pronoia

Insides, Insides

My food restrictions and I haven't been on the best of terms lately. There are lots of "practical" reasons why  (prepared food at the company retreat, camping with communal cooking, lack of groceries, unbelieveable exhaustion, etc.), but in each of these cases I could have, with just a little bit of effort, worked my way around.

And let's review: I'm supposed to be staying away from wheat and dairy, and, if possible, HFCS. This isn't all that complicated. I don't much like bread or pasta, but I love rice. I adore really good ice cream and fresh mozarella, but I don't miss most cheese and actually think it's kind of gross. I love cookies, but I can be made happy with really good dark chocolate, which generally has neither dairy nor wheat nor HFCS. I like my veggies to taste like veggies, so I'm not used to butter or cheese toppings on everything. I have a small Coke addiction, but I'm assiduously replacing it with Honest Tea. In theory, none of this is that hard for me to do.

In reality, though, it can be challenging, especially if we're eating out a lot, as we have been lately. (See "exhaustion," "lack of groceries," above.) With the exception of broccoli, green beans, carrots, and lettuce, restaurants don't serve much in the way of veggies because they're harder to keep stocked. So I'm left with meat and maybe some rice unless the place has really good salads, and for some reason this area is not so hip on the really good salads. Enter Thai food, sushi, and Indian food, most of which fits the bill, but these, too, get old. And if, as is happening frequently these days, I'm feeling squeamish about industrialized meat, I tend to want to avoid meat when I'm eating out. In other words, as long as we're eating out, I'm screwed one way or another.

Eating at home isn't a whole lot better in many ways, because while the selection of food is more appropriate to my system, it involves us having to actually plan, cook, and clean up, and even when we manage the first, the second trips us up. Worse, it ends up feeding into the housework crisis we're in the middle of, and it's easier to just throw up our hands and get something else.

See how well I can rationalize the calzones, the tzatziki, the bruschetta, the buffalo mozzarella? It's not that any of the above is untrue. Far from it! But the difficulty and the inconvenience is not the whole story, since I managed to avoid wheat, dairy, and HFCS for months at a time when I was single in graduate school, and friends, I don't really cook.

Walking to Whole Foods today to buy iced tea (and thereby break a $20 so I could pay for my $5 massage), I realized that part of what's going on is that, in this culture, especially if you're female, a "treat" is anything that is "bad" for you. This is usually defined as ice cream, chocolate, sweets, celebrity magazines, bad television. What's hard about food restrictions is not that I'm actually deprived. It's that the foods I'm restricted from shift over into the land of "bad for me" and therefore into the land of "treat."

And so, when I'm already feeling alone and vulnerable, as I am right now (see Mother's Day, writing the adoption letter for L&S, confronting the first birthdays of everyone else's kids, housework conflict, feeling isolated from my friends, lack of real downtime, BFF's emotional crisis, dog fight residuals, hosting V, trying to figure out vacation plans when the dogsitter can't come, etc.), food is one of the ways I comfort myself. I "deserve" a "treat," when the real issue is that I'm feeling sad or anxious or depleted or frustrated or defeated or hopeless or exhausted or whatever. And just to make it harder, when I'm feeling alone and vulnerable, mustering the extra energy it takes to ask for what I need at a restaurant or help spearhead cooking at home is more than I have to provide.

I don't miss bread, but suddenly I'm eating toast at breakfast. We don't eat pizza for months, and suddenly we're having pizza or calzones at least once a week. We're getting up too late to eat breakfast at home, so I'm getting bagels next door to work. It's a bodily version of the pathetic fallacy: my metaphorical insides feel crappy, so I make my literal insides feel crappy, too.

None of this is rocket science, and neither is the repair: take better care of myself emotionally. But I'm struck again by how interconnected it all is, how subtle and fine the tendrils are, how it all comes back to the same thing: tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

Reason #1,326,428 Why Heather Corinna Rocks

Her explanation for how she does the sex ed she does. If you don't know Heather and her work, she's a sex educator, activist, artist, Buddhist, and all-around amazing person.

I clearly need to go read some Maria Montessori, not only for sex ed, but for rearing kids and educating adults and everyone in between, on any subject.

