mom tears

I don't think I've changed all that much since becoming a mom. If I've changed I've just become more like myself than ever—more of a homebody, more attached to having a plan—an amplification of who I was before.

One thing has definitely changed: I cannot learn about a child dying without starting to cry. It can be fiction, it can be non-fiction, it can be a 1,000 word essay or a 10 word tweet, it could have happened yesterday or 100 years ago—whatever it is, I will shed tears. Same with a baby being taken from its mother or lost in some way. 

Of course these kinds of things were always upsetting, but I don't ever remember crying over them before. Not unless I had a personal connection to the tragedy. Learning about a 1-year-old who died of scarlet fever 159 years ago is not exactly new information that requires my immediate emotional response. And yet, I will now cry over it. 

It makes sense, of course. In the course of human history, mothers who are attached to their babies probably do better on average in getting those babies to adulthood. Obviously I'm crying about my baby, and the idea of anything happening to him, but I also find myself crying for all the women who have had to live through their children's deaths. 

Up until about 200 years ago, half of all children didn't live to their fifth birthday. That is so much cumulative grief, I don't even know how to think about it. So instead you will now find me over here crying about it occasionally.  

the little things

 I took last Friday off because I had to work on Monday (which was supposed to be a holiday.) I totally wasted the day by going window shopping, seeing a movie, and driving 30 mins away to get pho. I was sort of miffed with myself for wasting the whole day, but then I realized that I hadn't had good pho since we left DC, three years ago, and I hadn't seen a movie for 2 years, since the pandemic started. (The shopping was still a waste of time.) 

The movie I saw was Licorice Pizza, which was fun. Paul Thomas Anderson movies used to make me vaguely angry because they are weird and slow, but I guess I enjoy that sort of thing more now. (Phantom Thread is one of my favorite films.) 

Anyway, I thought I wasted the day but then I realized how happy I am that movie theaters are open again and daycare is reliable (for the moment) and I can go by myself on a Friday afternoon and sit in a dark room and eat reese's peanut butter cups and turn my phone off and watch a story on a giant screen. 

the baby turns one, we all turn 2022

The baby turns one next week—on New Year's Eve. I've been thinking about this as his birthday week, though, probably because I was in the hospital for so long prior to his arrival. It feels like his birthday should, at least for me, last several days. 

It's very strange to have a baby on New Year's Eve. The whole yearly retrospective gets tied up with the baby. I can't separate what happened in 2021 (most of it not so good) from the baby himself. And because I love him, it's hard to think that 2021 wasn't a good year. A good, exhausting, endless year. 

Having a baby really does induce a weird kind of brain fog. It's very hard for me to understand that the Capitol was invaded by a Trumpian mob this year—just 6 days after he was born. An attempt to steal the election very much seems like something I made up while sleep deprived and taking powerful narcotics. 

It's also very strange to me that covid has been happening for the baby's entire life—including the whole time I was pregnant. I can't even pretend to remember what I was thinking in March 2020 when I got pregnant. That seems so long ago, another lifetime on a different planet. When people talk about returning to normal I understand rationally what they mean, but it is clearly impossible. A world before covid, before the baby, before all this? What world is that? 

I've always hated New Year's Eve as a holiday. The mandate to go out and have fun or else has always repelled me—who can have fun when it's mandated? Of course I never appreciated it for what it really is, not a mandate to get drunk but the celebration of a new start. And now for the rest of my life New Year's Eve will always be about the baby, even many years from now when he's not a baby anymore and has no interest in celebrating his birthday with me. A wonderful way to fully neutralize a holiday I've never enjoyed.  

The baby himself is a delight at the moment. Crawling like a champ, working very hard to stand and take some steps. He loves so many things—the dog, the dog's toys, the swings, taking a bath, speaking gibberish, his teachers at daycare, food, going outside, his father. (Especially his father. I am of no interest currently.) He understands the word no and occasionally obeys when I tell him not to do something. And in turn he shakes his head vigorously from side to side when he doesn't want to do something. I'm sure he also understands the word yes, but we don't use that one very often. 

