Moving to Wordpress

For people who has asked about my long silence, thank you.  All is going along as well as can be expected. No major upsets to report.  I have some marvelous pictures of The Boy to update this space with.... however, I feel the need to move this blog to a more private location. 

There has been no major drama, but recent events have convinced me that my heretofore somewhat cavalier attitude about being personally identified is no longer tenable.  Please bear with me while I figure out how to make the switch (and by all means offer your technical advice or guidance if you have accomplished this feat yourself!!) I have a busy couple of weeks coming up, so I can't promise to do this immediately, but I will make it a priority when my deadlines are done.

In the meantime, thanks again.  Please bear with me.  When my blog is up and running in a new location I will put the word out.  Enjoy your summer!  There is a photo of the boy walking a donkey that very much wants to be seen by you soon...

The other side

So last weekend, The Boy and I went to Vermont to visit my family-- along with my ex and her partner and their two kids.  It was 45 degrees and rainy.  That cold, penetrating dampness that makes being outside intolerable.  Now picture this: 3 toddlers (18 months, 2-1/2, and 3) cooped up in a strange house without their usual toys and distractions + a grumpy grandfather who thinks kids can be made to be quiet and stop banging/running/bickering if someone (namely, me) would just get with it.
Ha!
But we had fun anyway. We went to the museum and saw T. Rex bones and a Parasaurolophus model.  We saw eels and touched starfish.  We had lunch in the cafeteria and shook hands with the museum mascot, a guy in a giant orange gecko costume. We visited the miniature donkeys my parents are getting (because two dogs, four llamas, a horse and geriatric cat are not enough) and picked rhubarb from the garden to make a fresh strawberry-rhubarb pie. We dug up llama poo in the fields to take home to our own garden. 

And we had Nutella for breakfast.

The Boy stunned my parents with his language skills.  In the week of his sickness, he did not talk much, but I think his verbal neurons exploded.  I love listening to his thoughts and ideas as his verbal skills have progressed to the point that he carries on a steady stream of coherent conversation whether or not anyone is listening.  The first night we we there, I handed him a slice of pizza on a napkin, and he turned to my mother and said "Do you have any plates here, Oma?" I assume editing skills will eventually follow. 

I went to therapy this morning-- our couples therapist wanted to meet with us each individually-- I am not sure how this is going to go.  I have such huge, chronic anger that I can't access my empathy or kindness.  When I look back on our relationship ("What brought you together?") all I see is a phalanx of red flags I blithely ignored in favor of smelling the pheromones. 
I have a habit of quitting.  I know that.  If it were just me, I would have quit already. 

But I want The Boy to have two parents in a kind and loving relationship, and for him I am willing to try to get back there. He's old enough to understand things now and that worries me.
Our cat Oyster was gone for two days-- Speedy (was it Speedy or Stinky?  I keep forgetting!) kept going on and on about how worried she was, and I kept asking her to stop-- it was stressing me out and not actually going to help us find Oyster any faster.  This morning, she said again how worried she was-- did I think Oyster got eaten by a fox? And The Boy turned to her and said, "Stop saying bad things, Mommy!" (I found Oyster an hour later, huddled in the upper loft of a neighbor's barn-- I think she took shelter there from the rain and somehow got too scared to come out, and last night we had another thunderstorm.)

So that is where we are.... The air is heavy and the sky is overcast, but I am not sure if the storm is coming or going.

The Next Step

Obviously, we are a family in crisis...thank you for your thoughts and support.  As many of you suggested, we are going to try therapy.  I am not sure where this will lead.  Maybe it is divorce therapy...or maybe it's a place for my feelings to hold equal floor to Stinky's overwhelming depression.  I have been stuck feeling angry and angry, and angrier for so long...I let myself get swept up in the undertow of Stinky's depression, even as I thought I could inure myself from it. If we are to move on, we have to restore the emotional equilibrium in our relationship. We have to face the real damage that we've both done to one another. And after all that, we have to find a way to heal.

It's very good for me to hear the other side-- it seems depression has touched many of us in one way or another.  It is good to have the perspective from others who are dealing with it on either side.  I don't know how not to be controlled by it... or is being in a relationship with a depressed person like being with an alcoholic:  you automatically are drawn into the disease?

Let me be perfectly clear:  The following is only my emotional reality and mine alone.  I am in no way am I trying to portray Stinky as a villain -- she is a fundamentally good person, but we have some serious problems in our relationship. 

