Mendolonium

I have no idea where we will be living this fall.  The Bay Area is a distinct possibility.  Washington D.C. area has emerged as a contender.  New York City is in the running.  South Carolina is the dark horse.  Then again, we might just stay right were we are.  Why all the possibilities and what are we thinking…moving with two young children?  Primarily, it is the lack of full-time job possibilities for Jeff in Southern California.  Jeff wants to teach at a two year or small four year school and in California, secondary education budgets have been slashed.  He cannot get a job in Southern California when most schools are laying off rather than hiring.   A secondary consideration is that despite our love of Pasadena, our home, and the life we have built here we have concerns about the sustainability of Southern California:  the expense of living somewhere where a “starter” home runs $500K* is huge and we are entirely dependent on imported water for our livelihood.  I have literally spent dozens of hours over the past month constructing elaborate spreadsheets; budgets, scenarios of raises and furloughs,  and commuting vs. rental costs.  I agonize over the spreadsheets hoping that technology will “save” me; will make our decision clear.  But, just like problems facing the larger world, technology will not give us the answer.  We have some hard decisions to make.

Living sustainability means living with a focus on the long term.  Lately, it has been hard to think about our life in the long term, when we don’t even know where we will be living in a few months.   I look out at my strong tomato plants and wonder, “Will I be standing over a pot of boiling water come August, sweltering in my little kitchen, preserving the bounty of the harvest?” or “Will I be  finding my way in a new city, without a job or childcare, but with the excitement of possibility?”  I can think about moving until I think about how that means leaving our home here and all we have built.  It is my hope that if we do leave, another family take what we have made here and use it to build a more sustainable life for themselves.  While I can’t take the dirt with us, I have learned a great deal and that knowledge will come with us to our new home.  Life is uncertain, but it is certain that people need to eat.  So I  weed my beans, plant another crop of melons, carefully guide the blackberry bushes through a trellis.  I am not sure who will be eating all this good food but all the effort shall not be for naught.

So, since my last update we’ve:

Plant something (or take care of something you’ve planted):

• Peppers (“Ace Bell”, “Purple Beauty Bell”, “New Mexico Joe E. Parker”, from seedlings)
• Thyme (from seedlings)
• Mint (from seedlings)
• Marigold (from seedlings)
• Watermelon (“Sugar Baby”, from seed)
• Cantaloupe (“Hale’s Best Muskmelon, from seed)
• Pruned and trellised grapes and blackberries.

Harvest something:

• Leeks
• Strawberries (just a few)

Preserve something:

• 4 half-pints of strawberry sauce (canned)
• 7.5 pints of blueberries (canned)

Waste Not:

• Gave away unwanted items for free on craigslist rather than throwing them away to be sent to the landfill.

Want Not:

• Raiding my treasure cabinet for things to keep the boys occupied during Jeff’s absences and our trips to check out possible new locations.  The treasure cabinet is filled with stickers, books from the library sale, toys from Goodwill, and new crayons and activity books bought on sale.  It has saved my sanity on many occasions.

Eat the food:

• Tried a new recipe for poppy seed cake with lemon frosting.  Two thumbs up!
• Eating heavily from our food storage so that we will have less food to move if we decide to do so.

Build community food systems:

• I am now a certified California “food protection manager”.  This means I took a class on food safety and passed an exam (with a score of 95%, I might add).  This certification was the first step in my teaching food preservation and sustainable cooking classes to the public.  I will be teaching the classes at a local “kitchen incubator”, a commercial kitchen for rent to those starting food based small businesses.

*So it is of course with great irony that the two official job offers Jeff has received have been in the Bay Area and in Manhattan – the two places in the country more expensive than Southern California.  At least it rains there.

People with kids often wonder what the talked about before they had children – so focused are their conversations on their precious little bundles of joy.  In our house, I wonder what we talked about before Jeff began applying for jobs and we began preparing to move.  As Jeff has garnered interviews across the country over the past month I have been stalking zillow.com and realtor.com for the perfect 3+ bedroom, pre-1930, in a good school district, under $500k house in Illinois, New York, Michigan, and now the Bay Area.  We have a “sell the house punchlist” with a daunting list of things to fix before we put the house on the market; you know, little things like baseboards in the kitchen*.  but maybe it just doesn’t exist.  As I consider a career change into politics I plot the distances from our new potential hometowns to the state capital.  I still fantasize about med school as well and also look for how many medical schools are within a one hour driving radius.  Overwhelmed with it all, concerned by the salaries being offered for a tenure-track professorship, and wondering what the hell I am going to do in a new town with no job, no friends, and two little children we have had something of a radical thought:

What if we just stay?

