Knitters-Knitters

Before There Was Daisy

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

- Emily Dickinson

 

Daisy was conceived against medical advice. 

Approximately two weeks before her zygote-hood I was in exam room one, waiting for the gastroenterologist to confirm what I already knew but did not want to admit: my Crohn's had come back.  The eight short years of remission were over and I was, once again, a 92-pound bloated tick of an abdomen with matchsticks for arms and legs. This is what Crohn's does: at first, you don't realize you're losing weight because your belly is so distended.

I noticed there was a copy of Everybody Poops among the magazines. Why?  It felt like a cruel choice for reading material, even if the exam room was meant for pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease.  Yes, everybody poops -- but not everybody poops fourteen times a day. 

By the time the gastroenterologist came in, I was sobbing.  He sat down and said, "Well, the good news is Prednisone isn't the only option anymore.  There's a whole new class of drugs out there than the last time you were sick.  Sulfa is a thing of the past, and they've come up with more tolerable ways to get the 5-ASA where it needs to go."

I said, "Can you take it when you're pregnant?  Because I really, really want to have another baby." 

He put his hands to his temples and said, "No.  We are not having this conversation.  We're going to get you stable.  That is the only thing we are going to do now."

I do not remember the rest of the visit.  I imagine we talked about drug options, I had blood drawn and he sent me home with prescriptions for mesalamine and cholestyramine resin.  All I had heard was that I was not supposed to get pregnant, and as you know, I only had two modes when it came to maternity: nary a thought of children, or wanting to be pregnant yesterday. 

The thought of Sabina being more than two years older than her younger sibling felt intolerable.   At that time, I perceived every unhappy moment of my childhood as a direct result of my siblings being eight, eleven and fourteen years older than I was.  And that sibling who's eight years older than I?  We hadn't discovered each other yet.  I mean, I knew about Lo, but we had never been in the same phase of life at the same time, and I had no reason to believe we ever would.  Before she left for college, her interest in me was limited to my ability to assemble snacks.  "I'll time you," she'd say, as if that somehow made it fun. 

The day after that awful appointment, something unthinkable happened: the gastroenterologist called me on the telephone to apologize for the way he had spoken to me in his office.

I'll give you all a moment to regain consciousness.

Yes, a doctor called me to say he had been wrong.  "I was way too harsh," he said. "Would I want my daughter to conceive while on mesalamine?  No.  Would it be safe?  Probably.  But you're entitled to want a baby, just like any other woman.  And I had no right to dismiss you out of hand."

So there I was, on a drug that had not yet kicked in, living on Ensure and overcooked carrots.  (I don't care how many flavors Ensure adds to its repertoire.   They all taste the same: like the can they come in.)  I looked cadaverous, and yet, in two weeks I was pregnant. 

And I was terrified. 

I can honestly say I did not relax for one moment of that pregnancy, even though as sometimes happens with autoimmune disorders, I was back into remission by the end of the first trimester.  Daisy was born at thirty-six weeks and two days: long enough to weigh a respectable six pounds and five ounces and have a healthy amount of lung surfactant, but not one moment longer.  I truly believe she was trying to make things easier on me.

For the first four weeks on the outside, Daisy did nothing but eat and sleep, sleep and eat, and sleep some more.  Her eyes were almost always closed.

At some point during the fourth week, she opened her eyes and saw that it was Not Good.  Daisy was a much fussier baby than Sabina had been, but made up for it by having eyes like stars.

Daisy did not like her bassinet.  She did not like strangers.  She did not like her bouncy seat.  She did not like the car.  She did not like to be held in any position that was comfortable for the person doing the holding.  Oh, sure, I was a handy food source and LB was tolerable company.  But there was really only one person in her life who could do no wrong.

Guess who?

Happy 16th birthday, Daisy!  I'm so glad to be in your society.

 

Becoming Jen

There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

        - Steven Hawking

 

I was named after someone my sister had a girl-crush on.  Jennifer was not yet a popular name in August of 1965, but would become so shortly thereafter.  I know very few 46 year old Jennifers but hoards of 45 year olds on down.  It tapers off sharply, and I now know of no Jennifers between the ages of 15 and 30.  Anyways, I had a common name, even if I was released slightly ahead of its popularity: much like my brother David (that would be Hen) who was born before the Davey Crockett song came out.  Just ahead of the trend, our mom was.

I was Jenny for most of my childhood.  I never really liked Jenny: I didn't feel like a Jenny, and it reiterated my position as the youngest.  I was the only family member who was called by a diminutive, the only child whose name did not have a Spanish translation, and thus, the only child whose name my mother could never correctly pronounce. 

In fifth grade I switched schools and saw a golden opportunity to become Jennifer, and Jennifer I stayed for the next thirteen years.  I made it clear to all I met that I would not answer to Jenny, and it was very rare for someone to even try.  I was a small but formidable person and I think it felt natural to call me by a name that began and ended with a consonant.  During those thirteen years I remember only one person calling me Jenny: my thesis adviser in college. She called me Jenny even when in a classroom full of people who knew me as Jennifer (the creative writing majors were a small group, and by senior year we all knew each other and heard each other's voices in our heads, critiquing our stories as we wrote them).  

My thesis adviser's Jenny felt like the gesture of pointing towards one's eyes with index and middle finger.  I see you!  I see the Jenny within.  And because I admired her to the point of worship, I never corrected her.

I liked it.

On the first day of fiction workshop at Brown, our instructor (like my poetry teacher later at USC, she was a Female Face #4) took attendance.

"Jon?"

Long-haired guy raises his hand and says, "...but I go by my middle name, Dan."

Female Face #4 takes what feels like absolutely forever to make a notation in her attendance roster.  How long can it take to cross out Jon and write Dan?  This comes as no surprise.  Female Face #4, in all her incarnations in my life, has moved in a slow and deliberate manner with a distinct awareness of being watched.

