Of life's turns, small and great

It's been a couple of weeks without posting while we continue to plod through January, each busy with the routine. Tom has preached, visited sick people in the hospital, seen a basketball game at an inspiring school for special needs children, and nearly helped preside at a bar mitzvah. (Never let it be said that this minister is inflexible about worship styles!) I've graded a stack of exams proving that college students are better trained to meet expectations than to think critically, while preparing syllabi for a semester in which I hope to make critical thinking itself the expectation. Meanwhile I've spent the week between semesters in the company of other non-tenure-track faculty and post-enrolled graduate students who are crunched for writing time, revising an article for publication. It's a return to the other side of academia that prompted a full-scale anxiety dream, complete with public humiliation, temporal distortion, panicked flight, and ultimate surrender to the seminary shuttle bus driver, sent by the police to hunt me down. ("Well, if you had to surrender, wouldn't you want to surrender to Cliff?" asks Tom.) Actually working on the article has been much less traumatic and more rewarding than the dream, such that now my anxieties are focused on the looming spring semester load. Please send energy and good vibes. The fall semester's obligations seemed like about the maximum this family could handle; spring adds to my plate senior theses and a set of new junior paper advisees. Plus Tom and I will be taking Swahili every morning. May seems very far away.

The girls, however, live wholly in the present and are flourishing. Alice is fully ambulatory now and as pleased as she can be with her new freedom. She is more adventurous than Edith was at this age, meaning we might actually have to do some childproofing one of these days. Yet even as she is getting into cabinets, stacking objects to climb onto her sister's bed, or swinging on the edge of the bathroom sink, she also is observing everything, but everything, that the big people around here do. When she pulls tissues out of the box, she pauses to hold each one to her nose and rub. She wiggles a toothbrush back and forth in her mouth diligently and runs combs over her head. When she gets her hands on anything with a strap, whether a purse, diaper bag, or pair of swim goggles, she drapes the strap over her forearm, then turns and announces "bye-bye" before toddling out of the room. And in a childhood-first that astonished as much as it delighted me, the other day I held her up so she could put her hands under the water from the bathroom sink, and she proceeded to rub them together, hold a hand under the soap dispenser, then rub the soap all over both hands, rinse, and reach for a towel.

Edith meanwhile still needs prompting through every step in toilet use, dressing, and basic hygiene but has recently shown a wonderful new capacity for empathy. The words "I understand how you feel" have issued from her lips several times in the last few weeks--as when Sunday School friend Leanne was cross that her older brother and friends were not including her in a game of catch, and Edith leaned in toward Leanne sympathetically and said, "I understand how you feel: Sometimes Alice won't play with me either, and it hurts my feelings."

For the most part Alice is only too ready to play with Edith these days, and it's unclear whose takes greater pleasure in these sisterly interactions--kids or parents.


There are of course times when Edith would prefer that Alice keep her distance, such as when she is at work on her new illustrated edition of the Odyssey. I'll have to take pictures of the drawings on my bulletin board at work, which include a magnificent Circe with flowers on her shoes and wings to carry her up to Mt. Olympus, as well as Odysseus guarding the trough of blood in the Land of the Dead while Tiresias, the blind prophet, predicts his chance of getting home to Ithaca. Sensing market potential, Edith is also introducing some original adventures for Odysseus, such as the war of Oma ("the cousin city of Troy"), at which all the soldiers get terrible sunburns.

Not quite the Virgin Mary's effortless mastery of life with two kids (rear), but fun all the same

So even with winter colds, the novice toddler's bumps and bruises, continued interruptions of nighttime sleep, endless nagging about socks and shoes, and the perpetual stresses of managing the work-family balance, we try to enjoy every day. We're certainly thankful for each one.

***

That's something we remember especially today, a quiet gray day that Tom says felt filled with death. Today we give thanks for a series of lives recently ended, each known to us to different degrees, each a great gift:

-J.D. Salinger (b. 1918), not known to us personally but in whose literature multiple generations found exquisitely mirrored their own quiet sense of alienation, loneliness, or anger at the world's obtuseness and hypocrisy. However frustrating Salinger's reclusivness may have been for his fans, in the era of hyperconnectivity and megacelebrity he at least provided a model of one who resisted all that noise and insisted on keeping his life his own.

