Agency

If you listen to scientists, particularly biologists, talk about their work, you might be surprised to discover the rich secret life of things you rarely give any mind to. DNA doesn't like to be single-stranded, you see. Some proteins just hate being in solution or else they refuse to form crystals. And do you know how hard it can be to put together a buffer that will make your particular PCR reaction happy?

This is called anthropomorphizing, ascribing human form or attributes to non-humans, and is something scientists are very fond of doing. Of course when experts do it, they understand what the other actually means. These phrases are a shorthand for "the laws of physics and chemistry make it energetically favorable for X to do Y." It also, IMHO, makes for a much more enjoyable conversation. But that could just be me.

When I switched from bench science to research and practice of science education, it quickly became clear to me that anthropomorphizing was a very dangerous thing to do around novices. There is a certain mystery to the systems that can't be directly observed, and there is a certain amount of intellectual inertia at play for students entering a required freshman class. These two things combined can result in a student remembering his TA emphasizing that DNA molecules prefer to be double-stranded, but being entirely unable to explain why that is based on the structure of said molecule.

I have been mindful of that in my teaching ever since. In making my curriculum materials, I emphasize the basic underlying reasoning. If I do slip up in class and use an anthropomorphism, I stop myself immediately and ask the class to say what it is I actually meant there. Clarity. I seek clarity and I seek to impart clarity.

This is what came to mind for me when I realized I was feeling uncomfortable with talking about the baby doing things that result in me freaking out and needing medically-enabled reassurance. You know, not kicking as much as I would like, flipping to a head up, face in position one day (causing me to look smaller in the midsection and lose my mind with worry until the emergency ultrasound that explained it), things like that. Or the contractions, which are not even technically his fault, except they do seem to correlate with the days he spends head down.

Earlier on in my misadventures in worrying, in fact right around that first trip to the labor floor, I asked B how to say "little shit" in Hebrew (harah katan, in case you are wondering). I thought it would be clever to call him that when I freaked out, you know, after it was clear that nothing bad has happened. I even did that a couple-three times.

And then I realized that it didn't feel right. I wanted to make jokes. I wanted to be able to say that I will duck his allowance for this or that infraction (as if! there are no allowances in my house, at least not yet). But I can't. I.just.can't.

As near as I can tell, I am seeking clarity again. For myself and all around me. When A died, a seven-year-old son of a friend of ours asked his mother what happened, and then asked how come the baby was playing with the cord-- didn't he know long rope-like things were dangerous to play with? This past winter it came out (and was dealt with) that Monkey was a little upset at A for pulling his cord.

If this baby doesn't make it, if anything goes wrong, I don't want to have to remember myself or anyone else faulting him, even in jest. Whatever he is doing, he is not doing it on purpose. There is no intent. There is no agency. I am being protective, over-protective even. Not his fault. Wasn't his brother's fault. I still can't visualize the good outcome to this pregnancy. The bad? It's familiar, and terrifying.

I have apparently appointed myself (or have accepted the mantle of) the protector. I will talk about that soon-- there is much to say. But for now, the relevant point is that this is also something I am apparently keen to protect my son from-- any implication of culpability in the eventual outcome, whatever it is, or even in any individual freakout I engage in along the way.

I have been thinking, though, that with this, as with everything else grief-related I have found so far, there is always more. More than one reason, more than one level, just more. I did make one joke, after I stopped shaking following that emergency ultrasound that showed the baby assuming the weird position. I called JD to tell him, and in the nervous energy between us, we spontaneously created a joke the punchline of which is that as the punishment for his in-utero antics, upon his live birth, we would subject him to what amounts to a standard Jewish religious rite.

I thought it was funny because, see, nothing extra would actually be happening to him. We are just, for now, calling it the punishment. Ha-ha, isn't it clever?

My friend Natalie called me when I was on my way to that ultrasound, so she knew what I was worried about, and she called later to check on me. I told her it was all ok, and told her our new joke. She laughed for a minute straight. Another friend I told the next day laughed too, this full, deep, appreciative laugh.

I get how and why the joke works-- I constructed it after all. What I was trying to figure out was why it didn't seem nearly as funny to me. It's the levels thing, those damned levels. The joke, see, it's predicated upon this baby being born alive. His brother did not get that rite. His brother couldn't be subjected to any of the other punishments we could conceivably joke about either.

My boys, right now, are both just babies. Babies who, by definition, lack agency. And here I am, with this enormous love for both of them, teetering on the long brink where everything will be decided-- do they both stay babies? Do we get to raise one of them? They can't do anything about it, either of them.

And maybe that is another level. I felt such overwhelming gratitude that this baby didn't die before or during my sister's wedding. I felt so relieved, but also grateful. And having nowhere in particular to direct that gratitude, I think I felt grateful to him. But he didn't do that either, he had no active part in surviving so far. Maybe what I am doing here in focusing on agency is reminding myself that if he makes it, it won't be because he did anything to cause it either. That he didn't do anything better than his brother did.