I'm sure he will be even more interesting (and annoying) next year. Here's to 2022. 

i just can't take it anymore

Someone I work with got covid a couple weeks ago. I don't like to write about work because, given my huge readership (hello to the four of you!), I don't want to write anything that could get me fired. But every good rule deserves to get broken now and again, right? Right. The four of you won't tell, right? Sure. 

When I learned this person had covid I wasn't too concerned—I assumed it was a breakthrough infection, which happens, and they'd be fine. This was a reasonable assumption because I work at a university where vaccination is required. And I also did not think this person was stupid enough to be unvaccinated. Alas, my faith in intelligence is clearly unwarranted, because this person is not vaccinated. Not vaccinated and not young, either. 

My coworker is fine. But I am angry. I'm not angry because I'm scared, I'm angry because it's so utterly stupid and selfish.

I just, I mean, aargh, I can't even explain how much work it takes to be unvaccinated here. You need to apply for a religious exemption that is very onerous and time-consuming. And once you have that, you actually have to risk getting covid. The work and the risk is just so much greater than the minor inconvenience of getting vaccinated that I just cannot comprehend the utter stupidity of this choice. It is so completely selfish! If you don't get sick you're a possible vector to someone immunocompromised and if you do get sick and go to the hospital you are taking up space someone else might need. 

And this is a person I work with every day! I have to listen to their opinion! They routinely insist that I follow administrative rules that are pointless and yet they couldn't be bothered to get a required vaccination against a deadly disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Every time this person speaks all I can think of is how selfish and misguided they are and it's utterly exhausting. 

(To be clear, this person's religion has no prohibition against vaccination. I assume they came up with something to meet the requirements of a religious exemption but this person isn't a Christian Scientist or anything. I would wager all the money I have that they have been vaccinated for polio.)

And then, on the flipside: my parents just returned from 2 weeks in Germany where you are not allowed to go anywhere—even an open air market—without wearing an N95 mask. If you are wearing a cloth mask the covid police will refuse you entry. Everywhere you go you are required to report your location through a government app. You are required to get tested for covid every time you travel to a new state or town. At one point my parents were refused entry to a hotel where they had a reservation because the number of cases in that town had increased and they shut down all the hotels. They had to travel to a different state in order to find a place to stay. 

My parents loved it. They thought it was truly wonderful to have the government track their movements, they felt so safe, they can't understand why Americans would object to being monitored in this way. And I said, really? You really can't understand it? No, they said, it's ridiculous that anyone would object to being tracked by the government at all times. Especially during a health crisis. 

I need to go back and reread Carl Schmitt, but I'm pretty sure we're so deep into the state of exception we can't even recognize it anymore. And I am just so, so, so tired. I want to move into a house in the middle of the woods with no internet or phone and never talk to anyone ever again. Goodbye, cruel covid world. 

happy mother's day!

An old friend wrote to me on Mother's Day this year, ostensibly to wish me a happy first Mother's Day but actually to tell me why she would probably never have a child. It was a long email. I believe it contained the words "happy mother's day" somewhere in there, but the meat of the message was that motherhood isn't all that important. 

I replied with qualified agreement—I don't think that motherhood is the most important thing. Having a child is not the only or necessarily the best way to contribute to the world. I did respectfully disagree, however, with the message in general: having gestated a person, very painfully birthed him, and then kept him alive for a few months, I was inclined to think that being a mother was pretty damn important, if not downright miraculous. 

I've been thinking about this a lot because there have been a number of articles lately on the growing "child-free" trend, and they all say basically the same thing: the birthrate is not just falling by circumstance, women are choosing not to have children. This is a principled choice, ostensibly not made just for their personal benefit but for the good of the planet. Humans are the world's biggest problem and so having fewer humans is a good thing. Fewer people = less climate change, less suffering, less general mayhem, etc, etc.  

For the record: I have no opinion on the procreative choices of these women! I don't care whether or not they have children. What's weird to me is that they spend way more time on this than seems healthy or useful. For many years, I myself was not interested in having children. So I did what most people who are uninterested in having children do: I learned how to avoid getting pregnant, made a plan, and then followed that plan. This did not require me to get my fallopian tubes cut, start a reproductive justice non-profit, or email my friends on Mother's Day to tell them parenthood is unimportant. I just, well...didn't have a kid. 

So I say we just let these women get on with their lives and stop spilling digital ink over their choices. Perhaps they will then stop sharing their sterilization surgeries with their 64,000 tiktok followers and we can all just live in blissful ignorance. But, you know, on second thought: I really do love a good overshare story! So maybe let's keep these articles coming. I want to hear next from someone who decides not to have houseplants on principle. (I am available to be interviewed.) 

In all seriousness, though: I do care about one thing in these stories, and that is the suggestion that the world would be a better place without human beings in it. If that's true then why just stop at childlessness? What's the case against against suicide, forced sterilization, or murder? If one less person in the world = one less polluter/oppressor, then is the next climate/social justice "solution" going to involve some selective culling of the human herd? What the hell is going on?  

More chaos

Yesterday, daycare closed because someone (unclear who) tested positive for covid. 

Today, we had packers come and put all our belongings in boxes. 

Two hours ago, the power went out. 

WHEN DOES THIS END???

an update on the chaos

 This past month has been total chaos. A month ago we had just gotten notice that we would need to be out of our house at the end of July. In the last month I have, in summary: 

1. Scheduled (and re-scheduled) movers

2. Found and reserved an apartment in Ann Arbor

3. Hired a lawyer

4. Learned a great deal about eviction law

5. Spent three weeks at my parent's apartment in northern New Jersey (unoccupied because they are in California (good) and without any childcare help because they are in California (bad))

6. Gone on three interviews for a job at Princeton 

7. Received and accepted a job offer from Princeton

8. Found and leased an apartment near Princeton

9. Found and reserved a daycare spot in Princeton

10. Returned to Michigan to: give notice at my job, pack up the house, and move

The most stressful part of all of this has been the housing situation. Our landlords have ZERO idea what they're doing and seem genuinely surprised that they couldn't just show up on August 1 with a moving van and kick us out of our house. Our lawyer, who is possibly the mellowest person I have ever met, expressed actual amusement at their degree of ignorance. He advised us—and I shall also advise you—never to rent from landlords who think tenants are just paying guests instead of people with actual legal rights. In other words: don't rent from morons. 

The good news is that we are probably not going be evicted—by the time our landlords manage to get us to court we will have already moved out. They are very lucky we want to leave, actually, since it would likely take them many months to get rid of us if we did not. But in the meantime they are harassing us—calling my boss, showing up at our house without notice, entering the house without permission when we are away. Two possible upsides from this: 1) I have learned a great deal about housing law, and 2) we are finally convinced buying a house might be a good idea.

And in the midst of all this I got a new job! Pretty nuts. I am really happy to be going back to the East Coast so that I can be nearer to (in no particular order): family, friends, great cities, amazing ethnic food, and impatiently rude people. I am not sad to be leaving my job and I am not sad to be leaving Michigan, but I do wish it hadn't all been so rushed and fraught. Despite my eagerness to leave, we have been very happy here. Both of our beloved creatures—dog and baby—were born here. It's really a nice place to live and I'm so glad we moved here when we did. I wish the tenor of the ending could match the overall feeling I have about the place itself. 

Baby update: He turns seven months old in a couple days! He is getting super vocal and has added lots of consonants to his babbling. He has also just today sprouted a couple bottom teeth, and without making a fuss at all. Food makes a lot more sense to both me and him now, too. This morning he was eating some yogurt and after he finished I opened a banana for my own breakfast. He stared at me with open incredulity until I shared some with him. He has also eaten: shrimp, french fries, guacamole, and foie gras. Next we both need to figure out how a cup works. I have a feeling this will take a very long time.