November 2008 Archives
At dinner last night, Husband and I talked about the menu for Thanksgiving Dinner.
The peanut gallery felt compelled to weigh in.
Loudly.
Caleb: I WILL NOT EAT THAT TURKEY. TURKEY'S YUCKY. AND I DO NOT LIKE PIE. I WANT CAKE.
Liam, infinitely more reasonable now that he's eight: I will eat some turkey. With salt only. No gravy. No stuffing. I hate mashed potatoes. And I only want ice cream for dessert, not pie. I hate pie. It has fruit in it.
He thought for a moment, then added: Can we have soda with Thanksgiving because it's a holiday?
Caleb, not to be outdone: I want tanksgivn HOT DOG. On a BUN. With KETCHUP.
Here's what I thought when Caleb patted me awake yesterday morning, Sunday: "But I was mommy yesterday - why do I have to do it again? Can't someone else play mommy today?"
Seriously. Wouldn't all parents do better with regular sabbaticals from parenting? Sometimes I think that divorced parents with joint custody of their children really have the right idea; or perhaps an arrangement similar to the one the novelist Fannie Hurst had with her husband, back in 1915: they maintained separate apartments, had breakfast together two or three times a week, and called each other to make dinner plans.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
I spent Sunday recovering from the birthday party we had for Liam on Saturday afternoon, which was a relatively low-key affair, for Manhattan: we used the community lounge-space in our building and had games, a movie on the big screen TV, pizza, cake, goody-bag, good-bye. Cleanup was easy and I didn't have to try and hide the disaster area of my apartment from the parents who were dropping off their kids.
And yes, that is a picture of the cake I baked. A mommy friend insisted I document my culinary achievement, particularly because hiding under that atrociously sweet store-bought frosting is a chocolate cake with three cups of zucchini in it. It's the only way my kids eat vegetables (I'm sure that any day now, Liam will be diagnosed with scurvy, given the lack o'leafy greens in his diet). If you want pictures of real cakes, check out ezrapoundcake.com - great recipes and a fabulous play on words at the same time - what a bargain!
But as we put together this birthday party, I started to wonder...back in the days of my youth (lo those many decades ago), did I get what amounted to essentially three birthdays? It seems pretty standard now for kids to get cupcakes or something at school, then perhaps a family gathering, and then the actual party with their friends. And these parties...skating parties, bowling parties, gymnastics parties...hundreds and hundreds of dollars. In NYC, birthday parties are a lucrative industry, in part because unless you're lucky enough to have some kind of common space in your building, none of us really has the space (or inclination) to allow large groups of rambunctious children into our apartments.
And once you're having a party, you're also hooked into...the goody bag. That little trophy of participation, the "thank you for coming" present...Did we used to get those? Maybe, back in the day, if you won the game of Bozo Buckets, you got a little prize, but coming home with a zippy little bag filled with plastic doodads and maybe some candy...? Where did that idea come from?
Is there some mom in a remote suburb of Westchester living under an assumed name for fear that her secret will be revealed - that she is the ground zero of goody bags?
How do we resist this seemingly endless celebration of birth? Yeah, yeah, your being born is a big deal, and we're glad you're here, but couldn't we just toss you a cake and be done with it?
It's a game of chicken, really, I think, or maybe an arms race. None of us wants to be the mean mom who doesn't bring a treat on the birthday; none of us wants to host the party where there were no goody bags. I thought maybe I'd outgrow peer pressure once I left high-school - and for a while there, in my early thirties, I did. Then Liam started school and once again, all I want to do is hang with the cool kids (and yes, probably I would jump off a bridge if they did, what about it?)
Clearly I have no solution to this problem - all the kids who came on Saturday got decks of Kung Fu Panda Uno cards, and a small Hershey bar - and I felt a little guilty that we didn't give the guests more. At one point, I'd thought that we wouldn't do goody-bags at all, but my resolve melted into a puddle of imagined recriminations.
What this means, of course, is that I should start planning for Caleb's birthday, which is in August, now.
Next year, Caleb will start kindergarten.
This simple sentence keeps me awake at night, not just because I worry that he will be the only boy in his class with a nookie in his pocket (looks a bit like a rocket, true, but neither is appropriate at morning story-time).
Nope, the nookie is only a fraction of my worry. My main worry is our address. We live outside the "catchment," as it's known, for the public school that Liam attends - a school we like and where Liam is pretty happy. Yes, I know that in some worlds, Caleb would attend the same school his brother does, no questions asked. But - cue maniacal laughter - we live in Manhattan. Which means that just because we got a variance for Liam to go to this school, we shouldn't for a minute expect that Caleb will get one, too.
Maybe the next time I can't sleep, I should call Joel Klein, our so-not-beloved Chancellor of Schools. I'm pretty sure he stays up nights too, plotting ways to make the lives of middle-class New York families ever more difficult. One of last year's tricks, for example, was the "centralizing" of pre-K and Kindergarten choices: families filled out a gazillion forms, made copies of their lease, their mortgage, their birth certificates, and just about any other piece of paper they could find, and sent their packets of information to...
Pennsylvania. Which is, apparently, "central" to folks at the DOE.
You will be stunned to know that there were glitches with this centralization process: families with twins were told that each twin would be sent to a different school. Families "in district" were sent to far-away schools, and some families weren't told where they were going until early September.