Whew. Who needs therapy when you've got a blog?

A short and belated observation about people who have no shame

People who are about to get married by a rabbi, especially if it is by their own rabbi, in their own synagogue (as was the case for my sister and my now brother-in-law), often present themselves on Shabbat previous to the nuptuals (which generally works out to be Saturday morning before their Sunday ceremony) for an aufruf-- being called up to the Torah to recite the blessings before and after reading of the same, and/or, for the more adventurous, to actually read a Torah portion.

After that is accomplished, congregation sings congratulatory songs, and everyone pelts the happy couple with (soft) candy, thoughtfully provided either by the synagogue or by the family. Children then race up to collect the bounty, and a rabbi says some nice things and blesses the couple. Most Saturday mornings, especially if it is a largish congregation, there is also a Bar or Bat Mitzva happening. Which means that the teenager at the center of it also eventually gets pelted with candy and then, surrounded by his or her family, blessed.

Here's what I noticed on the morning of my sister's aufruf-- the rabbi, in blessing the couple, wished them many a good thing, including all sorts of signifiers of a long happily married life, but did not in any way mention children. The same rabbi, however, when blessing the Bat Mitzva girl, mentioned the "may you one day stand with your beloved under a wedding canopy" thing. So it's not that they are opposed to mentioning that next life stage. Is it, then, that they feel that getting married is a less iffy proposition than having children is? Or that they don't want to imply that children should necessarily be on the agenda? Or that they don't have to be on the agenda right away? Whatever it was, I appreciated that. I am pretty sure the young couple did too.

To be fair, the rabbi who officiated at the wedding the next day did mention children ("when you are ready"), but I felt that was ok since she spent the previous many minutes talking about the many things that make the newlyweds good together and for each other, knows them very well, and, it could be deduced, knows that they do, some day, want children.

The subject of this post, though? People who have no shame? That, my dears, would, somewhat predictably, be both sets of parents and, maybe less predictably, one other person. The parents, in their toasts. Our parents (mom, to be more precise) wished them children, though almost as an afterthought at the end of their toast, and his parents (mom, again) wished them many children, much more prominently in the toast. It's ok-- you can let out your collective groan now. Some of us did, in real time.

Care to guess who that one other person is? Ok, how about this-- I will tell you, only a few lines down. And then I will rely on the honor system for you to tell me in the comments whether you guessed it. Ok? ok.

Ready?

It was Monkey. She found a couple of our friends signing the guest book, and wanted to know what they were up to, and whether she was allowed to do that too. Here for your weekday amusement is her note, taking off the idiosyncratic family salutation and fixing her guess-and-go spelling, though it wasn't too bad:

Good luck with your happy life and your children.

Like I said, no shame.

MotherTalk Book Review: More Than it Hurts You

The nice thing about this book is that it gets better. For me that was almost exactly half way through the 400 page tome, when the t has been crossed, but the is have not yet been dotted, when the story finally moved out of the too-carefully constructed set-up phase and into the acting, reacting, and interacting phase.

More Than it Hurts You by Darin Strauss is a multi-threaded novel ostensibly about what constitutes the truth, at what level, and how hard are different people willing to look for it. The topic, even the subject matter are compelling and certainly worth the investigation. Unfortunately, the treatment of the material by the author left me wishing for a more thoughtful, more delicate, less heavy-handed approach.

The Publisher's Weekly review that accompanied the call for reviewers stated that in this novel "[t]he stereotypes are intentionally heavy-handed..." And are they ever. I am not sure that people like Josh Goldin actually exist-- shallow by choice, observant but not thoughtful. I can't call him a protagonist, although I suppose we are meant to. Is he compelling? Sympathetic? At times, yes. But mostly he is flat. Except for when he exhibits emotional awareness he should not by rights possess. I was, in fact, puzzled and almost offended when Josh, walking through the hospital to see his son decides that he can handle it, if worst came to worst, but that it was intolerably sad that so many people in the world would never meet Zack. Intolerable sadness of the world not knowing your child is one of the real, very real emotions of bereaved parents. But to me Josh getting to that place that fast and before he knew how dire (or not) his son's condition really was felt like cheating, like skipping a whole boatload of steps.

Likewise, Dori, Josh's wife, is drawn with two notes. Her backstory, I suppose, is meant to explain to us how she turned out this way. But it doesn't, not really, because nobody can be this squashed based on those events alone. Zack, their baby, is described in the most generic baby terms for most of the book, until, at the age of just over 18 month he is suddenly ascribed things resembling thoughts. Even in his parents' thought bubbles he is seen as mostly a lovable vulnerable lump. I know it has been a while since I have had an actual living baby under my care, but I do still remember definite streaks of personality, of determination, of expressed likes and dislikes, of behaviors, fercryingoutloud, that Monkey exhibited from much earlier than that. I am certain that when I thought of her then, I thought of those things, of her, not of generic baby descriptors.

