Mommy’s quest to remain well read.

It’s the most bloggable time of the year. I was recently filling out an editor profile for a site for which I freelance, and under the What do I do when I’m not editing section, I sorely wanted to enter “Breastfeed and wash cloth diapers,” not just because both of those things feel like hobbies that privileged stay-at-home-moms do, but also because when you subtract those things from my day, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of time left for anything else.

I have been trying to fit more into the breastfeeding time blocks, though. It all started in September, when I had a lull in editing work. Amid my efforts to tamp down the panic and self-doubt that inevitably accompanies such a break (“Why aren’t my usual clients asking me to complete more work? Did that typo I missed in Chapter 7 reveal what a shoddy editor I am? Did they realize what I have not yet grasped, that I am actually not a very good editor? Why did it take so long for me to understand that I am just not cut out for this kind of work?”), I decided to put my recently acquired library cards to use. I had been meaning to read Lolita for ages. In high school, I had deemed myself too young and immature to read it, even though it was on the venerated College Board list of 100 books to read before college. In college, floating in the library, I located a copy, read the first page, and was immediately drawn in by the weirdly compelling voice of one Humbert Humbert, but I put off jumping into what I could only assume was a very sympathetic psychopath’s head. Now, with a lit degree, and a baby no less, I figured I was old enough and experienced enough, and lo, there was an ebook version I could check out.
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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, completed September 2015: It turns out Nabokov is just as lyrical and hyperliterately clever as I’d heard he was, and I mostly thought it was a shame he felt this was the story he needed to tell. It’s an accomplishment, of course, to make something so viscerally disturbing enjoyable to read, but I don’t think I’m ever going to shake my evangelically moralistic approach to reading novels. Nevertheless, I was completely sucked in. A few months later, I proofread a memoir by a woman kept and abused by her father for years, and the parallels were striking, especially in the motif of moving west to evade detection, so the story in retrospect certainly carries the heft of verisimilitude. I felt, too, shades of the creepy lyricism of Thomas Mann’s short stories, which I found enjoyable despite themselves in high school. After I finished Lolita, I summarily began Pale Fire, but it was yet another peculiar professor in a small college town, and I was just kind of over it, and then my checkout expired, and I haven’t checked it out again.
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Meanwhile, I applied to editing gigs ferociously, and I started getting some responses. I ended up taking five entry tests and passing all of them. One company bumped me up a pay level immediately because I pointed out some edits that were erroneously marked wrong in the test, and another said it hired me out of 85 candidates, so I decided to give myself permission to feel good about myself again for a while. (One publishing company I cold emailed found some typos on my sole proprietorship website, and that knocked me down a few pegs, but I decided to tell myself it just proves that everyone needs an editor.)
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The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, completed November 2015: One of the companies that hired me immediately welcomed me into the fold and offered me two tickets to a luncheon with Isabel Allende downtown at the end of November. I was ecstatic to 1. be a part of such a cool company, 2. see a famous author, 3. get out of the house, and 4. not breastfeed for like 4 whole hours.  I had never actually read anything by her, but I knew who she was and that I could easily remedy that. The House of the Spirits is her first and most well-known novel, and I was absolutely taken in by it. The multigenerational plots are absorbing, and the characters are sometimes broadly drawn but ultimately fascinating. I appreciated most of all the window into 20th-century South American politics, which I’m pretty sure I learned nothing of in school, and the clear explanation of the movement from landed-gentryism, to communism, to a devastating military coup and fascism that continued until the end of the century. Also appealing to me were the characterizations of the women, who, it becomes clear, were the ones to hold the families and the country together despite their limited power and opportunities.
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Maya’s Notebook, by Isabel Allende, completed December 2015: I didn’t want to go the luncheon having read only one of her novels, so I began a second. Allende was charming and, for lack of a better word, feisty in person, and I deeply appreciated her thoughts on imagination (heightened reality), writing (if you don’t write it down, how do you know it happened, really?), and politics (imbuing the populace with fear makes it easy to enact atrocities). This novel draws on many of these themes in a chronicle of a young woman’s quest to escape her past while living among her grandmother’s people in a remote part of Chile in the 21st century. I was more than a little affected by the story of such an abandoned girl descending into complete destitution and then working to reemerge, despite the improbable murder mystery/evading the law hijinks that ensue.
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The Circle, by Dave Eggers, completed December 2015: During what I am sure will later come to be known as the Great Literature Hiatus (from when I graduated college in May 2011 to, oh, now, I guess), I read very few actual books. Sure, I edited a solid number of them, and I read large swaths of Slate, Jezebel, and anything discussed on Slate and Jezebel, but I just did not sit down and read books for the sake of reading books like I had since I had begun to read. Off the top of my head, I know I read Crime and Punishment (for the third time, I think?) because a friend wanted to try a long-distance book club. I started Reading Lolita in Tehran for some reason, and maybe now that I’ve read the real deal, I’ll revisit it. I also read The Peaceable Kingdom and Hannah’s Child, because Daniel and I were on a Hauerwas kick, me especially as I was looking for a semi-coherent account to rationalize the convictions I had buried in high school when my youth group leader asked us who supported the then-imminent entry into what would become the Iraq War, and I did not indicate that I did, and our leader told us that even if we didn’t support the war, we needed to support the troops, and, with the help of The Wall Street Journal, I began to open my heart to just war theory.