-Howard Zinn (b. 1922), whom I had the pleasure of meeting several times while living in Boston and whose gentle, kind, scholar's humaneness (and heavy brow) reminded me of my grandfather. Once when Tom and I were discussing books we liked shortly after we met, I spent a few minutes expressing my surprise at this full-blooded, twenty-something, American male so fond of an E.M. Forster romance, before clarifying that Tom in fact cared not a whit for Howard's End but was quite taken with A People's History of the United States. Perhaps the opposite of Salinger in his earnest, vocal engagement with society and its ills up until the end, Zinn was one of the sort we sorely continue to need. Even when his politics were too uncompromisingly left for many to swallow, he always helped us imagine a fuller range of political possibilities, pushing the envelope and reminding us never to be complacent.

-Lars Anderson (b. 1965), a member of our church at whose funeral Tom co-presided today. Having fought esphogeal cancer for two years, Lars was on the upswing when he was killed in a car accident last weekend. At his funeral his friends and family recalled a man who lived large and tackled life head-on. His wife asked if the organist possibly could play some Guns-n-Roses in the service.

-Ethan Williams (b. 2001), Tom's cousin's stepson, a sweet, wryly funny boy who loved baseball and who we had the pleasure of getting to know at family gatherings in recent years. He bravely fought a fourteen-month battle against diffuse pontine glioma, a deadly tumor in the brainstem, that ended this evening. All prayers for Ethan and his family.

Happy birthday, Dr. King

This year for the first time, I've been discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement with Edith. In earlier years I had the sense that she was still so unaware of race, never mind racial discrimination, that I didn't want to bring it up. But last week she asked about a Martin Luther King display at the YWCA, and I instinctively felt that though she still doesn't have the vocabulary for American racial categories, she was ready for some of the story.

Not all of it, of course. Figuring out how to tell a four year old about America's terrible racial past is tricky. I wanted to steer clear of most of the violence. And while I was prepared to talk about unfair laws, I didn't want to get into the impenetrable depths of racial hatred.

So I stuck with the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins--both early civil rights actions that were largely non-violent, as well as being creative, inspiring, and successful. Plus, Montgomery was where Martin Luther King got his start as a civil rights leader (at age 26, let's not forget), so as long as we were talking about him, it was appropriate to start in Montgomery.

The ensuing conversation included one of my favorite moments as a mother so far.

There's nothing quite like articulating a Jim Crow law to an unsuspecting child to throw its absurdity into starkest relief. It doesn't matter that you've taught the civil rights movement to college students for the last twelve weeks. Forget years of reading and talking about it. Never mind graduate school seminars spent parsing the significance of a color line that never stayed still and that in fact didn't physically separate the races at all. Instead just try explaining it to a child with no historical background:

"There was a law that on the buses in that city, people with dark skin had to sit behind people with light skin. [On some instinct I continued to avoid the labels white and black and used visual descriptors instead.] And if the bus filled up and someone with light skin got on and wanted a seat, the people with dark skin had to stand up and give them the seats."

Edith stared at me and then snorted. "Really? Are you telling the truth? That's a crazy law!"

Yes, it was. There were other crazy laws like that, I told her. She wanted to know more of them. I mentioned Jim Crow water fountains, train cars, movie theaters and schools. I tried to explain disfranchisement.

Then I told her about Rosa Parks, the Montgomery black community's organizing effort under King and others, the bus boycott plan, and after a year of walking and carpooling, ultimate success. She listened intently and smiled at the end.

She wanted another such story. I told her about the whites-only lunch counter at the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. (She wanted to know if lunch counters in Chapel Hill had been segregated, too, and I said, yes, they no doubt were.) Then I told her about the Greensboro college students who got together to change that rule and decided to sit in at the lunch counter, wave after wave of them taking the stools as previous students were arrested, until the jails were full and finally, the store relented. Both stories grabbed her. Though they appealed to her often fierce sense of justice, they also were opportunities to emphasize the power of a nonviolent, loving approach to deepest wrongs.