It has become abundantly clear from my investigations of new locales that the grass is not always greener on the other side.  In the case of the Bay Area it seems doubtful we could afford a house with enough land to grow any grass.  Our life in Pasadena is pretty damned good.  We have an affordable, beautiful, albeit (see above) incomplete home.  Our garden is a joy and I think that if we leave I might miss my bed of leeks as much as I would miss a friend.   Speaking of which, we have great friends and neighbors.  Our neighborhood is fantastic:  we can walk to multiple parks, the library, the post office, the drugstore, an Italian market, good restaurants, and the train.  And let us not forget that by staying here we would mean not moving:  not packing up boxes, not “showing” the house, not starting over with garden, friends, and schools.  As someone who moved roughly a dozen times, the idea of NOT MOVING is immensely appealing.

Jeff is still applying for jobs; his life’s ambition is to teach and he will make a fabulous professor, however we are going to be much more selective about where he applies.  And I am going to try to live in the present and to immerse myself in Pasadena.  I am going to re-engage myself in local politics;  I am rather horrified at the direction that our country has taken and I am coming to believe that we need to effect change from the bottom (local level) up.  I am going to work in my garden without thinking, “Will I be here to see these plants mature and bear fruit? ” In something of a leap of faith I ordered 18 seedlings** today.  I hope that no matter what happens I will be here long enough to can those tomatoes.

*  We have lived here SEVEN (and a half years) without baseboards in the kitchen.  Classy.

* Mint, thyme, tomatoes***, peppers, and eggplant.

** This year, I started tomatoes and peppers from seed for the first time, but they are so very tiny that my natural impatience and skepticism (Really these wee little things with four leaves are going to produce hundreds of pounds of tomatoes?) that I caved tonight and ordered a few seedlings.

When I first moved to Pasadena from Nebraska thirteen years ago I was not a very adept city driver.  One of my biggest failings was in spotting pedestrians.  You see in my small town in Nebraska nobody walked anywhere.  Perhaps you might see some pre-teen kids walking out on the side of the road or someone out for a jog, but if we needed to go somewhere we got in the car.  Despite what the song “Walking in LA” might lead you to believe, lots of folks walk in Pasadena and during my first couple of months here it was sheer luck combined with Jeff shouting at me from the passenger seat that I didn’t hit any of them.  I was never taught in driver’s ed to look for people walking across the street and doing so wasn’t second (or third, or fourth…) nature for me.  Thankfully, it didn’t take long for me to develop the instinct to always look out for pedestrians before I made a turn and now ,more than a decade later, I am  more often one of those pedestrians myself rather than a driver.