I also read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers because he was going to be at the PLNU writer’s symposium, and even though I wouldn’t be able to attend, moldering as I was in Michigan, I felt like I should, and because I liked McSweeney’s, and because his literacy center had an adorable robot-themed location in downtown Ann Arbor and I wanted to be in on the joke. And it was pretty heartbreaking, but also so, so self-aware in the way that is painfully annoying but also unfortunately authentic to the way we live now etc. The Circle is the way we live now in hyperdrive, a futuristic parable about what happens when we digitize everything (dystopian singularity, of course). At the beginning, the book felt blocky and ham handed, but then I decreased the size of the font in my ereading app and it began to feel more literary and written for adults, and by the end I was beginning to feel guilty about every digital move I was making, including writing this post, which no doubt will be monetized in the cloud and subsumed in the future digital armageddon. Luckily, I have Isabel Allende in the back of my mind reminding me that I am probably not going to remember much that I don’t document, so if I want to know what and how I lived, what made up my life, writing some of it down wouldn’t be the worst thing.

On the difficulty of speaking happy little truths.

I have now told /almost/ everyone, and I feel like I deserve a major reward, like dessert, except I currently eat so much dessert that that really wouldn’t be a good idea. Listen, I’m still nauseated by the thought of a lot of foods, especially ones that are good for me, so most of the time I’m just glad to get enough calories. Besides, I’m still taking a daily vitamin /and/ I’ve started DHA gummies for some delicious scientifically unsubstantiated brain boosting (the gummies were designed for young children, but they were much, much cheaper than the prenatal DHA pills, and it’s literally taking fish oil, which, come on, do the Inuit and Finlanders really have IQs that are that much higher? It might as well be snake oil. I’m a sucker).

It is very, very, very, very hard to tell people. I’ve been fretting about it for months, because, duh, I’ve been pregnant for months. And, let’s be real, I’ve been dreading it for years. My only recurring dream throughout my adolescence was about being pregnant. I would have progressive dream pregnancies over the course of several nights, and, interestingly, I was never alarmed or worried about the physical experience of being pregnant. It felt as natural as anything else. Instead, I was terrified about telling people. And then about having them know. Granted, I was always whatever age I was (15, 16, 17) and definitely single and spontaneously pregnant in these dreams (for whatever reason, the how of the situation was never apparent. I guess my subconscious was much more interested in the state of pregnancy rather than what it takes to get there?). But I think we can say, conservatively, that I’ve been dreading telling people I’m pregnant for nigh on a decade now. This is starting to sound pathological.

