Mendolonium

I went back to work last week.

I didn’t want to go.  I tried not to go.  I asked for a one year leave of absence from work and it was denied. I had a decision to make:  negotiate as long a leave as possible or quit and say goodbye to financial security and eleven years of building a career.  In the end it was a series of small things that made choose to go back to work.  I did some volunteer work and noticed how refreshed I felt after a few hours away from the kids.  I honestly think that I was able to be a better mother to them having had a break from them.  A smell began to emanate from our washing machine – not unlike a combination of burning tires and skunk.  A few days later smoke wafted out of our clothes dryer. The house needs new gutters. A friend’s family received a scary medical diagnosis that made me wonder how we would survive should something terrible happen to Jeff.  There is the looming threat of layoffs at work – if I quit now I would get nothing, but if I were to go back and be laid off I would get severance and unemployment.  I thought about how I wanted to show my daughter that a mother could balance family and career; I wanted to be an example of that balance.  I realized that while I didn’t want to work at my current job, I did want to work.  As much as I have loved the time I have spent with my baby girl, I didn’t actually want to be a long-term, full-time stay at home mother.

None of those thoughts changed the fact that I wanted to be with my baby girl for at least a year.  I didn’t want to have to pump and struggle to keep up with her demand.  I didn’t want to spend three hours a day in the car driving to and from work.  I still don’t find my job interesting nor meaningful.  But after months of being a stay at home mother, living on one income and savings, I knew that I would not be happy if I was the sole caretaker for three children 40+ hours a week.  Nor would I be happy having to live so frugally that a broken washing machine or other inevitable home repairs would prove financially challenging.

I was able to negotiate eight and a half months of leave and so I took it and tried not to think about it ending.  I kept thinking that I was going back to work in August and that August was a lifetime away.  My dreams and my reality collided last week as August came in with 100 degree days and my return to work.  I’ve been back to work a week now.  I’ll be working part-time, three days a week.  I miss my baby girl and my boys (more than I had thought I would for the boys) but I am fine for now.  This is the easy part, actually; after nearly nine months of virtually uninterrupted Mama time, the ability eat my lunch slowly at my desk or use the bathroom by myself is a welcome respite. I am not yet tired of the routine, but refreshed by my time away from the children.  I am, perhaps vainly, really enjoying wearing nice slacks and high heels.  I still have a nice freezer stash of pumped breast milk and am not yet too worried about when it might run low.  Anna even cooperated with my return to work.  In her typical fashion of keeping us guessing until the last minute [recall that she was the child who vacillated between head-down and breech in utero - nearly until she was born], Anna finally decided to take a bottle just before I returned to work – erasing one huge anxiety of mine.  For the next month she and the boys are being taken care of by their father; who I know loves them as much as I do and does fun Daddy things that I don’t.  (I arrived home after my first day at work last week to find he had built them a balance beam in the backyard out of scrap wood.)

The really hard part is coming.  In one month, Anna will begin spending two days a week at “school” (I hate the word daycare, although that’s what it is) and one day a week at home with her grandparents.  I don’t worry about the days with her grandparents at all, but I do worry about her days at school.  I have never had a child this young – still needing bottles of pumped milk – in daycare before.  I feel sick to my stomach when I think about it her teachers throwing a bottle of unfinished breast milk down the drain or Anna crying when being rocked to sleep.  In a month my commute will get even longer (traffic is noticeably worse during the school year) and I am sure the ongoing sleep deprivation of having a baby who wakes up multiple times a night will start to wear me down.

I am surprisingly sanguine about those eventualities because for the first time in my life I have the privilege of choosing to work at this job.  It seems to me that married with three kids (one in private school), with a mortgage, and all the other responsibilities of being a grown-up that I should feel the most constrained, or “weighed down”, of my entire life.   But I don’t; instead I feel a sort heady freedom that I am working because I weighed the pros and cons and decided that, right now, work is the right thing for me to be doing.  I would be very surprised if I quit this job without having anther job to go to, but the fact that I could makes all the difference in the world.  I don’t expect to stay at this job forever, or perhaps even very much longer, but I am here for now and I am doing the best job I can, savoring my lunch slowly at my desk, and wondering what the future holds.

The week after I graduated from high school I took a portion of the very generous money that I received and went out to our local Wal-Mart.  Among other things, I bought plates and dishtowels, an iron and a little ironing board; everything I thought I might need to set up my own mini-household at college – more than three months distant.  (Aside:  I am not entirely sure why I thought I would be doing much ironing in college – no one at Caltech, including me, gave a damn whether or not my clothes were wrinkled).  In June I began packing my room at home in boxes as if by being ready to go I could somehow make the time pass more quickly.  High school was fine, I wasn’t running away from anything; I had an exciting summer planned: I would earn my private pilot’s license and had a lead in the local production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”.  I was happy, yet I could not restrain myself from living in the future.

