swing shift (1pm to 10pm, Monday through Friday). If they agree it will mean I can never gig on a Friday again, which SUCKS ASS, but at least I’d be at work at the same time every day and not have to do this sucky nights-to-days translation every single fucking week.
Seriously. Let’s transpose the Awful Schedule to daytime hours and see just how fucked up it really is:
Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm 7:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm 4:00 am – 1:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Four in the morning?! I can’t figure out how the poor guy who was working it did it for as long as he did. If I have to do this for more than a month I’ll explode. Or go postal. Or simply pull a no-call-no-show because I’m ASLEEP.
. .. … ……….. .. ……… . … .. .
There’s good news, though. Deep thought revealed that my schedule change might enable me to find a yoga class!
The last time I looked into yoga classes, I couldn’t go to any of them because I was always at work when they were offered; now that I work swing I have my mornings free. I dug around online and found two yoga classes on Friday mornings and emailed the studios to see if I can join. One’s actually a Hatha yoga class that starts tomorrow!
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.-Four Great Bodhisattva Vows [pdf]
I also found a Buddhist meditation day retreat (with an enticing “focus on gratitude” theme) that I’d very much like to go to, on November 21st. Of course I’m currently scheduled to work that Saturday, but a girl can hope.
I could really use a meditation retreat right about now, so I’m hoping they’ll let me attend even if I haven’t been to any of their group meditations or classes. It’ not like I haven’t been meditating for twenty years, even if in a different tradition.
I’d find a retreat closer to my own discipline if there was one. A quick google shows there was an ISKCON in Walla Walla once, but as it’s no longer listed on the main site I guess it’s closed. No other hits. Buddhist meditation will have to do… and if I get to go I’m sure it’ll do just fine.
—
1 Network Operations Center.
Update 11/12: Good news! My new schedule is equitable and starts next week: I work 1pm-10pm M-Th, have Friday and Saturday off, and work Sunday from 11am-8pm. Sundays after gigs will suck, but that’s what coffee’s for, yeah?
In which I troll my own archives, as I am wont to do, and bring y’all up to date on my latest neurosis deep self-reflective musings.
Uterus
Two years ago yesterday I underwent a surgery consisting of hydroscopy and rollerball ablation. The results were fantastic; I no longer think I’m on the verge of bleeding to death when I’m on my period. Even though I was uninsured at the time my Uterine Monster1 was discovered, I’ve completely paid off the surgery in full and my uterus is once again mortgage-free.
Divorce
I still haven’t finished the debt reduction program I started not long after the surgery, but I can’t be too far from having most of the debts of my marriage paid off. I still need to do some research into the few debts my program isn’t handling, and the bills The Ex isn’t paying–two different cellular bills and his fucking satellite TV–and get those cleared up; that will probably take another year or so. (I expect to die before I pay off my student loans, but that’s no one’s fault but my own.)
I find myself wishing that The Ex would finish the remodel and sell the farm, and then – as he’s promised to do should he ever sell the property – send me a check for $40k. That would really solve a bunch of problems for me. I’m not holding my breath, because apparently he’s not even living there any more; he’s shacking up in town with AmmZon2. And, since the person who owns the paper on the farm is (probably) too nice to get all medieval on his ass, he probably doesn’t feel at all compelled to get his shit together. I expect that the place will just sit there and rot until someone buys it out from under him for his unpaid property taxes3.
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In which I don’t have to be at work until one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
Due to a personnel change at work, I’m now going to be the closing technician. Starting tomorrow.
Which is fine. You know how I feel about mornings.
Trying to get a fixed schedule is proving to be difficult though, because I need a lot of Fridays and Saturdays off for gigs and the other evening employee – the one with seniority – is in his twenties and wants those same nights off too. We’ve been trying to settle on a schedule between the two of us for the past four hours and basically gotten nowhere.
Which means that I’ll be working the following weird schedule for the next couple of weeks:
Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Pretty sucky, huh? I wish I could work Monday through Friday from 1:00 to 10:00 with occasional Fridays off for gigs, but considering the NOC’s necessary coverage needs and the available warm bodies it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
My boss said he’ll make sure I get my days off together, at least. I’m just afraid they won’t be days I actually need to have off; if I were to gig in Richland on a Saturday night I probably wouldn’t get to bed until three. Getting up four hours later to work the Sunday day shift? Would be pretty much unbearable.
Oh well, it’ll all work out! No moar waking up at six in the morning, at least!
In which every time I go to New York, I have some sort of revelation about how unhappy I am. This is a very long post; YHBW.
The last time I was in New York, I’d gone to sing on my friend Barbara’s a capella album. I went because I was invited, not because I’d decided to check out New York. But when I got there, I had an amazing and transformative week.
My then-husband was off in Colorado at the Telluride Blues & Brews festival. I’d been to that festival before, and while it is hella fun, lemmie tell you what: it ain’t no fucking New York City.
I loved every single second in the city but I kept having the recurring thought, each time I was transcendently happy with what I was experiencing, that my husband, if he’d been sitting next to me, would not have dug it. I realized that he would not have liked the food, the company, the conversation, any of it.