In fact, she has had me tell the stories over and over again this week. The second time was on the way to school. We got there and were taking off her coat just as we got to my brief mention of the white students who heckled the students sitting in at Woolworth's, even pouring ketchup and salt on them as they sat there. I once more emphasized the Greensboro students' incredible calm in the face of the crowd's aggression against them. Edith started pacing back and forth the way she does when she is overcome by an idea.

"Mom," she said finally, gesticulating intensely, "do you know what I would do if my blond-skinned friends were doing that to my brown-skinned friends? Like Torrey?"

"What?" I asked, noting both the emergence of her own categorical descriptors and the fact that she understood who among her friends would have been wronged under Jim Crow.

"I would take my blond-skinned friends, and I would march them right out of there." She trembled and looked determined. I was struck: She had described an option not in the story, imagining herself into the scene as a "blond-skinned" person who could help diffuse conflict by suasion of the wrongdoers. Her own non-violent contribution.

***

But it was actually her thought process on the first day we discussed these stories that really got me. After I'd told each story for the first time she was still processing, and her processing took the form of thinking about crazy rules. Having pumped me on all the crazy racial laws I could think of, she then started making up her own crazy laws.

"Like, it would be crazy if people with brown eyes could eat chocolate but people with blue eyes couldn't."

I agreed. Somehow thinking up discriminatory rules that had no basis in real historical hatreds seemed to be for her a safe way to work through the troubling information she'd received. So we thought up more silly laws. We agreed a few kinds of discrimination were okay: That it was fine to have a law saying adults could drive cars but kids couldn't. And we tried to articulate what made that okay where other discrimination wasn't.

The crazy laws continued to spill forth. And then she said,

"Or it would be crazy to have a law saying that the rich people could sleep on the soft bed but poor people had to sleep under the bed on the hard wooden floor."

I paused. "Well...yes, that would be a silly law. But you know, actually, rich people have a lot of comfortable things that poor people don't have."

"Why?"

"Well, they have more money to buy those things."

"But why do they have more money?"

It should be said here that many of Edith's imaginary games involve poor and/or orphaned children finding their way to a palace where the royals take them in, give them clothes and food, and adopt them. I often have been drafted into playing variations on this theme.

"That's a hard question. Sometimes rich people were born into families with more money. Sometimes they worked to earn that money. You know, some people think that people are rich because they work hard and deserve it, and other people are poor because they haven't worked as hard. So they think it's okay that the rich person gets to sleep on the bed and the poor person sleeps on the wooden floor."

Once again Edith paused and looked at me. "Really? You mean there are really people who think that in our country, still today?"

"Yes."

Edith looked disbelieving. "But we don't think that, do we?"

In his latter days, before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King was turning his focus increasingly on class inequity. He spoke out against the Vietnam War as an injustice to the poor--both the Vietnamese peasants and the American drafted soldiers who were disproportionately poor men. He focused on challenges to the more ambiguous, intractable, class-based barriers to equality as the next logical step in the movement, but he faced resistance. Plenty of people who had supported the abolition of de jure racial segregation weren't prepared for an assault on the American class structure. Forty years later, as the health care debate rages and people die in Haiti for lack of roads on which to reach them, I wonder whether we're ready to keep pace with Dr. King.

Can you tell me how to get to Safflower Street?

Four-and-a-half years into this parenting thing, and we've hit a food allergy. In November a Trader Joe's opened in Princeton, and so we started making a few trips there trying to figure out the allure of this place for its many devoted followers. Its primary appeal seems to lie in yummy products that can't be found elsewhere, so in our random sampling of things that sounded good and that we don't get at our regular grocery store, I picked up a bag of sesame-seed-encrusted, honey-roasted cashews.

