Mendolonium

The semester is over.  Last week I earned an “A” in microbiology.  Just today I completed my coursework (it still has to be graded) to become a certified Lactation Educator Counselor.  Now I’ve got four days of respite before the summer session of school begins.

School was, without a doubt, pretty damned challenging.  It wasn’t the course work per se, but the balancing act of school/work/kids/rheumatoid arthritis/house/making jam/sleep/The Unpleasantness.  You’ve probably seen one of those acts where a person spins a bunch of plates set on sticks – sometimes even stacking the plates and sticks precariously on top of one another.  That has been my life for the past few months.  This last month has been downright awful and I could barely sleep with all the work I had to do to keep the plates spinning and all the anxiety I had that they might fall down.

I am not quite ready to write about everything that has happened, but if my life were a movie you’d be hearing the music start to change tempo about right now.  Everything is coming to a head.  I know we are in for some big changes but I can’t yet see what the end result is going to be.  I do miss writing.  I keep going to bed at night feeling as if I have missed an undefinable something.  So tonight I shall start to write again.

I had two New Years Resolutions this year; neither of which I, quite purposefully, wrote about.  The first relates to The Unpleasantness.  Enough said for now.  The second, resolution was much less grand; quite simple really and yet it sometimes it seems laughably ambitious given the constant state of motion that my life is in.  It was quite simply that

I shall not purchase any bread in 2013

I didn’t write about it because I wasn’t sure it was possible.  But I baked my way through January and February.  Then in March all five of us succumbed to a bout of the flu (yes, despite all dutifully getting our flu shots this past fall).  I thought the virus might be the end of my resolution, but, in a fit of baking I had filled the freezer with loaves of rich, buttery white bread and earthy, comforting wheat bread.  We went though seven loaves of bread over the week of sickness.  It seemed that all anyone could stand to eat was toast.  But as I pulled the last loaf out of the freezer, I felt well enough to start another batch of dough and we made it through.  I have found the key to keeping us in bread to be baking in large batches of four to eight loaves at a time and then freezing all but one loaf.  If you’ve never tried it, well wrapped bread freezes beautifully.  Nothing beats bread still warm from the oven but my frozen bread certainly beats any store bought bread into crumbs.  Now, four months and change into the year, I have still somehow managed not to buy any bread.

I realize that it is just bread.  Lots of people aroud the world never buy any bread.  I doubt Ma Ingalls ever bought any either.  I know it probably won’t say on my tombstone:  “Here lies Gina.  She baked all her own bread”.  But I am, my friends, a control freak.  And right now my world is very out of control.  So I’ve taken a bread knife and carved out one tiny, flour dusted, corner of my universe and made it something I can control.  And it feels damned good.  Let’s see if I can make it all the way to 2014.

Way back in January 2011 when I only had two children and still worked in Pasadena (and thus had a minimal commute) I resolved to take a college class that year.  Over the past two years I’ve tried to register for a class at our local community college nearly every semester.  Due to budget cuts, demand for classes far exceeds supply.  As a prospective student enrolling at the school for the first time I am the lowest on the totem pole of registration times.  Every semester, by the time my registration appointment came, every remotely desirable class was full.  I expect much the same to happen this spring semester but when I looked a week before my allotted time to register there were, finally, open seats available in a class that I wanted.  At exactly the appointed hour I nervously went online and registered for the class and got in!  I was, perhaps excessive, excited.  One week from today I start a lecture/lab class in microbiology.

I’ll be going to class two nights a week; unfortunately on the same days that I work which will mean that I will have very little time with my kids on those days.  It’s going to be hard on all of us but there isn’t any way for me to go back to school, work, and be a parent and expect things to stay the same.  Last night Jeff and I stayed up late and hammered out a convoluted schedule involving multiple school drop-0ffs and picks, carpools, early wake-ups, and late nights that results in us at least getting to all eat dinner together as a family every night of the week.  I somehow feel that as long as we can all gather together every day over food we’ll be alright.  I don’t promise that the food will be my most creative offerings; I think I might stretch the limits of how often grilled cheese should be fed to a child.  I did spend nearly every day of my vacation the past week filling our freezer with soups, pastas, breads, and muffins in preparation for the coming time crunch.  Our freezer hasn’t been this full since the week before Annie was born.

In truth, I feel more nervous about going to back to school than I did having a third child.  It’s been eight and a half years since I’ve been in school.  Looking back at college, difficult as it was, it now seems that without a job or three children and a house to take care of I must have had incredible freedom to manage my time.  I wonder how I am going to find the time to study and do homework?  I don’t want to be cocky, I expect this class to be a challenge.  I’m excited though; this could be the start of something great.  At the very least, I’ll know some microbiology.

