this woman’s work

I haven’t gotten it together enough to put together a July archives page yet. Later this week maybe. So August will start here, along with all that old July stuff. Oh well, worse things have happened!

Pet Peeves for the day:

1. humidity;
2. dirty dishes;
3. Brett’s cousin who calls periodically to either announce she’s pregnant (again) or to give me some minor symptom and ask me if I think it could mean she’s pregnant;
4. busy signals at Earthlink;
5. bills;
6. potential employers who don’t acknowledge resumes sent to them.

Things that combat the pet peeves listed above:

1. reading to Noah especially Put Me in the Zoo, a fave from my own childhood;
2. getting an editing job from SRA for the weekend;
3. shopping at a thrift store and finding a ton of ancient Little Golden Books;
4. Brett going into work late so we can all have lunch together;
5. listening to showtunes (especially “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis as sung by Andrea McArdle, the original Annie on Broadway).

Noah is in the family room playing with a bunch of little robotic looking guys that he got at the thrift store. Apparently, they are all threatening each other with mortal harm but Buzz Lightyear (the third Buzz he now owns) will surely prevail.

Entries from my blog beginnings! Below the cut! (They’re for the entire month and go from the ground up.)
(more…)

Today, Noah and I made flubber/gak. I only had dry starch which didn’t work so then I started adding Borax and probably added way too much. In any case, it’s fun to play with. I was trying to make it for Noah’s un-birthday party on Friday but now I think I’ll just put out flour, water, and salt and let the kids make a giant mess with it. (We’re having the party out in the backyard.)

We’re coming out of a week of really hot, humid weather. It’s the kind of weather that drove me out of the midwest in the first place. Fortunately, today held the kind of weather that made me *miss* the midwest when I left. It’s been storming all day. It’s amazing how quick and clean the heat break is when it’s finally ready to break. But for this past week all I can say is thank goodness we have central air and drat the car for *not* having AC.

Not much else to say. Maybe this weekend something marvelously compelling will happen.

Everyone I know is having money trouble right now. The moon must be in the seventh house and Jupiter must be aligned with Mars. (That’s from Hair, in case you’re not too showtune savvy.) My (best) friend Mart just got laid off from his brand-spanking-new job at Banana Republic. (Note I have no link to them. Just go to a mall if you’re in need of over-priced khakis, ‘kay?) but he’s bravely forging ahead towards his dream of being a freelance writer. He’ll do well. He does everything well. And then I’ll hit him up for jobs and book deals.

Speaking of book deals, I am waiting to get a contract from the agent. How do these things work anyway? It’s very frustrating. I have a writer-friend who’s in a similar situation with an agent and we keep reassuring each other that it’s all going to be fine and that this is just how agents work. Hopefully, we’re telling each other the truth.

A couple of people have written to ask me what’s up with my conversion. This is what’s up: I’m not doing it. At least not right now. I still hope to in the future when I don’t have the same kinds of family considerations.

Part of this is because I didn’t click with the Rabbi. I felt very frustrated by his confrontational style and lack of instruction. A bigger part has to do with my ambivalence about being part of *any* formal religion. I strongly feel Jewish; however legally (according to halacha), I’m not Jewish. I felt like it was hypocritical of me to want to become a legal Jew without being willing to take on some of the fundamental precepts of Judaism (like circumcision for my son[s]). I was very torn about this. I did a lot of talking/debating/crying and yes, praying about it. The answer I came to was that I wasn’t ready to become a “real” Jew but this doesn’t have to keep me from being more Jewish-like or from studying Jewish thought. Judaism still (mostly) feels like home to me.

As for what we may do as a family; I am actually very interested (and have been very interested) in Quakerism. Brett and I have been to a few meetings and we think that this may be a place where we can worship as a family. It also seems like a very welcoming community.

What appeals to me about Quakerism is the emphasis on human rights and pacifism, and the deemphasis on religious legalities (some Quakers, interestingly, are agnostic). While Quakers as a group are “christians”, for many Quakers this means respect for the teachings of Jesus without deifying him. And all Quakers focus more on building a personal relationship with a God as they understand him (shades of AA, I know) and not on interpreting the scriptures which many Quakers view as fallible. That’s a big one for me. The more I read of the bible, the more mystified I am that anyone could actually believe that it’s the word of God.

For a good essay about Quakers, check out this page at ReligiousTolerance.org.

I’m sad that I won’t be Jewish anytime soon and that Noah won’t be Jewish. I just don’t think I can make that decision for him as much as I want to. The Rabbi told me that he couldn’t get formal Jewish instruction (like Sunday school) unless he was formally converted and I don’t feel 100% wonderful about doing that.

