Margo, darling

Ten Weeks

2008-10-03T14:08:00.002-05:00

Hello lovelies,
I don't have time for a real post, because we're nearing the end of Maude's mid-morning nap, so I've got to be brief. Life with a newborn/infant is both really hard and really boring. It's really hard because it's a relentless cycle: feed, change, comfort, rock to sleep, work on tenure dossier like a madwoman in hour increments while she sleeps, feed, change, comfort . . . And it's really boring because she's only awake and cheerful briefly, so it's like a long hike with no payoff at the top because you only get to barely glimpse the view before you have to start back down the mountain, which you then climb again the next day. Does that make sense? But I hear that three months is a magical time and that she'll become more and more of a little person and less of a suffering little creature. Which is not to say that I don't adore her, because I do--she's a peppery little elven thing.

What I'm really here for is to post some pictures.

Here she is as an intense two week old:

Smiling big at exactly one month:

Grinning at exactly one month:

(I love this one!)

Staring at the love of her life, her Tiny Love mobile:

Rocking what is my very favorite Maude outfit right now:

Here's what she looks like when we start out on our walks:

This is what we look like three minutes later, after she starts screaming, because she hates her stroller and prefers to be worn in a sling (better work out for me, as a bonus):

Sleeping. (When she wears her sleep sack she looks like a civilian extra on Star Trek. You know how they always wear romper-type outfits?):

Goofing off with Sfrajett:

And finally, what she looked like last week. Happy, chubby, sweet little girl:
(photobucket is being stupid, and not letting me paste this in this smaller and turned around. By the time you see it, maybe the changes will be in effect.)

As promised

2008-08-04T11:01:00.003-05:00

If you're not already a reader, my GF, Sfrajett, has a thoughtful, detailed account of the birth. I love her writing and am so happy to have her account on hand, since all I really remember is the darkness of the room, the interminable ticking of the clock, and how sick I was of Brothers and Sisters after I had finished an entire dvd's worth of shows. Stupid pretty people.

Also, my link to Luches didn't work in the last post. Try this.

Here's a little bit o' Maude:

And then there's Maude

2008-07-31T08:31:00.003-05:00

(I'm sorry; I couldn't resist)

(Sfrajett has all the pictures on her computer; I just have this one from my phone. What you can't see is all her dark, dark hair. More soon.)

So that was much harder than I expected . . .

Birth story in a sec, but first, much thanks to my friend Luches for updating the blog while Sfrajett and I were in the hospital.

We just brought our precious little firecracker home from the hospital yesterday, after 96 long, long hours in the postpartum ward, surrounded by well-meaning, but bossy, nurses, each of which knew exactly how to turn little Miss Maude into the latched on baby of my dreams. Funny how forcing a screaming baby's head onto your nipple doesn't make for a calm, productive nursing experience. But more on that in another post. So we were there for four days post-delivery because, after having maybe the easiest pregnancy ever, I had:

24 hours of labor,
2 1/2 hours of (hard!) pushing (Sfrajett's theory is that our ob/gyn played sports at some point, and approaches the delivery room with the affect of the coach. Me, I'm a pleaser, so I do well with coaching, and when I doctor I already hugely admire encourages me to push harder than anyone's ever pushed before, all I want to do is please her. So really, please believe me when I say I was in the last six miles of the marathon for these entire 2 1/2 hours)
an emergency c-section.

Turns out little Miss Maude was way too big for me. Well, really, it was her gigantic 14 inch head that was too big. After all that pushing--I heard the doctor telling the nurse they were "productive" pushes--baby's head still wasn't quite in the birth canal, only the elongated cone my productive pushes had been making out of the back of her head. The only way I was going to deliver her vaginally was via forceps and I knew that that would mean a lot more tearing, possibly a broken collar bone for baby, maybe a broken tailbone for me--a lot of distress for both of us. So the decision to go with the c-section was an easy one. Twenty minutes later I celebrated my baby's birth by throwing up some vile, bubbling green anti-acid medicine they'd made me gulp down on the way to surgery. As the doctor pulled baby's gigantic self out of little me I could hear her saying something like "wow, that was the right decision."

Sfrajett will write a more thoughtful post about the birth experience, if she ever puts the baby down, because she experienced it much more than I did. I just wanted to check in and thank you all for your beautiful messages of congratulations, and let you know that we're all doing fine here. I'm just glad it's over, glad I have Maude safely here in my arms, glad I have a partner who's a fiercely protective, tender, passionately devoted parent, who can make me laugh in the middle of a sleepless night with her sweet and goofy lullabies, and whose arms never seem to get tired.

For There She Was: Mrs. Dalloway is Here

2008-07-29T04:18:00.005-05:00

Announcing Maude Elizabeth.
July 26th, 8 lbs., 9 oz. 21 inches.
Birth story coming soon.

Sun in Leo

2008-07-23T14:10:00.003-05:00

Edited to change title from Moon in Leo to Sun in Leo. Blame Joni Mitchell. The entire month of July I had the opening lines to "Little Green" in my head: "Born with the moon in Cancer . . ."

You didn't think I could get bigger, did you? This is me last week. I'm now 39 weeks, two days, or six days from my due date. Based on my doctor's appointment yesterday, where I was told that things have progressed very nicely in the past week, and based on signals my body is giving me, I feel like this could happen really soon. But what do I know? It could be another week.

The thing is, I've decided I don't know how to wrap my mind around the idea that I'm going to have a baby. I really like my life. Sfrajett and I have a really cute apartment, we have lots of friends, we read a lot, we adore each other. Everything is peaceful and nice and perfect.

What are you supposed to do with your head when you know that any day now your life will change forever? But since it hasn't changed, and you can't understand that change unless you've experienced that change, and I'm still me, a totally happy, healthy, childless adult, only without the ability to bend at the waist, what do I do with today? I know, enjoy the quiet, sleep as much as I can, get last minute errands done. Okay: check, check, check. But apparently my list also contains: piss off friends for no very good reason, cry for no very good reason, pace the house, be scared shitless about the coming changes, read The Woman in White (why did it take me so long to get to this book?). Cry some more.