To me, however, the most annoying character in the novel is the narrator, who, omniscient as he is, I must take to be the author himself. While possessed of excellent eye and, often, sharp wit and slicing metaphors, the narrator is heavy-handed. Not content to paint the picture for the readers and let us draw our own conclusions, often the narrator shoves his conclusions, his unassailable by virtue of his omniscience explanations for people's behavior down our throats. Really, Mr. Strauss, after you spend half a page describing a man's thought process to me, I am capable of calling it rationalization myself. Having you spend another sentence telling me so feels no less insulting and patronizing than the way your fictional reporter treats one of your fictional characters.

One character in the novel does speak to me, though. Dr. Darlene Stokes is, I feel, the most realistic character in the bunch, and most familiar to me. Though I did not rise from that little, nor climbed that high, I share Dr. Stokes' dislike for workplace politics, her social awkwardness, her reliance on objective truth, her drive to know, her passion for observing and analyzing society around her, her inability to lie to her child. This is another reason, I think, for my dislike of the narrator. Narrator explicitly wishing she would shut up in a socially acceptable manner on a date, as well as other similarly condescending notes, just didn't sit well with me.

I originally asked to review this book because, in the wake of the Texas child removal case, there was a rather intense discussion of the institution of the Child Protection Services among a number of people I know in real life. However, CPS doesn't figure nearly as centrally in the book as you would think, and is drawn in fairly neutral tones. I would, I think, have liked more on the inner workings of the system. I would have liked to see the CPS point person in the book actually get a speaking part, for example.

Finally, the book could've really used a copy editor. Was Darlene born in '66 or '68? Was that thing found on the third visit or the fourth? And was that one thing or both? And really, how hard is it to check that June 12th was not a Wednesday in any year the book could've possibly been set in? Likewise, repeating small observations in only slightly varied contexts in chapters positioned close together makes the observations far less astute. A copy editor is all I am saying.

Overall, this is not a bad summer read. It may, paradoxically, be an even better book club selection. Not because the evening can be spent discussing brilliance of the work, but because it can be spent discussing the many issues raised in the book (albeit via those heavy-handed stereotypes)-- race relations, media influence, authority vs. family, various corporate cultures. There is a certainly a lot there, so don't forget your mixed drinks.

And... exhale

After days of crazy overfilled house, Saturday night and Sunday morning were actually nice and quiet. Only my sister spent the night before the wedding here-- everyone else was at the hotel. Sunday morning, while JD went to get bagels, and before the crowd descended, we even had some time to lazy about our bed, just the girls.

 

 
For all of you lovers of shiny, here's some more.

 
Soon the house was buzzing-- the hair lady, the photographer, bridesmaids, parents, aunt and uncle, my friend Natalie who was doing makeup for everyone in need. Miraculously, even though it was pretty crazy, it all also went pretty smoothly. Cream cheese ended up on bagels, not wedding attire. Coffee was administered strictly orally, and none of it got applied topically-- a minor miracle, considering sheer number of people roaming around my decidedly not-huge house and the amount of said beverage brewed for the occasion. Hair and makeup for seven people was being done in a fairly optimal order and in time.

And then the limo didn't come. For real. Calling the number on the reservation or the number on the company's website yielded no answer. The bride, unlike our mother, however, reacted in the most reasonable manner. All she wanted to know was which car was going to take her and her dress to the temple.

So we all got there, my sister got into her dress, some pictures were taken. I got myself into the bridesmaid dress that still zipped (can you believe it?-- most excellent choice of style back in December, and of size back in February). Then it turned out that our cantor's wife's water broke about 30 minutes before the start of the ceremony. Luckily our ritual director has pipes that some cantors elsewhere likely envy, and even more luckily he was puttering around his office that afternoon and was, therefore, available. He lives close enough by that even with going home to change he was still back in time. I feel compelled to point out that twelve years less one day before the events in question my own wedding got underway much later than scheduled, even though our limos came on time and there were no last minute clergy substitutions. So color me impressed.

 
Even more shiny for you-- my girls in ivory.

The limos came after the ceremony, thanks to the aunt of the groom who put in ridiculous amount of time calling, and calling, and calling until she got someone on the phone.

 
I went a bit special effects-happy there. You like?

 
This is Mozart the mouse, a gift to Monkey from one of the wedding guests. She hardly parted with him since making his acquaintance on Friday.

 
New cousins. Watching them at the wedding, you would never have believed that the first time they met was Friday. In fact Elizabeth was the one trusted to hold Mozart through the ceremony.

