Reading list

Wow. Okay. So I just don't really blog much anymore, do I? That's been true for a couple of years, though, so I'm sure it's not a big shock.

What's the news, you ask? Not much. Maternity leave is pretty uneventful--unless constant laundry, diaper changes, and nursing constitute "events." The big news is that Bonaventure is apparently allergic to the protein in cow's milk; this isn't that uncommon, and it ought to clear up when he's about 1, but it means that I can't have cow's milk (or yoghurt, cheese, or butter) until he's 1. Have I mentioned that I'm a vegetarian? This impinges gravely on my diet, indeed. Luckily I can have goat's milk, and we have a friend in town who's milking her goats for me. So there's that. (But butter!! A friend brought us a chocolate cake yesterday. I love chocolate cake. But it has three sticks of butter and half a cup of milk in it, so now it's just in the refrigerator, taunting me. This afternoon's project is the baking of a vegan chocolate cake, simply to retaliate against the forbidden cake.)

Other than that, I read. I have this bookstand (did I mention it?) that I use when I'm nursing, and I tear through books like nobody's business--especially because Bonaventure will now only nap after nursing, so I sit with him sleeping on my lap and read. Here are some (not all) of the books that I've read recently:

• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• Claire Dederer, Poser
• Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
• Tennyson, The Idylls of the King
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Neil Gaiman, American Gods
• Cervantes, Don Quixote (OK, technically I read this before Bonaventure was born. But I'm so pleased with myself for reading this 1000-page sucker that I get to mention it here.)
• Tolstoy, The Life and Death of Ivan Ilych
• Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
• Graham Greene, The Human Factor
• Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me
• Currently reading: Rory Stewart, The Places in Between

See a pattern there? No? Well, there isn't one! My project is to Read All The Books--all the books that have been lingering unread on my shelves. Hence Don Quixote, Waverley, and Vanity Fair--sizable tomes all--in the same five-month period. Let's note that it would've taken me about three normal academic years to get through this pile.

So, when I'm exhausted from the numerous night feedings, frustrated at my inability to get anything done, and filled with self-pity over the denial of all things milk- and butter-related, I try to remember how much good reading I'm doing.

What am I doing?

I don't mean that in an existential sense. I mean, What am I doing blogging right now? As in, What am I going to write about? See, that's about the least existential spin on that question. And that's more or less where I am, mentally, at the moment.

Maternity leave is partly rockin'. It's great that my baby can spend his first seven months being cared for exclusively by his parents, and that I can breastfeed on demand for that length of time (no, really! It's almost entirely great that I can do that! Because TM bought me this great book-stand, and I keep a novel clipped in its pages at the spot on the couch where I normally nurse him, and I am flying through books that I've had for years but never read! I've read Waverley! And Graham Greene! And am currently reading Neil Gaiman! Plus, the baby is cute when he nurses). Not teaching is pretty sweet. It's just a real privilege (which perhaps ought to be a right) to be able to do this and not sacrifice half our income for the semester.

But here's the thing:

I'm losing confidence in my ability to speak in a not-baby voice. I talk about diapers way too much. I am preoccupied with insanely minute details of my child's development ("I think that that was a new 'ah' sound! His B's are getting better! He can turn his head to the left much more smoothly now!"). I pick over his little body as though I were a chimpanzee (sooo satisfying to get the wax out of his ears [the upper cartilage parts; don't worry]). Running through my head all day are the little dorky nonsense songs I make up for Bonaventure, oh, all the time. In short, my world has become pretty small.

And this brings me back to my original question: What am I going to write about here? I mean, right now, not in a "Future-of-the-blog" kind of way.

And is it telling that all I'm able to do is write about questions I'm not asking? I feel that it is, but I'm not sure what it's telling. Of what it's telling. Whatever.

Sigh.

I should go to bed. Last night was a little rough.

