Even more thoughts

They just keep on coming. I remember a few years ago, visiting my grandfather when he was living in Pacific Grove, he was telling a story (I don't remember what story it was) which took place in the early days of the Quinn's stores, and as an aside, he said "I've always had lots of ideas".

I just nodded as he continued, feeling a deep sense of kinship, of connection and appreciation. I wanted to say, "this is who I am as well, and in large part I have you to thank for this particular aspect of my self". I didn't say it, because I didn't want to interrupt his story, which was riveting in its own right. But it was a great moment for me, nonetheless.

Needless to say, I haven't always been completely enthralled with a brain that churns and churns and churns, but I suppose it's better than a brain that spits and sputters. One of my chief concerns about having children was saddling some poor hapless babe with such a brain. Fortunately, it is looking more and more like I dodged that particular fate (as did they). Ruby acts as much like Natasha as she looks like me, and we have no idea where all the smiles from the little boy came from. Perhaps Aunt Kelly, who we saw yesterday. She was in San Mateo visiting her friend Andrea, who just a had her first child a couple of weeks ago. So, I trekked down on the train with the kids, and Natasha picked us up there after work.

Obviously, I miss my sister, but it was good to spend some time hanging out, and it was great to see little Anica. She tried to give Lupe a kiss as soon as she saw him, which I think bodes well.

Kelly and I were talking about some of the difficulties of family life, and it made me realize something that I hadn't before; that I have been writing from the perspective of the stay at home caretaker, and including my partner in the woes, because she has had her own difficulties that are different from mine, but are nonetheless there in substantial measure. It is a very particular arrangement, though, because her difficulties mainly result from breastfeeding, and the lack of sleep that produces. What this leaves out, then, would be the working father or mother who doesn't have substantial sleep issues. For those parents, the enterprise of raising children does not have the same issues.

As I said to Kelly at one point yesterday, I don't think that anyone who hasn't been a stay at home primary caretaker of a child under three for at least a month can ever fully appreciate how truly difficult it is. I know conclusively that I would have never been able to appreciate the difficulty at all without having done it. Mothering in particular, and parenting in general is mythologized to such an extent (probably in every culture, but for sure in ours) that the day to day reality of it is unknowable to anybody not partaking of it directly.

But what really puts it over the top is that if you are a primary caretaking parent, then your job follows you all the way through the weekend. The fact that being that primary caretaker is a very difficult job to start with, the lack of time off makes it really difficult.

That doesn't mean that my experience is necessarily typical. Many people, obviously, absolutely love caring for their children, and can't imagine doing anything else. I love, love, love my children, but damn, they are a handful day after day after day...

More Random Thoughts...

It's all so hard...

Well, I'm feeling a bit like what I've been writing tilts too much towards the negative, not necessarily because that's the way I feel, but because that's what weighs on me, and is easier to write about. So, a little of the positive side may not be a bad thing.

So, by far the best thing about being on leave has been falling in love with the little guy. Before, he seemed to be pretty much permanently attached to Natasha, so now I get to spend all day, every day with him. Which is fantastic. He is ridiculously happy, and very social. He's starting to sit up, which also means that he's spitting up a lot less.

He also doesn't seem to have the impeccably terrible timing that Ruby did (and does), where you could count on her to have a complete meltdown just as we need to be getting ready to go to an appointment or something. In fact, I went to the optometrist yesterday, and he fell asleep about 2 minutes before the exam started, leaving me perfectly focused on the task at hand. He woke up just as it was ending, and smiled at everyone in the room.

Ruby was actually really good while we were there as well. One thing that I have noticed recently is that I had been conflating two separate things in caring for her. We recently started doing a positive parenting technique based in part on empirical research done at Yale, which basically attempts to strongly reinforce good behavior by rewarding it with enthusiastic positive attention, instead of trying to deter bad behavior through punishment. As she has responded to the encouragement, and I have backed off from punishing her for bad behavior, I have found that quite a bit of her "bad behavior" isn't her being difficult or bad, but results from the fact that she hasn't yet learned to deal well with change or deviations from her expectations. So, if she wants the purple spoon, but I give her the red one before she can tell me, she loses her little mind, and has a hard time recovering.