The party rocked all the way to midnight when the bus for the hotel left, the band stopped playing, and the custodians came to take apart the room setup. As the catering was from the Old Country catering business, we had so much food to take home with us that for a while there we were unsure that we would fit into the cars we had with us, and then, upon getting home had to spend about an hour finding room for all that food.

Monday our friends came over to help put a dent in our supplies and to celebrate our own twelfth anniversary. Yesterday the newlyweds took off for their honeymoon and my parents went home, taking Monkey with them. I planned to mark the occasion by staying at work late to catch up on some neglected projects. Instead I got hit with some relatively frequent contractions, necessitating a trip to the hospital. Turned out they were just annoying and not at all productive. Fetal fibronectin was negative, and contractions I got while on the monitor were much milder and much rarer than what sent me in in the first place. So today I am mostly hanging on the couch, and so far so good. Tomorrow I am going back to work with the hopes that yesterday's performance was due to the excitement of the past week, and not to sitting in my work chair.

But dudes... My baby sister is married. Married, I tell you.

Show and Tell: Before the storm

The wedding is tomorrow. The wild ride starts in the morning, but this afternoon I got to stay home and chill while everyone else and a buttload of out of town guests enjoyed a reportedly lovely BBQ at a local park.

 

 

 

 

 
I think we are ready.


This post is part of Mel's weekly Show and Tell. Go see what everyone else is up to this weekend.

Meme time

It's meme time. Well, it was meme time two weeks ago when Coggy first tagged me, and then again three days later when Janis did. My excuse for procrastinating? Other than procrastinating? Well, my sister is getting married this weekend, and so my house is crazy house. My go.ogle reader is currently clocking in at 215 unread posts, I have about an hour before we have to head to yet another pre-wedding activity, and I am hiding in the bedroom with the laptop. Seems like a good time to lighten my conscience by doing the limbo meme. So here goes.

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?

Just turned in my master's thesis. Doing research for the PhD. Getting ready to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. Still unpacking from our recent move into the graduate resident apartment in the dorm. Wondering when the hell would the depression meds do their thing-- being able to actually wake up in the morning sounded mighty fine and completely unattainable. (It would take another nine months and a hail Mary pass to kick both the depression and the meds.)

2. What 5 things are you your to-do list today?

1. Accompany my sister to the pre-wedding ritual (the merits of which I am still debating in my head, but she wanted it and seemed to enjoy it and get a lot out of it).
2. Attend wedding rehearsal.
3. Growth scan and cervix state ultrasound-- checks out ok, and I am allowed to dance, a little, at the wedding.
4. Friday night services with a large chunk of the bridal party and guests.
5. Rehearsal dinner.
6. (bonus, if awake after above) Try to reduce the number of unread posts in the reader.

3. List some snacks you enjoy.

Nuts of all kinds
prunes
apples and dried apple slices
cherries
CHOCOLATE
latte
cheese

4. What would you do with a billion dollars?

Build a dual immersion bilingual K-12 school and put enough money into a fund to allow the school to run on the annual income of that fund. The school would be free, and it would be awesome.

Give a bunch of money to Monkey's school for a scholarship fund for families who could use tuition assistance.

Buy land and build environmentally-friendly middle-rise of very nice condos for us and oh, 15-20 families we like. With sports facilities, daycare, art studio, garden, and whatever else I can cram in there.

Move my parents to my city.

Give a lot of money to charities or establish charities where needed-- stillbirth research; something for sensitivity training for medical professionals, especially OB/Gyn offices; early childhood education; literacy research; basic science education; fund training for graduate students and postdocs in science who are looking to strengthen their education training/credentials; advocacy for infertility and insurance coverage for infertility.

Enter some high stakes poker tournaments.

5. List the places you have lived.

The Old City
Small village ~100km outside a European capital (for about 6 weeks)
Another European capital (for about 10 weeks)
Midwestern City where parents still live
East Coast City

6. List the jobs you have done.

Car window washer (self-employed)
Fast food employee
Library page
Dorm front desk worker
Lab rat/graduate student
Post-doc

7. List the people you would like to know more about.

You mean I am not the absolute dead last to do this meme? Hm... Beruriah, Thrice, Aurelia, Reality, and Apron Strings.



P.S. Also, a new post up at Glow in the Woods.

Hard days

 

Last year there were times when I was better, and times when I was worse. Three months increments seemed to be especially tough. Others said it was that way for them too, like the trimesters of pregnancy. This weekend three of our own are facing those round increments, and I think of them, and their babies. Please think of them too.

Today CLC is marking six months since Hannah was born still. Yesterday Amy marked the same terrible date for her son William Henry. This weekend Kate is marking a year since the night they held Liam as they let him go.