reconstruction

aside from putting my patio, my relationship with my parents re: religion and, well... my identity back together after finishing and or quitting pretty much everything I was consumed with for the last 2 years, I also made another major leap.

A few summers ago I went to this great garages sale and bought, among other things, a red pleather bag for 2 bucks (that I later found $12 in) and a Cold War Kids t-shirt. This Italian (I know) t-shirt has been my favorite, best fitting, most treasured article of clothing since. The problem is, it's crazy stained and wearing out. I've looked online and compared American Apparel and Alternative Apparel shirts to no avail. It's an orphan. So... I took the plunge.

Today I cut up the poor thing and used it as a pattern to deconstruct a few of Jesse's less than satisfactory shirts (y'know the ones from Target that have one arm longer than the other- things like that).

It was simultaneously horrifying to deal with the fact that I'd never wear my favorite shit, as such, again and deeply gratifying to see that I was right! It IS special! It's ever so slightly bias cut, the sleeves are asymmetrical the angle of the shoulder seams is of an elegance typically reserved for garment cut from much finer cloth that medium weight cotton jersey.

Pieces are cut, hems are out, now for gestation and...

dum, dum dum!......

the birth of the clone!

upheaval

After a semi-stern reprimand from a woman wearing onion-cutting goggles and wielding a tom-honed knife, I am back at the blog. I hear the re-entry phase can be cruel, so I'll keep it short. I'm entering a summer of no dayjams, no school, no teaching-related projects, not being on call for the first time in years, and no tiny baby. I am trying to wrap my mind around the idea of gardening in actual dirt-clothes - with my phone lying neglected on the counter in the kitchen instead of cozied up to my twitchy behind ready to ring me into action at any moment - instead of grabbing a few handfulls of weeds on my way from the car to the house after work or class. S-man can help and do things like (seriously!) "Bud will you go into the kitchen and look in the napkin drawer and grab the old blue towel with the stain on it and the spray cleaner and bring it out to me in the car, ok? Oh, and could you ask dad if there's any coffee left?"
For the record; he came back in less than 2 minutes with the right cleaner, the right towel, and the answer to my question (which was, sadly, no.) and I was well into cleaning the last few weeks worth of spilled coffee out of the minivan cup holders before I realized that he's not really a grown up, and is in fact 3 and 3/4.
J-man dug a giant pit in our backyard which will one day soon - with the help of the mysterious "Charlie from sand and gravel" - be a lovely breezeway again.
The constant steam of dirt throught the house would bother me so much more if I weren't experiencing the oddest lightness of being. I would mind the sweeping and the laundry more if I wasn't moving so slowly in my mind. I think this must be what it's like for those kids who get medicated instead of being thansfered to a self-contained classroom.
Everything seems so slow.
and so clear.

saying yes, again

Between christmas and newyear's I was priveledged to witness the birth of a VERY large baby. 11.8 to be exact. The heft of the infant, the ease of the birth, the proud Papa's crazy dance number and the family hoopla surrounding the whole event ( a house FULL of people, furniture and pizza showing up just about the time we thought she'd be delivering a baby) though bizarre, are probably not what I'll remember the most about the day.

I spend long months during the school year reading midwifery texts, studying journals, making paper perineal models, practicing stitches and stressing about NNR, just waiting for a chance to get to a birth, or even to prenatal appontments. So when I am on break, I'm usually totally gung-ho to drive through feet of snow, or leave parties or whatever if I have the chance to actually DO some midwif-y thing. When I got the call on the 27th, however, I was anything but excited. I felt tears welling up and my heart was racing the whole drive out. I spent a good part of the morning trying to ignore the voice in my head that was saying "What the hell are you doing?" "Why are you here?" "Just quit and go home."

When we eventually did leave for a bit, I struggled mightily with wanting to call my midwives and just tell them I wasn't going back. Or to any other births ever. I know. It's crazy sounding, but I just kept being hit by these waves of anxiety and dissappointment and tears (oh, the tears)and un-sureness.

I called A1 eventually and told her about my volatile emotional state. She, perplexed and kind, all but let me off the hook, but by the time she called back I had straightened something out - enough so that I could laeve family christmas number 76 or so to get lost twice and eventually make it to the house in time for the second stage of Mr. Giant Baby's birth.

Here's what I realized in the interim.
1) I was crazy stressed about the Mama and should have talked more openly about it with my preceptors. I hadn't been to any prenatals for this baby (just the little bro) and I think my feelings of disconnection didn't help with my aniety level at all.
2) I, the sworn enemy of hesitation, hesitate at births. I want so much to become skilled at this, and my opportunities to practice are so few and far between that I put a crazy amount of pressure on myself at every midwifery moment.
3) Being off call for long stretches of school tedium makes every re-entry into birth world like starting all over again. I like starting new things, but only because I like getting better at them. This is like some bizarre dating relationship: First date, second date. First date, third date, First date, fourth date, superlong vacation, who are you again? Second date, third date; and do I really want to be with you? Is this worth the trouble? AAAAGGGHHH!

The answer, of course, is Yes. Again.
I DID quit at least 8 times between 4 and 10 centimeters, but I started again 9 times, and I guess, if I'm honest, I can say that that's good enough for me.
Hopefully it's good enough for A1 and A2, and I'm not made to quit quitting by being fired!

wrecking ball

I heard today, on the radio coming home, a song for two year olds and the adults who act like them.

"I make a fist but not a plan,

I break it just because I can."

Mother Mother, the Vansterdam group to create this jewel sounds like hoe-down with LL Cool J beats from mid '80's and the singers from the Pixies. What's not to like?

money is money and a car is a car

yesterday I thought I left my wallet at school.
Getting home I realized that J left me with no keys.
I had a list of things to do and a stir crazy 3 year old and a rising feeling of dread when I made that annoying to receive but even more annoying to make phone call, "Honey... do you by any chance have 2 sets of keys in your pocket?
My far away husband's solution was - the pleasure van. excuse me, The Pleasure Van.
Our gracious neighbors have given us a set of keys to this 600 sqarefoot, crushed velvet beauty. It sways when you make a turn, rumbles, rattles and just generally draws attention to itself and it's (ironic?) bumperstickers about hippie festivals and ecological consciousness and hybrid cars while belching putrid smoke from it's suspect exhaust system. I've had to make use of it before, but never with S and freezing temperatures and the change jar. excuse me, The Change Jar.
J's solution to the no wallet situation was take the change to the bank. Not a bad idea, right?
So that's how I find myself rolling into TCF with S in the back of the gypsy wagon and a giant jar of change.

Even funnier was when we left the bank with $113.58 and went to sushi. And the sushi was half off. And we went to JoAnn fabulous for 1 spool of silver thread to finish the advent calendar that I was making to avoid reformatting my reference page. And when we went to CVS for some choclates to fill aforementioned advent calendar and ended up walking into Murrays. "MAMA! This is not a chocolate store! It's a greasy car stuff store!" whoops.
Little buddy laughed all the way home about that one.

We did finish the calendar (see photo). and I did finish my paper and J brought the keys home just as I found my wallet in my backpack.

free faling

it's so hard to believe that as of 1 december I'll be done with my thesis project and one lame class away from graduation or matriculation or whatever the hell you want to call it. I am feeling the life returning to my life and actually recognizing myself when I look in the mirror. I could still use a good dose of the sedative J's always promising to formulate for me. We're thinking of calling them "Hermiones" aka shut-yer-big-yapper pills. I am getting to the point now, though where I would probably only need to take them in classes or clinical settings and maybe when meeting new people. This is a significant improvement currently being deeply appreciated by many of those who are, yapping notwithstanding, still -unbelievably- near and dear to my heart.

I have had many occasions to babble senselessly and so much to yap (or not to yap) about lately:

Grandma's deathbed and Union City wake and funeral
MANA conference, incl: hooters, (yes.) recording snafoos, identity crises and crying in a bathroom stall for half an hour while my partner in crime was driving in the dark doing the same thing.
CRF making huge strides in the strategic plan, and getting to use the Depot town Community room.
My last class meeting with my masters cohort
The Election resulting in me actually not wanting to move to Canada for the first time in my adult life,
A great victory/ birthday (mama and Obama according to S) party
Making christmas woodcuts and other artwork with my live-in sister
Bloodletting AND Suturing classes
Grade 4 composition projects a soaring success (kids actually geeked abut writing notation. I know!)

Looking back at this list, I am amused by how I have been enjoying what has seemed like such a slow pace these last few weeks... maybe I need to reevaluate my standard of slow...

I have found though, that I can do several key things that have come to indicate a sustainable level of craziness for me:

1) drink more than half of my cup of coffee before lunch
2) play with S right away when I get home from work and still have enought time to get the house and school stuff done after he goes to bed.
3) wash my face with soap every night
4) stay in the car listening to whatever great song is playing on CBC radio2 when I get to work, all the way to the end of the song.

Speaking of which, I heard John Mayer (don't scoff) singing the Tom Petty song that isn't really a Tom Petty song, that everyone associates with Tom Petty because he did for it what Jimi did for All Along the Watchtower; Free Falling. I know. A suspect song covered by a mainstream hunky crooner, and I -completely in spite of my best efforts not to - loved it. There were some truly lovely moments in which that thing that happens in really great ballads happened. A huge vista opened up in front of my tangled thoughts and everything straightened out ahead of me and I just knew that better things - liscenced direct entry midwifery and fat federal arts grants and more kids and dinner with my friends - lie inevitably, gloriously, ahead.

crone

my grandmother has forgotten how to eat. I guess this is the expected progression of dementia. Soon, they say, her brain will unlearn how to swallow and that, they say, will be that.
Thinking about her tipping out of her wheel chair, or lashing out at her roommates; watching her say a series of unrelated words with the expectant look of someone who's just asked you a question they can't wait to hear the answer to, awakens the same primal impulse that propels me headlong down the stairs, instantly alert, when little S cries out in the night. I want to fold her in my arms and rock her into one last sleep just like the infant she's become.

Our relationship has always been incredibly basic on the surface, and complex in my head. My first fumbling attempt at a short story (during the Flannery O'Connor obsession) was begun on the way home from visiting her in the late autumn after my Grandpa died, when my mom, my sisters and I traveled to her house in rural west michigan to put up the storm windows, rake the leaves and winterize the car. I recalled our most memorable interactions; the good ones where we made stuff together, and the other ones where she criticized and questioned anything I did that wasn't the way she had always done. The relentless, insistent offering of turkey every at every holiday meal in seven vegetarian years. "But it's delicious! Your mother cooked it perfectly! Not dry at all!" When my Grandmother would go home after staying with us for the weekend, I heard the resigned and rueful tone in my own mother's voice as she told us how Gram had pleaded with her as a kid, when my great grandmother would leave from a visit, "If I ever start to act like that, you have to set me straight." Of course, my mother never did. Despite our assurances to her that she was "in a different universe" than Gram, and that we'd never let her become so out of touch, she'd just smile and shake her head. Even at 14, I could tell that, even more than she wanted us to say those things, she wanted to believe that they were true.

Observing Gram's steep decline, I am unsettled by the rush of warmth I feel toward this woman I know I have only poorly understood. I wish that I had tried harder to see her for who she really is. Instead, I was so afraid that I would find my self suddenly at 60, unable or unwilling to do anything beyond decorate a parlor or comment authoritatively on the proper preparation of Salisbury steak that I couldn't - or wouldn't. Over the years since my Grandpa's death, stubbornness and a little bit of a disconnect have gradually given way to confusion and the relentless, painful, regression of dementia . And now she's forgotten how to eat.

So, why have I been such a lousy/ conflicted granddaughter? Why have I always been so afraid of being close to my own Grandmother? What's happening now? Do I finally feel a sense of compassion and the ability to really love her because the archetype has lost it's power as her autonomy is eroded by disease? Have I seen my self and my own mother grow and change enough as adults to finally believe that a worldview isn't necessarily hereditary, and we aren't fated irrevocably to become our parents? Am I finally able let go of my angsty, self-obsessed, figuring-out-who-I-want-to-be, long enough to just be, and just care for this woman as she is, at the end of her life?

I know that I should, and will, look back to the many lovely moments; surround her in my mind with the sun filtering through the trees onto her clothesline, the dusty smell of her mysterious stone basement, the perfect, perfect starched white curtains shifting in the breeze through the window of the little attic room where she sewed and I spent overnights. I suppose I could try to write another dumb short story. Probably I'll just drive out to be with her before it gets too cold.