What needs to be done

2008-07-16T15:14:00.007-05:00

As of my 38 week appointment on Monday, baby is super comfy and not interested in coming two blessed weeks early. Oh well. I walked, I drank red rasberry leaf tea, I bounced on my exercise ball, I ate spicy food, and yes, I had lots of orgasms. Nothing. Sorry What Now and Perverse Adult, I think Adjunct Whore wins: this baby wants to be a Leo, not a Cancer.

Sitting on my desk is a dissertation prospectus from a grad student at a distant school who is writing on my author. I'm excited she's writing about my person, and I have stuff to say about her proposal, but I just keep putting off writing her. I've had her prospectus for way. too. long. Now, however, I think the universe is punishing me for not being more prompt. This baby won't come until I write up my thoughts about her project. She also won't come until I fold up the newly washed sheets from the house guests we had last week, but I don't want to do that either.

What I want to do:

Sleep
Eat soft serve ice cream (what I really want is frozen custard, but there's none in Chicago, as far as I can tell.)
watch "Brothers and Sisters," which I netfl.ixed (two episodes in, I'm reasonably compelled. enough to keep watching)
Swim in a swimming pool. I want this so badly I could die. But there's no pool, except at the school gym and that's for working out. I want to loll around in the sun and feel the cool water supporting my seriously unbelievably big belly. So. Much. Bigger. than in the picture I last posted. Why do I live in the Midwest where people don't have pools?
Be in Jo(e)'s blog. She always posts beautiful pictures, but this week she's killing me. It's so peaceful and cool and calm in her blog. I wish I could do what Gumby does with books and walk right into her world. Usually we'd be in New Hampshire right now, kayaking on Squam Lake, where Sfrajett grew up. We're both filled with longing for the lake. I tried to find a picture to show you, but they all made it seem too big and impersonal, and in my head it's quiet and smooth and peaceful. It's what I focus on when I'm practicing my Lamaze breathing. Lake Michigan, while lovely and festive, just isn't the same.

What I will do:

get a pedicure. (Yeah, I'm charging it, because I accidentally ran my bank account down and don't get paid until Friday. You wanna make something of it?)
Not write that doctoral student back.
Not fold the sheets.

July

2008-07-03T12:33:00.003-05:00

So this is it, folks. This is the month that baby is supposed to be born. At my 36 week check up on Monday the doctor said she was taking the word premature off the table and that when the baby was ready to come, she was comfortable having her come. GF and I spent the rest of the afternoon plotting how to get labor started--walking, drinking rasberry leaf tea, sitting on the exercise ball (which is suddenly the birth ball, according to all the childbirth books we're reading. Whatever. It's not like it was getting a lot of use as an exercise ball, that's for sure), which is supposed to open up my pelvis and help the baby drop, etc.

Then that night we looked at each other and said WHOA!!!! Why do we want this baby to come a month early? I mean, I'm tired of being pregnant, and my stomach, which was flawless up until a few weeks ago is suddenly covered in angry stretch marks and itches like crazy, and I'm tired of sleeping on my side and not being able to tie my shoes or rub lotion on my legs. But as One of His Moms put it, there are many, many reasons to not wish this baby out early, and to enjoy the quiet and peace of these last few weeks.

But here's the thing: my beloved ob/gyn is going to be out of town precisely during the end of my 38th/the beginning of my 39th week, which is also a full moon, which is when all. the. babies. are. born. DUH!!!!!!! So I either need to get her out of here early, or try to keep her in late.

So I'm walking, and drinking my rasberry leaf tea (which I really like, so no sacrifice there), and trying to keep the house clean, and buying last minute things for baby, (like that thing that pulls snot out of their noses) but I'm also finishing up my book: methodically tightening up chapters, rewriting intros and conclusions, deleting overly-emphatic italics, and adding in juicy bits (read incredibly catty, bitchy excerpts from letters--my research subject was a TERROR) from my archival research last summer. Today I'm going to try to fold in an amazing, anonymous tell-all from one of my person's personal secretaries. It makes Madonna look like a fun person to work for.

You want to know a secret? The real highlight of my day is waiting for UPS to deliver our hers and slightly-more-masculine hers diaper bags. Seriously. I can't wait. Mine is made from 10 recycled water bottles, so I'm feeling pretty smug about it. Hers has flames on it.

The biggest news of today is that we're finally sending in our second parent adoption papers. Unlike many other states, Illinois doesn't require me to surrender my parental rights so that my partner can adopt. They handle it like a step-parent adoption. And as of two years ago, they got rid of the mandatory (and expensive) series of home visits from a social worker. We had to wait, first, until we had enough money to cover the lawyer's check, and then for me to dig up my DIVORCE papers (when will my former life as a married Mormon housewife stop haunting me?), but I've got 'em, and we've got the check, and so that puppy goes in the mail today.

Here's a picture of me two weeks ago, before the attack of the stretch marks. Some of the many, wonderful lesbian mothers-to-be that I read have been dutifully posting belly shots, but I've been too lazy. So here goes:

Margo at 34 weeks preg.

hello, hello

2008-06-19T10:13:00.003-05:00

Hello, Lovelies.

I'm still here. Still pregnant. Still feeling much, much better than a 34 week pregnant woman has any right to feel. The baby is technically due in six weeks, but once I hit 37 weeks she's considered full term and could come at any time. While I really have my heart set on a Leo, I'm starting to seriously reconsider the merits of Cancers.

My stomach is HUGE, but baby is sticking straight out from my body, so from the back you can't tell I'm pregnant. (Except for the enormous, pendulous, size G breasts which are visible from outer space. If it wasn't for them, I swear I'd be the cutest pregnant person ever.) She's running out of room in here, so instead of kicks I get lots of squirmy squirms. She has the hiccups right now, which is fine by me, because it means she's practicing breathing and strengthening her lungs.

I have one more school obligation, a lunch today to celebrate the end of my year-long fellowship (sniff) and then I am free, free, free. Grades are turned in and I am done with teaching until January! Now all I have to do is finish up my book, write my personal statement for tenure, and finalize my tenure dossier. And start researching a totally peachy article my friend BW assigned me that's due in early fall. (Seriously, it's going to be yummy.) And I have a whole 3 to 6 weeks to do it. I'm being sarcastic, because really, that's a lot, especially when sitting at the computer makes my back ache and I can't really get as close to the keyboard as I'd like because of my belly, but over all I feel calm about it all. And happy. And excited.