An amusing thing about my baby

My baby is fascinating, isn't he? Don't you want to hear about nothing else? So here's a little bit about Bonaventure:

Lately, when he's upset, he says "Ni!" Actually, it's more like, "Mmmmmmmnnni!" It renders what could be exasperating and frustrating (his sleepy-induced crankiness, which is the most difficult crankiness to remedy) into something kind of cute. Yet it remains roughly as fearsome as its more famous counterpart:

Truth be told, though--and I hesitate to write this for fear that it'll jinx it (this is me, knocking wood) (seriously, I just rapped on my desk)--he doesn't fuss much, and lately he falls asleep beautifully at night, if not quite so beautifully in the afternoon. He's quite an agreeable little guy.

 

See?

Sorting Nonsense

I like to organize stuff. And I have grand plans for maternity leave (although I'm less than a week into the semester and already realizing what a joke my "grand plans" are. Mostly I nurse the baby, change the baby, change the baby's clothes when he gets bodily fluids on them, change the baby again, nurse the baby, play with the baby, try to get the baby to sleep, and THEN spend half an hour doing all the things that I haven't been able to do earlier, like get dressed or brush my teeth. Don't get me wrong--maternity leave is an awesome thing, and I do love taking care of Bonaventure, who is endlessly delightful. But it's not like I'm lounging around all day. Well, except for when I'm lounging around nursing the baby, but even then I'm occupied).

Let me start again.

I like to organize stuff. But for years, I've had this very disorganized folder-box-thing full of letters, cards, notes, and other mementos. I recently found a big accordion folder in my office and thought that, at last, I could organize those things--possibly along the lines of Flavia's letter-sorting system (I'm not going to look for the link, sorry). After all, I am sort of the family archivist; I bound all of our wedding cards together in a Coptic-bound book, I put together photo albums, and I even scanned a bunch of my grandfather's adolescent poetry.

This afternoon, when Bonaventure finally went down for a long and much-needed nap, I settled myself on the bed with my accordion file and my collection, eager to go through it and get it all straightened out.

But along what scheme? It's such a hodgepodge miscellany: a torn-off bit of paper with a nice note from my dad, birthday cards from twenty years ago, a collection of letters from a friend living in Spain, wedding invitations, cute pictures of my friends' kids. I found myself making (I kid you not) the following piles: (1) cards with pictures of cats on them (wow I have a lot of these); (2) items from 2004; (3) letters from Andrew; (4) things on 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper.

And then I noticed what fun I was having finding all of these things in no particular order.

So I've changed my approach. Instead of cleaning it up, I'll embrace the disorder as part of the collection's point. I have put it into the accordion file (which will keep it much more tidily and with less damage to the pages), and I couldn't resist a little bit of organizing (group 4, for some reason, remained intact), but I'm keeping it messy--a strangely liberating sensation.

How would you respond?

So I'm afraid that Dr. Koshary's fear has been realized: I had a baby and stopped blogging. I won't say that this was Dr. K's greatest fear, but it was, at least, a minor, trifling concern that he expressed in the comments to one of my posts.

Anyway, I've compounded my unreadiness to post (because of having a baby) by convincing myself--as I always do--that I need to have some earth-shatteringly clever post to mark my re-entry into blogging. And then I would compose mildly amusing posts in my head, decide that they would be said earth-shatteringly clever post, forget how they went, and try to reconstruct them (still in my head) with little success. And then I'd, like, go to sleep or something. And so it went.

Whatever. I'll just jump right in here with this little incident from the afternoon:

I was walking down my quiet, residential, small-town street to a meeting. Two girls (around 12ish? I couldn't see them very well) were sitting in the open cargo space of a van at a house on the other side of the street, with the door open. One of them yelled, "Hey, girl, you want some milk?"

I figured that she was talking to someone in the house and ignored her. But when I drew abreast (ha ha) of the house, I saw that they were looking at me. I smiled, as one does in a small neighborhood in a small town. One of them repeated, "You want some milk?"

"No, thanks," I replied uncertainly, since milk seemed like a weird thing to be selling out of a van.

Then, when I was a little bit past them, one yelled at my back, "Those are some big boobs you've got there!"

!!!