"Josephine?"

Small Malaysian girl says, "I am Josie."   Again, our instructor makes her slow and painful corrections.

"Susan?"

Blonde athletic girl says, "I go by Sukie." 

Immediately, I know Susan/Sukie and I will be two ships passing in the night.  I cannot fathom why someone, when given the opportunity to stop being called Sukie, would let it pass by. 

More painful crossing out and rewriting.

"Robert?"

Flannel-shirted Sacramento boy to my immediate right whom I'd already learned had been graduated in 1988 says, "Present.  But I go by my middle name, Joseph."

It takes FF #4 even longer to write Joseph than it did to write Sukie.  Finally she looks up.

Sacramento boy then says, "... and most people call me Joe."

Asshole!  I think.  You did that just to be difficult.  I glance at him and see from his bemused profile that's it's true -- he's poking at the teacher! 

Later, I'd be surprised to learn that he really did go by Joe.  To me, he looked absolutely nothing like a Joe.  At that time the name "Joe" was irrevocably tied to Giuseppe from the empennage section.  This Robert/Joseph/Joe person was far too Norman Rockwell to have a name I associated with ethnicity.  He looked -- yes, here's when it first occurred to me -- like the boy who mowed my parents' front lawn when I was growing up.

"Is there anyone else who goes by a name other than what's written on this roster?  Because this is the only time I'm going to make changes."  Apparently, Female Face #4 herself was getting tired of this game.

Our instructor had started with me and worked clockwise around the room, ending with Lawn Boy.

"I go by Jen," I said. 

Why did I do that?  I had rarely, if ever, been called Jen.  It felt too personal, too casual, and it was as if I'd stood at the front of the room, lifted my sweater and showed everyone my very new, very angry-looking bowel resection scar.  I could feel Lawn Boy looking at me and I knew he could tell that Jen was something new.  He also knew that I had done this not just to bug the instructor, but because I wanted to become someone new.  And he sensed I regretted it. 

I ascribed a lot of thinking to this Lawn Boy person I'd just met, a lot of thinking about me.  And I wasn't wrong.  He was still looking at me now that roll call had finally finished and our instructor had begun the slow, laborious process of saying what we'd be doing in her class.   I stared straight ahead.  This odd discomfort was nothing new.  Whenever I've encountered destiny --  one of those characters who's going to be important later in the novel -- my first reaction is always to look away.

This is the Way We Talk on the Phone

Lo: Do you ever have nights when Ambien doesn't work?

Jen: Yeah, it happens.

Lo: What do you do? 

Jen: I've found it doesn't do any good to take more of it. 

Lo: So then what?

Jen:  Sometimes I give up and go downstairs and knit.  Or sometimes I just lie there and list poisons in alphabetical order. 

Lo: Ah.  "A is for Arsenic..."

Jen:  Arsenic is a round three poison.  I like to start with more obscure ones, like Acetic Acid.

Lo: "B is for Benzene..."

Jen:  Good one.  I usually go with Botulism.

Lo: And this works?  I would think it'd just make you more nervous.

Jen: No, it's oddly soothing.  I know I'm getting close to sleep when I start coming up with lazy poisons like, "T is for Tylenol taken to excess...."

Lo: ... Did I tell you about the special project I'm doing for my music history class?

Jen: No...

I have been brutally interrupted while on a tear -- so many clever poisons I was about to name!  But this is nothing new.  My sister has the attention span of a gnat.  Of a magpie.  Of a goldfish.  Look!  Shoe sale!  I don't take this personally, but I do remind myself I'm an inch and a quarter taller than she is.

Jen : So, what's the project?

Lo: I'm making a series of flashcards.  Each flash card will have a "fun fact" about Fanny Mendelssohn.

Pause. 

This is one of those seemingly innocuous conversations that stops time for a moment, maybe two, and makes it restart at zero.  Our sisterhood has been unwittingly encapsulated, defined by our choice in lists.  Lo and I have similar opinions about books, we look alike, and are similarly wicked in our quips.  But Lo takes after our dad's mom, the sanguine Annie H. Feitelberg, whereas I bear a hefty load of DNA from our mom's father: the melancholy Guillermo (or Wilhelm, or William -- he moved around a lot) Lowenthal.

Jen:  Now that is a lot like my poison list.  And when they write the book about us, they'll use this one example: poisons vs. fun facts about Fanny Mendelssohn -- to describe our similarities and differences.

Lo: Very true!  Hey, you should blog about this.

You May See a Stranger

When Sabina was just shy of two and Daisy was about six months old, LB and I took the little girls to a night-time carnival in Concord.  It had corn-dogs, a midway, rides--everything you could want in a small town carnival.  We were about to put the girls on a kiddie ride when a woman standing in line grabbed my arm.  She said, "You don't know me, but my name is Denise and I'm here to tell you everything is going to be okay.  I've gone one hand just like your little girl," she held up her short arm, which was indeed just like Sabina's. Then she pointed to the teenage girl at her side.  "This is my youngest daughter; I have two others who are grown."  The girl smiled sheepishly.  "I'm happily married and I have a job I love.  I just want you to know there are probably times you worry about the arm and her future, but it's all going to be fine.  No big deal at all." 

The moment was over as quickly as it started.  I barely had a chance to thank her before she and her daughter were on their way and it was time to strap our girls into the ride.

Readers, I am not making this up.  It really happened: this visitor seemingly sent from the future.  She spoke with the speed of Millie serving carrots and peas, which will only make sense to my fellow old-timers who watched The Dick Van Dyke Show.  If you're not familiar, watch the below clip starting at the 7:40 time mark:

This story from the carnival will be important later: I promise.