I’ve always been this way.  I recall disliking the other children in my kindergarten class; they all seemed so young and immature to me; I wanted them to grow up so they would be more interesting.  I dreamed longingly of how much better things would be in third grade.  I thought of middle school as merely a necessary evil to be endured before high school.  High school was simply preparation for college.  And there was never any question that I would go to college straight after high school.  I picked the college I attended primarily because it was the best.   (It didn’t hurt that they paid for me to visit unlike their rival MIT and that the weather there was 70 degrees and sunny during said visit).  After college grad school was a given and I began a Ph.D. program in astronomy without giving a great deal of thought to it – it was simply what one did with a bachelor’s degree in planetary science.  After two quarters in the program I was utterly miserable and my wise soon-to-be husband asked the obvious (to everyone but me) question, “Why don’t you just quit?”  I quit and took the first job that was offered to me; never even contemplating taking some time to figure out what my next step in life should be.  I knew that the job was “wrong” for me in oh so many ways but I thought of it as a means to an end.  I was thrilled at the salary – four times my graduate student stipend and visions of being able to be more “wealthy” than I had ever been danced in my head. I got married, a good thing overall, but something I rushed – seeing no point in waiting.  I was just shy of my 23rd birthday.  I received a diagnosis of severe endometriosis and an edict to “try to have your children before you are thirty” which sent me in to panic preparation mode:  we bought a house just after I turned 24, in large part because I wanted a home for my, as yet, non-existent children.  I took a new, better, job again knowing that it was wrong for me.  I went to grad school and got a master’s degree, again, because it seemed like the next logical step, pushing away the thought that would creep into my head during an advanced propulsion class:  “Wow.  I could not care less about this.”  It was as if I was on a hamster wheel – always running away from where I was, but never going anywhere I wanted to be.

People talk about stopping to smell the roses, but until recently I don’t think I even noticed roses existed.  That all changed in November 2006 the moment Thomas came into the world.  When Thomas was a baby it seemed that I wanted life to slow down, rather than speed up.  Although I looked forward to a future of sleeping through the night and older kids I was in no hurry for it to come.  I feel the same way with Theo, he woke up three times last night between 8:00 pm and midnight, and I truly didn’t mind.  He’s growing up so fast that I savored the minutes spent singing, rocking him to sleep, and stroking his wispy hair.

After I started a pastry and baking program a couple of months ago I had something of an epiphany:  that very few decisions in my life have actually been decisions. Rather than a conscientious weighing of options I have simply continued on a path that I am not even sure when or where I began.  I am loving culinary school, however, I don’t think that, in the end, a pastry chef is what I will be.  But I am so thankful that even though it was a “rash” choice made over the course of only a few days, culinary school was truly my decision.  In addition to the sheer joy of baking large volumes of bread and other delights two nights a week, school has given me the joy of freeing me from “the wheel”.

But the lure of the wheel is strong.  I work part-time at my paying job, 20 hours week.  As of this morning I had already worked 20 hours this week (and them some).  Yet, I was tempted to go into work today; not because I was asked to, not because I had a particularly interesting project to work on, but because I felt that I hadn’t done enough.  There really was no reason for me to go into work other than sheer masochism and yet I still considered it.  It is going to take a long time – perhaps the rest of my life, to stop listening to the voice in my head that tells me what I “should” do and start listening to myself.

In the end, I didn’t go to work today.  I wrote here to leave a record of my thoughts, to proclaim that I will live my life in the here and now instead of allowing it to lead me.  I will make the decisions.

Our head chef instructor for the baking and pastry program I am studying does much more than teach us two nights a week; she is an accomplished food writer/author and, in addition, devotes time going out to Los Angeles (LAUSD) schools to teach healthy cooking.   A couple of weeks ago during class I had a free moment while I had one product baking in the oven and another in cooling in the fridge and I asked chef if she ever needed any volunteers to help her out during her (LAUSD) classes.  She said that she didn’t really need any volunteers, but that the program itself was always looking for chefs.  “Oh,” I said.  Then after a couple of moments, what chef had really meant dawned on me, “Oh,” I said dumbstruck, “I will be a chef.” While I am sure it seems as obvious as white chocolate against dark to everyone else, somehow the conclusion that I was in school to begin a new career, to advocate for sustainable, healthy food, to have fun had not all added up in my mind to the fact that I am going to be a chef.  Chef; as in, I will be qualified to have people pay me to cook food for them.  I somehow was stuck with the idea that I would be  still be an engineer/analyst that happens to be rather good at and enjoy baking rather than an engineer/analyst and a chef or perhaps even just a chef.  This realization has officially blown my mind…in the best of ways.  And to celebrate, I think I’ll just have to go bake something.

