the love (and otherwise) of neighbors

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation with some neighbors that confirmed for me some fears I've nurtured for a while. The fear was that they were judging me about my family. I can't say for sure that they thought/think I'm insane for choosing to have a fourth child, but that's certainly the overwhelming impression I got from them.

Around the same time, I had a run in with another neighbor. The experience let me know that she was watching me and my family from her window and judging what I was and wasn't doing as a mother. This is not someone I had previously given much thought to other than the occasional friendly wave as we passed on our street. But she had apparently been watching, unable to get her work done because she was concerned.

She lectured and threatened and otherwise made herself unpleasant. 

Let me say, for one thing, that I'm fairly certain that one reason I'm so sensitive to the judgment of others is because I'm so apt to judge others myself. 

But whether I'm exactly accurate in my understandings of how they are judging me, I know they are. Especially as a mother. 

So I have this desire, as I'm observed parenting my children while sporting this enlarged belly, to have it look easy. I feel like since they already think I can't handle even having three kids and that I'm crazy to have another, I need to make it look like this is totally manageable for me at all times. Even down to making sure I don't walk like a tired pregnant woman. Even when I am one.

Like maybe if it looks easy they won't think I'm crazy anymore? Or they'll suddenly approve of me? 

I guess you can tell I've realized that's just nuts. 

First, there's not a whole lot about being a mom that's easy. I do believe most (if not all) women have some mothering instincts and a nurturing side. But most moms agree it's not easy. Duh. And I don't think it's supposed to be easy. It's so so hard to be the mom I want to be, especially at the times when no one is watching and judging and threatening. 

And I'm not going to pretend that pregnancy is easy, either, but I've had pregnancies that were way easier than this one. I suspect that was in part because I didn't have three kids already at that point.

But isn't it actually better if anyone watching me thinks, gosh, what she's doing must be tough, but she's cheerfully hanging in there instead of believing the "this is easy" lie that I could never convince anyone of anyway? I guess I just want them to know that I don't regret where I am. No matter how hard this is or how hard it appears, I'm doing it because it's my life and I chose it. And there's joy in it. Difficulty and joy go together more often than my neighbors might realize.

I can live with it if they don't love me or accept me. They never have, and have made that clear. But I can at least make every effort to allow my life to reflect the truths I acknowledge here. 

Names we will not be using

After mining our respective family trees for girl names, Jeremy and I have found several awesome names. Despite how much we love these names, we've decided not to use any of them. Feel free to take them for use in naming your own children.

From my ancestors:

Mehitable
Regula

From Jeremy's ancestors:

Slicke
Sidsel
Experience
Submit
Silence

I have to say that those last two are my favorite. It's a shame we aren't having twin girls, you know? Can't you picture it? Submit and Silence, the Darrington sisters. Oh well.

The search for suitable girl names continues . . .

On having a girl

On Friday night, I allowed myself to buy my first little girl outfit for this baby girl I'm carrying. Well, "buy" isn't technically correct since I had a coupon that said "$10 off a purchase of $10 or more" and the outfit cost $10. But anyway. This was something. I let myself do it.

It's a little dress. Black with little white dots. And a tiny white cardigan that goes over it. The dress and cardigan each have pink trimming and a pink bow. And the cardigan is embroidered with a pink heart.

Yes really. I purchased this and brought it home. You have no idea what convincing I had to do to get myself to do it and think it was ok. You have no idea the number of little girl outfits I rejected because they were too girly to be starting out with. I even had to tell myself Jeremy would not think it was weird or odd or inappropriate for me to bring this outfit into the house.

I'm having a girl. As I mentioned in another post, I couldn't tell anyone about this without at least getting choked up for the first few days. And I assume all that emotion and weeping was about joy. I've tried sorting out the exact nature of my feelings with little success.

There's some relief. As in, I'm having a girl so I'm relieved I don't have to "keep trying for my girl" by having child after child after child until she comes. (But there's that sister question--no! I will not think of it now!) There's some just plain excitement--this will be new and different and fun. Right? There's the niceness of being able to tell people it's a girl and get their excitement for me instead of potentially having to deal with their Pity or efforts at reassurance or whatever. Yes, that's more relief I guess.

And don't forget fear. The fear is fed by comments like, "you're going to have to learn to do hair, you know" and "girls are SO much harder!" and "get ready for the drama," and " girls are way more expensive. You have to buy earrings and hair bows and all that stuff." I think about this stuff and the phrase that keeps coming to mind is be careful what you wish for... I walked into a shoe store the other day and saw all the little girl shoes. Could a little girl get by on one or two pairs of shoes like my boys do? Doubtful. I walked past the Justice clothing store for girls in the mall--full of fluorescence and glitter and just uh, loudness, and uh, fashion. And I thought. NO! I want nothing to do with this!

One answer to this is that my daughter need not be the same as every stereotypical girl out there. She will be herself and she will also be the product of her household full of brothers. But this sounds as if I'm kidding myself into thinking "not MY daughter" when I know perfectly well that fighting it won't help.