This is the cycle: The depression hits-- Stinky gets angry/sad/snarky about something; I push back; we argue; we go to bed angry.  The next day (or two days later) Stinky says, "I'm sorry, I was being a jerk. Thank you for putting up with me. I'm so messed up..." Then she puts on a sad face and asks if I still love her, at which point it is my role to care-take for her and reassure her with hugs and profess my undying love-- and then Stinky is reassured and redeemed, and the whole exchange (in part because I know the script by heart) leaves me feeling manipulated and exhausted-- I have once again been played by her depression. In Stinky's depressed world, any action is justified or redeemed by love, any emotion is trumped by sadness. 

Stinky's father is a Holocaust survivor.  Her mother fled North Korea as a child during the Japanese invasion.  Family du Stink have perfected the art of invalidating anyone else's emotions by trumping them with the weight of their own tragedy.  I am not diminishing the unfathomable suffering of living through war and the Holocaust, but the residual effects of those things is that sadness is wielded like an emotional cudgel, and the person with the biggest one wins.  True story: Stinky's nephew needed some extensive and painful dental work.  When another family member expressed sympathy, he replied "It's ok, [Grampa] lived through the Holocaust."  There's perspective, and then there's self-erasure. I feel like I have been living with the latter for far too long.

More soon.  Therapy tomorrow.  Thank you again for all your thoughts.

Depression Part 2

I have been reading about depression, as the thing itself corrodes my wife and our relationship from the inside out. Some of you asked if it's situational: yes and no.  I think the move has triggered some long-simmering discontents for Stinky-- being farther from her aging parents and away from the familiar charms of the city (must I enumerate them again?  Wine bars; good coffee; these things called bagels that seem to elude us outside of the city limits; friends) has uncovered some ugly truths as she faces mid-life without a crowning moment in her career, without a boatload of ready retirement cash, without some kind of life glory that would, I dunno, validate her existence. 
I am not one to pursue some external meaning in life; I find the very concept tiring and vaguely annoying.  I believe you make your own meaning just as you find your own happiness, and that anything else is hollow or deluded; seeking some external source of self is the stuff of cults and fascists...writ large, it's Jonestown and Nazism...
[rest of rant deleted]
But Stinky is on a never-ending quest to find meaning and validation, past mistakes assume monster proportions in her depressed mind, evidence of grand-scale character failings and moral turpitude.  By association, I am also condemned.  You can imagine how this looks after a long day, as we bicker over bills and dishes. 
I think depression is a mean, self-centered, narcissistic, bully of a disease.  It gives license to formerly kind and loving people to act like a$$holes and apologize only by way of blaming the disease.  I hate it. And it is killing us.
I look at The Boy, who is still in the midst of a sudden onslaught of fever, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, sleeping fitfully beside me as the antibiotics flush the ear infection out and his equilibrium slowly returns, and I feel a visceral rage at Stinky and her godd@amn depression that is tearing the guts right out of our family.  I admit it:  I am thinking of leaving.  If this does not improve, I have to think of The Boy's health and future.  Much as I know he loves her-- and her, him-- I know that in the long run, this depression will wound him in ways that can't be undone.  I am starting to think he would be better off as the son of a single mom. 
Anyone out there with experience to talk me off the ledge?  I hate to plead for help, but this is a time that I really need it.  I have been a terrible commenter, and I don't really deserve your help-- but if you can, I'd deeply appreciate any words that can help me regain my footing here. 

A night apart

Sunday, Stinky and The Boy departed for New Jersey to spend a night away. Stinky wanted to go visit her family and I wanted some time alone.  Or so I thought.

It was my first night away from both of them ever. I have always prided myself on being independent, to the point of infuriating my significant others, past and present.  I did not grow up believing in or searching for The One. I loved being single (especially when I figured out the appropriate gender with which to spend my nights back in my wild days).  But this was my first time being not single but alone. Did I go out to the best bar in town and savor a solitary glass of wine? Curl up on the couch with my stack of unread New Yorkers? Zone out watching YouTube videos of kittens? Take a hot bath and give myself a mani-pedi? No, I did not. 

I panicked.

I spent nearly the entire time they were away on the Sisyphean task of tracking down and organizing digital photos of our lives together.  I salvaged photos from three wrecked hard drives and enlisted the help of a kind professional computer geek and iPhoto Library Manager to wrangle the digital diaspora of our history into an organized format.  I called Stinky every 40 minutes and demanded reports. I forgot to eat and then ate only a freezer-burned bagel, being too despondent to go out and buy actual food. I drank an entire bottle of wine. I forgot to go to bed, and when I finally crashed, I could not sleep. 

It turns out I have lost my talent for being single.