Notable Occurances Since Last We Spoke

On Thursday I took my camera lens in to see if it could be fixed or cleaned, because all of my pictures have had a muted, dimly-lit quality to them. The repair guy took one look through it and told me it was supporting a fungus and was irreparable. However, they did have a replacement lens, used, for $50. I suppose 17 years was plenty of life out of that old lens, and the new one is taking really amazing photographs. I also had dinner with friends from SchoolJob, and the ship is sinking even faster now than it was before. I felt a profound sense of relief that I wasn't still there, but it might have just been the margaritas talking.

On Friday, Ms. P took her first final in fifteen years. She rocked it. She had 100% going into the final, which tells you something right there. We also left for Beltaine camping. How is it that it takes an entire Civic full of stuff to keep two girls alive in the woods for two days? With friends? And free coffee? And showers and flushable toilets?

On Saturday, we watched the most beautiful Maypole ceremony I've ever seen. That new camera lens proved its worth, since I got some amazing photographs complete with ribbon-color detail. Later that night, Ms. P priestessed a Beltaine ceremony while the skies opened up and deluged the celebrants. At one point it was raining so hard I couldn't see the other side of the circle, and it wasn't that far away. I need to write a love letter to Timbuk2, since my lovely, wonderful camera was in my messenger bag outside the circle. After forty minutes of solid, unbelieveable rain, my camera was still bone-dry.

On Sunday, we came home to find that the dogs had had a huge fight that morning with the dogsitter present. They'd been growling over food for a few weeks (very unusual for them), and it finally manifested. Phoebe, as always, was afflicted only with the stiff and sticky fur that comes with Gracie having had mouthfuls of the stuff. Gracie, on the other hand, had a hole in her leg the size of a quarter and a ripped-up ear. We also found out that Ms. P's father is having additional health complications, and we won't know their real scope until we get the path lab results back in a few weeks.

On Monday, I dropped Gracie off at the vet, intending to work from home. But then the home internet went out. So I threw the laptop in my bag and headed for *bucks, where I paid an extortionate $10 for 24 hours of internet access and spent forty minutes in chat with a technie to get work's VPN and remote desktop established. Running a remote desktop across a VPN through a wireless hotspot means everything went veeeeeeeerrrrrrrrryyyyy slooooooowwwwwwwwlllllyyyyyyy, but I did get work done. The only highlight of the day is that the vet bill was lower than I thought it might be, but we got caught in Cinco de Mayo celebration crowds on our way to the dinner that was my reward for a shitty day.

It feels like Monday, but it isn't, and I'm dopey on antihistimanes, and Thursday and Friday are our company retreat, so this week is just hosed. I'm just getting through the next two days until I get to have a hot-stone massage courtesy of my lovely, lovely job.

Does everyone's life have this kind of texture, or only ours? Ms. P said last night (in reference to an acquaintence of hers), "I haven't had that kind of chaos in my life in years," but although we don't have the suicide / alcoholism / overdose / psychosis kind of chaos she was referring to, I feel like we have more than our fair share of crises and dramas. Or is that only because I like a crisis-free existence and any feels like a lot?

When I Say Everything Hurts, I Mean It

A few weeks ago I ready Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Eating." I'm sure I'd have gotten around to reading it eventually, because I love me some Michael Pollan, but it's the assigned reading for Wednesday's book club at work, so there I was.

It picks up where "The Omnivore's Dilemma" leaves off. I had heard that it was something of a retread, but where Omnivore is focused on the different methods of food production, Defense is about the implications of those methods for individual eaters. Unlike Omnivore, it answers the question, "so what the hell do I do now?"

Pollan argues that the answer to that question is three-fold: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And he further argues that we should all start vegetable gardens, because you can't get more local than your own backyard.

When I read Omnivore I wanted a garden, but mindful of our actual time, we opted for the CSA. Although I loved the CSA, it ended up being a bad fit for us--there were too many things we don't like and too many things we didn't know how to cook. With world enough and time, we could have fixed both problems, but we're not spending enough time cooking as it is, and if we have to look up what to do with celeriac, well, the reality is that it's becoming compost.