Ultimately, I’m not sure where we’ll end up but we’re searching so I’m sure we’ll find it.

For those of you in Portland, the woman who strangled her toddler with a shoelace is an ex-client of ours at the shelter. I remember her pretty well. She was in once with her kids and once without but I can’t remember which came first. Maybe she was in three times which was our limit for clients. I think that I case managed her at one point because I can remember dealing with her a lot and her kids, not so much. Since I was the family program coordinator, it was usually the other way around. I do remember that the last time she was in, her mental instability was really manifesting (I don’t remember much sign of that before) and her face was strangely red and angry all of the time.

The big news is THE AGENT WANTS MY BOOK! I don’t have a contract (yet) but she emailed me and said that our relationship was now a professional one. She’s a great agent. She sold Katie’s book to Simon and Schuster (the Pocket Books division) and got her a nice, fat advance. Here’s hoping she does the same for me!

Today I wanted to write the story of our house. It’s a hot, humid day here in Central Ohio so Noah and I are staying at home inside enjoying our air conditioner. I’m hanging out laundry and reading Morgan’s Passing. He’s playing with his Fisher-Price Main Street and listening to Sharon, Lois & Bram. I love our house best on relaxed stay-at-home days like this.

OK, here’s the story; this will probably be a pretty long entry.

This was our second househunt but I won’t go into our first disastrous househunt. Suffice to say that this time around we were a bit more realistic about our income bracket and didn’t waste time lamenting the neighborhoods that we couldn’t afford. I knew that we needed to find a good mortgage person so I called a tacky little realtor who seemed to specialize in our price range and preferred locations and asked him for recommendations. He sent us to Val. I met with her and asked her for other realtor recommendations and she gave us two. I chose the one with email, natch. That led us to Jeff.

Jeff’s picture on his page doesn’t do him justice. In person he wears sheer polyester shirts, more than a couple of gold chains, and a great big, onyx pinkyring. He drives a maroon luxury car and his office has fake wood paneling. We liked all of this about him; he reminded us of John Candy who just happens to be one of Brett’s favorite actors.

In good (albeit heavily ringed) hands, we started looking.

We set our sights low. We’d drive through neighborhoods looking for appliances in the front lawn ‘cuz then we knew that the houses were probably in our price range. When we saw “For Sale” signs, we’d look for tell-tale indications of affordability: no garage, lack of basement, seedy surroundings. There were some things that were non-negotiable like being near a busline (we have one car and Brett works downtown) and a decent yard. For me, it was all about the yard. I wanted a nicely fenced-in affair with enough greenery to be interesting but I noticed that things like trees sometimes put the house out of our range. (Imagine my surprise to find out that things I preferred also seemed to be preferred by others so that the price would eke just beyond our reach.) We decided that tacky lawn ornaments were a good thing in a neighborhood (unmolested plastic flamingos and kissing garden gnomes meant no rowdy teenagers storming through people’s frontyards) and that manicured lawns guaranteed retirees home during the day keeping an eye on things.

We found three houses that we wanted but didn’t get. These are the three:

* A tiny white house without a basement but with a two car garage in a lousy neighborhood in a great suburb. The school district is excellent, the elementary school was just across the way. We figured we’d pack all of Noah’s giant toys (the train table, for example) into the attic garage and shove the washer/dryer into the kitchen. The yard was nice; big with one little tree and a privacy fence. We got outbid.

* A towering, hundred-year-old home on the edge of campus. (Clinton St. for those of you who know the area.) It was massive (by our standards) and haphazardly kept. It had the original clawfoot tub, a walk-up, finishable attic, and a strange small yard that came with one of those awful cement geese. We looked at the towering ceilings, the extensive woodwork (painted a horrible mauve and sickening skyblue) and wanted to put a bid in immediately. Wonderful Jeff expressed his concern. His exact words were: “If it was just the two of you I’d say go for it. When the boiler blows (and it’s gonna blow) you can just put on extra sweaters and get through December. But you’ve got a kid and no way to pay for the things that are going to break in a house this old. And there’s no way you’re going to get FHA approval.” Down went that house.

* A tiny goldenrod house without a basement or garage on a dingy street in a nice neighborhood. This house was so cheap that our house payment would be practically non-existent. We figured we could just buckle down and live in its tininess long enough to get ahead financially and the move the hell away from there. Then our miracle house saved us.

Our miracle house is three streets over from the goldenrod house on a not-dingy street in that nice neighborhood. We stopped there only because the paper said that Cheryl’s Cookies was sponsoring that realtor’s open houses. What the hell, we figured, let’s go ahead and get a cookie. (This was miracle #1 because normally a measly cookie would not be enough to make us stop at a house we couldn’t afford and would probably just depress us.)