Today was an unusual day.  Tuesdays are work days for me and I headed into the office this morning planning to leave early to go to a doctor’s appointment in Santa Monica this afternoon.  Santa Monica is “only” a 25 mile drive from Pasadena but that doesn’t mean much in Los Angeles traffic particularly when it involves the dreaded 405 freeway.  I make the trip every eight weeks to see most fabulous rheumatoligist around but I was dreading it today.  Rain was pouring down from the sky and I had an odd sense of foreboding.  I used to commute 30 miles each way, every day, to and from work but today such a drive felt reckless to me somehow.   I kept thinking about rain soaked pavement, vehicles skidding to a halt, and the sound of cars slamming together.  I stopped at home in between work and my doctor’s appointment, saw the boys, and decided to call and cancel.  The office was very understanding and scheduled me in an open slot for tomorrow morning.  I had had a productive morning and already finished up everything I needed to do at work for the day so on Jeff’s suggestion I stayed home and played hooky.  It was quite lovely.  I nursed the baby before for his afternoon and opted to simply hold him rather than put him down.  We snoozed together in the rocking chair for an hour or so.  I savored the feeling of his warm body curled around mine like a comma, exhaling sweet milky breaths of happiness.  When he woke up I found Thomas and the three of us baked chocolate chip cookies together in our warm kitchen – giving Henry his first taste of chocolate chip cookie dough – much to his lip-smacking delight.  I called my little sister to find she was a work at a new gig – waitressing at a little pizza place in Silver Lake.  After I hung up with her Jeff suggested we all trek over to say “hi” and get pizza.  It was pouring rain and I reiterated my aversion to driving in this weather when Jeff said, “I thought we should take the train.”  Again I thought of the pouring rain, but Jeff, certainly the more spontaneous one in our relationship was undeterred.  The boys were still in their sleepers and long underwear from the previous night; along with jackets they would be perfectly warm, he countered.  We could put them in the stroller with the rain cover, Jeff could wear a raincoat and push said stroller, and I could bundle up and use an umbrella and sling the baby if necessary.  I couldn’t really argue with such a well thought out plan and I do love pizza and my sister so off we went.  We were rewarded with the sight of our second double rainbow (one nested inside the other) in the space of a week.  We rode the gold line; little old ladies exclaiming in Spanish at the beauty of our two blue eyed, long eyelashed boys.  Henry beamed at every new person who got on the train and and Thomas vibrated with excitement in his seat.  I was reminded of all the good things about living in the city.  At Union station we took a few minutes to show Thomas around the magnificent Art Deco building.  We then hopped on the red line and out to Silver Lake.  It was a long trip; the Los Angeles metro is not particularly well laid out nor efficient but a good time was had by all.  And then on the short walk from the metro station to the pizza joint it happened;  the screech of tires, the sound of metal slamming into metal.  I looked up to see a solid red light at the intersection we were approaching and then a car run said light smack into another car making a left hand turn.  Both cars had seen the accident coming and hit on the brakes; preventing any major damage or injury.  I offered my name and phone number to both parties as a witness – writing it out in the crayons that I carry in my diaper bag.  I offered my cell phone to the girl who had run the red light.  She was in shock.  She didn’t appear intoxicated; she hadn’t been on her cell phone.  She had just made a mistake.  She knew the accident was her fault and was cursing herself, her dead cell phone battery, her purse with her driver’s license in it that she had left at home.  The other woman involved was shaking with fright and kept looking at my Henry to the carseat in her own car saying “I am so glad my baby wasn’t with me.”  I was so very glad we hadn’t been in the middle of the intersection.  If the accident had happened thirty seconds later the red light runner might have plowed into our little family and I found myself feeling sick at the thought.  I thought that driving in the rain was unsafe, but I forget how vulnerable we all really are no matter where we are or how we choose to get there.

I supose all we can do is to do our best to be safe and try to be kind to one another.  It felt good to help the two women in need; both the one who ran the red light and the one who was hit.  As I left I told them both “Good luck,” and that I hoped tomorrow was a better day for them.  Perhaps I made a very bad night for them a little easier.  And tonight when the baby wakes up and needs me to help him fall back asleep I won’t mind so much; instead I will hold him tight to me and be grateful that life has been good to us.

Recently in casual conversation with a colleague of a colleague the subject of children came up.  I was asked about daycare for my kids and I responded that my husband and I have arranged our schedules such that one of us is always with the kids – that my husband was taking care of them right now as I worked.  One of the men in the conversation laughed, and said that it must be hard for me knowing that my husband and children were sitting around all day eating macaroni and cheese and watching TV.    In a voice tinged with relief and disdain the man commented that, “I could never do that. “  And I thought to myself, “No, jackass, I’ll bet you couldn’t.”

Jeff was thrust into fatherhood on March 11, 2006 – the day we found out I was pregnant with Thomas.  I took the pregnancy test myself and walked into the kitchen not knowing how to tell him we were expecting a baby.  The words, “I have something to show you…” escaped from my mouth and I led Jeff to the bedroom where he was expecting I would show him a spider I wanted him to kill.  Instead I showed him two lines on a home pregnancy test.   After he regained the power of speech, he declared that we needed to go get some more fruit and vegetables to feed me and the growing embryo within.  Off to Whole Foods at 8:00 at night we went, Jeff adding a massive array of  colorful produce to the cart.  If we lived in neolithic times I imagine Jeff would have pointed at his spear, grunted at me, and then gone off to slay me a mammoth.  He started as a great father long before any of our babies even took their first breaths.