A few days later Edith and I were sharing them, among other snack foods, when she suddenly announced that her tongue felt itchy. At first I thought it was an odd passing notion of hers, but as she started to get increasingly agitated about her itchy tongue, then added that her lips felt swollen, I looked more closely, saw hives around her mouth, and realized she must be having an allergic reaction to something. I gave her Benadryl and tried to soothe her in her discomfort, while keeping an eye on whether she still could breathe freely. The symptoms continued causing her discomfort but not acute distress, so we proceeded with our evening agenda, heading over to the campus dining hall for dinner. By the time we got through the line and sat down, Edith started rolling around on the floor moaning that her stomach hurt.

At this point--about 5:30pm--we got out the cellphone and tried to get through to the pediatrician's office. It was a frustrating task. No one was answering, so after ten minutes on hold with Edith continuing to cry intermittently about her stomach pain, Tom hung up, started the phone tree over, and this time chose the after-hours, contracted-out, emergency nurse hotline. He got a nurse on the phone right away, but she said our pediatrician's office technically wasn't closed yet for the night, so she couldn't take our call. The stomach pain didn't seem to merit 911-level attention, so it was back to waiting for someone to pick up in the pediatrician's office. I got through after 27 minutes on hold, during which time I'd started to speculate on one of the reasons health care costs are so high in this country: people calling 911 out of sheer frustration with inaccess to more appropriate levels of care, perhaps?

The nurse I spoke to said that it was now after hours, that there were no pediatricians left in the office, but that she thought the situation merited attention. She told us to keep watching Edith for signs of difficulty breathing, and to come in first thing at 7 for follow-up with a doctor.

Edith shortly thereafter seemed much better, to our relief, and we were able to attend her preschool Christmas show without further incident. We were prepared to see the doctor the next morning at 7 to have her examined and review what had happened, but when we got home from the show and listened to our voice mail, we discovered a message from the anxious and somewhat irritated nurse, saying it was 7 and where were we? It hadn't occurred to us that if a nurse told us at 6pm that the pediatricians had all left the office and it was now after hours, that our appointment with a pediatrician scheduled for "first thing at 7" was to be at 7pm rather than 7am.

We finally got medical care the way we get much of Edith's medical care these days: We snuck in a question about her at one of Alice's many infant physicals. Our regular pediatrician is still novice enough that she seems open to this repeated ploy and doesn't even charge extra for answering the questions. This time, in fact, she gave our question a good deal of attention and scheduled Edith for bloodwork on Christmas Eve...which turned into a preliminary diagnosis, and then this past week a follow-up with a pediatric allergist and a full-scale skin test for 15 different allergens.

And the answer at the end of the day is that Edith is allergic to sesame. Significantly so, but not critically so -- as in, she shouldn't eat anything with any sesame in it, probably shouldn't travel in China anytime soon, and should be wary of cross-contamination at salad bars (where we've already had one problem), but she can certainly be in the presence of other people's sesame-filled foods and presumably can still safely visit Oscar, Big Bird, and the gang at the waterpark in Bucks County next summer.

***

As long as we're talking health care and describing our week in television titles, then the other relevant one is E.R. At a tender 12 months, Alice was the first of any of us ever to be admitted to an emergency room, after a misstep at daycare this past Wednesday brought her down on the arm of the toddler-size sofa, and she split her lip. She had a pretty wide and jagged gash that we suspected would need some attention--though by the time we arrived to get her she was as happy and smiley, if blood-stained, as any victorious prizefighter.

This time we got through the pediatrician's phone tree in less than five minutes but were told that "we don't do the pink part of lips" [ed. note: what other part is there?] and were instructed to go to the E.R. So Alice and I got insight into that side of the American medical system while Tom and Edith headed for pizza. It was quite exciting: They sped her in through the double doors on a guerney, everyone yelling and machines beeping, and immediately six doctors were bent over her speaking tense, hurried jargon, while I stood in the corner weeping. Five of the doctors were sure it was a laceration and were prepared to suture, but one young, headstrong doctor remembered a rare disease which causes 1 in every 3 million infants to experience rapid deterioration of the lip beginning around age twelve months in weather under 30 degrees, and he realized the condition could be life threatening if he didn't act immediately to perform a dangerous, highly controversial, but critical procedure not yet approved by the AMA or the FDA. The other five doctors ridiculed him, but he insisted, declaring to hell with protocol and announcing that he would heroically go it alone in a last-minute effort to save my baby. By this point I was hysterical, but as the rest of the staff pulled off their latex gloves and walked out of the room in protest, this young doctor bent over Alice and, with a laser-beam-like stare of fierce concentration, performed the miracle maneuver. Within moments, she came out of the coma into which she had been spiraling, her cheeks pink and her breathing normal, and the young doctor had the satisfaction of my undying gratitude and the other physicians' sheepish humility, even if he stands threatened to have his credentials stripped this time next week.