Yesterday, Beata came over at 8:30am and began cleaning the house. In addition to sitting for Olive, she has also replaced our housecleaning team at a much more reasonable price. When I came back from dropping off Olive at school, I saw Beata had laid a bunch of ingredients on the kitchen island: parsnips, carrots, celery, and a large array of spices in special jars:

Now I see why she rolled her eyes at me when I told her I did have a few spices of my own she could use.  Most of the ingredients were things she had told me to purchase, but apparently I misunderstood about the parsnips: she wanted the greenery at the top.  She asked me if I had capers and garlic, and when I hung my head no she said she'd be going shopping later.

While she cooked and cleaned, I went to a long meeting at Olive's school.  This was a meeting that takes place apparently once every three years (it feels like it happens more often), and involves sitting with a social worker and going through a long list of all the activities your child cannot do.  The social worker made it as painless as possible, and we realized that although Olive has made less than no progress on the speech front, she does use tools effectively.  The social worker was very impressed when I told her that if Olive encounters a locked door, she will find herself a wire coat hanger, unbend it, take the point of the wire and inserts it in the tiny hole in the door handle to release the lock.  This, apparently, puts her ahead of many of her autistic peers and skews her testing results considerably.  In most areas she tests at an 18-month old level, but not this one.

When I came home from the meeting, a large brisket was simmering in an enormous pot of water, Beata had already shopped and returned home with the capers, garlic and parsnip tops, and she was using her own cuisinart to chop the vegetables.   While the soup simmered, she continued her cleaning.  In the end, she finished both the basement and the second floor yesterday, and is working on the main floor today as I type.

Later I went back to Keshet to pick up Olive from school.  She'd had another good day.  Operation Hyperspace has been -- knock wood -- a success.  Olive's anxious behaviors and impulsive ones are way down, and she is happy now when dropped off at school.  I told her, "There's someone special waiting for you at home."  She did askancers-askancers and I let her mull over the question of who? during the drive.

When we got home the soup was finished and Beata had magically whipped up a large pot of Bechamel sauce in a separate pot.

Frequently Beata takes Olive to her own house when she's watching her, so Olive has seen Beata cook before and is familiar with her food smells.  Beata served Olive a large bowl of soup.  Olive ate all the meat and vegetable of the soup first, then tapped me very gently on the arm to indicate she wanted more soup guts.  After another hearty serving, she lifted the bowl and drank all the broth.

Then she stood up, patted her rather large stomach in satisfaction, and led Beata to the front door to indicate she was ready for an outing.

They went to Beata's house where Olive got to hold the Guinea Pig.  Here's a photo Beata emailed me:

LB actually came home before Beata and Olive, and we had the soup and pasta with the Bechamel sauce for dinner.  Olive ate two bowls of the pasta, and then a separate bowl containing just the sauce.

There's a day I think about from time to time, when Sabina was four, Daisy was around two and a half and Anatole was about eight months old.  I had the two girls in a double stroller and Anatole in a backpack, and we were going to see the pediatrician for the girls to get well child check-ups.  Anatole was just along for the ride.

As we were waiting in the exam room I overheard the doctor say to one of his nurses, "I really hope I don't have any more double appointments today."  Sorry, Pal.

Sabina was going through a brief yet annoying phase of shyness, and she actually screamed when the doctor entered the room.  Daisy, who looked at the world filtered through her sister, began to sob piteously.  Anatole woke up, and, not to be outdone, began crying, too.  Crying is not the right word.  Anatole never cried in the conventional sense.  He bellowed like a musk-ox, holding his face heavenward and taking deep breaths between yells.  Did I mention I was expecting Agatha at the time?

It was a difficult appointment, a difficult day, but I took comfort in thinking things would only get easier and I would look back at that day as being as hard as things ever got.  That's a lot like a woman in early labor thinking that the pain is strong but manageable, and that she's already been through the worst of it.

Many years later I was in another pediatrican's waiting room, this time with eight year old Agatha who had an ear infection.  LB and I had spent the morning touring Autism Academy.  We had fallen in love with it instantly as simply the ideal learning environment for Olive.  Then we were told the tuition, which had, at the time, made the entire possibility of Olive going to Autism Academy disappear in a puff of smoke.

An elderly man in the waiting room approached me and said, in an Italian accent so heavy it sounded put on, "Why you looka so sad?"  I said, "I'm just tired," and thought, Nope, that other pediatrician appointment was easier than this one.

Two years later I remembered that first visit again, this time when I was in the pediatric dermatologist's waiting room with Olive.  We had been waiting close to an hour when Olive, who was about eight years old, extremely mobile and completely incapable of reason, decided she had waited long enough.  She gently laid herself on the carpet, then commenced to kicking and screaming.  I had to carry her out of the office without her ever getting to be seen by the dermatologist.  By this time, that doctor visit with Sabina, Daisy, and Anatole seemed more like a romantic vacation in Jamaica, complete with partaking in the ... local agriculture. 

It would have been nice if a stranger from the future had visited me and said, as I bustled our of the office carrying a shrieking Olive, Don't worry!  In a few years an amazing Polish woman is going to come into your life and charm Olive like an autism-whisperer while simultaneously cleaning your house and cooking four nights worth of dinner for your family.

Maybe in this case no stranger appeared to reassure me because I would not have believed her.

Everything Yesterday

Once LB and I were engaged to be married, the fact that I was not yet expecting his child was a situation not to be tolerated.  It took some time for us to conceive, and by that I mean it did not occur exactly when I wanted it to: the day before I realized I wanted to be pregnant.  I felt like I was very old (27--that sounds young by today's standards).  Given my advanced age, I felt we should go straight to drastic measures.  By that I didn't mean a fertility clinic or finding a surrogacy lawyer: I meant involving a Higher Power.   I did not know who to pray to or really how to pray, and I rarely felt like I was "doing it right."  I was more superstitious than spiritual.