In short - a mess. And an expensive one - those people in Pennsylvania didn't work cheap. But we'll come back to money in a minute.
To get Liam into his school, we had to get a variance - or, in DOE parlance, "placement exception request." Acquiring this form took about fifteen phone calls, several emails, and three trips to an office building in Herald Square. I had to fill it out and return it to the office on the first day of business in January of the year Liam entered kindergarten. So on January 2, I hauled ass out of bed and hustled over to 333 7th Avenue - and my form was far from the first in the pile. We didn't hear from the school until mid-August, after we'd already started forking over money we didn't have to a private school that had given us huge amounts of financial aid. Mostly we don't regret our decision to shift from private to public, particularly when it comes time for birthdays, holidays, new winter coats, the occasional vacation... all of which would be a stretch if we'd had to continue to pay that tuition bill.
Now it's Caleb's turn and, given the DOE's proclivities to change its procedures whenever Joel Klein can't sleep, there's a new PER policy (love those acronyms, dontcha?) But no one knows what the policy will be. No one can tell me when variance forms will be available, when the forms will be due, or when we'll find out. The "centralizing" process that was put in place last year has been yanked, according to a recent article in the Times, but it's not clear what (if anything) will take its place. The article made it sound like children in Caleb's category are not precisely high priority: first to enroll are kids who live in the school's zone, and next are kids who live in the district but outside the zone. Then we get to Caleb's situation: kids outside the district who have a sibling in the school.
This map, from the DOE website, is supposed to help clarify things. But nowhere on the site does it explain those red lines. Are those "catchments?" Maybe they are "regions?" Or "zones?"
What are our options? We could try again for private school and simply close our eyes to the financial strain and to the potential inequity of sending one kid public and the other private. But without financial aid...? Well, tuition at Friends Seminary, for example, a wonderful private Quaker school nearby, is upwards of thirty grand (not including mandatory fees and "donations"). Unfortunately, I have not a spare pile of cash on hand.
Other options: Hunter College Elementary School, the holy grail of public elementary schools in NYC because it's the hardest to get into: you need to hit some mark (upwards of the 96th percentile) on an IQ test even to be allowed to the second round of the admission process. Hunter takes 48 kids in kindergarten (and another batch later, in seventh grade) - 24 girls and 24 boys. Hunter gets more than a thousand applications a year and I'll bet that this year, as the economic bad news penetrates further and further into formerly affluent households, even more applications will come flooding in.
What else? We could aim for the so-called G&T programs (and no, unfortunately, these are not schools that serve gin and tonics at their PTA meetings, but what a good idea). These are the "gifted and talented" programs, some of which draw from a city-wide population and others that are local (in terms of district, zone, catchment...who knows). The DOE instituted a new policy last year for TAG programs that was supposed to increase diversity among TAG programs (and did precisely the opposite) by standardizing admissions.
Here's how that standardizing works: kids take a test and depending on their score, they are admitted or not. Period, end of discussion.
Right. Depending on how your four-year old fares during a particular hour on a particular day (and on whether you can wring the correct information from the DOE website about how to apply), your child may or may not be eligible for an advanced curriculum, smaller classes, and (probably) more engaged classmates.
Basically, despite all this standardization, it's a crapshoot: did Caleb play nicely with the doctor who administered the IQ test for Hunter admissions? Will Caleb tell the examiner that the TAG tests are stupid? Where does recalcitrance fall on the "talented and gifted" grid? Will my variance request, when I ever get it, be mis-filed because I don't have the same last name as my son?
If it weren't the educational fate of my children at stake here, this whole scenario would make me laugh. All these efforts to standardize and streamline, so much energy put into plotting points on a grid, arranging data in a graph - but does anyone know a four-year old who plots tidily into a chart? And what does this data really tell us?
Let's look at a different data set for a minute, shall we? Let's look at some costs: the city spent 130 million dollars designing and implementing "school report cards" that are supposed to increase "transparency" in the schools - if you can figure out how to read the report card (click here to see the spreadsheet). Another eighty million bucks got spent on a computer record-keeping program that doesn't work and then there was the paltry six million they spent on surveys for parents, teachers, and students. Let's see...that's about TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN MILLION DOLLARS for...paperwork? Wonder how these numbers factor into the recently announced 1.5% school budget cuts - Liam's school just lost fifty thousand dollars from its budget, with warnings of more cuts to come next year.
What happens when a city - oh hell, let's extrapolate, shall we? - when a country can't properly educate its children?
That's why the question of Caleb's kindergarten keeps me up at night.
Today Liam turns eight. Often on birthdays, parents trot out the baby pictures - here you are with mommy in the hospital; here you are the day you came home. But with Liam, as is perhaps the case with other preemies, we've hesitated to show him those pictures because - well, frankly, some of them are a little scary.
Take this picture, for example:
I mean, despite the caption printed on the bottom, he's really not adorable. That camera, with its ridiculous captions, gave us all a few giggles in the dark days after Liam was born - someone had gotten it in a hurry at the hospital gift shop, not realizing that all the alarming photos - of Liam with tubes and monitors and bandages - would be automatically printed with "It's a boy!" and "He's so cute!" and so forth. Added a note of the absurd to an already surreal experience.
After ten days on bed rest and two days in the hospital, I'd been delivered of Liam in an emergency c-section - the doctors had seen his heart rate decelerating and so bam! we were zoomed into the delivery room. So while on the one hand, Liam wasn't particularly adorable, he was, on the other hand, alive.
Liam spent two months in the hospital after he was born and none of the dire predictions we were confronted with in the first weeks after his birth came to pass: no liver failure, no kidney problems, no vision problems, no respiratory problems, no infections. He became a "grower and a feeder" - a baby who simply needed to achieve the magic weight of four pounds before he could be safely discharged. But let me tell you, when your baby starts at one pound, ten ounces, four pounds seems utterly unattainable - seems huge.
Clearly I wouldn't be nursing right away, so I bonded with my Medela breast pump, a machine designed to remind women of their links with the bovine world. I hated that machine but I was determined that Liam would get breast milk when they were ready to wean him off the IV nutrient line in his arm. I pumped and pumped, freezing the small plastic bags of breast milk and carting them up to the hospital in an insulated satchel. I found those frozen bags, like little popsicles, in the freezer for months afterward.
Liam started taking breast milk in a tube through his nose, which the nurses insisted didn't bother him (I never believed them), and then, when he was a little older, in a tube down his throat - starting with 2cc. Do you know what an infinitely small drop 2cc is? Like a flyspeck - another reason why four pounds seemed light years away.
Drip by drip, ounce by ounce, Liam gained weight and after he'd been in the hospital about six weeks, they let me try to nurse him. It was damn near impossible - Husband was sure I was going to suffocate the poor thing. The proportions were all out of whack: imagine a cantaloupe. Now imagine a tangerine. You can see the problem.
(Things got so bad that after Liam came home, in fact, that we had a woman from the La Leche League come over for a consult - now there's a weird job, hmm? Travel around the city fondling women's breasts in order to help them nurse their babies? I've always thought there's a sitcom premise in there somewhere...)
We spent hours in the surprisingly noisy confines of the NICU (monitors beeping, intercoms squawking, babies crying, timers buzzing) doing "kangaroo care": swaddling baby Liam in our shirts, next to our hearts, holding him close to give him some semblance of the stillness and calm that he missed out on by being born so abruptly. We held him and marveled, like all parents do, at the perfection of this new being, but somehow his tiny-ness made him all the more remarkable: he had none of the soft creases and rounded folds that most new babies have. We could see where his bones joined together, covered by a layer of skin so thin as to be almost translucent.
He came home on the dot of four pounds, the day after an operation to repair a double hernia. We plopped him, still swaddled in his car seat, in the middle of our living room floor, then plopped down next to him and just stared. Home. Dubya had been declared president, but we didn't care (much) because Liam was home.
Eight years later, my formidable son gazes at the world with wit and intelligence, and a certainty of self that I don't think I found until somewhere in my mid-thirties, after years of therapy. I know Liam can't consciously remember those two months in a plastic shoebox, being stuck with needles on an almost daily basis (red blood cell count, white blood cell count, electrolyte levels, infections, on and on). But sometimes, when I smooth back his mop of hair, I remember that tiny, oddly wizened little baby, and I can see the same thin web of blue veins in his temples that I used to trace with my finger when I reached through the little door of his isolette to say good-night.
Sometimes, when I think about Liam, I remember the closing lines of a poem by Robert Frost, "Putting in the Seed," which is ostensibly about a farmer doing his spring planting - but is also about birth:
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Liam came into the world too early, but his tenacity and grace have rooted in our lives; I watch him, wide-eyed and curious, to see what he will become.
I've been hooked, bitten, seduced, sucked in, pulled under.
Ever since last Tuesday, more or less, I've been living in two worlds: Manhattan, and Forks, Washington.
Yes, it's true. Stephanie Meyer, the sweet-faced Mormon Mom from Arizona, author of the Twilight series, can now count me as one of her readers.
It shouldn't have happened this way. I mean, I've got a doctorate, fer crissake! In literature! I'm supposed to read books like Twilight with an ironic sneer, with a knowing wink-wink at the cognoscenti to indicate that I'm reading these fat books with their sexy red, white, and black covers just to stay in touch with pop culture.
Truth be told, that is how I started - a colleague and I are having a "book chat" with a group of first-year college students about Twilight and then taking the group to the movie. So when I got my copy of the book, I figured if nothing else I'd get a little insight into the world of the YA reader. An adult friend of mine had started the first book and hadn't gotten past the first few pages, so I wasn't expecting much.
That night I read until 1:30. The next night until 12:30. Then I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the other three books (two of which are still in hardcover). This detail matters because I'm a get-it-on-reserve-in-the-library gal - if any more books take up permanent residence in our apartment, we'll have to move out.
Not this time. Plunked down my money, grabbed my books, and went home to my small fractious children (one of whom had strep throat last week, one of whom was home on a school holiday). I proceeded to let them both watch the telly (usually verboten in our house until that dark hour after dinner and before bedtime) so that I could READ. AND READ. AND READ.
I finished the fourth book Friday night.
Sunday I started the first one again.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME?
Don't get me wrong. These are not well-written books. The Jack Reacher thrillers, by Lee Child, for example, are probably better written, and the great Donna Leon detective stories, set in Venice (thanks, Sean, for telling me about those), have characters who are infinitely more "real." In Meyer's books, characters say things like "I love you more than everyone else in the world combined," which, while perhaps an accurate transcription of how a 17 year old girl might talk, doesn't make for profound insight.
And yet - I am obsessed. Maybe I was an easy target: I've always been a bit of a vampire junkie, ever since I was a little girl sneaking to a friend's house to watch "Dark Shadows" (which gave me horrifying nightmares for months, but that's a post for another day). I loved "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which had much more interesting, complicated things to say about gender relationships than does Twilight. But even though Buffy's sensibility is closer to my own, the show never enthralled me the way these books have. Even that other pillar of vampire pop culture, Interview with a Vampire, which I read when I was about thirteen, didn't hook me like Twilight has,
So here I am, a middle-aged woman with several advanced degrees, completely enamored of an alternate universe in the Pacific Northwest, where vampires and werewolves and shape-shifters live among us, going shopping, going to the prom, and driving really, really hot cars.
My real life - that pesky pile of student papers on the floor, the email stacking up like planes at Newark, the laundry that threatens to spill into the hallway - seems intrusive, almost rude. Vampires don't have laundry or dishes or dust or bills or children with strep throat.
Meyer paints a fairy tale about an ordinary girl beloved by an extraordinary being, although this fairy tale has quite the kicker: to keep the prince, you have to sacrifice your soul
And it's tempting, I have to say. Maybe that's because I've not quite come to terms yet with that whole "soul" question, but from where I'm standing, it looks like an easy trade: sacrifice my soul, which may or may not exist, in order to get: eternal love, exquisite beauty, an extraordinarily well-mannered lovah (as Sarah Jessica P would say), lots of money, loads of free time (no time spent sleeping, you see, so plenty of time to learn a language, travel, paint, write, study). What's not to like?
Meyer sweetens the pot even further by making her vampires "vegetarians" (their joke): they have sworn not to kill humans, only wild animals. Thus the whole "blood-sucking" thing becomes a little less hard to swallow (sorry, couldn't resist). I mean, if you've ever ordered steak tartare in a restaurant...
So is it just the fairy tale? Is that what has led to the series' enormous success and the huge buzz around the movie? Is that why I'm feeling a bit befuddled these days (or maybe I'm getting strep, who knows) - a case of fairy-tale-itis?
There is more for me to think about here, in part because I'm vaguely appalled that I've been recommending that people read these damn books. But I can't write any more tonight. I've got to go re-read book three.
After dinner the other night, we turned on the soundtrack from "The Commitments," that great movie about Motown in Ireland. It's a great family dance record - "Mustang Sally" has been one of Liam's favorite songs from his first staggering steps, and Caleb will dance to just about anything.
Our favorite dancing tune, though, is "Treat Her Right," with its "hey hey hey" chorus and heavy bass line. Caleb's got a great hip swaggle when he dances, but the other night he was wiggling around with one hand clasped firmly on his crotch, like a tiny Michael Jackson.
Typical mother that I am, I didn't realize that this was perhaps a stylistic choice on his part, so I told him we could pause the music while he went to the bathroom and peed.
He stared at me witheringly. "Mommy. I'm just holding my penis. It's what you do when you dance to this music."
Oh.
Guess we can pretty much rule out auditions for "Billy Elliott."
Another day walking home from school with Liam. His birthday is next week, so I asked him what Grandma should get him for his birthday, expecting "lego set, pokemon cards, bionicles," - you know, standard-issue 8 year old stuff.
He paused, turned, threw his arms in the air. "She should spend EIGHTY DOLLARS and get me a TUXEDO!" he proclaimed. "Like real vampires wear. Or a spy."
On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof's column addressed the "second most remarkable thing" about Obama's election: the country will welcome into the White House "an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual."
That's right, folks, a member of the professoriat has achieved the highest post in the land (and no, I don't mean the Presidency of Harvard, sorry Drew Faust).
Does Barack's election mean that it might start to be cool to be smart? Every fall, I teach groups of first-year honors students - kids who are complete over-achievers, who work hard, who spend hours in community service (not just at the holidays), who get terrific grades - and I always ask them if, in high school, it was considered cool to be smart. Almost to a person they shake their heads, "no, no, no way." The kids who do say it was okay usually went to very small Catholic high schools, where the nuns had done such a number on the students that they all thought they were idiots - and thus there were no "smart kids" to ostracize.
At the other end of the spectrum are those kids for whom doing well academically is seen as some kind of sell-out, some kind of betrayal of family or neighborhood or friends. I've worked with these kids and it's dreadful to watch them undercutting their own achievements because failure is more familiar than stretching towards something unknown.
Or maybe, additionally, Barack's election means that now professors should start being slightly more sartorially savvy. I mean, is there any logical reason that rumpled = intelligent? I know, I know, professors are too busy Thinking Serious Thoughts to avoid things like pleated trousers, "fun" ties, and bad shoes. Or maybe we're all too broke to upgrade our wardrobes with any regularity.
Kristof's column brought something else to mind, however, besides the possible smartification of the country.
It gave me a theme for the Barackian Presidency:
Bringing Brainy Back.
Think about it: both Barack and Justin Timberlake have graced the cover of Rolling Stone numerous times; both men espouse a Rat Pack fashion sensibility (skinny ties, narrow suits); both borrow heavily from a mixture of racial vernaculars, although doubtless Timberlake is the better rapper. And let's face it, they're both rock stars.
Timberlake's pop song starts "I'm bringing sexy back/Them other boys don't know how to act" - and doesn't that, with one minor change, sum it up: Obama brought brainy back, and those other boys (and girls) don't know how to act?
Of course, the song itself, which lasts roughly four minutes, is composed of about forty words in total and makes some unfortunate references to slavery, shackles, and whips - not in the historical sense, mind you, but in another, uh...more intimate context. Clearly unsuitable for Inaugural Dancing.
But we're bringin' brainy back anyway, with or without that pesky final "g."
Fall is Harvest Time: apples, squash, pumpkins, the last of the lettuces. The Greenmarket in Union Square is a mecca for cooks, both serious and amateur; for photographers, who exclaim over the brilliant colors (causing the farmers to snicker); and for urban wanderers, who wander among the stands and pretend they're in bucolic-ville.
I go to the Greenmarket several times a week, hoping somehow to instill in Liam and Caleb the awareness that food doesn't come from Fresh Direct boxes.I'm not sure it's working (the list of what my children won't eat is a daily testament to my failure as a mother), but I persist.
This summer, I even went so far as to plant my own vegetables. Three vegetables, to be precise. No, not three types of vegetables, just three vegetables: one pot of carrots (didn't grow); many pumpkin seeds, which turned into one thriving pumpkin vine for June and July, spawning great thoughts of Halloween carving, until mid-August, when the vines wizened and died, looking much like the legs and feet of the Wicked Witch of the West, post-house collision. And sweet potatoes, which I plant mostly because I like the bright green vines - I twine them around the fence of our terrace in an effort to make things look a little less institutional.
(Yes, we have that most precious of New York commodities: outside space. Across the hall from our apartment is a concrete fenced-in terrace that runs the length of the building; it gets sun until about noon at the peak of summer, as well as a steady stream of noise and bus exhaust.)
The vines grew and grew and I kind of forgot about the potatoes down there in the dirt, until I was cleaning up the flower pots this weekend, doing an urban version of readying the farm for winter. On the 15th floor, winter preparation involves throwing away the dead plants, saving the potting soil in plastic bags to be reused for next year, and taping black garbage bags over the two rose bushes, in hopes that they might bloom again next year (I've got my doubts).
But as I cleared out the long window box with the vines in it, I discovered that voila! I had grown two potatoes! The boys were amazed - and a little horrified by the coiled length of reddish vine I pulled from the soil.
I had some vague doubts about actually eating these things - god only knows what kind of New York city toxins filtered into the soil - but I figured whatever it was wouldn't kill us in such relatively small doses. Besides, whatever was going into the dirt was going into our lungs every day anyway, and we're not dead yet, as they say in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (a comment that comes verbatim from Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year. Swear to god).
So we peeled the potatoes, sliced 'em up, and made french fries! They look pretty good, right? Nicely crispy, a little sprinkling of Maldon sea salt...
Delish.
The boys each ate about two and then Caleb asked if we had any tater tots.
What's the growing season on a tater tot, I wonder?
It's been four days since The Election and mirabile dictu, Barack is still president. No Rovian chicanery has caused a recount in some Ohio district, no "non-activist" judge has reinterpreted the amendments that allow women and African Americans to vote. So that's a relief, eh?
There are some rumblings among public school parents in NYC, of which I am one, about rumors that Barack is thinking about nominating Joel Klein (NYC Chancellor of Schools) as Secretary of Education. Klein is a high-handed autocrat who relies far too heavily on test scores as a measure of "accountability;" he cuts the school budgets at the whim of the mayor - while spending millions and millions of dollars on meaningless surveys that are expensively printed and mailed to every single public school parent in the city. There's more to complain about, but this post is not going to be railing about NYC's public schools. That would take an infinite number of blog posts plus my head would explode.
Instead - well, on this gloomy wet New York day, I'm going to weigh in on something infinitely more profound: The Michelle Obama Grant Park Dress Debate.
It was hideous. Maybe in person, or at a cocktail party, or on Project Runway, that red-and-black dress would be totally hot and fashion forward. But under the lights, on TV, and in front of 125,000 people? Uh...no.
Critics of the dress, however, have overlooked the truly horrible aspect of this Narcisco Rodriguez creation. The dress is at the top of this post - now look at this:
See that red double triangle?
Exactly.
Is that the image the new first lady should be projecting? Methinks not.
Don't get me wrong - I'm still walking on air about Obama's election and would willing give just about anything (first born? second born? Husband? all three?) to be able to attend any of the inaugural parties - or even to stand in the cold in DC and watch on some Jumbotron somewhere as Barack gets sworn in
(FYI: Inauguration Day? Also my birthday. Makes getting that much closer to 50 almost okay.)
Let's just hope that this dress is the last time Michelle uses an arachnid as her fashion consultant. Maybe Tim Gunn could volunteer his services?
6:32AM, the day after election day.
"Mommy, Obama won, he won!" The same four little hands as yesterday, but this time chilly from already having gone downstairs for the paper before I was even awake.
The boys want to know the score, because of course if someone won, then there's a score. Once I'd gotten some coffee into me (don't I realize that I'm too old to start drinking champagne at 11PM? I guess one must suffer for history), I realized that there were, in fact, a whole lot of ways to answer that question:
- The electoral college score: 349 to 173 as of mid-morning, with North Carolina still uncalled.
- The voter rolls: more than 3 million first-time voters
- The international opinion meter: way higher than on November 3rd
- The national optimism meter: WAY higher than on November 3rd
- The correcting-history score: off the chart
Because I live in Manhattan, I could be pretty sure of encountering equally elated citizens this morning as I went around doing my errands after dropping the boys at their respective schools. (Okay, so Caleb has maybe just a little glimmer of a fever, but Mommy has Got Stuff To Do and it doesn't involve pushing a four-year-old around in a stroller all day.) At the grocery store, the farmer's market, Staples ... everyone had a little smile, and the "have a good day" exchanges seemed particularly meaningful.
For someone like me, who has a pretty cynical worldview (and okay, I'm often bitter, too, but without the guns and religion), what seems perhaps the most unreal about today is the emotion bubbling inside me. I think - dear god could it be? - I think I feel ... patriotism. Actual patriotism: pride about what my country represents, about what it did for itself last night, about the amazingly peaceful transition that just took place and that continues to unfold. Think about it: an entire regime has just been deposed without a single shot.
It's true: this liberal cynic feels patriotic, dammit, like maybe I should be wearing red-white-and-blue, or a flag pin or something. I am, frankly, amazed that my country, which so often takes pride in its xenophobia and ignorance, and which has for so long clung to narrow and parochial views of difference, managed to shake off its blinders and move forward towards something - dare we say it - that has the potential for magnificence?
Last night, in his amazing speech in Grant Park, Obama said "that's the true genius of America, that America can change." We needn't be trapped by tradition, or convention, or the bleaker parts of our own history. Let's revel in this particular change, shall we? Here's an image that will bring a smile: imagine Dubya trying to make that speech - no, not write that speech, we all know that's impossible - just trying to get his mouth around all those elegant, powerful words - those elegant, powerful ideas.
Before we left for school this morning, Liam and Caleb were working together (see? Barack does work miracles) on a lego fortress/castle/poison destroyer. Liam was sing-songing to himself as he worked: "we have a president and his color is black, we have a president and his color is black." Every now and then, Caleb would chime in "and blue!" because he's very excited about the Empire State building being lit up in Democratic blue tonight.
I guess you could say, then, that today, for a change, black-and-blue are the color of victory.
"Mommy, wake up, wake up." It's my typical alarm: four little hands patting me out of deep, luxurious, all-too-brief sleep. During the week reveille is between 6:22-6:46; on the weekends I get until the ripe old hour of 7.
I opened one eye, thought fast: "hey, guys, why don't you go downstairs to get the newspaper and check out the line at the polling place. It's election day." Our voting place is, conveniently, in a student lounge space in the back hall of our building; the boys always come with us to vote, usually in their pjs.
"ELECTION DAY! ELECTION DAY!" You'd have thought it was Christmas and birthday.
They stomped out of the bedroom, chanting "O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!" and I heard them racing down the hall to the elevators, intent on scouting out our voting prospects.
Their enthusiasm was dampened by the line at the polling place (confession: we inadvertently cut the line, so what should have been a ninety minute wait was maybe 45 minutes.To all who waited in line around us: apologies).
We finally wedged our way into the voting booths - Husband with Caleb, me with Liam. I watched Liam pull the lever for an African American presidential candidate.
Will Liam remember this, when he's finally old enough to vote on his own? Will Caleb? What if they remember the Obama presidency with the same ruefulness with which I think about the first Clinton term?
Remember the heady thrill when Clinton was elected? I was at an election party with graduate student friends, all of us totally broke, but we scraped together our credit cards to buy celebratory champagne. And then over the next four - eight - years, that elation just dribbled away.. But I won't think about that now.
Instead, over the course of the day, I started to feel - well, almost giddy. Like Liam and Caleb this morning (before the line-waiting part)
We had to pry Liam away from the TV earlier tonight for bedtime - he was furious about having to go to bed before it was all over and I will be sorely tempted to wake him up if Obama wins.
Now it's ten o'clock and they've just called Ohio for Obama. So okay, I'm going to say it - when Obama wins.
Maybe our country really can do this, really can cast off the ugliness of the past eight years. When I see the 70,000 people crowded into Grant Park in Chicago, I want to cry. I'm sure I will cry before the evening is out - not just out of relief, but out of pride. Pride in the people of this country who waited in line for hours to vote, who worked and worked and worked to get this man elected. (Swivelheader writes about this too, very eloquently.)
My mother is at a friend's apartment in Chicago, overlooking Millenium Park; she's planning to walk with her friends down to Grant Park later tonight, although she says she can hear the crowds from the apartment balcony. She's been an Obama supporter from his early days in Illinois and when she called me just now to exclaim over the Ohio thing, the phone practically vibrated with her excitement.
Some of my earliest memories are of canvassing with her on the North Side of Chicago; of going to "headquarters" to help stuff envelopes; of leaflets from this or that political campaign being piled under the dining table. Politics - good old-fashioned progressive politics - has been an integral part of her life as long as I've known her. And although I've never been as active in politics as she has, I'm hoping to give my children what she's given me: a firm belief that politics can be an honorable profession and that it does matter who runs - and who votes.
This election - and maybe all US elections going forward, until we institute serious voting reform measures - will occur in the long shadow of What Happened in Florida in 2000 (and, to lesser degree, in Ohio in 2004).
Much of what happened in 2000, however, I didn't realize until I saw the HBO movie "Recount," which is a fabulous - and maddening - dramatization of the grand-scale theft of Gore's victory (and concomitant disenfranchisement of who-knows-how-many US citizens).
It's not that I didn't want to pay attention to what was happening while it happened; it's just that I was distracted. I was about thirty weeks pregnant in early November; my baby was due in early January, everything was going swimmingly, absolutely according to plan. And then, suddenly, all our careful plans went kaflooey. November 18th marks Liam's 8th birthday, but he began to be born, in a fashion, the day before Election Day 2000, with a doctor who clearly failed "Bedside Manner 101" in medical school.
So now imagine that rippling effect you get on soap operas when they segue to a flashback - come with me, if you will, to a dark ultrasound room somewhere in midtown Manhattan, where I'm flat on my back, blue goo smeared on my six-months pregnant belly, and a doctor is about to interpret the flickering bluish picture on the ultrasound screen.
"Basically, you have a crappy placenta," the doctor said, snapping off her rubber gloves.
Pregnancy had been astonishingly easy thus far, so it took a while for her words to penetrate my mushily gravid brain.Crappy placenta? Howzzat?
"So you need to be on bed rest." Bed-rest? Wasn't that something for 19th century heroines, or maybe that crazy lady in "The Yellow Wallpaper," who by the end of the story is crawling around the attic attempting to escape her "rest cure"? But now? in the 20th century? ME?
"Starting now. For at least ten days, and then we'll see. Who's your doctor?"
I gave her the name of my midwife. "Oh," she said after a long pause. "You have a midwife." As if somehow that explained the crappification of my placenta.
(Just for the record, the ob-gyn who ultimately delivered my tiny baby in an emergency c-section credits my midwife, the amazing Sylvie Blaustein, with catching the problem early - Sylvie was the one who sent me to the ultrasound and who, at the risk of sounding dramatic, may have saved Liam's life with her knowledge of babies and women's bodies. If I were ever to move out of New York, I would probably travel back from wherever I was in order to have Sylvie be the person I go to for checkups and all that lady-plumbing stuff. Midwifery of Manhattan - MOM, get it?)
The idea behind bedrest, as near as I can tell, is to give over all your bodily resources to the entity that has nested inside it (in much the same way that all financial resources will be given over to this entity once it's born). And yes, bedrest seemed like a great idea - sprawl against the pillows, be waited on hand and foot - for about ten minutes. Then the itchy, scratchy, maddening reality set in: I was allowed to walk to the bathroom, but that was about it. I had to beg Sylvie for permission to leave the bed in order to vote, and she only said yes because the polling place was literally around the corner from our apartment.
So on the second day of bedrest, I shuffled to the polling place, pulled the lever, then shuffled home to my pillowed prison, certain that in the next twelve hours Al Gore would become the next president.
The next ten days - the next two months - were an astonishingly surreal convergence of the body politic with my maternal body: both in suspension, both hostage to forces beyond their control. I had no way of knowing if my horizontality was helping "Burbage," as we called the blob inside me (a name courtesy of Dick and Nancy Horwich).
Bed-rest rubbed my face in the hardest part (for me, anyway) of being a parent: the part where, basically, you're not really in control. I mean, you might think you're in control because there are rules about this or that, or because you can take away "privileges," or because your children think you can magically cure the pain of a boo-boo. But it's all a charade: they are their own people from the moment they first breathe air.
Parenting is more like lion-taming, you know? The trainer gets in there with the whip and the stool and the occasional treat of raw meat, and the lions kind of go along with it because, well, frankly, what the hell else do they have to do? But at any moment the lions could totally take over. The trick is not to let them know that they outnumber the trainer ... (this analogy holds true, by the way, even if you are the parent of only one child. One child is more than a match for two parents, which is why those of us in two-parent households should bow down and worship in awe at the feet of single parents).
A week passed. Still no president, still no baby - but an increasingly angry electorate and an increasingly angry mommy-to-be. I was FINE and bed-rest was STUPID and there was nothing WRONG.
Ten days of bed-rest later, still no president, still no baby. Husband and I go for a follow-up ultrasound (not with the "crappy placenta" doctor but with the perinatologists at Babies Hospital). In the tiny exam room there is barely room for a table and the technician, who announces that she can't "see" the baby with the conventional ultra-sound tool so she brings out ... The Probe. And boy, that's just a whole lot of fun. Makes me hope I'm never abducted by aliens.
So she's probing and looking concerned and not answering my questions. She calls in a bunch of doctors and if I hadn't been so terrified, I would've laughed: in this tiny room there are four doctors, the technician, me, and Husband, although we were clearly last on the list of priority: the doctors only wanted to see the ultrasound screen.
Suddenly we got a whole new set of vocabulary words to match the other new set generated by the election - to hanging chad and butterfly ballot, we added S/D ratio, doppler, deceleration.
The doctors talked about whether to induce labor, to wait, to do a c-section...a blur until someone told me that I needed to be admitted immediately so that they could monitor the fetus.
So boom! there I am in the hospital, with the central question being whether this now thirty-two week-old baby would be better off in the NICU or in me. At 33 weeks, babies are considered "full term" but this baby was only the size of a twenty-five week old baby - and they weren't sure how he would fare, were he to be delivered that small.
To my host of aches, pains, and anxieties, steroid shots were added, to help develop the babie's lungs. "You know, his lungs are like little smears of jelly right now" said a particularly jolly resident. Lovely. Thanks for that image.
The residents tied themselves in knots trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Usually IUGR (intra-uterine growth restriction, which is apparently the fancy name for "crappy placenta") happens to people with high blood pressure - or to drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes. As I answered no to all their questions - no high blood pressure, no alcohol, no placenta abruption, no placenta previa, kicked that nasty heroin habit years ago - I imagined the residents madly flipping through the medical textbooks in their brains, trying to figure out what was wrong with me.
And the answer is...medical anomaly. There is NO REASON for what happened, other than the fluke of a crappy placenta that refused to nourish Burbage the way it was supposed to.
You know, like the t-shirt says, Shit Happens.
Liam was born before the presidency was decided - and I promise that I made no bargain with the gods about exchanging the country's well-being for the well-being of my baby. Promise.
When Liam was born, at dawn on November 18, in an emergency c-section because the doctors saw that his heart-rate was decelerating, he weighed 1 pound, 10 ounces, a little bit more than a full-size loaf of bread. He looked like Gandhi, like Yoda, like the most fragile baby bird you've ever seen in your life.
They wheeled Liam away in the little plastic shoebox where he would spend the next two months and we were given a long list of the potential afflictions that such a tiny body might face: respiratory problems, heart problems, liver and kidney problems, developmental delays. He simply wasn't ready to be in the actual world, poor thing, so we held our breath and prepared for the worst.
But in spite of everything he became the tiniest, healthiest baby in the NICU. He flourished. Would that I could say the same for the country.
Liam turns eight in a little less than two weeks; his days as a medical anomaly are - I hope - behind him. And at the risk of stretching a metaphor to the breaking point, perhaps tomorrow's election will demonstrate that the previous two elections were not part of a systemic infection but were in fact anomalous: the crappy placenta that may yet give birth to something amazing.
*Oh, and those teensy feet at the beginning of this very long post? Liam's, the day he was born. In actual fact, the footprint is slightly less than two inches long. And yet he STILL had toenails. Miracle.
It's Sunday before election day. Do you know where your vote is?
Well-intentioned friends and loved ones, including the other adult in this apartment, keep sending me statistics and polling data: Barack is up by 10%, Barack leads by 5%, Obama will carry 15% of left-handed, brown-haired,fifty-year-olds in the lower-right quadrant of West Virginia. To all of them I want to say STOP! DON'T JINX IT!
Call me superstitious if you want to (and some people who live here have, let me tell you), but right now ... it's like walking past a graveyard or a cave with a big mean dog inside: the thing to do at this point is hold our collective breath and be very, very still, lest a single inadvertent movement tip the undecided voters (all 4% of 'em) into the McCain column and lose us the whole shebang. (Did you read David Sedaris's piece in the recent New Yorker about undecided voters? That at this point it's like being offered chicken or shit with ground glass on top of it and saying, "uh...how is the chicken prepared?")
I don't need to tell you what a big shebang it is, right? It's huge. Epic might not be too big a word. No need for me to rehearse the reasons why the tall skinny guy from Illinois should win (and yes, I do mean for that description to resonate with the OTHER tall skinny unlikely president from Illinois); why it's become, as far as I'm concerned, a moral imperative that he does win; why I shudder to think what will become of us, individually and as a country, if he doesn't win.
A friend worked with a group called Progressive Futures on a wonderful short advertisement about what's at stake, set to the plaintive strains of Paul Simon's "American Tune":
http://www.progressivefuture.org/american-tune%22
What if we had an election in which we didn't just pay lip-sevice "democracy"? Think about it - if you're twenty years old, you've grown up in a country where in the past two elections, huge swaths of people were systematically disenfranchised. It's a far cry from Whitman's description of democracy:
Did you, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it might pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between people and their beliefs - in religion, literature, colleges and schools - democracy in all public and private life.
Sounds good, eh?
The other day on NPR, I heard Melissa Block interviewing African Americans in St. Louis at a job re-training site. One of the men interviewed said, "well, there's a saying going around in the black community: Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack is running so our children could fly."
Maybe it was the really crappy traffic on the FDR (where I had my rant about blaming Nader for the country's ills), but I got all teary-eyed when I heard that.
Fly, indeed. I know that electing Barack isn't going to erase two-hundred-plus years of institutionalized racism, but his victory would go a long way towards putting a new face on our country's future - a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan face, equally at home in both Manhattans: Manhattan, Kansas, and, you know, The Manhattan (the one in "not real" America).
Of course, another person in this same NPR interview said, "well, can't be too sure - any fugazy thing can happen with the 'publicans."
I think I'm too old to know precisely what "fugazy" means, but I get the gist: be careful or they're gonna steal this fucker too.