To all of my bloggy friends, I am sorry I don't update this much, but know that I follow your blogs religiously, and feel so happy to know how you are and what is going on in your lives. Peace.

Here's a bonus sneak preview of baby:

six word memoir

2008-03-27T17:07:00.002-05:00

Adjunct Whore tagged me for this meme last Friday.
Instructions:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

(Which AW totally didn't do, but that's okay because I subscribe to her on bloglines and never miss a post. Also, I'm not going to tag anyone, because almost everyone has done this except Sfrajett, and I can tag her by walking across the room, so I'm hardly one to talk.)

I immediately knew what I wanted to write:

It's still snowing, and nothing fits.

Because it was snowing last Friday. On March 21st. Snowing so hard our power went out, just as Sfrajett was putting together our new dining room table. (It's getting hard to eat hunched over our old "dining room table," aka the coffee table in front of the television.) At first this seemed kind of fun--new furniture, and a whole day to spend together without the guilt of needing to work because, no electricity equals no computers equals, I couldn't sit down and work on the stupid, worthless, lame book on once beloved, forgotten author who I am wholly sick of writing about/hawking/being invested in.

(Pause for a quick rant: that's basically how my publisher described it when she turned my project down, only her words were "I just don't think we can pull this one off." Even though the two books I've published with her on my forgotten author have, in fact, done well, and got me a great job, and get me recognized at my sub-specialty conference by the very authors who inspired me to do this work in the first place.

Oh well, as my co-editor put it, this publisher seduced and abandoned us and our forgotten subject even as the ink dried on our contracts, so move on, move on. But still, it smarts! Believing in this author is like being Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. I swear, she's right there! I can see her!)

But back to that snowy day in March. Our fantasy of staying in and being cozy and warm in our darkening apartment was ruined by our having opera tickets that night. And not just any opera, the last opera in our series and a Tchaikovsky at that. We'd been excited about this for months. But going out in the snow? To the opera? The problem is that even though we have nose bleed seats up with all the other academics, and aren't expected to do super fancy opera attire, I don't feel comfortable wearing jeans to the opera, and the right now the only warm pants that fit me are my Secret Fit Belly jeans (yeah, that would be jeans with panty hose sewn on the top. Shhhh. It's a super secret!) Because back half a lifetime ago when I started showing it was also winter, and I bought a few pairs of cords with a demi-panel, thinking they'd get me through the winter, if not the entire pregnancy. But it's still winter! And even though they fit my butt and my legs (which is to say, this is not my fault) the demi panel doesn't fit around my no-longer demi belly, and if you let it slide under your belly, like the impossibly cheerful model, it squishes your bladder and makes you sad.

So I had a melt down, because this winter has been too long, and I can't bear the snow, and I don't want to buy more maternity pants, and nothing fits. End of story: I pulled a pair of black pants, their cuffs whitened by salt from the roads because I also don't want to pay to get maternity pants hemmed, from the dry cleaning bag, pulled on a couple of layers of t-shirts and sweaters, and we went, driving through McDonalds on the way, which tasted really, really perfect.

And since it's snowing again today, a week later, and still, nothing fits (though I have nowhere to be, so it doesn't matter) I figured this would be the perfect time for my six word memoir.

Halfway There

2008-03-11T18:36:00.003-05:00

Holy hell, how did it get to be March already? February was one long, dark miserable snow storm, with layers of ice freezing over layers of ice on our narrow street. Thank God for In Treatment, (anyone else feeling kind of crushed out on Gabriel Byrne?) or I never would have made it through the winter. You know spring is almost here in my ugly little stretch of Chicago when the ice has thawed enough that the inexplicable chunks of long, curly, reddish brown hair (which I think, hope, pray came from a wig), which were laying in the street in front of my building before the snow fell, begin to reappear. It's almost as moving as that first crocus.

But this week the temperatures are finally crawling back into the forties and with daylight savings making the days longer, everything is seeming much better. I'm officially halfway through my pregnancy this week (20 weeks). Yesterday we had our anatomy scan, a super thorough, 45 minute ultra-sound at the hospital, where they check to make sure the baby has a spine and ribs and a four-chambered heart and a liver and kidneys and bowels, etc. People like to tell you horror stories when you're pregnant, especially when you're of Advanced Maternal Age, and we've heard some doozies, so we went into this feeling mostly like everything was okay, but looking forward to reassurances.

And it's all good, folks. Mrs. Dalloway, who was really more of a Mrs. Joe yesterday, kicked and squirmed like crazy the entire time (guess I shouldn't have pounded that orange juice in the waiting room), so much so that the doctor (a neo-natal specialist, not my regular ob) got a little irritated, and was so rough with the ultra-sound thing when he was trying to get a good picture of the brain that I left with my stomach feeling bruised all over. I felt like apologizing, thinking, I can't believe my child is already misbehaving in public, but I wasn't really sorry, because I didn't like him. When he walked in the room he was looking at my chart with confusion and said something like, "Well, you're not Mrs. Shall I call you Miss, or Ms.?" I said, "You can call me doctor." Then he looked at GF and said, "And are you a friend, or a special friend?" with a sugary intonation on special. Seriously. I hated having his disgusting, hairy arm all over my bare, lubed-up stomach while he moved the ultra-sound around. Happily the first half-hour was with a dykey technician who was chatty and kind and who worked diligently to get the hyper-active baby into a position where we could see the sex, which was the real excitement of the day.

She found it, and I know I shouldn't care, and I would have reported this news with joy and excitement no matter which sex the baby is, but I must confess to being giddily happy to say that Mrs. Dalloway is a

drum-roll . . . . . .

GIRL!!!!!!!!!

The letter R is purple

2008-01-18T16:46:00.001-06:00

Did you see this article on synethesia in Salon this week? In it Alison Buckholtz describes her lifelong association of numbers and letters to colors. In her mind

numbers have always had their own color -- not just the number itself (though that, too), but the very character of the number, its presence in the world, is a color. An obvious, intrinsic color. Five, for example, is orange. Two is yellow. Seven is green. It is as natural and unchangeable as the color of someone's skin.