If you've ever tried to conceive and it's not happening as fast as you like and you're too young for a fertility doctor to see you, then you collect advice from other people.  And the one piece of advice everyone gives you -- whether you've asked for it or not -- is to relax.  If being told to relax feels like a kick in the jaw when you're a young person of probable fertility, I can only imagine how much it stings if you are a woman of a certain age who has been trying for a long time and is already using alternative methods.   Now, if you are a Perlman, then the advice to relax neither stings nor decimates: instead, it is as if someone has simply pat you on the shoulder gently and said, "You won't be having any children." 

By twenty-seven, I had an absurd level of confidence about things within my control.  I knew the importance of Showing Up.  I knew I excelled at any task involving speed. Give me a #2 pencil and a standardized test and I was sure I could set the world on fire.  I also knew my limitations. This business of relaxation: I didn't know how to relax, I could not identify relaxation when I saw it, and by this time I had convinced myself that the ability to relax was actually a flaw. If conceiving a child required my ability to do the R word, then it simply was not going to happen.

I approached one of my coworkers, Elisabeth, a woman with two children.  Seeing as how we both worked as administrative assistants to the two most difficult doctors in the radiology department, we had become fast friends.  The difference was my boss was demanding, but basically reasonable.  Elisabeth's boss, on the other hand, expected her to write letters of complaint to his home owner's association on her own time, and go to flower auctions during her lunch hour to bid on rare orchids for him.  Elisabeth bore the distinction of being the administrative assistant to that particular doctor for the longest amount of time in anyone's memory: she was on her fourth month when we became friends.

First, Elisabeth told me that I should relax.  She relayed a long, dull story about how long it took her to conceive her first child, and how it finally happened when she relaxed.  The fact that I don't remember this story is a good indicator in how much stock I took in it at the time, and Elisabeth was a perceptive woman. 

She said, "Or... there's something else you could try.  You could make a sacrifice to the goddess Yemaya."  At the risk of stereotyping I will say this: I had lived in California for about six years by this point, and her suggestion did not strike me as outlandish at all.

This was 1993, and the Internet was just a mewling infant at that time.  It was difficult for me to find much info on Yemaya, so Elisabeth and I made a date for the following Saturday to visit a Botanica.

I don't speak Spanish, but I understand quite a bit and have, I'm embarrassed to admit, pretended not to know a word of it when I want two people to speak freely in front of me.  Elisabeth and the owner of the botanica spoke for a long time about how I wanted a baby, and whether or not I qualified as a Hispanic.  The owner of the botanica looked dubious, but Elisabeth told her I was cubana.  This is partially true: my mother was born and raised in Cuba, emigrating to the US when she was thirteen.  However, her father was a Polish Jew and her mother was a Spaniard.  This makes me -- well, I'm never sure what this makes me but the owner of the botanica had a word for it and she used it with some contempt: europea. 

Elisabeth reiterated that I was buena gente and wanted a baby very much.  Then the owner said to me, in English, very slowly and loudly as if I were hard of hearing in addition to being hard of Spanish, "You should try to relax."

Ai!  Elisabeth said and made a series of universal gestures that meant, roughly, "If you had any idea what a piece of work you've got in front of you, then you'd have more sympathy to what I've been forced to endure as this woman goes through months of disappointment."  It's difficult to describe, but it involved rolling her eyes while slapping herself on the forehead repeatedly.

The owner of the botanica would not take any money from me.  She gave me a Yemaya saint candle to light at home.  She told me that Yemaya likes things in groups of seven, she appreciates things that smell and taste sweet, and that I should make my sacrifice at the ocean.

That afternoon, I gathered together presents for Yemaya.  I cut seven lengths of ribbon, and soaked each one in a different sweet scent.  Then I found seven sweet, edible things.  I only had six in the house, so for the seventh I had LB pick up a mango on the way home from work.  Now, this was June in San Francisco, so the mangoes available to us were hard, unripe, and not worth the money they cost.  I simply chose "mango" because when they are good there's nothing better, and as unfamilair with Yemaya as I was, I just knew she wasn't the type of goddess who likes persimmon.

You may wonder where LB was in all this: did he want to have a child?  Did he believe that making a sacrfice to a goddess he'd heard about for less than 24 hours would help us conceive?  Was he worried that it hadn't happened yet?

Yes, no and no. 

LB wanted to have children and he was ready for it to happen, since we had decided on having three and we agreed we wanted them all to be close in age.  But in his youth, LB was perhaps even more mellow than he is now.  I tease that he's my 160-pound Diazepam tablet, but at that time he was more like a Thorazine.  And if I'm currently his personal Starbucks Black Eye, I was, at that time, more like a tiny taser pointed at the back of his neck.  He was learning that living at a speed faster than he was used to might be a little scary, but it was never dull.  If I wanted to go to the shore of the Pacific and throw in a bunch of sweet smelling objects, than that, apparently, was what we were going to do.

LB helped me assemble the various gifts and we put everything in a flowered satchel I'd received free for ordering a Spiegel's catalogue.   We wore clothing we didn't mind getting wet.  He put on shorts, and I wore a very loose-fitting cotton dress given to me by my mother in law.  I wore no underwear of any kind, this being a fertility ritual and all.  We took the L-Taraval all the way to 46th street, then walked the rest of the way to the ocean.

Mark Twain wasn't kidding when he said the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, and that day was particularly cold and overcast.  I waded into the water until it was at LB's knees and my waist, then began dropping items one by one into the ocean.  Yemaya seemed to really like the ribbon soaked in Yve's St. Laurent's Paris, as well as the Prescriptives Calyx.   I remember she kept spitting out the mango -- who could blame her?  It was so green it looked more like an avocado, and it was rock-hard.  Finally LB threw it baseball style, and we waited a moment until we were sure it wasn't going to washed back on shore.

Sabina was conceived in November -- too late for us to say with any certainty that Yemaya had anything to do with it.  In fact, I didn't not think about the connection between that afternoon at the shore and the baby that was Sabina for many years.

