Mendolonium

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.

Sometimes you spend years searching for the answer to a great question in your life.  You research options, weigh pros and cons, ask for advice, question your gut, and eventually you come to a decision.  Other times you go through everything only to find yourself still at a loss as to what to do.  You feel stuck, mired in indecision.  The unanswered question gnaws at your brain, a mental parasite, sucking energy from you in a tiny but constant stream.  And sometimes, if you are lucky, there is a perfect storm of thought and everything comes together with a strike of mental lightning.  The decision is made. You are at peace.

I’ve really been struggling lately; whereby lately I mean the past eighteen months or so.  I have alluded to feelings of depression before on this blog, but I’ve never been very specific.  It hasn’t been a matter of hiding it per se, more that I didn’t know what to say.  I have something to say now.  I have been depressed and one of the major triggers of that depression has been a deep dissatisfaction with certain aspects of my life – namely my job and the challenge of balancing my need to work with my need to be with my children.

In the months after Thomas was born Jeff and I began to talk seriously of moving.  It began with exploring the possibility of moving so that I would not have a long commute to work.  We went so far as to contact real estate agents and look at houses.  We came to the conclusion that such a move was not the best decision for us – thankfully, a conclusion that nearly three years later I believe was the right one.  Those conversations sparked a greater idea in both of us; the idea that we might make a big move – to another state, to new jobs (or no jobs at all).  We talk about the possibilities almost daily.  Where might we go?  What would we do?  Rural life or city life?  How much land do we want?  Always holding us back from truly committing to an intensive search for a new place has been our family, our friends, and our home here.   My sister is a mere 20 minute drive away and Jeff’s parents a one-hour car ride south.  My parents are a five hour trip north, but my dad, the intrepid road warrior, doesn’t consider this much of a hindrance and they visit us often.  It gives me great pleasure to see Thomas so comfortable and happy with his grandparents.  Henry, who is going through an uptick of separation anxiety will still settle happily into his grandmother’s (both of them) or  my sister’s arms when everyone else seems scary to him.  I never really knew any of my grandparents or extended family and it is priceless to see the closeness between my children and their kin.  I have wonderful friends here, women with whom I can talk about everything from sex to snot – friendships that have taken years to grow and find.  And then there is our house.  We bought our little piece of the American dream just after I turned twenty-four.  I scraped off wallpaper, pulled out carpet tacks until my fingers bled.  I found out that I was going to become a mother (twice) in our little bathroom.  I spent my labor with Thomas walking round and round our living room in seemingly endless circles.  Henry spent his first night on Earth tucked in between us in our bedroom.  Pasadena is home to me in a deep and profound way that no where else has ever been.

And yet…I want to live in a place where it rains – really rains  – with thunderstorms and lighting.  I want my children to be able to attend a decent public school; one where they are not two of eight hundred students in an overcrowded elementary.  I want to be able to afford an acre (or more!) or land.  I want to plant tulips.  I want to live in a place where our water, the most vital of all resources, is not imported from hundreds of miles away.  I want to live in a place where the local paper publishes real news rather than endless coverage of the entertainment industry.  I want to live in a place where we can live on one income and prosper.

Tonight I started reading a blog recommended by a friend of my sister’s.  It is filled with beautiful writing and photographs and I found it absolutely riveting.  I was struck by how the author seemed to feel about the place that he lives, Detroit.  Though his writings I could see that ,despite its flaws, Detroit is his place – how he cares about the city and belongs there.  And somewhere during the second hour of my devouring his blog it hit me like a moving truck.  Southern California is not my place.  While there are many things that make me happy here; it is not the place that does so.  If we stay here, I will never stop looking for another place – my place.  I have spent my entire life looking for a home and despite my thirteen years here my soul does not feel at home.  I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if the right place was out there.  I want to find our place, move there, and make a home .  That’s the epiphany and it feels wonderfully freeing to have come to a conclusion.  I don’t know where we’ll end up, what we’ll do there, and when we will find it.  But tonight I began to say goodbye to Pasadena and to start searching for what comes next.

Dear Universe,

I know that I resolved to line dry my laundry this year; and I will…promise.  In fact, I have been trolling the internet looking for the perfect clothesline.  But did you have to pick this week, purported to be the rainiest since 2005, to break my dryer, causing it to emit a distributing burning smell?  You do know I cloth diaper, don’t you?  And as luck would have it, today really needs to be diaper wash and dry day as I have two diaper pails full of what can only be called “the smell of evil”.  I would appreciate a quick fix on this one or alternatively a nice check in the mail to cover the purchase of a new dryer.

Your hapless pawn,

Gina