I have this! I've always experienced my numbers, many letters, and a few key words as colors, intrinsically, irrevocably, but before now I'd never heard of anyone else who experiences them this way. Aside from disagreeing with her specific number/color linkages, more on that in a minute, this article comforted me, and made me feel a little melancholy. Like Buckholtz, I've thought of my number/color thing as a weird thing about me, something to spin into a self-deprecating dinner-table anecdote, not something to cherish, even nurture. And while I've used the word synesthesia to describe my experience, I didn't know that's actually what I have. I always thought it suggested a cognitive disorder, or a really mild case of a.sperger syndrome.

Here's her technical explanation for it:

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which activation of one sensory processing system (e.g., numbers or written language) leads to the automatic engagement of a second, distinct sensory processing system (e.g., color) to create a "crossed" sensory perception. For example, as in my case, numbers appear to have their own colors. Or, in other forms of synesthesia, sensory processing is "crossed" with emotion processing, imbuing letters, words, days of the week or months with their own personalities.

According to the article women and left-handers are more likely to experience it. I am both. My form of synesthesia involves color and the processing of emotions, particularly with numbers. The numbers 1-5 are girls; 6-9 are boys. 1 (yellow) and 2 (orange) are toddlers. Everyone likes them because they are cute and don't ask for much. 3 (purple) is saucy, mostly because she doesn't know enough about the world yet to be shy and retiring like 4 (pink) who embodies every negative stereotype of extreme femininity--she is passive and so, so pink. 5 (red) is a tomboy who can take care of herself. She likes to hang out with her boy cousin 6 (blue). When they have sleepovers they become 11 (looks like two sleeping bags side by side). 7 (green) is lucky (kind of obvious, I know), but 8 (light baby blue) is a horror, the most hated and detested of all the numbers. He embodies every negative stereotype of normative masculinity, only his is a failed masculinity: he is a soft, squishy, round bully who takes sweet little four and swallows her up, TWICE! 9 (deep purple/black, because he has three inside him three times, something which somehow didn't bother me the way the 4/8 debacle did) is the oldest cousin. He doesn't have to try to be cool: he is cool, which makes him a good, non-threatening kind of guy who actually has some power.

Synethesia is neurological, but as the drama of my numbers shows, it reflects how biological and environmental influences are impossible to untangle (I'm not saying that quite how I want to, but I want to publish this and don't want to wait until I can say this more cogently.) Maybe this is what I mean: my way of seeing numbers as colors might be neurological, but how I see colors reflects my own nascent perceptions of the world, especially my understanding of gender roles and intra-gender dynamics. Certainly it reflects an early understanding of the connection between male brutality and failed masculinity. My numbers are cousins because I was raised in close contact with my 13 cousins, who formed my earliest social group, my positioning among them my earliest self-identification. I was the eleventh of the fourteen grandchildren and though I felt safe with my cousins, I always understood that, as one of the youngest, my place was to watch and learn, not to call attention to myself. I think I related most to 2, aspired to be 5, feared I was 4.

Sometimes my synesthesia causes me to mix up letters/colors/numbers. I still stumble over 3/R/purple and 4/Y/pink, as those pairing are interchangeable in my head. So I'll write an R when I mean to write 3, for example.

My months have colors too, but I suspect that is because of elementary school bulletin boards more than anything--February is pink, March is green, September is burnt orange. But sometimes the logic of my number narrative creeps in: January is yellow I think because it's the first month (1 is yellow, remember?), which means June is yellow, too, because it starts with J. Or maybe it's because June is the daisy month, and daisies are yellow.

happy new year

2007-12-31T20:07:00.000-06:00

This is just a quick post, because I'm on my way to what promises to be a pleasantly mellow New Years party, but when I saw What Now at the MLA blogger meet-up (Thanks for organizing, Dr. Crazy!) she said it wasn't very clear whether or not I was still pregnant, since I've discussed it primarily in terms of numbers that don't make much sense to people not in the ttc whirl. Oops. Sorry about that.

Yes, as far as I know, I am still pregnant. Since I can't feel anything (other than a little nauseated, incredibly tired and hungry all the time, and like my breasts have been replaced by enormous, pulsing, hot sandbags that hurt from their deepest core.) I have to trust the doctor and ultra-sound technicians on this. I'm about nine weeks along. I've had three ultra-sounds, all of which showed a strong, steady heartbeat and an embryo increasing in size just the way it should.( Actually, now that I'm past eight weeks I get to call it a fetus. Hooray! Recently, though, I keep wanting to call it Simon and Schuster. My friend says that's because carrying it makes me incorporated.)

I graduated from the fertility clinic (which I loved. Any readers in the Chicago area who want to know about it, please drop me a line. They were amazing.) and the day after Christmas GF and I met my dyke ob/gyn. She's delivered two of my favorite colleagues' babies and is straight forward and down to earth, which is exactly what I hoped for. While she didn't do an ultra-sound she did an, uh, more hands on examination and said that I did indeed feel pregnant. (I think her words were, after I anxiously asked, "Oh, yeah, you're pregnant.") My next ultra-sound is in a week, when I'll be about eleven weeks along. Twelve weeks marks the end of the first trimester, when the chance of miscarrying goes down to 5%, but the doctor said if everything looks good next week I can feel pretty confident about this. In the mean time, gf and I are trying to be positive and trying to enjoy the experience of being pregnant, because right now, as far as we know, we are.

So that's my update. I have all sorts of end-of-year things I want to blog about, but I don't know when I'll blog next because I had some GREAT talks with acquiring editors at MLA and they made me want to do a few more revisions on my book proposal (seems less literary is a stronger sell. if that's true, my book is way more done than I had anticipated) and then I need to write the syllabus for that class I'm teaching, starting on, oh, let's see. . .

THURSDAY!!!!!

7 things

2007-12-02T21:36:00.001-06:00

I got tagged for the 7 things meme by adjunct whore. Now you might remember that only two or three entries ago I did a similar 6 things meme, which I mostly pawned off on my cat Manfred. Here goes, briefly though, because I really want to watch Amazing Race and see those awful blonde women who u-turned the already-losing team last week get their car rammed by a bus.