What I remember most about that day was how very cold it was, and the man who was seated several rows ahead of us during the long ride back to Forest Hill station.  The train car was empty except for LB, me, and this tall, slim man with his daughters.

The man had what may have been as few as three little girls with him, or as many as six.  They appeared to be within the ages of two and seven.  They never stopped moving -- hoping from row to row, jostling over the seat on their father's lap, looking out the window -- or talking, so it was difficult to tell exactly how many of them there were.  Daddy, are we there yet?  Why are those people in back of us wet?  Were they swimming?  Can we stop for ice cream?  Can we stop to go to the bathroom?  What time is Mommy meeting us?  I don't want Thai food -- I only like pancakes.  I want hamburgers. What? I refuse to eat hamburgers!  I'm a vegetablearian.!"

I do remember teasing LB, "This may be you in a few years..."

Thank-You Notes

Yesterday afternoon when I was in the Schechter parking lot waiting for Olive, my window rolled down due to the unseasonably warm weather, a woman approached my car and introduced herself.  I'd seen her around but didn't know her name, and it turns out she is a special ed teacher who subs at Keshet.  Given that Spectaculans spread super-germs with a speed and effectiveness that rivals chemical warfare, I imagine she's at Keshet more days than not. 

She told me that she lives very close to me and that if I liked, she'd be happy to spend some time with Olive during the upcoming Spring Break.  She knows how long these breaks are for little Spectaculans (naturally, she didn't use the word Spectaculan) and their parents and she'd be happy to help out.

At one time my first instinct in such a situation would be to feebly protest, then she'd say it was no trouble, I'd say, "Oh, I couldn't impose," and we'd do a few rounds of that before I'd take down her contact information with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment.  Then I'd never call her.

Those days are gone, and that page of instructional behavior has been ripped from my personal copy of the social contract.  You'd thing that page would be a hard one to remove, being so woven into the fabric of what it means to be a well-mannered American mom, but when you have a special needs child you learn, sooner or later, that this page is perforated. I whipped out my appointment calender and took her phone number like it was a See's Candies Key Lime truffle, thanking her profusely. 

She said, Don't thank me. It would be for me -- I miss Olive over breaks!

Do I believe her?  Yes, because I want to.  Because there's absolutely no reason for her to have approached me and made such an offer.  Because working with Spectaculans does not pay enough to do it for reasons other than personal satisfaction.  Given the difficulty of the work, I'm not sure there's any amount of money that would make it appealing from a financial perspective.   And as we all know the pay scale for a special ed teacher makes no pretense of even trying to approach the level of fair, let alone, enticing.  Short of offering bone marrow and organs of which one has duplicates, there's no way to thank people who work in special education sufficiently.

Non-Californians may wonder about my See's candy reference.  See's candies are on my mind and in my mouth, because my dear friend and reader Dixie sent me a box of See's cream-centered chocolates, along with a smaller box of Easter themed, egg-shaped truffles.

The reason I'm only showing a picture of one of these truffles is because I had already eaten the other seven before I emerged from my white chocolate trance enough to realize that I had not yet taken a picture and if I didn't whip out the camera fast, all I'd have to show you would be a mountain of brown fluted paper cups.  Usually when I get a gift in the mail I take my time, photographing first the box, then the opening process, etc.  This time I took one look at the return address, tore the the box open with my nails and teeth, and scarfed down at least two truffles before ever leaving the front porch.

But here's some more pastel prettiness for you to admire. 

The blanket for the baby-on-the-way of one of the aides from Olive's former classroom is done, and is now safely in her hands.  The stockinette and garter stitch backing took a lot longer to knit than I had expected and made the project an unwieldy one, but I'm very pleased with the results.

The front side is a hodge-podge of intarsia and slip-stitch using boy-appropriate colors.  Personally I never had a problem putting my boys in pink and lavender, but one never knows another parents' comfort level when it comes to gender-influenced color choices.

This was my first time working with Swan Island merino.  I found it unforgiving and surprisingly prone to splitting, but the finished result feels so soft and smooth that it's hard to imagine even the world's most wool-allergic child being bothered by it.

As I've griped ad nauseum, the parking lot of Olive's school is small and difficult to navigate, and it seems all who enter are immediately reduced to their most Hobbesian selves.  Paradoxically, arriving very early makes the whole picking up process easier because I can find a space to wait that is legitimately mine, where no one is forced to work around the giant and unsightly obstacle that is my Wolski-mobile.  Thus, pick-up time is a great opportunity for focused and uninterrupted knitting.  Some people have a knitting project for their car that's mindless and easy to jump into, but in my situation, the parking lot is the place to work on things that involve charts, row counting and multiple yarn balls going at once.

I hope the mom-to-be likes the blanket as much as I liked Dixie's chocolates and recognizes it for what it is: a feeble thank-you for the sort of kindness that is, hopefully, self-rewarding.

More blankie photos and details here:

Hyperspace

I know I've told you that for a time, the Ex and I lived with a third party: a friend of his from work who had to suffer the horrible fate of living with two people who fought like rabid weasels.  We tried not to include him, but looking back, I can see our living arrangement took its toll on him.  He developed a habit of grinding his teeth at night.  He saw both a dentist and a psychiatrist, but the mouthguard was soon ground to shredded plastic and this being the era of Halcion instead of Ambien, there was no acceptable long-term sleep aid. 

In the end, he discovered that making himself an enormous strawberry daiquiri before bed did the trick.  Sure, it was harder to get up in the mornings and in those days an aerospace engineer was either unemployed or working 70 hour weeks, but it eased the grinding and the headaches.  He and the ex were always gone for work long before I woke in the morning (I had the schedule of a grad student and a waitress) and I would wash out his daiquiri glass and blender for him from the night before.  It was the least I could do, seeing as how it appeared we were slowly killing him.