It's not just that I'm afraid of all this girliness. I had 5 girly roommates at a time in college, remember? So I can handle girliness. I'm more afraid of what I won't be able to give her. Not knowing how myself, I can't teach her how to properly apply her makeup. That's one example, and perhaps a silly one, but it represents this ineptitude I see in myself that I know I must fight to see differently.

I'm pretty sure God knows what he's doing. He'll send the girl I need as a daughter, the girl who needs me as a mother. And I'll be enough. I'll have to remind myself of that every day, just as I have to when I think about parenting my sons. But I will be. So I'll work through the fear.

But beyond all that--fear, excitement, relief, novelty--I have felt something else. I wonder if I can write about it here. I don't think I can (as I've tried and not gotten it right for the last 15 minutes). It's a kind of joy. But other words I associate with this feeling are fulfillment and gratitude at being understood. I'm afraid I can't do much better than that at explaining. But I'm sure you've felt it sometime. Or you will. It's nice but it's big, a feeling that doesn't fit inside me. Overwhelms me.

About my ultrasound

It was on October 26th.

I learned several important things.

1. My baby's umbilical cord has three blood vessels. That's the normal and hoped for number. My friend, who is due next month, has a cord with only two vessels, and this causes her and her doctors much concern.

2. Anatomically, my baby is formed as you would expect. Internal organs are growing appropriately and in the proper location.

3. My baby is a girl baby. The ultrasound technician seemed in no doubt about this. When she told me this, tears began seeping out of my eyes (not hers). The technician asked if I was ok, if I needed to stop for a minute. I told her no, I was fine, and then I told myself to pull it together. It was kind of hard. I didn't anticipate that I'd have such a strong reaction. For the next several hours, I couldn't tell anyone without getting teary or choked up.

4. My placenta is not where it's supposed to be. Yet. It may still move, but right now, it is partially over the cervical opening of the uterus. It needs to move up to be completely clear of the cervix so that I can safely deliver this baby in the expected and desired way. They will do another sound at 26 weeks to see if the placenta is moving up. I'm told that it usually does. If it doesn't, I will deliver this baby by cesarean section. In the meantime, I have been put on certain restrictions. No vigorous exercise, for example. And absolutely no unnecessary heavy lifting.

In case you're wondering, my 2 1/2-year-old son is heavy. And sometimes I have to lift him. But I have to minimize that. This wasn't too hard to do when Jeremy was home--as he was most of the week last week because of Hurricane Sandy. But when he's gone, it's very challenging.

I don't like these restrictions. I bristle at them and want to rebel against them.  But I'm being an obedient little pregnant person. Or doing the best I can.

One thing that can happen if I am disobedient (or also if I'm not and for no reason) is sudden bleeding. Bleeding is never good during pregnancy, as you probably know. Knowing this threat is in the background of my life has had strange consequences. I now run mental scenarios--what would I do if I suddenly started bleeding badly while alone at home with Edmund? Or all three boys? Who would I call first--the midwives or Jeremy? And so on. Last night I dreamt of blood in the toilet. In the dream, I could smell the blood. (Ever smell things in your dreams?) But in my heart--or deeper, at that level where you know things and you don't know why--I don't think I will bleed.

And I don't know if it's fear or knowing, but I don't think my placenta is going to move. I want it to. But I just don't have confidence that it will. I will probably write more about this thought and what it would mean to me, but later.

Also, more about #3 above in another post.

Today's failure

I have this friend. She's got a mountain-sized rock on her back right now. When she wakes up in the morning and tries to get out of bed, she has to lift this rock. Then, each time she wants to take a step she has that same rock pressing down on her, urging her to give in and be squashed flat. She feels she has to keep going, has to keep lifting and carrying her burden, yet as she looks to the future she can really only see ways for it to get heavy and harder to carry.

I was thinking about this friend yesterday afternoon, so I called her to check in with her. She said she was functioning. I offered to help her today by watching her children for a few hours.

This morning around 10, I arrived at her home to pick them up. I knocked at the door and her three-year-old son opened it with an exuberant "Trick or treat and HAPPY HALLOWEEN." My friend came down her stairs and greeted me. Every time I see her, she looks thinner. I don't think she's eating. The look in her face was saying "I'm just holding it together right now. Just." I hugged her. I'm not a hugger, and neither is she, but there are times when only a hug will do.

I contrived to fit her kids' carseats into my car along with my kids' seats. My kids, out of school due to power outages, were waiting in their seats. I got everyone buckled in, and my friend came to say good bye to her son and daughter.

The three-year-old said to her, starting to cry, "I don't like it when it's different." And he's had a lot of different lately. His mother crumpled. She tried to reassure him, but she was in tears herself. She looked at me and asked, "should I just keep them with me today?"

I told her he would be ok. "He really will," I said.

She cried and hugged me. She said another goodbye to her kids, and Edmund helped me get her son distracted by talking about his candy bucket from Halloween waiting at home. As she walked inside her house, I could see that she was crying again.

Remember: everything is harder with that rock on your back.

I drove away. I was about 5 minutes from her house, when she called me. Apologizing for being a bit "schizophrenic," she asked me if I could just ask her kids if they wanted to come home or if they wanted to go to my house. I asked, and they both said, "We want to go to your house and play."

This didn't make their mother feel better, but it seemed to help her decide to let them stay with me instead of following her desire--that I turn around and bring them right back. I told her I would do whatever she wanted. Bring them home earlier than we'd planned, bring them home when they got sad. Whatever.

She couldn't decide. She didn't know. We made a plan to check in later, and I continued to drive toward my house. Another two stoplights and suddenly I felt wrong about it. Bad. I thought about this and told the feeling to go away. It didn't.

I tried to pray the feeling away, but I couldn't speak the words of my prayer--even inside my own head--because they were wrong. I made excuses to myself. Still not calling her, still not turning around. Still pretending this thing I was doing was right because it was intended to help her.

I was really searching for a reason. Any reason that would help my rational mind know that this instinct was worth following. I sorted through a few potential reasons. After a while, I hit on a reason. Something clicked in my brain. This reason--something my friend didn't know about--rang so true with what I knew of my friend and her situation that I couldn't pretend anymore.

And by the time I came to this, I was at my street some twenty-two minutes from her house.

I got up my courage, and I called her. She answered sounding relieved. She had wanted me to call her. And when I told her my reason, she was so glad that I had. No doubt in her mind now. No question what the decision should be.

Long story short, we got her kids back to her. I spent the next few hours feeling horrible. I had so wanted to help her, but in the end, all I did was complicate her day and give her little son more "different" than necessary.

I tried to help, but I failed. It could all have been avoided if I had thought of that reason yesterday before we made our plans. But I just didn't. And I don't know why.

There she is with her rock. She knows people want to help her, and many people do successfully help her. Instead of feeling horrible that it couldn't be me today, I'm trying to be grateful that she has these other friends who are helping her. I'm so glad she's not stuck with her massive rock and only my flailing attempts to help her.

I'm not giving up. I'll help her another day and another way. But I can't help feeling that today was a failure.

bump in the night

Sometimes I get up in the night to go to the bathroom. Lately, I get up three times in the night to go to the bathroom. I know, you're jealous.

It's not that I really mind getting up to go, but I long ago learned that such mid-night adventures often lead to post-potty awake time lasting an hour or two, especially if the potty break occurs near 4am. And one of the three usually does.

So, I long since changed the way to handle these potty breaks.

Old method:
stagger into the bathroom
flip on the light
do my business
flush the toilet
wash my hands
turn off light
go back to bed.

The old method is bad bad bad.

Current method:
stagger into the bathroom
feel my way to the toilet in the dark
do my business
go back to bed.

Hands can be washed and toilets can be flushed in the light of day.The current method might be disgusting to you, but I prefer it to the awake time I mentioned above. It helps with that, but does not completely prevent it.

This is all to say that last night, for the first time ever, I had a bathroom mishap. As I attempted to line myself up with the toilet before sitting down, I went too far and smacked the side of my face (right near my eye) on the shelf that hangs not-quite-over the toilet on the left side.

I cried out. "Owwwww!"

The best part about the whole incident was how fast Jeremy was out of bed and coming to where I was. "Ann?" he called, "are you ok?" Talk about an instant response. Good to know, right?

But the worst part is that I still have the headache brought on by the incident. But at least I didn't lie awake for an hour thinking about it when I went back to bed.

Wednesday

1

In the airport on our way back home from Boise on Wednesday, I held Johnny's hand while Jeremy and the others walked a little way ahead.

Johnny said, "Mom, I'm glad we got to go to Boise."

"Me too." I said. "I'm going to miss all those people there."

"Me too." After minute, he added, "I miss them already, right now."

2

Edmund, singing a song of his own creation.

"I want to turn into a monster. I want to turn into a rubber chicken!"

3

Charlie threw up on the first flight, from Boise to Minneapolis. 

Here's what happened. The flight was very bumpy. Johnny, next to me, told me he was starting to feel sick. I got him the barf bag and was keeping an eye on him. Then, suddenly, Charlie, across the aisle from me, grabbed his barf bag and, you know, used it for its intended purpose. 

The man next to him showed no signs of disgust or annoyance. His face showed concern and a little bit of "i've been there."

Then the man pulled out a little notebook and a black pen. At the end of the flight he gave Charlie a drawing of an airplane. Nice man.

Johnny never barfed, but Charlie used two more barf bags before me made it to our little home. Poor guy. Now I know he needs motion sickness meds when we travel.

Charles and the sad, proud, wrong, and grateful mother.

I watched the other day as a group of children played tag together at the park near our house. Charlie was one of them. They played "hot lava"-style tag for a while, but I became aware the game had changed when I heard one girl say, "No, you have to squat down while you say it. Like this." I couldn't hear what was being said.

Then I began to hear and I began to know. As the person who was "it" approached, each child hurriedly squatted down and called out the name of a television show.

Now I had to keep watching. I knew that Charlie was at an obvious disadvantage here because, as you know, we don't have tv. By this I mean to say that if you turn our television on, you will not be able to watch anything unless you've put a dvd into our dvd player. We receive no channels for free, and simply because we are cheapskates, we are unwilling to pay anyone for the privilege of wasting our time looking for something to watch on that very old box. (I admit we pay plenty of other folks plenty of money for the privilege of wasting our time.)

So we just don't have tv. You know I am not saying that we don't waste any of our time. And you know I am not saying that all tv watching is a waste of time.

This is all not to say that we never watch anything. I regularly take the kids to this place called the library. For the small fee of $0.00, I can borrow up to 5 dvds at a time on each library card (we have two). And not only do they put movies on dvds these days, but they also put tv shows on them. So my kids watch movies and tv shows on dvd.

But not like other kids. Oh, my kids watch plenty. Too much. But they don't watch what's on. They don't know what's on. And they never see commercials for those other shows. I'm pretty stingy with what I let them watch, figuring it won't hurt them to be limited to mostly pbs stuff. So if you think for one minute that just because Charlie is extremely bright it might mean he could keep up with these kids on naming tv shows, you are wrong.

After a few successful squats, I saw Charlie running away from the boy who was "it" and yelling, "I don't know any!" A moment later, Charlie "it."

So what happened after that. What would you do in a situation like that? Oh, and pretend you are 6, almost 7, and that you're playing this game with kids who are older than you are--2nd through 5th graders.

He ran. He ran hard until he tagged some pre-squat child.

The game went on. He was "it" a few more times, more than he wanted to be. And once, as the tagger approached him, he squatted and said, "Dora the explorer!" But eventually the other kids did run out of tv shows and the game again shifted.

Later as we walked home, I told Charlie that I'd like what I'd seen, that I thought his behavior showed he was a really good sport. He didn't complain against me at this point--me, the reason for his lack of tv knowledge. He simply shared with me that he had wanted to avoid having to say that last one. He'd had fun, but, he said, "Mom, I had to say Dora the explorer."

I'm hoping that the story mostly speaks for itself. I want to say, though, that I needed to see this. A parent needs these glimpses of the strength inside her children. Maybe it's nothing to you, but for me it's evidence against that thought I'm sometimes plagued with. You know, the horrible idea that he will be only as good as what I can manage to put into him. Yes, this mother is grateful to be proven wrong by a little game of tv tag.

I will blog about this trip, Part 6

Last things about Egypt.

I haven't told you everything about Egypt. I couldn't possibly. I loved it there. Cairo isn't a beautiful city (sorry!). But I loved the people we met. Since I've never been anywhere, this was my first chance to just absorb a very foreign place. And I did.

I was not able to capture my favorite image of Cairo. As we were riding in our mini-bus through the city, we passed a huge flat bed trailer. It was as long as a semi-trailer and it held great bundles of re-bar. The trailer was pulled by a horse. The driver was dressed in the stereotypical Egyptian-looking garb--about like what the camel guy was wearing. He was holding the reins and a cell phone at the same time and was texting as he drove. This is Egypt.

Before we got back to our hotel, we were taken to a cotton store. You know, Egyptian cotton is supposed to be fabulous. The store had some beautiful stuff, but I couldn't afford any of it. It was clearly a place for rich tourists to shop. I tried on an awesome dress, but didn't buy. The salesperson wouldn't give us any space or I would have taken a photo of myself in it.

Anyway, when we pulled up to the cotton store, we could see kids kids pouring out of the gates of a building across the street. Wael told us that was the public school. I took a picture.

You can see the young boys coming
out of the gate on the right side of the photo

The next day, when we got to the airport in Cairo, I noticed a lighted sign that was everywhere, in English and in Arabic.

The fact that this sign was everywhere shows that they have a great deal of pride, especially about the revolution. But I just can't seem to reconcile the words with the images.

What do you have to say about it?

Egypt is voting this week for their new president! So I am thinking of Wael, his wife, and his little son Omar and their future in that ancient land.

IWBATT Part 5 or Claustrophobia Part 1

We're still in Egypt. It's still April 12th.

I got to get up on a camel. One of the last things Jeremy said to me before I left was "ride a camel if you get the chance." But, I'm cheap. And I didn't want to pay $20 to do it. So I paid $2 and got to get up on this camel long enough for a photo. Well, you pay $2 to get down actually. As Wael said, "how much to get up on a camel? Free. Always free. But how much to get down?" It was only $2 here because Wael had arranged it with this man and his associate (and their camels). We heard stories of panicked tourists paying $40 or even $100 to get down off a camel. Who knows.

I have a lot of photos of me on this camel. Wael had my camera.
It's quite a ride getting up and down on a camel. So fun!

I'm no photographer, but tough to screw this one up.

The sphinx is big, but in this photo, we are standing on a cliff, kind of, in front of it.
So it looks a little smaller here than it really is. 

There was one very pushy vendor at the sphinx selling colorful Egypt books. A person gets the impression that some of these street vendors think they will impress us with their English skills, that knowing the slang phrase that will make us laugh will also make us buy. It is perhaps for this reason that my mom thought she might thwart them by speaking Spanish to them. They would see her, assume she spoke English, and address her in English. She would answer in Spanish. Guess what? They would just speak Spanish right back to her. After a long exchange with the pushy vendor here, in both English and Spanish, he finally let her go, for the moment, trying to compliment her by telling her she was not as bad as the pushy Russians. Later, catching up to us again, he told her she reminded him of his mother. Hmm. Good one, bro.

Also, what these photos of the sphinx do not show is that there were tons of people here. Countless times unwanted folks walked into my photo before I could take it.

We had the chance to go down inside one of the pyramids, and I thought, "how many times do you get that chance?" and I thought, "I'd better take it." Wael told us, first of all, that there's nothing down there. There's not really anything to see. You are doing this just for the experience of going down inside the pyramid. He also told us: you exit the same place you enter and it takes about 15 minutes. He warned that if some of us were afraid of small places, we might not like this. Of course, we all wanted to go inside. There's just one thing. I'm claustrophobic. Aren't you? No? Well, I am, and I don't really get why other people aren't. But. My mom said she'd go if I went, so Wael got us our tickets, made us put away our cameras, and led the way.

Another woman from our group told me she's very claustrophobic, but that she has some essential oils that help her. She told me she'd give me one of them so if I got feeling panicky I could sniff that. Uh, ok. Why not? How hard could this be?

Clutching this tiny bottle and with a group of tourists in front of me and behind me, I approached the pyramid entrance. There were enforcers there at the entrance checking tickets and looking inside our bags. They let us past and I saw the opening there in front of me. It looked like the mouth of a cave but with wooden stairs built onto it. The opening itself was not tall enough for me to walk into, and I had to duck quite a bit as the stairs began descending. My mom was a few people in front of me. We walked on a great wooden ramp with foot rungs bolted onto it. There were hand rails on both sides, and the ceiling we crouched beneath was rough-hewn rock.

I got about six steps down. Then everything in me said, "GET OUT NOW." And so I did. I called to my mom ahead and told her I was turning back. It was tricky turning back, both for me and her, a few steps ahead, because of all the people. The cave/corridor we were in was just big enough for people going down and up at the same time, but it took some negotiating. But she heard me turning back and came back also. Once I was out in the blessed daylight again, I remembered the essential oil in my fist and began sniffing it and taking deep breaths to calm the rising panic in my self.

And so for the next 10 or so minutes, I tried. I talked myself into it. I steeled myself. Several times, I stepped into the cave there and began going down. And each time, my phobia got the best of me.

I wasn't happy with that. I waited until the passageway was mostly clear--no people to block my escape. Then I tried again, saying, "It's ok" to myself with nearly every step downward into darkness. And this time I just kept going when I felt like I would suffocate under the tons of rock above me.  It's ok. It's ok.

At last I reached the bottom of the ramp and found that there was a stone chamber larger than my kitchen there with lights and a ceiling of decent height. I could stand and breathe myself into calm before continuing on. I faced further into the pyramid now and saw that to continue I would have to bend down and pass under the low place in the corridor ahead. My calm fled as I imagined myself doing that, going further in. I turned around and faced the great ramp. Facing this way I could see the daylight, and I could breathe calmly. I waited, then turned around again to keep going.

And you know what, I just couldn't. I guess I didn't want to see the empty chambers on the other side of that low corridor bad enough to turn my back on the daylight, crouch almost in half under massive stones, and go on.

Here's why. And this is where you may learn more about me than you want to know. As I stood in there with my back to the way to freedom, all I could think of is that this is what my bad dreams look like. I thought it at the entrance to the pyramid, too. I dream it often and have for years. I am in a tunnel. There is darkness. At first it is comfortable and I am perfectly safe. But imperceptibly, the tunnel is becoming smaller and smaller until I am stuck in there. I can't get out. Or, I come to a place that is just big enough for me to squeeze myself through and I have to do it--it's the only way. Or I come to a dead end. I turn around to go the way I came and find it's changed and I can't get out that way either.

I exited. As I ascended, many German-speaking tourists passed me going the other way. I said the only thing I could to them about my experience, "schade. Schade."  A few minutes later, I was out.

I love being out.

I will blog about this trip. Part 4

More about April 12th.
Until right now I had forgotten about the fact that I lost my camera in Cairo. For about five minutes. But let me tell you, the horror and panic I felt in those five minutes was enough for me. I didn't need anymore. Luckily, my mom had inadvertently put my camera in her bag, so I found it. And all I had lost was my bridge over the Nile photo-op. Mom, I need your bridge over the Nile photos, ok?

You have to cross the Nile to get from Cairo to Giza, where the pyramids are. So we did. And as we drove along toward them, we started seeing them peeking out from behind apartment buildings and shops. Like this.

Or this.

In case you didn't know, they're, like, kinda close to everything. And they're big.

My mother and me in front of the Great Pyramid. Wael took this photo and cut off the top of the pyramid, but that's ok because the top of this one is all eroded off anyway. Also, my mom is happy here, she just doesn't know how to show it in pictures.

Here I am with a vendor-guy.  See below for the conversation we had. I wish with all my heart that I knew what the dark evolves around. He REALLY wanted me to buy the thing that's on my head in this picture.

The second pyramid. Bad bus window photo, but this shows that this pyramid still has the original limestone facing up at the top. The rest has eroded away.

The littlest pyramid with the three mini-pyramids for his wives. This is the pyramid I (sort of) went down inside.
More on that later.

Me with all three pyramids. See? I'm cute in Egypt!

So, do you believe me now? I actually went to Egypt. For reals.

Here's what the guy in the pink shirt said to me:

Him: Where you from?

Me: America

Him: What state?

Me: Pennsylvania

Him: (excitedly) My friend in America lives in Kentucky!

Me: Cool.

Him: (Fist up in the air) Obama! Obama!

Me: Uh, yeah!

I will blog about this trip, Part 3

April 12th, 2012, or some of it anyway.

We get one day in Cairo, and it starts with a hotel breakfast.
Here I am, fed and happy in our hotel lobby:

My mom and I joined 11 others who were part of our same tour and boarded a mini-bus that would (somewhat miraculously) carry us safely around Cairo and Giza that day. I could not believe the streets and the traffic and the driving in that place. The concepts of lanes and rights of way and other things that make me feel safe while driving don't exist there. I thanked the universe that I didn't have to drive there but watched out the window in fascination. 

First stop: The Egyptian Museum, by way of Tahrir Square.

I have to start by telling you that I always felt safe in Egypt. I never thought, "Hm, is this smart and safe?" No. I always knew I was ok.  And part of that was because of our guide, our busdriver, and our security guard. Let me introduce you to Wael, our Egyptian guide. He told us that if Wael was too hard for us to say/remember, we could call him Willy. But he just wasn't a Willy. So we called him Wael. 

This is the best photo I have of Wael. Here he's going between us and the street vendors (thank you, Wael!). Behind him is our security guard who spoke very little English but really watched out for us.

Wael stood in the bus while we drove and told us things. He told us his version of the revolution back in January 2011. I won't go into that, but he told us that "nobody knows why" the people are still living in tents in Tahrir Square. He said that the city is only dirty since the revolution. Throwing their trash about is civil disobedience. He told us that "no one will vote for a Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president. No one." He told us not to believe what the American media says about Egypt. He told us there really are no difficulties in relations between Christians and Muslims in day to day life. "Hidden hands" are stirring up conflict and putting it into the news. 

Tahrir Square from the bus window (over someone's head). According to our guide, "nobody knows why" those people are still living there in tents.

Wael was a really good tour guide and I loved him. One wonderful part of our day in Egypt was when we were inching along in traffic to get back to our hotel and Wael came and sat next to us in the back of the bus and talked to us about Egypt--politics, family, and his hopes for all of it. Here is a man who was educated at a good private school and trained to be a tour guide. Why would someone have it be their career to lead foreign tourists through his country? Well, it seems like a logical job in a country where tourism is (or was before last year) the number one industry. But despite his excellent English and knowledge of Egyptian history and culture, he says he now only has work about one day a week, sometimes only one day in ten. Tourism has plummeted since the revolution. He is married and has a little boy, Omar. And his wife is expecting another baby. He is doing all he can to secure a job in America. Perhaps teaching Arabic? I asked him why he would want to leave his country if he loves it as much as he clearly does. He said he would go only for a few years. "Everyone who leaves his homeland must return home again, even if many years have passed." But he says that each generation should be able to do better for their kids than their parents did for them. He says that his parents gave him an excellent education, and in Egypt right now, he's not sure he can even do that for his son, let alone better. He says that he is trying not to disappear with the rest of the middle class.

Initially, I believed every word Wael said, but the more I learned, and as time passed and I reflected on our time with Wael, I realized that he was working hard to strike a balance between selling us on the glories of Egypt, opening our eyes to the realities we may never see in the news media, and networking with us so that we can help him find that golden opportunity in America. He often spoke in extremes, and we got conflicting pictures of how things really are, but I think that served his purpose: conflicting extremes kinda sums up Egypt.

Take the Egyptian Museum. Right next to the torched Parliament building.

Parliament building (center) with Egyptian Museum (red) next to it.

The main entrance to the Egyptian Museum. No cameras allowed inside.

Another shot of the torched Parliament building with the corner of the museum 

The museum itself is enormous and utterly jammed with artifacts. Our guide said that it holds 250,000 pieces. This is a museum unlike any I've been in. But not for the reasons you might think. If you go inside without a guide to show you what is what, you will be lost. Not only is there just too much take in, but most of it is not labeled in a meaningful way. It's clear that the many artifacts are not being cared for and preserved as they should be. The room housing King Tut's mummy mask and other treasures is one exception--most of that is beautifully labeled and displayed and protected. But there are many rooms where the only labeling consists of type- or hand-written yellowing notecards dropped into glass cases seemingly as an afterthought. The place needs some updating and some tender loving care. But I loved it. I stood in a vaulted room that was lined wall to wall and floor to ceiling with minimally labeled mummies in glass and wooden cases. We didn't have time to see even a quarter of what was displayed in the museum, but I wanted to stand staring in front of many things until a bit of the reality of what I was seeing slipped into my brain.

Full size chariots found in the tomb of a king who died 1300 years BC? His gloves and slippers? The jars that held his dead organs? 

What? 

I needed more time to comprehend all this. 

But after only an hour or two, we were off to the Pyramids.

I will blog about this trip. Part 2

April 10th and 11th.
What I didn't write about in the last post was that my mom was indeed waiting for me at JFK. We jumped through the necessary hoops ("Thank you for participating in security!") to get to the gate where our Royal Jordanian flight would take us to Amman, Jordan.

The misery of an overnight flight 10+ hour flight need not be detailed. We ate weird airplane food. Hours crept by. I turned my nose up at some breakfast fruit cocktail (think: the canned stuff). Somewhere over the ocean we jumped ahead 7 hours. And pretty soon it was the next afternoon.

The Amman airport was a new experience. After getting off our plane, we trekked through the airport to the departure gate for our flight to Cairo. Imagine our surprise when we had to go through another security screening to get to it. And this wasn't the security screening of a JFK. No, here women and men were sent to separate screening lines. Each man had to remove his belt, shoes, and watch and walk through a metal detector. Each woman would walk though a metal detector, but its beeping was entirely ignored. A woman waited for us in a curtained area on the other side of it and patted us down one by one.

I passed.

We arrived in Cairo at about 6:30pm local time. Most of what I saw of the city that night was from our airplane as we landed. I could tell it was immense and colored almost entirely in shades of dusty and rusty brown. Luckily, there were people at the Cairo airport to meet us, usher us neatly through Customs, etc., and drive us to our hotel, which was attached to an immense shopping mall.

I'm in Egypt. What?

I will blog about this trip. Part 1

I just realized I haven't posted here since late January. This observation startled me into action. Not only must I write here about my momentous trip to the middle east but I also must send a message to my loyal followers that I am alive, well, and queen-ish as ever.

So here I start.

April 10th, 2012

I said a tearful goodbye to my children and husband and wheeled my large suitcase (with my small suitcase attached) into the New Jersey Transit Train Station in Trenton, New Jersey. Here I would take a train (or three) to JFK.

A few minutes later, I sat down on the train knowing it was the right train and that it would be going the right direction. My feeling of relief was short though because just as I began experiencing it, I attempted to lower the roller-bag handle on my large suitcase and found that it was broken. As in, it wouldn't go down. And then when it did go down, it wouldn't come back up.

Ah, the first crisis of my trip. How would I get halfway across the world (let alone to JFK) and back again with a HUGE suitcase that couldn't be rolled by its own handle? Luckily, at the next train station, the brain God gave me kicked in and I realized that since the two bags attach to each other, I could use the handle on the smaller bag to make the wheels on the larger one useful.

Crisis solved. Pretty sure this is the worst thing that happened to me on this trip. Sure, I got sunburned, my mom snored, and we all had to wait for nearly two hours at the border before crossing from Jordan into Israel. But all this and other petty annoyances were part of the joy of this trip. That's right--once-in-a-lifetime annoyances really can be joyous.

And, just because it's the only picture I took on this day of the journey, I'll post this.

Raise your hand if you know what the word "egress" means. Ok, now, raise your hand if you know what the word "egress" means and you also ride New Jersey Transit. That's what I thought.  

Stay tuned for more meaningful posts on this trip and more interesting photos.

I cannot eat quinoa.

This is a food I ate regularly when we lived in Berkeley. Jeremy and I both like it, and I had several ways I liked to prepare it--a salad, a stew, a pilaf. You get the picture.

We ate it occasionally when we lived in Boise but not as often as before, probably because our young children wouldn't touch the stuff. Big surprise, eh?

Fast forward to a few months ago. I ate a delicious dinner at my sister's house. She'd made a quinoa salad (the recipe I gave her) and I enjoyed it. Not even an hour after dinner, I started feeling horribly sick. Horrible abdominal pain and headache, followed by diarrhea. At the time, I didn't associate it with the quinoa.

A few weeks later I decided I would make the quinoa salad that my sister brought back to my memory. Guess what? Exactly the same reaction. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I did make the connection. And I decided that no matter how much I like the food, no matter how healthy it is, no matter how many sources tout it as the superfood we all need, I will not eat the stuff.

A few months passed. I was reading a magazine that does all sorts of food testing. I found these two sentences: "Thoroughly washing quinoa before cooking removes all traces of its bitter saponin coating, nature's way of making the high-protein seeds unattractive to birds and other seedeaters. In addition to being unpalatable, saponin is mildly toxic, causing low-level gastrointestinal distress in some people."

Aha! I thought. I must (all of a sudden) be one of those people for whom saponin causes (not necessarily low-level) gastrointestinal distress. I just haven't been rinsing it thoroughly enough! If I do rinse it very thoroughly, all the saponin will be gone and I can enjoy this healthy food again. I was filled with hope. I had always rinsed my quinoa before because I had been told that the coating was bitter tasting, but I'd never heard of anyone getting sick from it.

So, last night, I found a recipe I wanted to try. You know, all healthy and meatless and so on. And this time I would rinse the heck out of that quinoa.  And I did. I rinsed. Then I placed the sieve of quinoa in a bowl of water, agitating it and then rinsing, changing the water and repeating this four more times. Then I rinsed again, very thoroughly and let all the water drain out. For real.

Guess what? It was delicious. I'm saying I really liked it. So, less than an hour later, when I was sitting at book club and I started to admit to myself that I felt a horribly familiar stomach pain settling in on me, I almost pretended I didn't know what was going on. By the time I left book club, I was miserable, and I moaned and complained my way home.

It's this horrible "I don't know which end is gonna blow" feeling.  And it always comes with a headache, although the headache this time was mild compared to my previous reactions. It all lasted most of the night. I hugged my barf bowl while I groaned my way from my bed to my toilet. I finally slept well from about 5:30am to just before 9am when husband guy left for work and I had to get up and be the parent on duty. The headache is the only lingering symptom now, aside from weakness and general bitterness.

I read a bit about this phenomenon this morning, and one allergy expert recommends that if you have a reaction, you should wait a few weeks or months and try again, this time rinsing more thoroughly, you silly inadequate quinoa-rinser.

Exactly how much rinsing would I have to do, people, before I'd feel it was worth it to risk trying to eat quinoa again? Answer me that.

The young artist

I was sitting at the computer when I heard the boys in the other room.

Charlie: nude means naked.
Johnny: (giggling).

I didn't think much of it. They were sitting at the dining table with paper and markers. A few minutes later, I heard

Charlie: (loudly) Don't show that picture to mom. Don't show it to mom. Johnny, I'm telling you! Don't show that picture to mom!
Johnny was giggling as he approached me but still looked a little sheepish. He showed me his picture. I looked at the picture and he looked at me. No, he watched my face for any sign of reaction. I saw lots of colors and a face, but nothing else I recognized.

Me: It's a nice picture, Johnny. I don't know what it is.
Johnny: It's a nude going to the bathroom.

Ah, now I understood. They both went silent, watching me and waiting. And I knew this was a key moment. How does a mother respond when her son draws a naked person going poop? I'm sure Charlie expected me to disapprove. Johnny might have hoped for some laughter but thought he'd get an eyebrow raise instead. But no, I didn't laugh and I didn't scold. I just calmly said the first thing that came into my head.

"You know, a lot of artists draw nudes."

Teachers on strike!

It's true that when it was time to send Charlie back to school after the Christmas break, I was a bit sad. For one thing, the break was a lot shorter than any holiday break I remember as a kid. He had seven days off. Add in the weekends and you get 11. Lame. So it didn't feel long enough to me. Besides that, he seemed to be getting nicer and sweeter and more cooperative as the break wore on. Almost like the roughness of school was wearing off of him. I liked having him around.

So now, after one week of Charlie being back in school, I get my wish. Be careful what you wish for, my dear friends. I'd rather not get into the politics of the strike, the teacher's union versus the school board. I know almost nothing about it. I just know that they can strike for 14 days before they have to go back and teach for a while, no matter what. Then they can strike again if needed. We'll see.

It's a good thing our family vacation is planned for this week, eh?

Anyway, all this is to say that we are only about 5 minutes into the first school day (going on school time) and we already have one blanket fort built and abandoned over here. It's gonna be fun, people.

I'm ok with it.

It's January.

On December 30th, I was pondering my lot in life. I may or may not have been thinking about setting some resolutions or making some changes. And these words came into my mind (and saved me).  The words were simply a reminder of something I already knew but had forgotten: I am free.

I'm free. I plan to keep reminding myself. Sometimes my brain likes to try to convince me that I'm stuck somewhere. Like, "I have this bucket of candy leftover from Christmas and I have to eat it. I simply must."  But that is a lie.  I am free.

Or, "I have set up this pattern in my life and I am not going to be able to get myself out of it." But again, not true. Nothing about yesterday or last month or last year has to influence what I choose today. Just so you know.

So I'm facing January with courage. Want to join me?