It’s a lot like telling people when we got engaged (which I didn’t spend nearly enough time worrying about as an adolescent). Leading up to becoming engaged, I was terrified of not being able to muster up socially acceptable levels of excitement in the wake of the big moment. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the moment actually made me physically happier than maybe I ever had been—it was actually a visceral rush of joy. And I needed every bit of it for the excruciating phone calls and texts and conversations that I knew I needed to conduct afterward. Even though I felt every bit of the euphoria, it was still pinprickingly painful to share that joy. And not because I didn’t want to share. I was glad to make a lot of people happy and excited to be excited with me. So what was it? What is it?

This time around, I wasn’t even concerned about my own emotional response. I knew I would be happy being pregnant, and I knew it was a good time to start trying. I did think briefly that I might be weirded out about a little swimming alien in my stomach, but it turns out I’m enchanted by what feels like a tiny whale undulating in a tiny sea, and what’s even better, it helps assuage my fear that the fetus has spontaneously died and I am unknowingly a walking mausoleum. But I was absolutely, positively, desperately dreading letting anyone else know.

But I did it anyway. Just under the deadline in a lot of cases; much earlier, after much goading, and just on the cusp of offending people in others. And it has gone really well, at work, with family, at church. People get really happy about the prospect of a baby (maybe because it’s not theirs and they won’t have to feed/clothe/change it around the clock? Kidding). And I even got a frisson of excitement each time I spoke my happy little truth. But that didn’t make it any easier.

So what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I take joy in sharing the happy events of my life? Maybe a clue lies in our other major life milestone, because I despise telling people we bought a house. And if you look at the way we’ve accumulated adult accomplishments like a precocious child with so many Awana badges (to use a metaphor ripped straight out of my own experiences), it starts to look kind of obnoxious. For our time and place, anyway. I understand there was a time when checking off college, marriage, grad school, house, and baby by 26 wasn’t unusual (or least three or four of those things?). But here and now, we’re not only privileged enough to have gone to college and grad school and snagged a mortgage, we’re also fortunate enough to have found our soulmatey ring by spring counterparts on the first day of school freshman year, and, cherry on the sundae, to have gotten pregnant the first time we put our minds to it. It might just be that I’m deeply embarrassed to have gotten everything I ever wanted (or dared to hope for, really).

I don’t even know what to do with my own happiness. I was a deeply lonely and unhappy little girl from the ages of 11 to 19. I had hopes, but not very high ones. I was increasingly convinced that the only people who had ever seemed to understand me had died 50-200 years ago, and I was doomed to a rich inner life and a large collection of books. And when the first year of college was a disappointment, connecting-on-a-deeper-level-with-other-humans wise (I might have met the guy the first day of school, but that doesn’t mean things clicked immediately. Sometimes love at first sight is like at first sight and then later wonder what you were thinking and even later realize your subconscious knew what it was talking about all along), I was a little adrift. And then suddenly things started coming together, and they kept coming together, and here I am.

And I wonder if admitting to myself, and to the world by extension, that I am secretly wildly happy doesn’t feel a little like setting myself up for having that happiness taken from me. When you start thinking about how rare and unusual and precious your beautifully orchestrated life is, it can begin to paralyze you with fear and maybe make you never want to leave the house again. Because what if something happens to one of the rare and unusual and precious gifts you’ve been given? And that’s no way to live. So I compartmentalize my happiness in a little corner box and peek under the lid every once in a while to flood my brain with the golden glow, and then I shut the lid again so I can let my husband out of my sight, and leave my little house during the day even though what if it burns down and no one is there to stop it, and eat pumpkin pasta for dinner even though what if it has too much vitamin A for a pregnant woman.

And in this particular act of telling I am currently so concerned about, there is also a modicum of not wanting to be the center of attention, and not wanting to relinquish my Cartesian, autonomous male persona of physical imperviousness in exchange for soft, vulnerable, dependent, secondary, breeding femininity, with all the social undertones and implications of “giving up your career” at 26 to be just a homemaker etc. But we’ll deal with that as it comes. For now, it’s enough to have little abdominal taps and some very negative genetic testing results and pumpkin pasta for dinner with a special someone.

First grade memories.