In short, I finally really grokked that my husband and I were utterly unsuited. Add to that the observation that I’d been panic-free the entire trip (save for the episode I had my last night there, when I thought about having to return home), and I’d had a life-changing breakthrough: I wasn’t sick, I had a panic disorder. I had a panic disorder because I was deeply unhappy. I was unhappy because I hated my life: my husband and I had nothing meaningful in common and I was emotionally, intellectually, and socially starved. On Maslow’s chart I was essentially hovering between the bottom two states, with no hope in sight of ever going any higher. Ever again.
This was a revelation to me (although perhaps not to those around me) because I honestly hadn’t allowed myself to know how miserable I really was. I had been trying to count my blessings, I’d been trying to make the most of my choices, and I was trying to honor both my wedding vows and the terms of my mortgage. It just turned out that, after trying both, I didn’t like marriage or country living. Not even a little.
So I left New York after a deliriously happy and fulfilling week, and went home knowing that if I were to survive some shit seriously had to change. Within the year I had separated from my husband and moved back to town. What followed then was a period of fucking off and being selfish, followed by a period of being responsible again.
Five years later I’m having regular panic symptoms again, and once again I’m trying to attribute them to physiological anchors – I wrote a post about my luteal phase less than two weeks ago, didn’t I? Well, I don’t know if it’s perimenopause. I think I might just be really fucking unhappy. Again.
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In which I’m catching up on my New York posts.
Last Thursday I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art all by myself.
I went downtown (er, uptown) with Deboka to her school to see if I could get in for an acupunture treatment but the day was fully booked. In the library I got online to figure out how to get to the Met. Deb gave me directions to the subway from her school, and off I went with a few handwritten notes.
I walked the wrong direction after I surfaced from the subway, but eventually got where I was going.
The museum is gigantic and I wasn’t able to find a map among the leaflets in the lobby, so I simply walked in and started wandering.
I saw the Art of the Samurai exhibition.
I saw a bunch of modern art I wasn’t particularly interested in, but I was kind of tickled to be in the presence of my first real-life Andy Warhol and my first real-life Jackson Pollock. I ended up in the French Art Deco section and had a brief but torrid love affair with a newspaper table:
Saw a bunch of Greek stuff, some Egyptian stuff, some African stuff… and finally, finally I found the Asian exhibitions. There was an entire room full of Buddha statuary:
A few rooms later, I found the Hindu deities. Ganesh!
Lord Shiva!
Of course, the museum closes at 5:30 on Thursdays, so immediately thereafter I got kicked out.
Deb was taking a mid-term until seven, so I sat on the steps of the museum for awhile and people-watched.
After that, I found a bar to sit in. I had a drink, rested my feet a little more, and caught up on my Twitter feed. Then I managed to get all the way back to Deb without getting lost, and we went out for Indian food.
Success! I navigated the subway twice and didn’t end up in Queens!
In which I’m gonna be droppin’ some names, bitches!
I saw many of teh gayz while I was in New York City, and some of them were World Famous Bloggers too. I totally took pictures! Let’s take a little visual tour of teh gayz I saw, shall we?
Here’s VUBOQ. He’s my friend and a World Famous Blogger. He once let me crash in his home for nearly a week, and no one is more willing than he to find a Mexican joint and drink margaritas:
Here’s Derby, my college friend and fellow musician. He’s one of the world’s genuinely good people, and I love talking with him. You remember him from a previous post but I’m reposting because he’s one of teh fabulous gayz and it’s the only pic I have of him from this trip (plus I luff heem):
Here’s Derby’s supercute partner. I’d never met him before but he has a sweet vibe and fell asleep while Derby and I were up late talking, curled up with the puppy:
Here’s my World Famous Blogger friend Jake, who totally let me sleep in his living room for free. He made me a fried egg I will never forget. I *heart* Jake for many reasons (including his intelligence and his kindness and his wool coat) but mostly because I just think he has a big heart:
This is my new friend and World Famous Blogger Jere, who is in law school. He’s charming, funny, kind, erudite, has a wonderfully dirty mind, and is basically a fantastically awesome human being. I think he’s adorable. Here he is dressed up as an evil morgue employee for Halloween:
I got to meet the wonderful David, World Famous Blogger, after seeing him perform in Brigadoon. He’s animated, cute, kindhearted, disturbingly active (he goes to yoga on Saturday mornings on purpose), and possesses a really gorgeous soul (and you know I can cognize such things). He’s shown here with VUBOQ:
I saw Yuval, too! He and I met a couple of years ago in DC and he’s just charming as hell with his PhD in linguistics and his cute accent:
Here’s my favorite Halloween pic of Jere, VUBOQ, and Yuval not being gay at all:
Okay, maybe they’re being a little gay (where “a little gay” = WHOLLY AND COMPLETELY GAY).
In other news, I almost-but-didn’t meet Josh, World Famous Blogger, and Craig, World Famous Blogger, so sadly I can’t show you pictures of them. Which is good, ultimately. Because if I could? This entry would be entirely too gay to post.
VSCO
Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