We drove up and noticed that the house was very cute. It also had a basement. We started playing “guess the price” on our way in. It had a nice open family room (ugly carpet but neutral so we didn’t notice it then) and then we saw the kitchen. The kitchen is not exactly paneled but it has real wood on the walls. My fashionable friends assure me that it’s lovely. I thought it was but I have no taste so don’t always trust my own judgment. Anyway, the kitchen has french doors, too. Brett and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. We added a couple thousand dollars to our original estimate. I went down to the basement to find a beautifully finished room with a great big walk-in-type closet lined with shelves. Oh the playroom possibilities! I started yearning for this house that was rapidly going up in price in my own mind. Then I walked through the (clean! shelved!) basement to a secret finished back room just right for middle-of-the-night paper shredding. (I remember that Noah was very excited about this “secret room”). Then upstairs we saw the three bedrooms with beautiful wooden floors and a big bathroom with *two* sinks! (If you have only one bathroom, make it a big bathroom — that’s my motto!) Then we tripped out the french doors onto a deck (!) and out into the backyard shaded by two big trees. (Our cottonwood tree is 4 or 5 stories tall. The black ash in back is a nice manageable size.) There was a sturdy, pretty shed and three pine trees along the privacy fence in back. The chain link fence on the sides was nicely hidden by lots of foliage. The yard is interesting with slopes and things and I could just see a puppy romping with our boy.

We got our cookies and Brett gave the realtor a fake name but then panicked and gave her his parent’s phone number. (This is unlike him. He always gives a fake name but usually a fake number as well. I told you he was odd.) We stumbled out into our car and started sighing and talking about this wonderful house that we could never afford and about all the things we could do there and how fabulous and how lovely and on and on and on.

Here’s where the miracles started coming at us so fast that we started getting winded from catching ‘em all.

Now Brett’s mom had been saying that his grandmother Ellen (her mother) was guiding us on our househunt. She was sure of it. Ok, I said, great ‘cuz we need all the help we can get. I really clung to the idea that was going to help us find a house where we would be happy. Believing that it was all going to be fine is what kept me sane in the process. Meanwhile, we put a bid in on the goldenrod house with an eye to saving money. Then fate began to conspire (or Ellen, who knows) to get us the Cheryl’s Cookies house:

Miracle #2: One day, Brett’s dad called to say please don’t give our number out when you’re giving people your alias but a realtor just called and the price on that house just went down $5000. Suddenly the house was almost affordable.

Miracle #3: I lamented to my mother about it. She offered to co-sign. Now we’d looked at other barely affordable houses (the big monstrous one listed above, for example) and this was the first she’d mentioned co-signing. We started getting excited.

Miracle #4: The goldenrod house people wouldn’t get back to us about our offer and it expired. We were pre-approved so if they’d taken it, we would have been stuck with that house.

Miracle #5: Our mortgage person had originally said that there was this fabulous FHA grant that would get our interest rate down to 4.5% for the first year, 5.5% for the next year, and 6.5% for the rest of the loan. Unfortunately, the bond money went quick. Then the night before we put our bid in, someone else’s contract fell through and the exact amount of bond money we needed became available. With that, our house payment would be less than we were paying in rent!

The final Miracle: It looked like we’d be stuck paying rent on our apartment and the mortgage for the house for three months and even though it was something we could do, it would certainly screw things up. Then our friend, Ann, suddenly needed an apartment and offered to take over our lease.

Voila! The miracle house was ours! It *is* ours!

I feel lucky that all sorts of things conspired to keep us nearly away from this house. If we had been looking in this price range (nearly $15,000 more than we’d been approved for), this would have just been another boring starter home. Since we’d spent so much time looking at tinny, little houses without amenities, our modest home bowled us over. And it still does. I love it here. I feel so lucky to be here. All the buggy things that are in any house haven’t dulled the charm for me. Sometimes I have to stop and marvel at the things that make this home so sweet. It’s not just the incredible basement playroom (all my friends are jealous of that playroom), but it’s the way the tree in the front yard across the street fills the picture window in our family room; the way the kitchen fan stirs up a breeze when I’m wiping down the kitchen counters; and the marvel of an attic fan that can cool the house in seconds when the night gets chilly after a hot day.

My gosh I’m grateful!

My dear Brett is like the protagonist in an Anne Tyler novel. Every time I read one of her books, I’m reminded of this. He’s a little odd, vulnerable, and has a tremendously good heart.