So this year, reading Defense, I got the gardening bug again. And this weekend, we started a garden.

This was no mean feat. Our yard is enormous, and the combination of torrential rains alternating with sun and my own health issues meant the grass had gotten more than unwieldy. Not only that, we don't have a really fantastic space for the garden outside the fence--our options were either too shady or too public, and I don't trust that we'd have any veggies left for ourselves. So we coopted a corner of the fenced-in part of the yard from the doggies and set to work.

Lucky for me, L&S both know how to make raised beds and were happy to pitch in. There's no way I could have done this without them, since together we spent two days to collect the lumber, cut the lumber, dig out the sod, construct raised-bed frames, fetch top soil and organic matter, and fill the damn things, and plant the actual plants. It turns out we only got enough soil for three of the six of them, and I didn't get as far as spreading mulch on the now-sod-free path, and it started to rain before we finished planting the plants we'd already gotten, but we have a garden! Sort of! We'll get the existing plants planted, and I'll spread mulch on the path, and when V comes in two weeks, I'll get him to help me complete the process.

All of that is to explain that today I am EXHAUSTED. My forearms hurt. My hamstrings hurt. My back hurts. But we're going to grow the foods we love -- tomatoes, basil, lettuce, spinach, peppers, cucumbers, thyme, mint -- and we're going to share, and we're going to see if we can successfully grow some of our sustenance.

It's a good kind of exhaustion.

Insensitive

On Sunday mornings, Ms. P and I go to the local hippie coffee house. She does homework; I read the NY Times and do the crossword puzzle. We get there around 8 or 9 at the latest, and L&S will often join us later in the process. It slows down the work considerably, but usually we've gotten enough done that it's fine.

Today, they spent the whole time ranting about how long this whole adoption process is taking them. I mean, the social worker can't meet with them for 10 WHOLE DAYS. In the end, it will have taken four or five months for the home study instead of three.

Two. Hours. To us. Whose process from decision to putting in the application (never mind the home study or waiting in the pool) will be measured in years.

We're both just drained and in tears. We're going to say something to them about it, but right now we can't see exactly how. Right now we're just nursing our wounds.

Insensitive

On Sunday mornings, Ms. P and I go to the local hippie coffee house. She does homework; I read the NY Times and do the crossword puzzle. We get there around 8 or 9 at the latest, and L&S will often join us later in the process. It slows down the work considerably, but usually we've gotten enough done that it's fine.

Today, they spent the whole time ranting about how long this whole adoption process is taking them. I mean, the social worker can't meet with them for 10 WHOLE DAYS. In the end, it will have taken four or five months for the home study instead of three.

Two. Hours. To us. Whose process from decision to putting in the application (never mind the home study or waiting in the pool) will be measured in years.

We're both just drained and in tears. We're going to say something to them about it, but right now we can't see exactly how. Right now we're just nursing our wounds.

Tax Day

Last night I sat down and finally finished my taxes. I did them originally in January, and we filed Ms. P's then as well, but she was getting money back and I was owing money, and so I sent hers and kept mine so we could eke a few more dollars of interest out of those funds.

I'm confronted with the extra-legal status of our relationship at many turns: when I sign up for an IRA and have to claim myself as single and my beneficiary as my non-spouse; when I get a new job and have to fill out forms; when I answer demographic surveys. But nowhere is this confrontation as prickly for me as it is when I sit down to do our taxes.

All of our money is joint money. We have a shared savings account, a shared checking account, and a shared money market account. Our retirement money is separate, as IRAs require of everyone, but our income and our expenses are so intertwined that there's no sense of "hers" and "mine"; there is only ours.

And yet, when I sit down to do taxes, there is hers and there is mine. Right now it's fairly simple: paychecks officially come to one or the other of us; interest income counts as mine because the account is "officially" mine, despite her being a joint owner; 401(k) payout taxes are officially mine. But what happens when we adopt a child? What happens if we, at some point down the line, buy a house together?