Okay, not quite. It's true that we didn't have to deal with much bureaucratic intake, because once they entered Alice's name and DOB in the computer and confirmed that she'd been born at that hospital, they didn't need any more demographic or financial information from us but just printed out her legband and labels, which was nice. But if there was little bureaucracy, there also wasn't much drama. Alice tore up magazines and toddled up and down (with help) in the quiet waiting room for an hour, then in our little curtained-off corner of the ER for another 45 minutes or so while we waited for the arrival of the physician's assistant who apparently was the hospital's best at stitching infants. At least two other kids were there for lacerations from falls, but they were older, and other people felt better equipped to deal with them.

But Alice was really an excellent patient, except for the ten or fifteen minutes pinned in the baby papoose with the burka over her whole face except the mouth, with someone poking needles into her lip. (During the stitching the physician's assistant, who was otherwise quite calm and competent, did object at one point that all Alice's crying was raising her cranial pressure and causing her to bleed more profusely. I didn't respond to him, just calmly admonished, "Alice, think of your cranial pressure." A beat later the nurse said, "Yeah, like she could think of her cranial pressure instead of Ernie or Bert or something!" Lightbulb.) But almost immediately after they unstrapped her she was fine again, curled up on my shoulder, misidentifying the overhead light as an apple. The joy of an infant's ability to live in the present. And another silver lining was that the crying tired her out enough that she slept through the night for the first time in weeks.

Even more to the point, the rate at which this wound is healing is astonishing. You can see it change by the hour, meaning I never even got an intimidating picture of our tough kid for posterity. Watching Alice heal makes one understand why people have searched so hard throughout time for the fountain of youth.

Even so, I wouldn't mind if next week in our family life brought just reruns of The Cosby Show or the Brady Bunch...

Twelve hours after suture. As we left the hospital Edith wanted to know why the medical staff hadn't just "gotten some blood and a chunk of lip and put them back on Alice." Edith's knowledge of medical procedure seems to come from Gary Larson's "The Far Side."

Diminishing returns

The number of pictures of our family Christmas is inversely proportional to their quality--with the exception of the ones my dad took in North Carolina. Still, they should give a feel for our holiday.

A late-breaking pageant photo of Edith and her bovine buddy, Robin. Here she may be a supremely satisfied milch cow, but in the photo of the whole stable (i.e. 3/4-year-old Sunday School class)...

...her attitude is a PK-ish, "You really want me to smile?"

The girls were back to hamming it up while getting dressed for Christmas Eve services

Of course once we got to church, nothing would persuade them to keep the hats on

With friend Leanne, enjoying the candy they received from the pinata broken on the chancel steps during the children's sermon, with 50 eager kids waiting to pounce. Yes, our ministerial staff (ahem) thought this would be a fun way to expand on the celebration of the Mexican posadas tradition that was the focus of the service. Upon the pinata's breaking I went into mama bear instinct mode, ran to the front of the sanctuary, and started plucking my four-year-old Sunday School kids out from underneath the trampling feet. Miraculously, no one was hurt. The other parts of the service were lovely and a little less nerve-wracking.

Post service, hoping for a special visitor

...

Going in to investigate Christmas morning

Bubble gum in her stocking!

Against all odds Alice appears fooled by the toy cellphone she received, now seemingly as satisfied with it as with mommy or daddy's phone

Edith got a long-desired set of children's handbells. They are pitch perfect but don't require the delicate handling of real bells...a good thing, since Alice is interested in eating the clappers.