If this blog remains silent from January 8 though May 5 you’ll know why.

I didn’t think I would enjoy motherhood as much as I have.  I had no idea how much I would love it.

When I was pregnant for the first time I read voraciously about motherhood.  I am nothing if not prepared.  According to nearly everyone I talked to or everything I read motherhood would “change me forever”, “shake me to my core”, “be the hardest and the best thing I have ever done.”  I didn’t expect motherhood to be easy.  I steeled myself for breastfeeding battles, years of shitty sleep, and toddler tantrums.

I was so prepared for the worst that it took me months to finally realize that despite Thomas having colic, food allergies, and being the worst sleeper I had ever heard of that this motherhood gig was actually pretty fantastic.  It was, in fact, not the hardest thing I had ever done (those honors go to Physics 106 at Caltech and no I am not joking – that class almost broke me and surviving post-postpartum depression after Theodore’s birth).  I loved maternity leave and found myself perfectly content taking long walks with the baby, cooking phenomenal dinners, and hanging out at home.   Working part-time I have loved most my days that I spend at home with the children.  Overall, I have felt quite happy and confident in my role as a mother.

But over the past year something has been increasingly nagging at me; a feeling that I am no longer enjoying or doing a good job at part of motherhood.  Last night I finally admitted out loud that I feel like I am floundering at being the mother of a school-aged child.   I sat down to talk it out with Jeff to try to understand why after six years of feeling competent and content as a mother I felt so lost now.  There is the obvious; I spend far less time with Thomas now than I ever have.  Thomas is clearly happy and thriving in school and although I know I could do a good job at it I don’t have any desire to home school him.  Yet, most of his waking hours, nearly 40 hours a week, are spent at school – a wonderful school to be sure – but a place that feels quite far removed from home.

Then there are the more subtle things.  One in particular which escaped me until just now.  I absolutely despise, being forced to be on someone else’s schedule.  I am not in a mood to rehash my own childhood, but suffice it to say I grew up without much stability in terms of home and school.  One of my coping methods (I now realize it was a coping method at the time I just thought of it as ambition) was to throw myself into a constant schedule of activities.  I did not allow myself time to think.  In high school I was rarely home; there was the science fair, speech team, mock trial, ballet lessons, theater, singing, flying lessons (fun Gina fact:  I learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car), and I took college classes in addition to my high school ones.  I then went to Caltech which was beyond challenging and basically had no life outside of school and Jeff for four years straight.  I worked for two years and then went back to grad school for a masters degree in engineering while continuing to work full-time, with a demanding travel schedule to boot.

And then a couple of years later I had a baby and much to my surprise, despite popular wisdom that having a baby “ties you down”, I finally felt free.  While on maternity leave, for the first time in my life, I had nothing really to do.  Nurse and play with the baby, yes.   Change diapers, certainly.  I absolutely relished the freedom of being on no-one’s schedule but mine and my little baby.  I had never had such a lack of structure and it was shockingly glorious.  While other moms were signing up for weekly music classes and organizing regular playgroups I refrained from committing to anything on a regular basis.  Now, six years later, with the addition of two more children my life is certainly more constrained but also remarkably (to me) free.  On the days I am home with the children we sometimes stay in our jammies all day, we sometimes head out to a museum.  We eat breakfast for dinner and pizza for breakfast if we feel like it.  On the rare occasions that both of the little ones nap at the same time I sometimes sneak in a blissful nap too.  Even though a significant part of the world takes a siesta every day and naps have been shown to have great health benefits, sleeping in the middle of the day still feels delightfully sinful to me.

Now with Thomas in kindergarten he, of course, has to be to school at 8:25 sharp every day.  He has to be picked up at 3:15.  I am very much a minimalist when it comes to scheduling young children and limit our kids to one activity at a time but there are now weekly piano lessons for Thomas and weekly ballet lessons for Theo.  And the boys are asking for more; gymnastics and T-ball.  So far I am holding out because those are simply too expensive for us, but if we had the means I would probably say yes.  It seems that unless I want to home school so much of parenting school age children in our society involves shuttling children from one place to another.  And I just hate it.  I hate driving.  I hate having to wake up two sleepy cranky children to pile them in the car to go pick up their brother.  We have been fortunate in that Thomas’ school follows a very traditional approach to kindergarten and that there is almost no homework for him but good lord I am not going to like fitting homework into our day as the years progress.  And how does one actually fit that in after work or with younger children around?   It seems impossible with my current job, I don’t usually get home until 7:00 pm on the nights that I work and having Jeff supervise three kids, one of them doing homework (knowing Thomas’ personality probably resisting homework), while he tries to make dinner seems like a bit much.