I know straight couples who buy houses together and have children together and choose not to marry. They willingly take on the extra burdens of figuring out taxes and apportioning fiscal responsibility in the most advantageous way. But we did choose to marry, and our choice has no bearing on our taxes, or our legal relationship to one another, or our ability to protect our family from fiscal disaster.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our taxes would have come out to about a wash and they would have been done three months ago. If we were able to file jointly as married, we would get the full "refund" of the economic stimulus package, instead of only getting half of it because Ms. P is far below the cut-off and this year, because of the aforementioned 401(k) fun, I'm over the line.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our outsides would match our insides, and we wouldn't exist in a kind of reality-shifting no-man's land that questions, at every turn, the actuality of our lives. There are days when the constant stress of having to assert the reality our lives, our relationship, our family becomes visible as stress, as a constant activity we engage in, and this is one of those days.

Weekend Update

• While reading the NYTimes on Sunday morning, I was suddenly overcome with the desire to attend a dance class. Not ballet, although I have more ballet training than anything else. I want jazz, salsa, modern, African--anything that's energetic and joyous. The yoga studio down the street, to which my mother gave me a 10-class card for my birthday, offers some good options, so as soon as my period tapers off, I'm heading down there.
• I've been listening to country music at work courtesy of Pandora. It makes me very happy for reasons I can't quite explain. Music is more important to me than I sometimes give it credit for. Despite not listening to much of any music all weekend, I had a full playlist of country music in the jukebox in my head. This morning's inexplicable choice was "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." Shrug.
• I attended OldJob's annual fundraising gala on Saturday. The kool-aid has definitely worn off. My date, who was once my employee, stood me up because she flat-out forgot about it. I got to catch up briefly with those colleagues I love and miss, but I also watched while Mr. Burns gave credit for the school's success to those employees who have nothing to do with the students instead of the ones who have raised test scores, raised standards, raised the college enrollment, and otherwise made it a good and productive place to learn. Priorities much? I also spent the rest of the weekend saying "we" and "our" about it, while Ms. P gently corrected me. It was a relief to arrive at NewJob this morning.
• I bought an EEE PC, which is just the cutest damn thing ever. It's a tiny little Linux box that's the size of a fat moleskine, and it runs OpenOffice and wireless internet, which means I can take it on our weekend jaunts to the coffee shop and not feel deprived that Ms. P gets the "real" computer because she's doing homework. Not only that, it only weighs two pounds, so it's weight in my bag is negligible. And it's green. I'm a total geek.
• And speaking of geekiness, I'm also stripping, reformatting, and reinstalling the "real" laptop, since it has gradually acquired problems. After the reformat and reinstall, however, the "standby" option is still greyed out in the shutdown procedure. Anyone more computer-savvy than I am have any suggestions for what I do next? I did once have a computer that got infected such that I had to overwrite the harddrive by hand using some old Norton utility that displayed the 1s and 0s, but I doubt it's still around.

About Face

One of the weirdest things about moving to the for-profit world is that, suddenly, I'm in a world that thinks capitalism is just great.

I mean, I didn't grow up in the world of business. My father was in the military, and my mother, when she worked, was the scheduler at a home health care agency. While there were budgetary aspects to their jobs, neither of them were trying to maximize profits for shareholders. These weren't concepts I was familiar with.

My dad does love the stock market, but he also thinks the American economy is just seconds away from whole-sale collapse because we aren't on the gold standard. (I'll entertain the idea that our economy can go under, but not because of the gold standard or lackthereof.) Investing, in my dad's world, is pretty much all about complicated strategies to predict market fluctuations rather than an analysis of actual businesses.

My education didn't fill in any gaps, either. Capitalism is roundly critiqued in humanistic theoretical circles, and for some very good reasons: It reinforces existing inequities by confusing individual privilege with "talent" and "drive"; it equates worth with money; it undermines community; it puts individual good and collective good in competition with one another (and guess which one loses?); it manipulates us into an endless quest for more and more and more and we end up unhappier than ever.

And then I ended up in public education, and while public education is always and forever budget-conscious (because those budgets keep getting slashed), it's not about making money either. My friends are in academia and mental health care and non-profit work.