The Boy and Stinky, however, had a wonderful time.  Above: a photo-- already uploaded and categorized-- of The Boy and two of his cousins.  He idolizes them and spent the day in pure rapture, kicking balls and running with the big boys.

Art as life

Title: "two"
Medium: ballpoint on white leather

How do you chronicle the movement of water in a rushing river?

I want to capture it all, but this child of mine will not stop, will not face the camera, will not smile for the stretch of time between focus and flash. I would have to video tape the entire day, every day, and run it back at 1/10th speed to fully appreciate the nuanced changes he undergoes daily, hourly. Each day he charges in to the morning, already leaving me behind in my clumsy efforts to match his energy and enthusiasm.  How is it that just a moment ago he was a bobble-headed baby, mouthing mashed food and sliming his baldy head with his pudgy, banana-covered fingers?
How did he slip from "dat" and "cah" to a handful of words that only I could hear, to lists and lists of words, to phrases and sentences, and (now) conveying complex abstract thoughts and his own evolving understanding of a world with past, present and future?
I want so badly to capture it all, but I feel like there is never a moment between in which I can reflect on it.  I spend my days chasing after him and my nights worrying about it all going too quickly, worrying about not capturing enough pictures or words. 
This is what seasoned parents tell you:  take lots of pictures, write it all down.  But how, when and where?
Out of nowhere, he has become a big boy (No more nursing!  After dropping all but the bed time feeding, where we remained stalled for weeks, our babysitter finally convinced me there was no other way than to just stop, so I did-- that night.)
As ever, he is implacable and impatient, and does not tolerate pandering or patronizing.  He rarely has tantrums (I could count them on one hand) but when he does he seems unconvinced of his own histrionics, and afterwards somewhat sheepish.
This move has changed us all...
For Stinky it has been hardest, but her memory (or lack thereof) does not permit her to compare what she has gained, only what she has lost: friends and wine bars, professional regard and a community with common interests and goals.
For me, it has been isolating-- but I have always been isolated to a degree, but mostly because I am socially awkward and sometimes a bit agoraphobic by choice.  This isolation is more physical and real in the sense I can go weeks only seeing 2 or 3 people other than Stinky and The Boy. Not having a real job-- I am freelancing in the meager time I have between dropping The Boy off and picking him up at babysitting-- takes my normal anti-social tendencies up a notch.
For The Boy, the changes have been theoretical, since he has barely been walking for a two weeks when we left Brooklyn, and the distance between infant and toddler is a vast, unbreechable gulf.
But, in contrast to our life in Brooklyn, we live in a house that gets sunshine from multiple windows, we have a good sized yard where we are trying to grow things, and there are a number of parks near to us that even on "crowded days" do not come close to harboring the hoardes of people, softball teams, barbecue accoutrements, dogs and kids on various wheeled playthings that made Prospect Park in Brooklyn a no-go on weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We have nearby hikes up hills and mountains and around lakes and reservoirs, there are farms and petting zoos, libraries and museums geared toward children, and an endless roster of child-friendly events and venues that we've only begun to explore.
The Boy doesn't remember his infant life in Brooklyn, but when we return, I can see that his first summer there has left its mark on his neural wiring. He knows where the water park is (complete with sharp, irregular stones that define the spray area-- genius!) and what a Mr. Softee truck looks and sounds like. He delights in stalking pigeons on the sidewalk and always remarks on the sheer number of cars and people, which to him probably signifies something important happening, like a parade or a fair, not just an average Saturday where people swarm the streets to escape their cramped apartments and get a little sunshine after a week of dawn-to-dusk work under fluorescent lights.
In short: the move has been a net loss for Stinky, a net wash for me, and a net gain for The Boy. Which is kind of how life tends to shake out after a child, I think. Right now I want to focus on staying present, on keeping up with what we have.  We can't move back.  We can only go forward.
To that end: an anecdote from Barbados.  As noted, The Boy does not count patience as a high virtue, and the time between "I want" and the manifestation of the desire to him is sheer torture.  One morning in Barbados, he declared he wanted to go to the beach that very instant.  I told him he had to put on  his shoes, to which is responded, "No, I want my COSTUME!"... It was only several days later that I realized in a similar circumstance that he was referring to his bear costume that he wore for Halloween, because he wanted to go barefoot. It makes me wonder how much I don't get.

Barbados!

Back home now, but still dreaming if beaches....

Depression sucks

We're coming out of it, slowly.  But this is what has been happening.  

For the past month or so, Stinky's been in a deep, dark stink.  Depression.  She comes home from work, lies on the couch and moans about how terrible life is, how she hates the fact that we moved here, how she misses Brooklyn, how we'll never get ahead financially, etc., etc.  (Meanwhile I write perky article for pay with headlines like "5 Instant Stress Busters".)