It isn't that her behavior is bad, per say, but that her expectations weren't met in some way. There are many subtle variations on this, and since I can see that it more for what it is now that it has been separated out from the truly "bad" behavior, I am starting to have a bit more empathy for her (even though I am still trying to hold strong to the notion that she can't get what she wants by crying). What's more, I have gained a bit more empathy for Natasha, as this difficulty with emotional recovery comes directly from her, and it's now easier to see that this isn't something that she can just snap out of, that most likely, she was very much the same at 2 years old, and that she is fighting her innate nature, so I can cut her a little more slack now.

In any case, I gotta go, here are a couple of pics from yesterday...

Random Thoughts in Mid-July

Karen and I are doing a thing on Mondays in which she brings Cecil (who is two months older than Lupe) over to our place, then I leave while she stays with the kids for half the day. When I get back, she takes off for the second half of the day.

So, right now, I am feeling like a reasonable facsimile of my former self; sitting at Café Abir, a hip coffee shop, with five others with laptops, two with what look like schoolwork of some kind, two with strewn newspapers laid out before them, and a couple of guys just chatting over coffee.

And what do I choose to do with this precious time? Well, communicate with you, of course. To try to organize and come to grips with the random thoughts and feelings that I don’t otherwise have the time and energy to organize and come to grips with. Of course, they mostly revolve around the conundrum of family life.

I realized something recently, or at least have come up with a jackass theory about why I am having such a hard time with being happy while on paternity leave. As I’ve said before, two aspects of that feeling are the discrepancy between the reality and the unrealistic, romanticized idea that I had of what it would be before having kids, and the shockingly extensive loss of freedom. Well, in addition to those, I will add a third, and it is this; the primary offsetting factor that makes having children worth it, that ameliorates that loss of freedom and the attendant drudgery of caring for the kids on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis, is that having children gives a life meaning, shape. In one fell swoop, a parent becomes part of something larger than themselves in a much more substantial way than was ever imaginable before, engages in a shared enterprise to which we commit more wholeheartedly than to any other thing before, with an emotional depth that we didn’t feel capable of, or know existed before having children.

And here is where I come up against a twin set of problems. The joys of having children are that they give life meaning and that they produce unexplored emotional depths. Yet, I have been thinking, rigorously I hope, for many years about the creation and experiencing of meaning within my life, and so don’t feel as though having children has given my life a meaning that it didn’t possess. The shape of my life has substantially changed, and I now have more competing priorities, but I don’t feel that having children has made my life mean more to me than it did. The second problem is that I have extremely limited access to my emotions, and so having an emotional epiphany is necessarily of limited scope. I love my children just as most parents do, with more emotion than I’ve ever felt before, but that love has not opened up some previously veiled great expanse of emotional terrain all across the various aspects of my life. The love exists, but it hasn’t carried over into other emotional centers of life for me.

I do feel connected to Natasha and the kids in a way that is profound and abiding, which is no small thing. Much of that thought about meaning in life produced the conviction that the deepest meaning in life derives from shared, purposeful experience. The most pungent example of this is the bonds felt by soldiers to those they have gone to war with.

So to be a part of the ultimate shared, purposeful experience is, indeed, profound. The problem, though, is that the drudgery of daily life with two jobs and two small kids erodes that profundity insidiously. We are both always tired. The kids are astoundingly and incessantly needy. The apartment is always a mess, in some way or another. Our social life is nearly non-existent, and what does exist is a constant struggle to maintain. In short, life often feels like little but toil and struggle, with only one reward; the kids.