Speaking of Anne Tyler, here’s a fine article about how she manages to be a mother and a writer both; something I cannot manage to do.

I’ve always had a shameful suspicion that if I should ever find myself locked in a cell in some foreign country — the kind frequently targeted by Amnesty International — with no one to talk to and nothing to write with, that I wouldn’t be one of those people who cut themselves so they can scrawl poetry across the walls in their own blood. No, I’m afraid that I would waste the ten or twenty years of my sentence daydreaming.

My therapist says that daydreaming counts but she’s not a writer so I don’t really take her word for it. Anyway, back to Anne Tyler, here’s a quote that echoes my own thoughts pretty well:

“I want to live other lives. I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.”

When I was a kid, I used to like to look into people’s lit windows as we went driving by at night. It pained me — a real, physical pain that hit me right in the center of my body — that I couldn’t somehow step into their lives. I also like to imagine living in someone else’s house (a specific someone, someone from my childhood). I try to remember every little thing I can about their home: the ceramic, hand-painted Christmas tree with tiny lights poking through the holes punched through each branch; the electric can opener painted goldenrod and mounted next to their sink; the way the light in their bathroom was tinted beige.

I have no discipline; that’s why I don’t write things down. I’m scattered, unfocused, and my attention span is awfully short. I’m clinging to the hope that when my child(ren) is/are bigger (in school maybe, this is just one reason that I don’t want to homeschool) that I’ll be able to sit down and write the way Anne Tyler manages to do it.

Hey, a girl can dream, right?

Happy 4th of July!

We just had the inlaws over for a pancake breakfast. I used to have some (ahem) issues with them that really had more to do with being an over-protective, new mother than with anything they were doing. I’m more than a little ashamed of it now. I think they’ve forgiven me.

I like them a lot and I’m pretty sure they like me but I think I overwhelm them. I tend to run my mouth non-stop and they’re a pretty quiet family. Of course almost every family is quieter than mine.

We haven’t told them that we’re seeing a fertility doctor but they know we’ve been trying for awhile. I also let it slip that I’m in therapy. That probably didn’t really surprise them; they’re probably relieved actually. They probably got in the car, turned to each other and said, “Well, at least she’s getting some help!”

I think a friendship that was important to me really suffered over the whole LLL fiasco and then I got my progesterone test back and the news wasn’t good (we’ll know more about what’s wrong when I get the results from another bunch of blood tests on Monday). I spent the week trying not to be depressed about these two things.

Happily, today finds me in a much better mood. I’ve made overtures toward the friend which is all I can do (and I’m not letting myself obsess about who said what and who meant what, etc.). And I’m still taking the whole fertility thing one step at a time. Right now I’m focusing on diagnosis and I’ll make decisions about treatment later. I know I have limits stating how far I’m willing to go but I’m not quite sure where those limits are.

I feel frustrated by the fact that I can’t afford adoption. I guess that doesn’t really matter since Brett isn’t as open to adoption as I am. Last night he told me that he really wants to have another child and it’s pretty darn important to him that said child be biological. I hope to adopt someday and I think that Brett will come around but probably not soon. I think our finances would need to be much tighter for him to feel good about adoption. Anyway, after this talk I realized that our limits may not be the same when it comes to fertility treatments. On the one hand, this makes me angry because it’s my body that will have to go through all sorts of ridiculous, humiliating, and/or difficult things but on the other hand, it he wants a biological child with me, there’s really no other choice.

I know it may seem early to be talking about specific treatment options but the next step after diagnosis is sitting down with the doc and discussion options and so it’s actually not too early at all. Just part of that whirlwind of reproductive medicine; a whirlwind that I’m not so sure I want to step into.

I may have mentioned here that my sister tried to have a baby for three or four years and went through a bunch of treatment to have my nephew, Frankie. Sometimes I feel rotten that I’m making such a big deal about babymaking when I’ve “only” been trying for 21 months.

Here’s the thing: I’m naturally more aggressive about getting stuff done than my sister usually is. Also, I’m feeling really driven by a gap between siblings that is already way too wide for my tastes. It absolutely slaughters me that Noah will not have a brother or sister before he’s five. It makes me want to scream and slam my fists against walls. Intellectually, I think it’ll all be fine and fabulous, but emotionally I worry that he will never enjoy his sibling, that that will never be close, that so much adult attention has ruined him forever. (This is not helped by my mother sometimes heaving a sad sigh and saying, “Noah *needs* another baby in the house.” It’s a dagger in my heart when she says stuff like that.) My desperation comes from the fear that I’m failing him; it’s not just the thought of holding a wee baby of my own in my arms again.