THE RULES:
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I recently discovered, thanks to Dr. Crazy's work pulling together a blogger meet-up at MLA, that adjunct whore is a long lost friend of mine. Yay! Thanks, Crazy.

2. I hate watching movies. Hate it. It's like pulling teeth. I'd rather watch a tv show, where I can commit to the characters for a good, long time.

3. I loved Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins (and Hawaii) so much as a child, in part because of her beautiful up-swept hair-do, that I refused to watch The Sound of Music because I found her short hair unfeminine and offensive. I knew that character was no good. (yes, when I finally watched it, I liked it plenty.)

4. My sisters and I have matching names. They all begin with the same three letters and are seven letters long. We do not have middle names. When I was a kid, I thought parents who didn't match their children's names were either irresponsible, or didn't love their children very much.

5. I almost failed out of my first two years of college, even though 2/3rds of my classes were ballet classes, which I got A's in. I wasn't partying either. In fact,

6. I first drank alcohol at 26, but made up for lost time by quickly figuring out that bourbon was the only drink you ever really need.

7. I got the chicken pox at 23. The first spots appeared only hours after I took the GRE, which I like to think is why I did so poorly on the math section.

This meme is racing through the blogsphere, so there's really no one left to tag, although I'm sure we'd all love another post by Sfrajett, so I tag her. BTW, her last post, in which she offers her take on all the big changes in our lives is really, really gorgeous. Check it out. I know I'm biased, but isn't she a beautiful writer? And do you recognize the design on her pumpkin from this long-ago post of mine?

update: so far, so good

2007-11-26T16:00:00.001-06:00

My hcg more than quadrupled since last Wed. Today's number is 1810 @ 20dpo.

In other news, it's really, really cold here in Chicago. Those of you who will be here in a few weeks for MLA, I'm sorry. I hope to see you, though, and am excited that the party (so to speak) is here this year.

We spent our third Thanksgiving in a row at The Land, my friend Exuberant Boy's kind of vacation home in Michigan, where we cooked and ate and watched tv in front of the fire and ate and ate and cooked and read magazines. Sadly, my contribution to the film fest was way less successful than last year's Pippi Longstocking. This year I tried to introduce everyone to what I could have sworn was the scariest movie ever--one of those movies that always seems to be playing on rainy Saturdays when you're alone in the house as a tween--The Other. When the imdb key words are

it's hard to believe it wouldn't be a crowd pleaser, but the 1972 pacing was way too slow for everyone's amped-up 2007 tastes, and everyone figured out the plot twist ten minutes in. Even Uta Hagen couldn't save it. OH. Well. I'm not sorry I bought it. Now that I'm home it's all grading, all the time.

numbers and letters

2007-11-21T15:16:00.000-06:00

BFP @ 10dpo
HCG @ 13dpo: 96.9
HCG @ 15dpo: 218

Translation, for those not fluent in fertility game lingo: this cycle was successful, (!!!) and though it's still really, really early, things are progressing like they should. If my hcg numbers have quadrupled by my appointment on Monday, then we'll still be on track. And if everything stays on track, we'll have a Leo, or possibly a Cancer, if it's a couple of weeks early. I feel a little wary, because it's so early, but the numbers are a million times better than they were last time, so I'm cautiously optimistic and hoping everything will work out well.

tagged

2007-11-14T22:18:00.000-06:00

J. C-K of Our Incredible True Adventures, one of my new blogging friends--part of a bunch of lesbians ttc and blogging about it, tagged me for the Six Random Things meme.

here goes:
1. I don't like sweets, usually, except maybe a little ice cream or a cupcake every once in a while. What I can't get enough of is salt. Recently I've crossed over to the really, really dark side and let myself buy those awful Doritos combo bags with two flavors. I can't stop eating the buffalo wing/blue cheese chips. Repulsive, I know. I portion it out into a bowl, so that I'm not eating the whole bag in one sitting, but still, gross.

2. The only black shoes I have right now are boots and a pair of mules. This is a big problem. I need an in-between black shoe.

3. I am obsessed with trying to figure out how to break up with my current stylist so that I can go back to my old one. Seriously. I think of it about fifty times a day. This is me trying to go to sleep at night:

"I wonder if I'm pregnant."
"Gotta break up with her. My hair is so ugly."
"Did I pay my credit card bill?"
"How do I do it? Do I call her?"
"Was it wrong of me to tell my students how much I hate that one queer theorist?"
"What if I sent her a letter?"
"If I get tenure, are they going to make me be the chair? Can they make me?"
"Should I tell her to her face? do you make an appointment for that?"

I've been with the old one on and off for a decade and she does great, funky cuts at a very cool salon that I love going to, but every few years I go super short and she refuses to take me there and so I stray, and then I come back when I'm ready to grow it out and she makes the process fun and never ugly and it's no big deal. But this time I feel trapped by my super-sweet new stylist who I just don't believe is funky enough to help me grow my hair out, but whom I really enjoy knowing and chatting with. Normally I'd just walk away and not think about it, but she lives in my general neighborhood, which is a small town in a big city. True, I've never, ever seen her outside of the salon before, but I've convinced myself that I will a couple of months from now, and I'll have to explain to her why I never came back. This is a super local lesbian hair salon, and it's infamous for being ridiculously possessive about it's clients. (Mer, you know the I'm talking about, right?)

Okay. I'm out. I can't think of anything else to say about myself that isn't self-deprecating, like how none of my clothes are cute and how I wish I knew what color my hair is. I was going to link to amazing posts I've written in the past that highlight random things about me, but instead I'll finish with three random things about my cat Manfred, who I hate tonight. Maybe blogging about him will make me like him again.