While I was pregnant Jeff made me innumerable meals only to have me reject them, retching with nausea like a sitcom cliche.   He would simply eat them himself and then make me yet another bean and cheese burrito or plate of nachos.  He suffered through hypnobirthing classes with me; truly torture for a man who looks pained whenever someone uses the word “spiritual”.  While I labored with Thomas for days he was right by my side;  he didn’t eat, he didn’t shower, he didn’t complain.  As Thomas was born he [the baby] promptly let out a big poop as if to say “This what I thought of being squeezed every four minutes for the past 46 hours”.  Jeff picked our new baby boy up to give to me and his [Jeff''s] arm was  immediately smeared with copious amounts of newborn poo – christening him as a father.  Jeff has changed just as many (if not more) diapers as I have.  He shirts are stained with snot.  He is up every single night  soothing a pissed off baby back to sleep without nursing during his “shift” from 12:00 am – 4:00 am.

Jeff is a father who truly knows his children.   It was Jeff who figured out that Thomas’ favorite color is yellow.  Jeff devised an experiment where he divided all of Thomas’ toys into four separate piles:  red, yellow, green and blue.  He then observed which toys Thomas preferred to play with and at the end of the day which pile was most scattered about.  The hands-down winner was yellow.  He recently did the same thing with Henry and although the results were not conclusive (Henry thinks toys are for babies and doesn’t seem to realize he is one – maybe we need to test him with different colored electrical cords) we think Henry preferred green.  Jeff is the one that noticed how much Henry loved the “chamois”  fabric of Thomas’ blankets.  He found Henry a sleep sack that we had made with the desired fabric and it has now become Henry’s “lovey”.  Jeff does a far better than I do calming Thomas down for sleep – to the point that Thomas will state  “I want Daddy to help me fall asleep.  Mama, you are not very good at it.”

Jeff doesn’t do everything the way that I would and I like it that way.  Jeff draws with the kids and I do playdough.  Jeff is  much more “open” to the kids staying in their jammies all day and I won’t leave the house with the kids until I have taken a hairbrush to Thomas.  Jeff often tries to nap the kids on separate schedules.; I aim for simultaneous naps.  Jeff doesn’t bake cookies with the kids but they do work on the compost pile (I try to think of all the leaves Henry surely ingests as fiber – I just hope that he isn’t eating the grubs for protein).  I take the boys to singing class and the children’s museum for hours, Jeff takes them to the park for the entire afternoon.  I won’t say it’s always easy to so fully share parenting.  Sometimes I get home from work and while Thomas tells me about their trip to the park I look down at what he is wearing and cringe (PSA to men:  grey and brown do not go together.  They just don’t.)    There have been times I have come home to find all three of them asleep and I am annoyed thinking at how late the boys will be up at the end of a long work day. But the hardest of all to deal with is when I come home to find them laughing and roughhousing; telling me about the great day they had together and knowing that I wasn’t there to spend it with them.  It is so bittersweet for me; the only way I am able to go to work without tears is to know that my boys are with someone who loves them as much as I do, but that doesn’t stop my feelings of jealously and even resentment that it isn’t me.

Parenting is hard.  I can see that in some ways it is even harder for Jeff than it is for me.  He doesn’t have the magic boobies that will fix nearly any baby complaint.  He doesn’t have dad’s groups to sit around and talk about sports or when to drop your three year old’s nap.   If being an at home parent is isolating for mothers it is even moreso for fathers.  The bulk of parenting has traditionally fallen to women and women have generally not been afforded a great deal of respect for parenting.  Jeff doesn’t get much either.   While many people will praise him generously for even once doing the things that every mother does – like getting up with the kids at night;  I think such praise is really an insult to fatherhood.  Jeff would tell you that he only doing what is right; he wouldn’t expect anything less from himself.   I am insulted on his behalf when people imply that simply by virtue of him being a man; he is somehow a less responsible, less capable parent.

He is not “watching” the kids.  He is not babysitting.  He is not Mr. Mom.  He is not a poor substitute for a mother.  He is a father.  And he does an inspiring job of it.