Now, I'm far more a Quaker than I am a Socialist, but I have some fundamental skepticism about the overall compatibility of capitalism with healthy human flourishing. And now I'm working for a company that makes its money helping people understand investing by understanding what makes a good company.

Not only that, Ms. P and I just opened IRAs. IRAs make investing real, unlike 401(k) plans, which mostly involved my picking two or three investments out of the fifteen available Morningstar listings without understanding a damn thing.

And so somehow, I need to start thinking about business and capitalism in a broader way. I still think many things about it suck, and we're not going to be buying stock in tobacco companies, industrial food production machines, or anything that strikes us as fueling the things we're fighting against with other choices, but still. Not all companies are bad. I'm working on this one.

Listening

When L&S first started really looking into adoption again, I told them how much reading blogs had been valuable to me in thinking through the process. I was thinking about Shannon and Dawn, Nicole and Jenna. I was thinking about issycat and Jae Ran Kim.

Two weeks later, L told me that she didn't know what blogs I'd been reading, but all the things she'd learned on blogs about the home study process were dead wrong.

It's a small thing, really, but it's illustrative of our different journeys to this same place. I know that the adoption agency will answer all of the factual questions I have about the home study, the fees, the forms, the process, and the wait. That's what they do.

But what they can't answer -- no matter how progressive they are, no matter how much they believe that the best choice for most women considering placing their children for adoption is parenting those children, no matter how much they advocate open adoptions -- is what that experience is really and truly like for the people involved, because at the end of the day, adoption agencies serve adoptive parents. Not children. Not expectant parents considering adoption. And I want to know how people have really experienced adoption, in all of its complicated facets.

That's why I read blogs. I read blogs written by women who placed children for adoption, some of whom have open adoptions and some of whom don't, some of whom are very angry and some of whom aren't. I read blogs written by women who have adopted children, some of whom are parenting transracially. I read blogs written by people who were adopted. And as I read I'm conscious of the blogs that don't exist, so far as I can tell: narratives by fathers, first or adoptive; narratives by people who have no issues whatsoever with their position in the triad and so don't talk about adoption.

I know that none of these blogs is representative -- none of them can stand in for the whole. But I'm not looking for the one Truth of adoption. I'm looking to understand the range of experience, the range of what people go through when they become part of the triad. I want to know what goes unsaid in everyday life because everyone's afraid of hurting everyone else's feelings. I want to know, from the perspective of first parents and people who have been adopted, what adoptive parents do wrong, what they get wrong, where they go wrong. I want to know where some of the obvious and common landmines are, knowing as well that every adoption has its own landscape born of the specific people and moments involved.

Sometimes reading adoption blogs is painful, given my strong desire for a child. I have spent a fair amount of time questioning the ethics of adoption itself (more on that in a later post), and yes, sometimes I've flinched away from the raw pain I've come across. Sometimes I don't want to hear what people have to say, because I, too, want to live in the fantasy. I want to drink the Kool-aid.

But I'm conscious of the fact that, as a prospective adoptive parent, I'm the one with the privilege. I'm the one the system is set up to support and respond to. And because I have that privilege, I have a responsibility to question it, to listen to and take seriously the voices of people who don't have the privilege, to use what privilege I do have in ways that dismantle the privilege and address the oppressions that are part and parcel of privilege. To do any of that, I have to listen. And so I read blogs, which, although always and forever partial, are also in many ways more honest than any lecture, workshop, or face-to-face conversation could ever be.

I'll be more stressed out about the logistics when we're dealing with the actual application, I'm sure, and to be fair, that's where L&S are. But I'm suspicious of a tendency among adoptive and prospective adoptive parents to ignore the voices of first parents and adoptees. I'm suspicious of the sugarcoating, the whitewashing, the assumption that if you just don't look, everything is peachy-keen. I'm suspicious of the assumption that agencies can provide everything one needs to adopt ethically.

At some level, all of that is about the desire to pretend on some level that adoption is "just like" birth, that first parents aren't part of the equation, that we don't need to know or understand any of the messy undersides of a difficult and complicated situation. I can't be part of that. So I read my blogs, keep up with the stories, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, and the struggles, because it's in the best interests of the child I hope one day to parent.