4. He likes baked goods. Our next door neighbor is incredibly sweet and often gives us homemade pie or brownies or banana nut bread. Unless these are in the fridge, Manfred finds them and eats them, even if it means tearing through tin foil to get to them. Tonight I hate Manfred because he knocked a box containing two beautiful cupcakes off the counter and did his best to eat them. I bought the stupid things on my way home from work tonight from a sweet little cupcake boutique in the silly boutique-y neighborhood where I teach to cheer myself up, because I had had really, really bad day. I rescued one of the cupcakes. Sure, I lost the frosting, but I would have scraped most of it off anyway, and the part in the paper was still good. I would have eaten it for breakfast tomorrow, but before I could finish cleaning up the frosting mess from the floor that stupid cat had it down on the ground and had pawed through it. I hope he feels miserable later, but not miserable enough to throw up.

5. We got him at the Shell Station off of Volmer Road on I-57, between Chicago and Kankakee. Not because we were there getting gas and happened upon someone giving away cats, but because that's where the crazy lady we bought him from (I know. That's what I get for buying a cat) wanted to meet us there. She never even got out of the car; she just thrust the little kitten out the window and said "he likes to suck ears. he's driving me crazy."

6. He likes to suck ~~ears~~ my left ear lobe. Only mine, only the left.

My academic bloggy friends have all done this meme, and my new ttc friends tagged each other when they tagged me, so I've got no one to tag.

civic duty avoided

2007-11-12T16:41:00.000-06:00

For the past several weeks I've had a summons for stand-by jury duty on my fridge door telling me to call today after 4:30 to see if I have to report tomorrow. I have a letter from my doctor getting me out of serving jury duty if called, but knowing that I'd still have to drag myself downtown tomorrow morning in order to show them the letter and get myself excused has weighed heavily on my mind. Disproportionately so. But I made the call and since my last name does not fall between the letter D as in Delta and K as in, who even knows--K words are hard, hence all the Scrabble points, and I wasn't really listening at that point--I'm off the hook for the time being.

life in two week increments

2007-11-09T18:17:00.000-06:00

It's only two weeks until the end of the quarter, and this one has both flown by and dragged.

The part that's flown: my work life. Since I have a fellowship this year, I'm only teaching one course this quarter and the next, so teaching hasn't been much on my radar. I'm teaching Feminist Theories and it's going reasonably okay. I think this is the first time I've actually scared students away--once on the first day of class, when I went through my usual spiel. I was sorry to see those students go, but it's a difficult, dense class, and not the appropriate follow up to intro. to women's studies. I hope they'll come back next year, or the next. But then I scared someone off more satisfactorily, when I finally called a bullshit non-major on his bullshit. You know when it's a tough class with tough readings and tense discussions and real, earnest trying on the part of most of the students and then some philosophy student who thinks he knows theory and thought he'd give feminist theory a "try," but never turns in any of the work, and doesn't do a very good job pretending that he's kept up with the readings nevertheless keeps trying to make it look like he's read by repeating what I've just said? Oh no. That wasn't gonna play this quarter, especially not when the other students are trying so hard and taking it so seriously.

Mostly I've been treating this like a research leave--I've only been going in to school on the day I teach and have spent the rest of the time working on my book. I completed a chapter that has dragged on and on and refused to end on a self-imposed deadline, and then a conference paper that forms a crucial part of another chapter I'm revising. (That conference, by the way, was fabulous! a fun, quick trip to Southern California where I got to hang out with friends I've made at this conference over the years, including the fabulous, fabulous Hilaire.) I'll do another round of revisions on The Chapter That Won't End next week, and then will turn to my MLA paper, which will also go into the revising chapter. After that I have two more chapters to revise and an intro., most of which is written. But the thing I can't bring myself to do, really, really can't bring myself to do, is send my proposal to editors. I have a proposal. I think it's a good one. It's snappy and sexy and explains why my book is important and why no other book in the world ever has, or ever can do what my book will do--promises I think the book keeps--but I find that I am loathe to send it out. What if they want my ms., which is still rough? What if they want the ms., see it in its roughness and say no, forever? And of course, what if they don't want my ms? That fear keeps me working and polishing and waiting.

And waiting is the real theme of my quarter. This is my third cycle of IUI and I'm in what ttc'rs (people trying to conceive) call the 2ww (two week wait). Again. It goes like this: you get inseminated as close to ovulation as possible (that's a whole drama right there. Well, two: first the drama of watching for ovulation, then the drama of inseminating, which can either be really pleasant if your nurse is nice, or really unpleasant if your nurse is a homophobe.)

And then you wait, for two weeks. If you get your period at the end of the two weeks, you are not pregnant. But of course you know this way before your period comes, because not only do you start spending all your money on home pregnancy tests starting around 9 days after insemination, you go back to the clinic for blood draws several times a week, first to measure your progesterone, E2, and lh levels, and finally, your hcg levels. (You start to realize that knowing all these numbers doesn't help you get pregnant, it just helps you measure how pregnant, or potentially pregnant you might be, day by day. It makes you crazy.) If you have an hcg level, you're pregnant. But maybe not pregnant enough. I got pregnant on the first try and was startled at my luck, because that's not how it works with me. Things usually take a long time coming to fruition. But there it was: six pregnancy tests saying that yes, I was pregnant. I wanted to be like many of the lesbian bloggers whose Trying to Conceive blogs I read religiously and post a picture of my digital test saying PREGNANT, but I hesitated. Which turned out to be good, because after a weekend of positive tests, my beta at the doctors showed that I was only a little bit pregnant and a day later, not at all. Technically that's called a chemical pregnancy. Not too big of a deal, theoretically, but certainly disappointing and, ultimately, expensive, because two weeks later you're back on the table getting filled with expensive vials of what you hope are super-potent sperm from a stranger.

During the 2ww you take progresterone (estrogen's fraternal twin hormone) to help your body be as ready for pregnancy as possible if 1) you conceived and if 2) your zygote feels like attaching. What makes this super fraught is that while you very well may not be pregnant, you start to feel pregnant--incredibly tired, craving salt, headachy, slightly nauseated, twingy and crampy in your uterus. You start googling things like "2ww symptoms" and then reading pages and pages of entries where women go through their cycles day by day and list exactly what they felt and when they felt it, hoping to find an experience that matches what you think you are feeling and confirms that you are still in the race.