We weren't the only difficult thing going on in his life: he had a boss who did not believe in him.  Our housemate's last name was Greek and uncommon -- uncommon but not difficult to pronounce -- and his boss never learned it.  He called him "Coronas," like the beer, which sounded nothing like his real last name at all, and no amount of correcting could ever convince him to even try to get it right.  This boss liked to go around the empennage section and say things to my future ex like, "You'll eventually go back and get your MBA and go on to better things."  Then he'd turn to our housemate.  "But you, Coronas," he'd say, slapping him in the back, "You're a lifer."

Aside from the nightly daiquiri, our housemate had one other stress reliever: a Defender machine.  Yes, I lived in an apartment where I could play Defender for free, as much as I wanted.  I was no good at it, and I much preferred to watch our housemate play.  He was stupendous and I never approached even one of his high scores.  And the thing that was the most amazing about ... Coronas is that when his last human would, as they always do in the end, die, he'd make a small, silent gesture of annoyance with his arms -- a sort of fluttering motion -- as opposed to letting fly a string of expletives, as my Ex would in the same situation.

You see this fellow standing next to the Defender machine?

That's not Coronas.  That's Giuseppe, yet another member of the empennage group.  There was a very strange time in my life when everyone was either an aerospace engineer or a creative writing grad student.  During the seven months of our marriage the Ex and I attempted to throw two parties, and trust me: these two groups of people don't mix well.

Giuseppe was, perhaps, even more miserable at work than Coronas.  He hated the sprawl that is the Southland.  He was from Staten Island, and went back at every opportunity.  It didn't matter if the child having her first communion was the step-daughter of his third cousin twice removed: Giuseppe would be on a plane back to New York. 

I maintain his troubles began on his first day of work, when he told the lady who typed up the security clearance badges that his name was Giuseppe V********, "That's G-I-U-S-E.."  She cut him off immediately and said, "From now on, your name is Joe."

Here we are together, on his couch, about to watch the VHS tape of the David Letterman show he saw live.  There was a brief pan of the audience where you could see a glimpse of him in a red tee shirt -- not clearly enough to know it was him if you hadn't ben told -- and we watched it many, many times. 

There really isn't much I can say about my hair in that photo except the fall-back defense I give when my daughters gasp in horrror at old pictures of me, It was the Eighties.

I feel bad when I think about Giuseppe and "Coronas," two very nice guys who no doubt think ill of me now, so I try not to.  But on Monday, that damned Defender machine dreamed me up again.

LB and I were at a meeting at Keshet to discuss Olive's increasing anxiety in school, which has escalated from the diarrhea and impulsive behaviors to relentless scab picking and occasional vomiting.  We went over the long list of schedule and activity changes made by the staff designed to help Olive transition more easily and someone very insightful took one look at my weary, shoulder-slump of a response and said, "How about this: we move Olive to the other classroom." 

It isn't that there's anything wrong with her current classroom: this was understood.  Both her teacher and aides have worked so very hard to make things less stressful for Olive, but now, she's had so many fits -- or as Olive seems to see them, failures -- that everything and everyone in that room has become a trigger for her.

Suddenly, it was 1989 in Huntington Beach and I was playing Defender.  My little spaceship was surrounded by dive-bombing mutants and exploding dots (bullets?) and I saw that beacon of hope: the hyperspace button.  Hitting hyperspace means your spaceship travels at warp speed out of its present danger, but there's always the risk that the new location will be even worse.  In fact, your spaceship could materialize on top of a projectile or a mutant and explode upon landing.  A good Defender player avoids using the hyperspace button but eventually, there comes a time when it's the best possible option.  Yes, it was time for us to hit that hyperspace button for Olive.

Today Olive had her first day in the other classroom.  There were a few tears, a small blort of vomit and more trips to the toilet than usual, but it was better.  I could see it in her face when she skipped to the car, smiling the tricky Olive smile that these days we only see when she comes home from outings with Beata.

It bears mentioning that I didn't lose all my male friends in the divorce.

Here we have a commemoration of the first time LB met Reader Tom, in my tiny apartment in the Tenderloin.  We went out for Thai food, and then we stopped by LB's apartment so that Tom could see LB's impressive collection of classical CD's.  Tom had gotten along well with the Ex, and gets along well with LB. 

You might say he transitions easily.

The Last Birthday Sleep-over

When Agatha turned thirteen a few weeks ago, she had a sleep-over birthday party.  It was an understated affair, as they usually are by that age, with just two other girls: a private and elegant candle-lit dinner in the dining room while the seven other members of our family cowered and ate quietly in the kitchen.  I was allowed to take one photograph, discretely, and lead the girls in song while bringing out the cake. 

After cheesecake and chocolate sauce and ice cream and cherry sauce and presents, they fled cackling to Agatha's bedroom, emerging every few hours to gather snacks.  It was understood that during these kitchen forays the rest of us were to be elsewhere, anywhere.  Other than the incessant giggles and the occasional sounds of stomping, (dancing?) and moving around of furniture, they didn't make much noise and we were, as sleepover hosts, resigned to letting the noise be what it would be.  I think the girls had a good time, and we seven leftover Sullivans did our job handily: the job of being inconspicuous.

It just so happens that the last birthday party sleep-over I remember attending was also a thirteenth birthday.  The birthday girl was someone fairly new to our school -- so new that the invitees, I'm embarrassed to say, all convened privately in small groups to discuss whether or not we'd be attending.  My school had a caste system that rivaled that of India's during the British occupation, and being new and having not yet gotten the lay of the land, Katy Cooper had invited across caste lines.  In fact, her own caste was yet to be determined.  (It was known that she had money, but it was rumored to be new money.) 

I was a shy child which automatically placed me slightly below whatever my caste might be financially, but I was also one of the small group of children who lived within the city limits, in the lower East Side near UW--Milwaukee. I was a PK, a Professor's Kid, and for some reason the children of professors were allowed some latitude even if their parents didn't own real estate on Sanibel Island.