Christmas dinner with the cousins in PA. Any oldest siblings or cousins out there will recognize the "we're playing school, and I'm in charge" pose. Our nephew meanwhile couldn't get enough of showing off his favorite presents, an extension cord and a circuit splicer. It's neat that by four years old, kids aren't all hitting the same milestones in the same order but really do have distinct interests and talents.

The day after Christmas we drove to North Carolina for a week of Christmas with the Bogers

The morning paper with Grandpa

Environmental documentaries with Mor-mor (courtesy of the film festival Uncle Peter ran in Madison this fall)

Alice got to meet her Great Grandmother Mary. While she has almost lost her ability to put together a coherent sentence, the woman who once directed actors in how to deliver their lines is nevertheless still somehow recognizably herself, in gestures, mannerisms, and optimistic attitude. She seemed really to enjoy the children.

Daddy, Alice, and Mor-mor

With Uncle Peter, a recent comprehensive exams survivor

Cheesy girls

Like her sister before her, Alice enjoyed the full-length windows next to the front door

En route back home we got to spend an afternoon with the VA cousins. These three engaged each other in a non-stop round of hilarity.

They quieted down just to listen to Aunt Suzanne read the elaborate, pop-up-book version of Peter Pan they'd thoughtfully given Edith

But it was all squeals again when Daddy/Uncle Tom managed a triple-decker piggyback ride, reminiscent of fun and games at a family wedding two years ago

We're fortunate to have so much loving family and to have enjoyed such a break from the routine. Now to keep the spirit with us into the New Year...

The benefits of travel

We've heard it said that babies (and maybe the rest of us?) are stimulated by new locations to attempt new activities and so achieve new feats. Alice seems to subscribe to this theory, as she made our week of holiday travel a chance to flex her wings. Identifying a surefire crowd-pleaser, she took her first few solo steps at my parents' house in North Carolina on New Year's Eve day while playing with me and my brother, then repeated the feat several times over the next few hours. The strip of carpet between the couches in the family room seemed an especially appealing spot for these test-runs. Proving her accomplishment wasn't geographically dependent, however, she followed up on New Year's Day at Tom's parents' house, toddling 3 or 4 steps to Mom-mom in the kitchen.

Even when not venturing forth solo, she makes clear her preference for walking with assistance rather than crawling. Indeed, walking around with a spotter is among her favorite activities of the moment. In the last week she has begun each morning by digging under the covers for my hands, finding my index fingers, grasping each in a hand, standing, lunging toward the edge of the bed, and announcing, "Go!" or "Wa(lk)!" In general she is quite adept at finding the fingers of the nearest adult and seeking to compel him or her into a stroll across the room.

Her language comprehension and production also have shot through the roof in the last week. She now responds intelligently to a wide variety of conversational gambits--including beginning to cry when someone tells her it's time for bed. As for her own conversation, her active vocabulary as of our return home includes:

hi
bye-bye
baby
happy
yeah
t(r)ee
dees (this)
ba(ll)
boo(k)
do(g)
do(ll)
du(ck)
chss! (cheese)
apple
wa(lk)
go
up
dow(n)
m(oo)
neigh
baa
Mor-mor
Pop-pop
no
whee! (meaning: Daddy, I want to play that game in which you swing me in the air, and I squeal)

And she signs

more (usually meaning, eat/I'm hungry)
bird
milk
all done

Just a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago, we read friends' blogs about their one year olds and felt that their children were in a completely different lifestage than our infant. And now we're there. It's as if overnight, our baby has been replaced by a sentient being.

Alice loves to share her joy in her ever-expanding universe, capturing the gaze of those around her, then throwing her head back and flashing a huge grin. She has developed a thorough game of peekaboo, which she instigates by pressing her hands together across her eyes and waiting a few beats for someone to begin bantering with her, and she loves to bait Edith and others into fast-crawling, giggly games of chase. At the same time she remains relatively easy-going, as even those spending just a few hours with her over vacation noticed.

Edith had a wonderful time on vacation, too, and we parents were grateful for all the grandparently and avuncular attention to the kiddos that allowed us time to relax. We'll be sure to post the photos soon.