You try to be a normal person and go on living your life, but there's lots of conflicting information: some sites say eat lots of pineapple to help the egg burst out of its corpus luteum; others say No! Pineapple!, claiming that it causes contractions. Some say no deli meats or soft cheeses (which kind of makes sense during pregnancy, but during the part where an egg that may or may not be fertilized floats around your tubes? Really?) Some say no cold drinks, only room temperature. Some say no coffee; some say lots of green tea--the kind with caffeine. Most say no alcohol. Some say have sex as you normally would; others warn to be careful of the uterine contractions that come with an orgasm. Some say the only exercise you can do during the 2ww is "mindful" walking, whatever that is; others say exercise as you normally would, only don't let your body get overheated, or let your heart get above 140. My logical mind says this is stupid: most straight people don't know they're in a 2ww and they run marathons and do cardio kick-boxing and eat whatever they want and have rough sex and their zygotes don't bounce out of their uteri, or shrivel up, or melt. But my illogical mind says, why take the risk? Think of the children.

So I walk, mindfully, around my neighborhood, and I lie around like a Victorian heroine and I take my progesterone, and then, because that first cycle failed because I didn't have a "strong enough" ovulation, my clomid, and the hormones make my body start to feel and, yes, LOOK, pregnant; my pants stop fitting and my button up shirts stop buttoning. I live in fear of someone noticing and asking if I'm pregnant. I crave Doritos. I drink fertility teas made from oatstraw and thistle and red clover and red raspberry leaf. I throw caution to the wind and eat pineapple and let myself have one cup of coffee, maybe two, as I read the paper in the morning.

the next chapter

2007-09-08T00:41:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of drama in the neighborhood this week. Message boards immediately went up about the gym, with people commiserating about how much they'd miss it and the impact its closing would have on the neighborhood; then rumors started flying and the flame wars began. Some said the owner was going to be on Oprah. NPR interviewed a group of people threatening a class action suit. Then came word the owner had tried to kill himself and was hospitalized. The anger didn't die down. People said really, really ugly things.

Then, today, big signs appeared in our location and the Bucktown location (housed in what had been the Real World Chicago building, btw) saying the gym would reopen on Sunday under new management.

I'm happy and relieved and a little embarrassed at feeling so happy and relieved about a gym. It's been a weird to see both how neighborly and how Lord of the Flies-ish it got around here this week.

There goes the neighborhood

2007-09-05T23:37:00.000-05:00

I almost didn't lift weights yesterday. I had just spent 45 minutes on an elliptical--my first time since surgery--and was feeling pretty triumphant and already a little sore in the legs. Why not just come back tomorrow and lift with gf when she's in town? But I was there, and it wasn't crowded and my ipod still had a strong charge, since I had spent the whole time on the elliptical talking to one of my favorite colleagues/gym buddies who hadn't been around all summer. So I did my full weight routine and even threw in some extra shoulder exercises and went home feeling happy and tired.

I love working out at my gym. I love how it looks like a loft, with exposed brick walls and huge vaulting ceilings and tons of windows. I love that I know, or at least recognize, many of the people who work out there, because we've all been going there for years. I love how gay the gym is, and not in a cliquish, Chelsea kind of way: everyone is nice to everyone there. There's not pressure to be thin or pretty or hip. Purists, who remember the neighborhood before the gym arrived would scoff at this, but I think it's made the neighborhood a friendlier, more accessible place, an impossibly cheerful queer community. In a city where you mostly have to spend money to get community, usually at gay bars, this place offered an inclusive, social, healthy, relatively cheap alternative. Not that there aren't plenty of gay bars nearby where you can go for a post-workout drink, or five.

I have belonged to many gyms in my adult life, more than I can probably even remember, since I've moved around a lot and joined a gym every place I've lived. I've never felt so attached to a gym, felt such a sense of belonging and happiness to be there. Because, really, you're supposed to spend most of your time as a gym member feeling guilty about not going, right?

Today the gym was closed. Forever. A rambling note on the door, from the owner, claimed he had to close the gym (along with his two other locations) because of employee theft, which nobody believes. GF and I walked by on our way home from a bar tonight, where everyone had been talking about the sudden closing, and there were news vans lining the street and swarms of people milling about, reading the sign, and swapping stories about their run-ins with the owner, who has a reputation as kind of a, let's say, troubled soul. There was lots of talk of how he lost the gym up his nose.

GF and I are pretty bummed. We can join another gym--employees from rival gyms spent the day passing out fliers with offers of waived memberships for Gone Gym's members--but we don't want to. We realized, talking with people on the street tonight, how much we'd built our lives around the gym, and how it tied us to the neighborhood. You're supposed to flake on the gym; it's not supposed to flake on you. I'm glad I lifted yesterday.

10 IQ points stupider after yesterday

2007-09-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

Did anyone else find it almost impossible to turn off VH1's Rock of Love Marathon yesterday?

I just got back from visiting my family in California and my otherwise smart, feminist, kick-ass niece introduced me to this show. (I don't think her mom knows she watches it.) I could have finished a syllabus yesterday. I could have worked on my book. I could have bathed, or exercised, or cooked, or gone grocery shopping.

But I didn't. I sat on the couch and watched the trashiest women I've ever seen roll in mud, flip off of motocross cycles, dig through garbage cans, drink until they couldn't stand up, vomit through their fingers, strip off their clothes and fling themselves onto stripper poles, and tear each other's hair out over this guy:

Hope everyone's labor day was as fun and productive as mine.

wet, wetter, wettest

2007-08-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

It's been raining for three days now. Rainy and gray and just the slightest bit hot. Not hot enough to justify running the air conditioner, but hot, and still enough that the house feels and smells like the trunk of a car. An old car. How can it be so still when there's all kinds of rain-induced motion in the atmosphere?

baby steps

2007-08-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

On Monday my podiatrist said I could start wearing running shoes for a few hours every day, freeing me to drive and run errands and do cardio, so long as I don't put weight on my foot, which means, of course, all I can do is the recumbent bike, and even then it started to hurt after a half hour and by the time I got home it was swollen again and I had to ice it back to feeling okay. But it's a start, and it felt good to move quickly again, and what made it even better is that I got to the gym just as a repeat of Star Trek Voyager was starting. And what made it even better than that was that it was one of my favorite episodes ever, "Counterpoint." It's a perfectly generic Star Trek episode, one where the loner captain gets a (brief) fling with a sexy alien, but this one has a classical music soundtrack (because counterpoint, the musical concept, helps Janeway understand how to open a worm hole. Obvious, right?)