In my inner monologue, I used the fact that I was running late for my meeting as reason not to turn around and demand to know why these young women were heckling women about their breast size, but in fact, I still haven't come up with a witty retort, and this is the reaction I almost always have when other people (= men, up until today) shout comments about my body. I'm curious: What would you have said to these girls, if anything?

All I can figure, honestly, is that they've seen me (discretely, let's note) nursing my son on the front porch of my house, because "want some milk?" is a pretty weird body-heckling comment, isn't it? The truth is, though--well, they're not wrong. But still, I'm not endowed to the point that it would like call to you from across the freaking street to comment.

Anyway, isn't that just strange? I have never been yelled at by girls. I'm rather appalled, to tell the truth. But I do expect that they'll grow out of such behavior, and maybe even be embarrassed about it one day. (Perhaps on the day when men start yelling at them. Unfortunately.)

Baby = here

Bonaventure (not his real name) (now that he's earthside, he doesn't have to be Lumpy Homunculus anymore) arrived at 4:30 in the morning on Thursday, June 14. He is a perfect and gorgeous little creature. I've always thought that newborns were rather funny looking; oddly enough, I seem to have birthed the one and only ideally beautiful child!

This is him, just minutes after birth. What a love. Every tiny part of his tiny body fills me with delight, and there's nothing sweeter than to watch his papa cuddle him.

A word about new-parenthood: I'd heard that it's hard, of course, and accepted that in a vague sort of way. But I really had no idea. You know how new parents often say that they consider it a good day if they get to take a shower? That's setting the bar pretty high, methinks. I put on deodorant this afternoon (yes, afternoon). I'm feeling pretty good about that.

And also: My entirely drug-free birth has given me oceans of empathy for women who opt for epidurals.

I'd thought, I guess, that if it's just pain, and nothing bad is happening to you, of course you can bear it, right? I'm good at managing pain and breathing through it, etc. Again: I had no idea. Childbirth has been utterly deromanticized for me. It is extremely hard work--no candles and soft music, here. I spent transition lying inert on my side (if I moved at all, I'd tense up and panic), howling, eyes closed, while TM, my mom, and my doula stroked my hands and shoulders. I wouldn't have been able to do it without their comfort and reassurance.

And as for pushing.... Suffice to say that I was naked, indifferent to decency, emitting unearthly sounds at a very high volume. I bit pillows and growled. I screamed and snarled and thrashed. My whole body shook. Later I was told that I frightened some nurses out in the hall--they aren't used to natural births and didn't know what could possibly happening in the room. Yes, I am Hard Core.

Now I just need to find a way to get to sleep before 3 am....

Two things that may or may not be real

1. A class I totally want to take: a combined history and cooking class on some particular geographic region. For every session, we'd do some readings on cultural influences and major historical events; listen to a little lecture; and then have a cooking class in which we'd make a historically accurate(ish) meal from the period being discussed that week. The course would start as far back as possible and move forward in whatever increments make it most (culinarily) interesting. Wouldn't that be a fun way to learn about cultural history?

The problem is that, as far as I know, I totally invented this concept and certainly couldn't teach such a class myself (not that I'm wanting to do more teaching, anyway). It came to me when TM and I were discussing medieval cooking over lunch--I'd reprised a quite tasty 14th-c./thereabouts dish that I made for my Chaucer class last year. I thoroughly enjoyed making medieval food for my class; I learned such interesting things! Like how to make a sauce gelatinous when one doesn't have access to corn starch.

-and-

2. I may not believe in the nesting instinct, but I just cleaned the toaster. (I'm due in a week. Anytime now, deary...or Lumpy Homunculus, as TM and I have taken to calling him/her, in honor of how lumpy my belly is much of the time.)

(I'm not sure that I don't believe in the nesting instinct; I just think that I'm generally so nesty and compulsive that such a thing would be largely unrecognizable in me. But I haven't cleaned the toaster...well, ever, at least not this toaster, which I bought when I moved to Field Town [for $6--I didn't actually expect to keep it] five years ago. You decide.)