We all decided to go. 

There were at least twelve of us invited, and we arrived in carpools.  Since this was a private school, we didn't all live in the same district or even the same county. 

The first thing we noticed is that Katy's house was new -- new and huge, even though she was an only child.  So new, in fact, that the sod lay in rolls next to the house, all over the expansive property, yet to be unfurled.  "You'll all have to come back for a sod-rolling party," Katy's mother joked as she greeted us.  Her presence at the door was our first clue that this was to be a children's sort of party. 

The dining room was decorated with streamers and noisemakers and there were party hats and little crepe-paper cups filled with candy.  We stood silently in the entryway: in my imagination I see us in two straight lines, like the girls in Madeline, except in this case the smallest one was Jen.  For the most part we were all wispy and small, except for Lorna.  Lorna (old money; highest caste) was what they used to call back then an "early bloomer."  She was thirteen, but looked more like seventeen: tall, blonde and developed. 

Lorna led the way and took a seat at the table, and it was our cue that we were all going to pretend this was normal: a child's party for a group of children who did not consider themselves children anymore.  And since we were playing make-believe, we left the caste system outside by the rolls of sod and simply sat wherever we found an empty chair, with no thought to who belonged next to whom in the grand hierarchy.

It was a pizza party, and I remember Katy's dad carrying in the pizzas.  As you know I've always had an old dad, but Katy's dad was young even compared to those of the rest of my classmates.  He was young enough that we could see he was attractive as opposed to being just old, yuck!  Someone's dad!  Mr. Cooper was cheerful, even sanguine, able to joke around with us a bit without making his daughter die of embarrassment.

Since we'd made the unspoken agreement to be children at this party, we behaved like children.  We got loud.  There wasn't exactly a food fight, but at some point Karen Baumgarten reached into her crepe paper cup, pulled out a jelly bean and threw it at another girl.  Pretty soon jelly beans were flying everywhere.  Karen took a streamer from the chandelier and began prancing around the table, waving the streamer like a rhythmic gymnast.

Suddenly the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room opened and out came Mr. Cooper, looking like an entirely different person than the man who'd brought in the pizzas not a half hour earlier.  His face was red, his plaid shirt untucked, and he yelled, "Just what in the Hell do you little bitches think you're doing?" 

He yelled for what felt like a very long time, the gist of his argument being that fancy-pants girls like us that went to such a ritzy school should have better manners -- or maybe, he spat, maybe we did behave that way at home and just had a full staff of servants (ayas?) who picked up after us. 

We were dead quiet.  I looked at Katy and her eyes were squeezed shut, her face red, her hands clasped firmly on the table in front of her.  Most of us had never seen a person leave the room with one personality and then re-emerge with another, but it was clear from Katy's face that this was something she had experienced before.  Perhaps it had even been something she'd worried about in advance.  Please don't let Dad do that thing that he does.

Lorna was the first to speak.  "We all apologize, Mr. Cooper.  We were having such a good time that things got out of hand and we forgot ourselves."  We forgot ourselves?  I remember thinking.  Who says things like that?

Lorna said things like that.  I remembered an incident that had happened a year earlier, in our Ancient Civilizations class.  Mrs. P. had called on Lorna, who had been clearly staring into space.  Lorna paused, then said, "I'm very sorry, Mrs. P., but I wasn't paying attention.  Could you please repeat the question?"  I think everyone in the room gasped.  None of us had ever tried this gambit -- honesty -- and Mrs. P. was very impressed.  She made a shining example of Lorna, praising her for being frank and mature. 

Mr. Cooper was immediately disarmed.  His face returned to its normal color and he was once again the man who brought in the pizzas.  We all sighed and mumbled sorry.  Mr. Cooper looked at Lorna for one, two, three...eleven seconds, during which she calmly picked up a slice of her pizza and resumed eating, all the while her gaze meeting his.  Then she slowly lowered her focus to the slice of pizza in her hand, and Mr. Cooper left the room. 

Katy was trembling and continued to do so long after the cake was cut, but somehow, we all rallied. I don't remember who broke the ice and got the conversation going again.  Odds are it was Lorna.

After cake and presents, we all went into the emptied living room with our sleeping bags.  We played Ha Ha, tentatively at first but then with abandon because Mrs. Cooper came in and told us, conspiratorially, that Mr. Cooper had retired for the night and could not hear us from their bedroom.  We told ghost stories.  We had chicken fights.  We played "Light as a feather and stiff as a board."  At some point in the evening, Karen Baumgarten reached menarche.  Katy summoned Mrs. Cooper who handled the matter so smoothly that Karen opted not to call her own mother and tell her.  It was a big night.

As often happens at sleep-over parties, the Early Bloomer was the first to fall asleep.  We lost Lorna somewhere between the chicken fights (I know she was awake then, because I was the one on her shoulders) and "Light as a Feather."  There was a great deal of discussion on what should be done to poor, unconscious Lorna, since it went without saying that taking advantage of the first to fall asleep was a cultural imperative.  No one had thought in advance to bring shaving cream and drawing a moustache on her with an El Marko seemed cruelly permanent, so we got straws from the kitchen and pelted her with spitballs.  After about thirty seconds she sat upright in her sleeping bag and said, eyes still closed, "That hurts my feelings very much!"  We left her alone after that.  Even in sleep, Lorna had the ability to humble us with her poise.

The next morning, Mr. Cooper was to drive us all home.  Thankfully he was the Mr. Cooper with the pizzas, and not the one we'd seen briefly during the jelly bean fight.  As we all piled into the Town and Country station wagon, Mrs. Cooper said her good-byes and then made a very odd demand:  "Now girls, make sure each of you gives Mr. Cooper a kiss when he drops you off." 