I grew up in a cluster of small suburbs east of Cleveland, right off the lake. This meant serious humidity in the summer and serious lake-effect snow in the winter. Not that I knew any better. Summer was an excuse to live in my bathing suit, walking to the neighborhood pool for swimming lessons at Manry Park in the morning and running through the sprinklers in the backyard in the afternoon. Winter was the time when we bundled up, made a lot of snowballs, and chased the squirrels in the backyard. Plus it meant I got to go to school every day, which was great. Monday was my favorite day of the week, because it began a whole new series of school days. When I told my first grade teacher that, she laughed a lot and said most people didn’t like Mondays. I was baffled by the idea.

I had tested into Zenith, our district’s gifted program, during kindergarten standardized testing (which is insane if you think about it—standardized testing for five-year-olds? Deciding who’s “gifted” in kindergarten?), so on the first day of first grade, I got on not one but two buses for an hour-long ride (both ways), one of which involved sitting near terrifying middle schoolers, to get to the school where the gifted program was. Already painfully shy, I was supremely proud of myself for going up to the principal once I arrived and asking her where my classroom was. One of my first serious personal accomplishments.

My teacher was Mrs. Ciferno, and I loved her. Unfortunately for me, Mrs. Ciferno was pregnant and would soon be going on maternity leave. The day she announced she would be leaving was heartbreaking. I mourned on my long bus ride home and planned, when my mom asked me how my day had been, to declare, “Bad.” But to my chagrin, she didn’t ask me when I got home, and when I couldn’t take it anymore, I burst out, “I had a bad day!” and sobbed for what felt like hours.

Miss I forget her name, our long-term sub, was no replacement. She was dour and insensitive to the needs of first graders. In later years I had no problem imagining why she had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. Right before Christmas, Miss Whatever handed out books as presents, a chapter book about an anthropomorphic pig named Oliver for the boys, and an activity book filled with snowflakes to cut out for the girls. But she had the gall to give me the pig book, because, she said, she knew how much I liked to read. To heck with reading! What did I want with a talking pig? I wanted snowflakes! I spent the indoor recesses begging pages of snowflakes from the girls so I could join in the cutting and pasting.

I also spent my indoor recesses cleaning my desk. I loved cleaning my desk. Our desks had tops that lifted up and generous storage areas. I adorned the underside of my desk top with my art projects, held up by the sticky tack that I also stole from the teacher’s walls and played with on my bus rides home. Ronald, a red-haired freckle-type kid, did not love cleaning his desk. His desk was so jammed with papers and books that it wouldn’t close—he had to sit there trying to write on the upward slant. Miss So and So once said to him, “Ronald, why can’t you keep your desk clean? Look how nice Kaitlin’s is!” I felt, even at the time, that that was uncalled for. She also once asked him what was taking him so long to complete a project we were working on, pointing at me and indicating that even though I had started after him, I was already finished. What part of that did she think was pedagogically helpful?

We had an extensive playground, including the kinds of monkey bars that are now largely banned. I regularly swung and flipped on the monkey bar dome, and once I landed on my stomach and completely knocked the air out of myself. I had never felt that before and was terrified. It was such a horribly helpless feeling, like when I would awaken in the middle of the night and be unable to lift my head or move my body, a phenomenon I found out years later is common in children and was the absolute worst physical sensation I have probably ever had. Having the wind knocked out of me was a close second. That didn’t happen to me again until fourth grade, when it wasn’t nearly as scary but just as painful.

My classmate E.J. and I decided it would be fun to start kissing each other on the playground. Our P.E. teacher thought we were hilarious, pecking each other on the cheek and whatnot, but our parents were rather upset about it. I didn’t kiss another boy until I was 19. Not because I was traumatized, but really because the opportunity didn’t present itself again until then. Carpe diem.

I held my pencil with two fingers over the barrel until midway through first grade. It would be my only N (needs improvement) on my report cards until sixth grade, when I came back to school after having pneumonia, which gave me a new devil-may-care outlook on life and prompted me to giggle and talk to the boy across from me in science class. My science teacher, who quite liked me, was severely disappointed in me and gave me an N for classroom conduct. He retired at the end of that year, and I always felt like I was in part responsible for that, being such a large disappointment and all.