One of the oft proposed solutions to parenting school age children seems to be to “get involved” at your child’s school.  Quite frankly I am as involved as I want to be.  I am happy to talk with Thomas’ teacher regularly, bake cookies for parties (we bake cookies a couple of times a week at our house anyway and this way I get to control the ingredients and the amount of sugar), and do very occasional volunteering such as the talk I recently gave to Thomas class on the solar system (that was fun).  But I don’t have a particular passion for education – I respect teachers greatly but it is not a job I would want.  I am never going to volunteer to be room mother or on the fundraising committee.  I don’t particularly enjoy attending holiday concerts, etc.  I would rather go to the dentist than a PTA meeting.

I think that what scares me most is the day when all of my children are in school.  I don’t feel like I am doing a great job being a parent of a school-aged child right now and I am not sure how I am going to feel about parenting when my little ones have all gone off to school.  How will I spend enough meaningful time with them?  How will we stay connected?  What is mothering a school age child beyond chauffeuring them around, attending to the tasks of daily life (cooking meals, packing lunches, doing laundry), and being “involved” at their school?  How is there time left for anything else and what else is there when they are too old to want to go to the park or sing songs together or sit on my lap and read a story?

I fear that I sound like an ungrateful whiner.  I know that this is a very first world problem.  I am just really struggling with how to be parent of an older child.  This floundering must be how many new parents feel – completely out of their element.  Apparently I am a bit of an oddball in that it took me six years to get to feeling.

I am hoping to reconnect with Thomas over the winter break.  But I need to find my footing as the mother of a school aged child – I am going to have kids in school for the next eighteen years of my life!

I find myself neither joyful nor melancholy today.  I am surprisingly content.

For the first time in a long time I did not engage in much political activism this election cycle.  I am, at the moment, so focused on the day-to-day joys and challenges of life that I simply did not have it in me to get particularly riled.  I don’t expect a great deal from the federal government. I think any bureaucracy with 300 million constituents is bound to be unwieldy and full of compromises that please no one; regardless of who is in charge.  As we filled out our ballots, Jeff and I mused as to how much the result of the presidential election would matter.  While we both firmly supported Obama over Romney we vacillated between the opinion that regardless of who was elected it would be business as usual or that the differences between the candidates, particularly in the areas of civil rights and women’s issues, would greatly influence the progress of the country.  As the election returns came in last night I found myself nervous; hoping for an Obama victory more than I had realized.  The networks started to call the election for Obama and I found my nervousness growing; not wanting a repeat of the 2000 debacle and also hoping that Obama would win the popular as well as the electoral vote; I don’t think a split is good for the country.  We stayed up late and finally relaxed as it was clear that Obama would remain President.  I am glad that we will stop hearing the vicious political rhetoric.  I am thrilled that it will be a while before we have to hear the phrase “the lesser of two evils”.  Evil is a strong word.  As much as I dislike Mitt Romeny I don’t think he is evil.  And as much as I have disagreed with some of Obama’s decisions he is by no means evil.  Both men are products of an imperfect system.  I don’t expect Obama to be a hero; but I am still idealistic enough to hope that he will move our country towards greater equality for all people, a force for peace in the world, and fiscally responsible.

Today I am more content than I thought I would be.  Although Proposition 37 to label genetically modified foods failed I am looking at its existence on the ballot as a huge step forward in advancing the conversation about what we eat.  Proposition 30, sustaining education funding, passed.  Washington, Maine, Maryland legalized gay marriage and Minnesota voted against bigotry.  Elizabeth Warren was elected Senator in Massachusetts.  I read Elizabeth Warren’s “The Two Income Trap” years ago and was immediately taken with her logic.  I would love to see her on the 2016 presidential ticket.

In 2004 and 2008 I volunteered dozens of hours for the Democratic Party and for our local Congressman’s reelection campaign, respectively.  I’ve also spent time advocating at a local and state level on various issues.  Those experiences have all shaped my impressions of government.  I’ve often thought that I might get into politics at some point.  I used to think ambitiously of running for Congress.  After the experiences I have had it is clear to me that my real passion is for the local.  I don’t think we can expect our president or Congress to save us all.  I think that we have to work on smaller scale for change.  Perhaps I will be asking you to vote Gina for city council or school board in 2016.