I didn't understand why she wanted us to do this.  Was it so we'd forget he yelled at us and remember him instead as...friendly?  I was only twelve, but I was old enough to understand that this was not the normal price of a ride home.

I remember climbing into the way, way back seat -- as far from Mr. Cooper as possible.  Like I said he was being nice, but I wasn't about to take any chances. 

Mr. Cooper asked Lorna, "You live the closest.  Would you like to be dropped off first or last?"  First, I thought, trying to communicate with her telepathically, but she said, looking right at him, "Last."

"Then you may as well sit in the front seat next to me," he said, relegating his own daughter to the second row.

Why would she choose last?  These were in the years before children were empowered and knew terms like "just say no."  It did not occur to me -- as I'm sure it didn't to any of the other girls -- that I had the right to decline the kiss.  But Lorna had been given a choice, and in that situation it would have been fully permissable for her to say first.  I did not understand it.  It did not make sense.  And like most things that did not make sense to me as a child, I put it out of my head.  I did not think about it until I had thirteen-year-old daughters of my own.  A girl -- a child --could get turned around by her own power.  And then, in exercising that power, surrender it entirely.

The only mercy I saw in this car ride was that living as far south as I did, I was the third girl dropped off and the station wagon was still full of witnesses.  The kiss was on the cheek was perfunctory.  I had to stand on tip-toe and Mr. Cooper had to bend way over.  It was clear mine was not the kiss he was looking forward to, but that was fine with me.  I had a brother not much younger than Mr. Cooper, and I just pretended it was him.

I remember ringing the doorbell when I got home.  Though both my parents worked, there was always someone home to let me in.  We lived in the city, which meant it wasn't wise to leave the door unlocked.  And yet somehow, I never had my own key as a child.  It was a point of honor for my parents: no matter how much schedule juggling took place, I never came home to an empty house.  It had never come to that.

My mom asked me how the party went, and I said, "Karen Baumgarten got her period."  I don't remember what Mom replied.

I remember going into the sun parlor and throwing myself on the old red couch to do the one thing I hadn't done at the party: sleep.  I felt glad I lived on the East Side, on a city block with all the houses right next to each other and sidewalks and straight driveways and a lawn small enough that the sod could all be rolled out by one person, as it almost certainly had been, close to a hundred years ago when our house was built.

I remember I felt glad to be twelve.

The Kate Bush Rule

Sabina and I have what we refer to as the "No Kate Bush" rule.  Namely, when I take the kids to Milwaukee to visit my parents, we are not to listen to Kate Bush in the car.  This is because on one occasion, Kate Bush reduced me to such a state of tears that I had to exit in Racine and pull into an A&W parking lot while Sabina called LB to talk me through the rest of the drive.  She's wary of me listening to anything that came out before 1990, and we usually settle on Chaiyya Chaiyya, Jai Ho or other Bollywood.

What is it about Kate Bush?  The nostalgia factor?  The timbre of her voice (somewhere between Soprano and Spaniel Abuse)?  I suspect one could find a connection between my reaction to Kate Bush and my feelings about the sound of the violin. 

At any rate, as I type this, I'm listening to Fergie.  T-Pain.  The Black Eyed Peas.  There's a reason Ellen never plays Bryan Ferry's Slave to Love when she does her opening dance with the audience.  It's all about  Boom Boom Boom and getting that party started and songs with references to that elusive, undefinable Shawty.

From my last several entries you may have developed the impression that in real life, where you don't have the option of fleeing to a blog featuring Araucana chickens, I'm actually quite taxing.  I will neither confirm nor deny, but I'll admit there are some adjectives that have never been applied to me: mellow.  Easy going.  Unfettered.  Feathered.

But I'm not usually this bad.  That I can say with a clear conscience.  If I were you, I wouldn't take my calls right now.  In fact, if I could split myself in two and one half of me were to telephone the other half, Half the Second would refuse to pick up.

Okay, you caught me.  I left off  Ramalama Bang Bang and am now listening to Joni Mitchell's Down to You. 

But you didn't think I'd leave you on a downbeat, did you?

 

Cremains of the Day

I fall in love very easily.  I have, at various points, wanted to adopt Aliza, Teacher Emily, Sally the aide, Stalwart Cate, and Magical Realism Maria.  In fact, the only person I knew who fell in love more easily was my brother Abel.  In his case, it was Eros love.  Every woman he saw was, "Drop dread gauugeous."  He fell in love like other people fall down flights of stairs, and with similar results.

This time, though, I know it's real.  Beata's the real deal.  That fleeting romance with the girl we found at Starbucks who decided that maybe Romania wasn't such a bad place to live after all, despite having waited eight years for her green card -- that was a flash in the pan.  Pure folly on my part.

I can say -- or I'd like to say -- that this has been the worst week of my life.  It was worse than the week Abel died, because at least then I felt no sense of personal failure: just grief.  The same goes for when I found out my friend Rich had died. 

Come to think of it, this week was when I found out how exactly Rich died, and it didn't help my current mood. (A Google search revealed his cremains are buried in a  Jewish cemetery, in a separate section.  'Nuff said).  It should have come as no surprise, but I had thoroughly convinced myself he died as a result of a complication from a prior suicide attempt, like perhaps a stroke from the original head injury.  You know, the result of something that happened before.

The reason I can't say it's been the worst week is because, as we all well know, things can always get worse.  There could be rain, snow, or killer bees. It is, however, the first week when Olive was sent home from school for behavioral reasons alone.  No diarrhea, no wheezing: just an inconsolable, uncontainable fit.

Today LB took Olive to PUNS to get her registered for special services, like respite care.  Or better yet, for the state of Illinois to pay Beata.  If you've been through this process then you know it's a long, long wait before you get anything at all in the way of services, but it turned out Olive did all her tricks: tearing at her arms, crying, trying to flee the room, etc., and the PUNS lady told LB she'd put us on an expedited list.

I feel a song coming on: