this woman’s work

You are browsing the archives from 2005 February.

Why am I not coming up with anything that I want to keep???? I’ve been thinking about this all week. The baby wakes up at 3am and I feed her while I contemplate various adoption studies. I think about it in the shower. I meditate on official agency statements and bulletin board flamewars while I scrub bottles, hustle laundry downstairs, and say “How big is Madison?” in a cheerful voice for the umpteenth time.

Every night I’ve been at the kitchen table or at the library or at a bookstore pounding away. I made a long brainstorm list, I made tons of notes, I read study after study, trying to sift out truth from propaganda and by god, I wrote. I made several false starts and a couple of good beginnings and several middling middles.

I figured it out, I figured it out while I was driving to pick Noah up from Spanish. We had a freak snowstorm for about ten minutes so I was trying to focus on the road and while I wasn’t looking at the mess in my head I realized how I needed to write it. Then I had 45 minutes of chasing the baby around the Spanish teacher’s un-babyproofed home (her children are into legos and Madison is into eating legos) and a drive back with Noah nattering on in the backseat. We walked in, I set the baby down and she immediately grabbed my legs and started to scream. I spoke soothingly to her while I flipped through the mail Noah handed me, then picked her up, carried her into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle. Half a bottle later, she wanted to play. I picked up toys while pretending to play with her, checked the voicemail (my sister called), checked my email (work is demanding something) and then tried to fix the work thing while simultaneously chatting with Madison. Needless to say when Noah asked to go watch television I said — with enthusiasm — “Yes!!!”

Finally I got the baby down to nap and I boot up here and it’s gone. Totally gone.

I hate myself. I hate my life.

No, wait. I love myself and I love my life but my god, I hate this. Dammit dammit dammit.

It’s just how it is, right? But I’m (relatively) young and I have time, right? I have no deadline — it’s not a time sensitive story but my god, I am so depressed about this. This was going to be the test of whether or not I could make time to sell a book and you know what? I don’t think I can.

God, I just want to go pound my head against a wall. (Instead I’m listening to This Mortal Coil — same thing, really.)

But if you didn’t, you’ll regret if if you don’t check it out:

Fag This is what I heard someone call my little boy today. I didn’t ignore it. I asked. I glared. What did you say? The kid muttered under his breath. Nothing. We walked to the car and he was quiet. He’s a boy who takes everything into himself. When he shares, it’s a gift. It has a meaning beyond what it is.

You can download my friend’s beautiful song, Kristine’s Lullaby either by clicking that link right there that I just put in here or by going to The Official Jodi Shaw Web Page.

Who is Jodi Shaw, I hear you asking? Besides being a brilliant singer/songwriter, Jodi is also a friend of mine from Portland.

Here’s my “How I Met Jodi” story.

First off, Jodi is really beautiful. She looks like a J. Crew model with a fabulous swimmer’s physique (she swam competitively) and a fresh, clean face — no make-up required. I was totally intimidated by her because she’s also very tall so she really could be a J. Crew model. What I usually try to do when I’m intimidated by someone who I’m going to have to live with in some way is make friends with them. So when I found out the new night RA at the shelter was this fabulous-looking woman, I decided that if I liked her, I wouldn’t have to feel all jealous of her gorgeousness and would instead be like, “I’m so happy for Jodi, because she is gorgeous inside and out!” or some such schlock.

(This works, this technique. It makes jealousy fade pretty damn quick.)

So it turns out that Jodi is also really smart — she graduated from Smith College on her swimming scholarship. She’s also funny. And she’s good at every single damn thing she ever tries to do. She decided to work in computer graphics and got into a competitive computer graphics program. She graduated and then decided to be a poet and got into a high-falutin’ MFA program. Then she decided to learn to play guitar, write music and sing and lo and behold — well, download the song and you’ll see.

She also taught me a lot about feminism — she always challenged my thinking.

Jodi also took in my cat, Colette, when we left Portland (my mom said we were welcome to stay but the cat — who had been with me longer than Bret had — was not) and she threw us our baby shower when I was pregnant with Noah.

I have other Jodi stories but Madison is hanging on my shirt tail so I’m hitting post.

Both came in the last week and I haven’t read either (yet). The first is the miscarriage book that was featured in Newsweek: Coming to Term: Uncover the Truth About Miscarriage. One thing about this book gave me pause, the author says that “veterans of three or more miscarriages ina row, become pregnant again, they will, with no treatment, carry to term nearly 70 percent of the time.” I was surprised to read this because it was not the statistic I’d been given (the stat I got was much more dire). So hopefully that will be good news for someone. The second book was just overnighted to me this morning — about ten minutes before I booted up — and it’s When Nature’s Not Enough: Personal Journeys through In Vitro Fertilization.

Edited to add: Mr. Cohen, author of the miscarriage book just wrote to me and said: “Just so there’s no confusion, that statistic of 70 percent success should have an asterisk next to it: It applies to women who have no identified cause for their previous miscarriage.” He also sent along a study to explain this stat further and if anyone wants to see it, let me know and I’ll send along Future pregnancy outcome in unexplained recurrent first trimester miscarriage by K.Clifford, R.Rai and L.Regan

I’m telling you, people, it’s hip to be infertile now. Where is getupgrrl’s book deal? (Actually, I have a theory about this. I theorize that some agent has contactd her — because it’s in the water these days — and either she said no to preserve her anonymity or else she said yes and hasn’t told us. If Mimi can write a book as Mimi, then getupgrrl should be able to still write as getupgrrl, right?)

… with trackback spam and are using MT, check DisguiseTrackbackURL out and see if that’ll help.

I got hit really hard this morning and I’m hoping that this plugin will stop that from happening again.