I hate it. I hate depression.  I am no good at being supportive, because it taps into my deeply judgmental side. It triggers my anger. I am not good at keeping my mouth shut because the banal tasks of feeding and cleaning the living beings that depend on me sometimes outstrip my energy reserves and I need help.  I am not good at faking it.

So we reach an angry impasse, Speedy sulking and sighing, me huffing and slamming. The boy, obliviously absorbed in his own world, seems not to notice.  But I hate that on some days I feel like we are those parents, the ones I swore I'd never be.  Silently angry and seething with each other and overly sweet and attentive to him to compensate for the iciness that engulfs our own relationship.

We are getting better.  Stinky is perking up, whether because of my demands or in spite of them I don't know.  My anger is receding.  The boy is just as fabulous as ever.  I hope Spring time will bring a desperately needed fresh perspective.

Jumping in

It was easy to write the first post.  The second is harder: what merits a post?  I'm out of practice and being sleep-deprived is not helping.

As I mentioned, weaning is well underway at Chez Schroe, but the Boy is not on board at all. He loves his b00by (and indeed that was one of his first words, back when we could enumerate them). In the last two days we have gone to only bedtime nursing, which means instead of spending an extra hour in bed with him nursing, I am now up the moment the first real hunger pang hits him-- right about 5:30-- making pancakes, making coffee, making chitchat to distract him from the injustice of me reclaiming my own body.

But that's not the issue.  I know that we'll move on from this.  I know that we'll drop the night feeding eventually, too.  What worries me is not as much the nursing as the fixation.  Even though he knows there is no daytime b00by at all any more, he cannot seem to get himself to sleep without it holding, fondling, stroking it.  "Just hold, mommy, pleeeeeease!" he'll plead tearfully, an hour past his appointed naptime, the sheets damp with tears and his face sweaty and crusted with snot from his broken-hearted wailing. This is a full 2 months after we have given up all daytime nursing. Inevitably, I give in. Just today, I tell myself. He is exhausted, he needs to sleep. And just like that, he'll relax and stare off in a b00bful bliss, stroking my n*pples as he falls asleep in mere minutes. 

In other words, weaning off the nursing is going as well as can be expected; weaning from him from his tactile addiction is not going at all.  Can I expect this issue to resolve itself over time, or do I have to draw a hard line with him, and endure the toddler fury that will ensue?  Or should I assign Speedy and/or his babysitter, Mrs. F to get him to sleep at naptime and bed time?  Anyone else have a very short b00b-obsessed person in their household?

---
I am still catching up on blogs... so much to comment on, it's hard to know where to begin. But I feel compelled to comment on the tragic and unfathomable loss of Caemon.  I briefly posted on it last night then deleted the post because it seemed somehow presumptuous and self-serving.  All there is to say is that I feel deeply for the Reproducing Genius family and wish them the best with their process, both in grieving their loss and in moving forward with the TTC. 

Is anyone still there?  Thank you for everyone who has checked in on me in the last um... year (wow.)

I have missed you all, and have no good explanation for my prolonged absence other than busy-ness. With four hours of babysitting a day, between deadlines, dogs and blogs something had to go, and, sadly, it was my attention to the blogs.  I will not make any promises about future performance, but I will state my intention to update more regularly and thoroughly because as it turns out, I am a good writer of things science and medicine, but a terrible documentarian of things baby and family, which is precisely the inverse of my investment in the matters.  I am sure a therapist would have something to say about this, but I have neither the money, time or interest to find out what.

 The past year has been pretty friggin' tremendous.  Moving bumps (I moved from Brooklyn to the wilds of Northampton), and the dearth of decent restaurants, coffee shops and wine bars aside, the growth of The Boy and my life have been wonderful.  He's talking nonstop, still nursing (when I brought up that he is getting too big and we had to find a good time to stop, he said, "No, mommy!  I not big, I just little!"), and developing an ironic sense of humor that seems beyond his age.

I leave you for now with a recent of video of his interpretation of the Barney Song.  I can't stand that purple dinosaur, but it gave me this moment that I absolutely cherish. 

Thanks again for checking in, and I hope to be able to get back into the blogging spirit again as Spring has finally arrived and the darkness of the Winter (and the pall of the first year in a small town) has begun to lift.