Three year olds are naturally self-centered creatures.  They take offense at the denial of another graham cracker like North Korea is offended by the denial of aid from the United States.  They think that a dearth of new toys is the worst poverty that a human being could suffer through.  Some of this is natural to the age and some of this attitude is innocence.  Hopefully, a three-year-old has never been exposed to true injustice and scarcity.  Yet as a parent, part of my job is to teach my children to show empathy and generosity.  Part of that teaching is to elucidate the concept of necessities – the things that every human must have in order to live the minimum of a humane life.  We’ve been talking about the concept of needs versus wants a lot lately in our house; debating what is truly necessary. Unexpectedly my debates with a three year old have fostered a great deal of thought in me and refinement in my definition of necessity.  I can really only think of three items that are absolute in their need:

• A community; perhaps, but not necessarily, encompassing family and friends.
• A clean, secure environment including shelter, clean water, clean air, clean soil and freedom from conflict, persecution, or abuse.
• Healthy, nourishing food.

Written out in three short bullet points these requirements seem so simple, so basic.  Of course, that is the point – that they are the bare basics and yet it is deeply disturbing how few people in the world truly have them.  Even those of us affluent in the United States may not truly have our needs met for clean air, water, and food.  When listed one after the other it is also obvious that needs are inseparable.  For example, one cannot grow healthy food without a healthy environment and it is the good stewardship of communities that keep environments safe.  No one need is more important than the other, but it is the last item, food, that occupies my thoughts.  I see injustice in food everywhere I go:  on school tours where students have no access to water during meals and instead must drink milk from a big industrial dairy if they are thirsty, in the perfectly edible and delicious half a pizza that lies uneaten at the restaurant table next to us that will be simply thrown away, at the total absence of places to purchase fresh food when I drive through the poor urban core of Los Angeles, to the hungry children on TV and in our own towns who live in a world with plenty of food to eat and yet they do not get enough.  More than any other issue,  the pursuit of healthy, nourishing food for everyone on the planet feeds (pun intended) my soul in a way that almost nothing else does.

Today I had the privilege of attending a symposium, “Bringing Home the Ranch”, at the Huntington Library and Gardens to mark the opening of a new urban agriculture research and eduction station, Huntington Ranch.  The symposium focused on the revival of sustainable urban agriculture and it was wonderful simply to be in the same room amongst so many people who were working towards that future.  Rose Hayden Smith gave a talk which provided an inspiring overview of “Victory” gardens over time.  She stressed that urban agriculture is not a new or odd idea; growing significant amounts of food within city limits has actually been the norm for most of history.  In particular, there were two items in her talk which were particularly memorable.  First, that the concept of eating locally originatied during World War I – a government publication actually encouraged citizens to embrace “local production and reduce the food mile”.  Sound familiar?  From the World War II era she presented a gem of a poster, “The Food Commandments”:

1. Buy it with thought
2. Cook it with care
3. Use less wheat and meat
4. Buy local foods
5. Serve just enough
6. Use what is left

Those commandments are just as relevant today as when they were first published 65 years ago.  In addition to others, Gary Nabhan also gave an excellent talk in which he encouraged us all to think of ourselves as “designers” of the food system.  Dr. Nabhan quoted the words of a friend, Fred Kirschenmann, “Change in our food system is coming whether we want it or not so the question is whether we want to be passive victims or plan to creatively act as players” Every time we choose what to eat, what to purchase, what to plant, and what seeds to save we are shaping the food system.

I have been searching for a long time, perhaps since I first became aware of the concept that people “did something” when they grew up, for focus in my life.  I don’t know how just yet, perhaps as a writer, a chef, a doctor, a farmer, or a policy maker, but the excitement and ease that I felt at the symposium cemented for me that food is what I should be focusing on.  Touring schools recently brought the Pledge of Allegiance into my thoughts again for the first time in years.  I mentally recited the Pledge and as the last line rang out, “…with liberty and justice for all”, I questioned, how can one have liberty if one is hungry?  We, as a society, should pledge more than just liberty, there must also be, “…with food and justice for all”.