I was left handed, and it was hard for me to imitate the teacher’s pencil holding. I figured it out eventually, though, and became quite proud of my penmanship. We had sticker strips showing how to write the letters of the alphabet at the top of our desks, and one day when we had a sub for Miss Long-term Sub, the rebellious boy next to me took a paper clip and ripped rows through my sticker strip. I was very upset about this and made sure to tell on him when Miss Etc. came back so that it was clear I would never deface my desk that way and so that I could get a pristine new strip.

When we still had Mrs. Ciferno, she gave us a brief writing assignment (which, in first grade, is a single sentence) in which we were to identify our favorite music. I knew mine immediately: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. I had figured out how to use my parents’ giant stereo system at home, which could play like six CDs at a time, and I spent hours exploring their music collection. The Seger CD contained such hits as “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Hollywood Nights,” and “Night Moves.” I rocked out to it after school all the time. (Incidentally, while retrieving that Wikipedia link, I discovered Seger now lives near the Detroit suburb I used to commute into. Meant to be.) Of course, being six, I couldn’t spell “Seger,” “Silver,” “Bullet,” and probably “Bob” or “Band,” for that matter. So my teacher was mystified by my assignment. I gladly read it to her, and I’m sure she probably still didn’t know what I was talking about.

When we learned about Martin Luther King, Jr., there were no black kids in our class. So our teacher gingerly explained to us what it meant to discriminate based on the color of a person’s skin and outlined the history of such in the United States, but not all of the kids quite got the social context. Some of them looked around when she mentioned dark skin and started pointing at a girl whose parents were from southern Italy. “You mean like Andrea? Dark skin like Andrea’s?” Our teacher was flustered. I felt really bad for Andrea, who was my good friend. I could tell the difference between Italians and black people.

I had at least three friends over for my birthday that year, and we took a bunch of adorable Polaroids that I’ll have to digitize someday. You can tell which one is me by the ring of what looks like Kool-Aid around my mouth. I had started licking my lips in an effort to compensate for the dry winter air, even pressing my mouth (this is pretty gross in retrospect) against the condensation on the bus windows to try to moisten them and relieve the dryness. This launched a lifelong obsession with chapstick. Luckily, Lip Smackers were gaining prominence, and I quickly amassed a sizable, flavorful collection. Mmm, Dr. Pepper chapstick.

By the end of the year, I was very good friends with a little girl named Grace. Her mom would often take us to Dairy Queen after school, which was an unmitigated delight for me. I loved going to her huge house and playing with her interesting, endless toys and crafts, things I had never seen before such as Lincoln Logs and American Girl dolls. Grace’s birthday was in June, around the time school ended. On the way home from her party, my mom gently told me that Grace’s mom had cancer, and then tried to explain to me what that meant. It wasn’t hard to grasp the severity of the situation, and it was the beginning of three years of hope and finally sadness where I would watch news segments on new cancer treatments and think they were on the cusp of curing Grace’s mom and later try in my limited little way to be a good friend when it was clear they weren’t ever going to. It was my first glimpse of the kind of senseless pain and suffering that you become so accustomed to as an adult.

Baby fever.

Early pregnancy is largely a work of the imagination. I have spent the last nine weeks living in my head much more than in my stomach, willing myself to project downward the images in the stash of pregnancy apps in a secret folder on my phone (cleverly labeled “Folder”) in an effort to produce my own reality. I have to conscientiously narrate what the bare facts don’t indicate, that there is a Very Important Thing happening, that my mildly distended stomach is not just too much sammoon and shawarma, which is what circumstantial evidence would otherwise point to. I am a very modern, educated person (ask anyone; they’ll tell you), and yet if I put on my Cartesian hat and divest myself of all knowledge and context, what do my five senses tell me? I’m a little pudgy and I feel sick and tired all the time, and I don’t seem to get periods anymore, but that could be anything. Without the little colored strips and doctors, how would I ever know what was going on? Primitive humans are to be congratulated for establishing cause and effect, because I surely never would have on my own. I’d probably be keening back and forth in a corner muttering, “But how is babby formed???” over and over until like after the tenth kid.

It’s a lot of work, this work of imagining, and it’s infuriating not to know what’s going on, not to be able to troubleshoot, problem solve, and anticipate potential issues to stem them before they arise, like you usually can when you undertake a large, important project. You just don’t get to do that. There’s not much of anything you can do, except follow every recommendation like it’s ironclad law and then run the numbers in a sick little statistics game (you can find percentages of the risk of miscarriage for every week of pregnancy, and then ask yourself if you feel lucky this week. It’s great fun).

But honestly, have you ever felt as if your very body were, at any moment, ready to erupt into a scene from a bloody horror movie involving tiny body parts? Because that’s the corollary to the feats of imagination you’re thrown into. You suddenly, urgently, desperately realize that any of a great list of horrible things could absolutely happen to you or the little living being you keep pretending is there, and they absolutely have happened to so many women you know and feel like you know because you compulsively read their heartrending blog posts. Because it’s the internet, I will link to the ones I can’t stop thinking about. Empathetic pregnancy hormone cry with me: here’s a series of heartbreaking posts, and then look at the birth announcement and give up on holding it together. Also this one.

I like to think I’m a rational person, whatever that means. And part of being a rational person, my kind of rational person, is taking into account the calculated possibilities of all of the things that can happen, both bad and good, and preparing oneself for all of them. And then, especially, being endlessly grateful if and when many or all of them don’t occur. What this leads into, of course, is an explanation of my theodicy, such as it is, and how that affects the ways in which I conduct my affairs. Let’s take this premise and accept it as true without bothering to prove it: Bad things happen to good people. And bad things happen to bad people. So whether I am a good person or a bad person (without having to define either one), I can conclude that bad things will in all likelihood happen to me. Things I may or may not deserve. Things I may or may not have been able to prevent, through methods known or to be known in the future.

This is getting abstract. Let’s take Mary Wollstonecraft as an example, because she’s been on my mind lately. Wollstonecraft was a writer in the 1700s. She wrote about how women were equal to men, and then she died from childbirth. Many witty people at the time said she disproved her own writing—how could women possibly be equal to men when they were so weak they couldn’t even bear children? Well, guess what. Mary died from a contagious disease that is prevented by doctors washing their hands. I’m not kidding. So did Mary deserve to die because her idiot doctor didn’t follow basic hygiene principles? (I don’t normally cry, especially because of a Wikipedia article, but good grief, think about how incredibly preventable her death was and then look what her husband wrote to a friend right after she died: “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.”) Did any of the millions of women who have died from puerperal fever over the centuries deserve it? No, they didn’t. People who get cancer don’t deserve it, people who get ebola don’t deserve it, people whose lives are ravaged by hurricanes or wildfires or earthquakes don’t deserve it. I consider this incontrovertible.

How and why we still believe in God of infinite goodness is a complex topic for another time. I have a lot more thinking to do in that respect anyway. But understand where that leaves us. I can’t believe that if I read my Bible every night and say very selfless prayers and serve at church and think very very positive thoughts, I will be granted cosmic insurance against all evil that might befall me. That’s not how it works. Time and circumstance happeneth to us all.

So how then shall we live? Not with the expectation that everything will go according to my very well-thought-out plans, that’s for sure. I’ve got 21st-century medical knowledge on my side, and that’s comforting, but it’s not everything. And yet good and amazing things do happen. They’ve happened to me before, and I don’t think my ruthless emotional temperance has tempered the joy I’ve taken in them. So can a person be both happy and realistic? Well, why not?

On a vaguely related note, how is it that suddenly the only thing I can drink reliably is sweetened, carbonated beverages? I can barely abide water (and water can increase nausea—I have a pamphlet to back me up). Which is crazy, because I am not a carbonated beverage kind of person. Carbonated beverages tickle my nose and make me burpy. There was a time when a flat, room temperature soft drink sounded just as good to me as any other soft drink. So how it is that my fridge is now filled with club soda and Torani syrups? Because it’s darned expensive to buy Italian sodas at the rate at which I now drink Italian sodas, that’s how. And because I feel guilty drinking the 89-cent cranberry ginger ale from Walmart, even though it is absolutely my drink of choice. Anything for you, little baby.