My boy

This is the Boy dancing to his absolute favorite video, Bruno Mars on Sesame Street. I have to admit it has grown on me, too, even though his saccharine good looks induce a sort of allergic response in me.  Rainy weekend and I am flying solo the rest of the week while Speedy does vet things in the Dominican Republic (I know, real tears, right?) What else to do but learn how to edit videos of my kid being his goofy self?

The kitchen, as you can see is still half-done (And a mess.  Note to self: clean before next video!) But it has come a long long way.  I am just very ready to be through with this.

Adopted!

 The Boy was officially adopted on Monday-- Hooray!  Thank goodness we waited this long-- Speedy was already on the birth certificate so we had that in our pocket-- and in MA it cost 1/10th the time, money and hassle it would have in NY.  And now it is done.  (Above:  chitchatting with the judge while she signed the papers; the Official Photo.)

And... a gratuitous picture of his adorableness. 

It is amazing to me how quickly he is learning and growing.  We had our first "conversation" about race last week when a black friend of mine was over.  The Boy picked up a book he had never previously shown interest in-- one in which the protagonist is a black boy-- and very deliberately brought the book to my friend, pointed to the boy in the book and then to my friend's arm in a clear effort to communicate that he noticed the similarity.

This weekend we are having a party to celebrate the adoption and the final stages of the renovation.  With any luck, the electrician will come today and hook up our dishwasher and pendant lights, leaving only the backsplash undone.  Fingers crossed!

Nature Boy

The Boy no longer has even a hint of baby about him anymore; he had his first big boy haircut on his 15-month birthday and left the last remnants on his baby self on the salon floor, never looking back. Today he is sick, feverish and glassy-eyed, already napping in my lap at 8:30, but for the last few weeks he has been spending a lot of time at my parents' house in VT, where the two black labs, four llamas, and a half-blind old mare have kept him in Nature Boy bliss... Goat bite notwithstanding, the Boy loves him some animals. I include the above video because you can hear him, at the very end, calling out to Sadie, the horse-- I would say 90% of his first words are animal-related.  He also says goat, llama, bird, squirrel and moo as well that the usual doggy, kitty and our pets' names...

We have been busily renovating, and at the last phase our floors were sanded and polished up beautifully, turning the dull old dark oak floor into a shiny clean expanse of blonde.  What with the still-to-come paint job,  the new white cabinets and the removal of the very-wrong wall, the house has been transformed from a dark hobbity hole to a bright, clean modern space, safe and tight and clean.  It has been nearly a year since we have had space that felt like our own, but in just a few more weeks, it will be done.  Our countertops will be installed, our kitchen will have electricty, and the refrigerator will finally be able to move out of the living room.  Then I will share  Befores & Afters...

Beware of Goats!

It is only fitting that the Boy's first big-boy injury (necessitating a howling trip to urgent care) was precipitated by a goat; my mother still bears the scar of a monkey bite from her youthful adventures in Senegal and I have a permanent reminder from the two-toed sloth I unwisely attempted to help cross the road in a Panamanian rain storm. The Boy is merely following the tradition of letting love of animals trump innate caution.
In this case, the Boy was feeding the pygmy goats in our local park through the chain-link fence of their enclosure (still closed for winter, despite the 80-degree weather.) I was watching with one eye while chatting with an acquaintance whose slightly-older son was toddling about in the sun.

Commence the blood-curdling shrieking.

I ran over to the Boy to see him extract his mangled finger from a hapless goat's mouth-- he had evidently decided to investigate the goat's molars while they were at work grinding up the kernels of dried corn the Boy had been feeding them.

Oh! The shrieking! The finger was fairly well masticated, but the blood was minimal. Still, I know the pain of crushing injuries, particularly on the finger. Luckily, earlier citcumstances-- namely, Speedy having driven to work with my keys in her bag-- meant that my friend had driven us to the park and she swiftly drove us to our doctor, while I ministered what I hoped was calming words and pets to my poor distraught baby.

A dose of tylenol later, the boy had sufficiently calmed down to nurse while his finger was gingerly cleaned and bandaged by a very gentle nurse.

But the moral of the story is: beware of even the gentlest of goats-- especially when your toddler finds new and inventive ways to imperil himself daily.

The finger is healing well, and the Boy is none the worse for wear (though I have not yet taken him back to the goats and I hope he is not traumatized for life by the incident, since we were seriously toying with the idea of getting him a goat as a pet before this happened.) Spring was seemingly bypassed altogether in these parts, for the blazing sun and searing heat of summer, but that, combined with the longer daylight hours has meant more time and energy to explore our new town. This is good, though we have sadly concluded that we were unwitting food snobs, a fact belied by the insistent mediocrity of the local restaurants. Still. On balance,life is good.