The episode ends with my favorite shot in the entire series, this wonderful moment where Janeway sits alone in her chair after she has been betrayed by, and then, in a counterpoint kind of move, herself betrays, her new and/or almost lover. (In the fanfic he's totally her lover. Mostly in a smdb kind of way. It's hot, if you like imaging Janeway having a three-way on the holodeck with the alien and a holodeck version of him, which maybe you don't.) Mahler's 1st has been playing throughout the scene as Janeway checkmates the alien man and sends him away. The music swells as the camera pulls back, and the look on Kate Mulgrew's face--somewhere between stoic and resigned--her body language as she sits, slightly slumped, in her captain's chair, perfectly conveys the total loneliness of her command and, to me, sums up the series' message for women: you can't have it all. You can get your four stars and be a Star Fleet captain, and you can command loyalty and respect, and you can be smart and sassy and you can even beat the Borg Queen, but though you might experience fleeting moments of love and passion, ultimately you will be alone.

It's a great moment, and there is a women's studies 101 connection between my attachment to this moment, which serves as such a powerful, compact meditation on the difficulties of desire and ambition and being a woman in our culture and what I'm going to say next, but I didn't start this post intending to write about Voyager. I started it to add another bullet point to the list from my last post, and to tell why I had foot surgery this summer in the first place.

vials of sperm purchased last week: 2

See, I had to have foot surgery this summer because I'm trying to get pregnant and I needed to stop procrastinating and fix my foot, which had been getting progressively painful over the past year, and which would have gotten impossibly painful if, for example, I suddenly put on a lot of weight.

Those of you who read my partner's blog already know that we've been planning this for a while now. I'm lucky enough to have really amazing health insurance that has a generous fertility plan and covers everything--the blood tests to check your hormone levels to see if you're perilously close to menopause, the ultra-sounds to see if you still have eggs and what your uterine lining looks like (weird to see that. really. weird.), the insemination(s), and, if necessary, ivf. The only thing it doesn't cover is the sperm. So I've spent the last six months researching fertility clinics and sperm banks, getting tested, weighing the pros and cons of using a known donor versus anonymous, taking prenatal vitamins, saving for sperm, and learning how to chart my cycles.

I've been hesitant to blog about this because I feel a little embarrassed about wanting a baby, and a lot superstitious about admitting it. I don't mean embarrassed because there's anything wrong with wanting and choosing to have a baby. I guess I mean embarrassed to admit that I have the audacity to want something so big. I don't know how much I'll blog about it while we're trying to get pregnant. If I don't say anything, don't ask: I'll let you know if it happens.

By the numbers

2007-08-07T15:43:00.000-05:00

episodes of Horatio Hornblower I've watched so far: 0
times I've eaten a tuna fish sandwich in the last two days: 4
On a scale of one to ten, how hard it is to wrap an ace bandage around your foot, by yourself, while standing on one leg: 8
The Cat Who . . . mysteries I've read in the last week: 3
pain pills I took yesterday: 0 (is it because I don't have pain? Not necessarily. It's because I'm almost out and I'm too scared to call my doctor and ask for more because I think she'll think I'm addicted, even though I've only been taking between 1 and 3 a day for the past week)
stitches I had taken out last Monday: 15
times I've left the house in the past three weeks (not counting trips to the doctor's office): 5
Of those times, how many involved bars? 4
hours wasted idly surfing the internets per day: 4
episodes of Big Valley I've watched in past week, after a lifetime of avoiding the show becuase I didn't know how oddly appealing Barbara Stanwyk's blue eye shadow could be: 2

"Live" Blogging from the Couch

2007-07-27T12:36:00.000-05:00

When I optimistically promised I'd be back blogging with a vengeance during my recuperation, what, exactly, did I think I'd blog about?

Gilmore Girls repeats at 10am and 4pm?
The joys of keeping my foot elevated around the clock?
What it feels like to go three days without washing my hair?
Getting a care package from my dad containing no less than 30 The Cat Who . . . mysteries. (Sweet that he thought I'd like them, since I have Siamese cats, but how long does he think I'm going to be laid up? And how many do I need to read to be polite? I read one the first day and it was actually a pretty fun read, though the protagonist/amateur detective is impossible to like.)
The virtues of frozen peas vs. frozen corn as non-melting ice packs?
Having to eat constantly, so that I don't get sick from my pain meds, and indulging in my worst, most shameful, least nutritious, most fattening, least in need of chewing, embarrassingly infantile food desires, including Chef Boyardee ravioli*, Swiss Miss chocolate pudding, and Uncrustables pb&j sandwiches (I always secretly coveted them when I saw my students eating them).
How excited I am for the next installment of Damages? How disappointing I, too, thought Saving Grace was?
How completely tired I am of reading articles about Mormonism/anything related to Mormons? (I gotta say, though, last month Bust had a pretty right-on article about Mormon feminists--I was ready to hate it and them, but it was solid and not afraid of explaining why this is such an impossible position to maintain for long.) But still, enough. Stop it. Doesn't anyone want to write about Jehovah's Witnesses?
How much I wish I was this blogger, spending the summer in Northern California with my beautiful son and fabulous artist spouse, going to glamorous art events and eating amazing, local food on a eucalyptus shaded patio? (I'm guessing about the trees, but it's a good California staple.)

Earlier this week I thought I was almost better and stopped taking my pain meds and started walking around a lot--thinking, "this wasn't such a big deal operation, and I don't want to get addicted, and motion is good so my joint doesn't freeze in place while it heals." But it turns out that that pounding, pulsing, feverish feeling that my foot is about to burst open IS pain! So I'm back on the couch, alternating reading The Cat Who . . . books with work-type books, listening to the radio for company**, and spending way too much time in my head.

* Did you know he was a real person?
**When did U2 start getting played on classic rock radio? Unforgettable Fire seems to be the album my station likes to pull from the most. I always loved its hot pink cover. I feel really old.