Which are, it goes without saying, are worth it, and deserve it. But, it means that all components of our happiness must be derived from the joy of being a parent, and for people as multifaceted as Natasha and I, that is not only extremely difficult, but downright unrealistic. I simply cannot sublimate all of my own personal feelings, dreams, desires, needs to the kids and be uncomplicatedly happy with it.

I guess what’s particularly hard to deal with is that I can’t help but thinking that many, if not most, parents must fall into this category as well, but it’s a perspective that simply doesn’t get expressed. It seems taboo to even suggest that the trade-offs may be much closer to not worth it than the prevailing wisdom might lead us to believe. There are the bitingly amusing accounts of parenthood such as Alternadad, but no matter how acerbic they get, there seems to be an unspoken understanding that having kids is the best thing that ever happened to them, and that no matter what shenanigans they get into, or difficulties they raise, it is always, always way more than worth it.

Not that I mean to complain, or to imply that I feel that having kids isn't worth it. Again, they are to me. I am just trying to work through why I don’t feel the way I thought I would, or the way that our culture expects us to, as a parent. I know that I am smack dab in the middle of the worst of it right now. Aside from health issues or multiples, we’re in just about a perfect storm for having two kids: One extremely headstrong and verbal daughter deep in the midst of the terrible twos, a newborn who can’t sleep by himself, a tiny basement apartment, a city where it hasn’t topped 62 degrees and the sun hasn’t broken through the fog for more than a couple of hours at a time for two weeks in the middle of July, and we have no family living in town.

I know that it will get better. Years from now, it will seem silly that I could have broached the subject at all. They will both be sleeping through the night. I won’t be Ruby’s primary focus of attention six days a week. She won’t be two forever. The running of a family will be easier, Natasha and I will have some semblance of our independent selves and lives back.

Shit, well, it looks like I've spent all of my allotted time on one random thought. Too bad. Rest assured, the other were equally deep, incisive, and meaningful. If it wasn't for the constant, incessant neediness of the kids, I'd have time to share them all with you. Oh well, the kids get everything, and all else in my life, including you, gets very little. Just be happy that it was too early to go to a movie, or you wouldn't have gotten even this...

The Black Sheep

Lucky for him, being the Black Sheep in this family means being really happy. As you may have noticed, Ruby came out swinging, filled with the conviction that the world must bend to her will. Natasha is filled with indignation, me with existential angst.

And little Lupito is, it appears, filled with laughter. And smiles. For all. When I walk down the street with him in the bjorn looking out, I get nothing but big smiles from the people we pass. They look down at his smiling face, can't help but smile back at him, then, at the very last second, look up and smile at me as they pass.

Yet, even though he is very much the smiley boy, and will smile all day for just about anybody, including Natasha and I, there is one person who can really make him laugh.

Indeed, in addition to being the most interesting person in the world, big sis Ruby is also the funniest person in the world, as evidenced by these short videos. These were from a few days ago, but she got him laughing even harder last night, even when she wasn't trying. He was sitting in the kitchen, and every time she came through he would crack up. Sometimes she'd notice, others she wouldn't. In these videos, though, she is most definitely putting on show for his benefit...

Ouch

Note: Mom, you might want to skip this one.

For some reason, I am reluctant to say that I live with chronic pain. I honestly don't know exactly why. Some sort of weird stoicism, perhaps. Maybe I don't want to say it out loud, as it were, and thus confer upon it a tangible reality and power. I know that I feel as though the amount of pain I have on a daily basis is relatively mild, and therefore don't want to whine about it too much. Then there is the fact that the fatigue I feel as a result of the arthritis affects my life much more than the pain does.

Or, at least it did. I have had a hell of a couple of months battling my body. And losing. Losing badly. As I've alluded to in a couple of the previous posts, I had an appendectomy a couple of days after Mother's Day, which was much more painful than I imagined. Even worse, the recovery was also more painful than I imagined, and lasted much longer, or at least seemed like it lasted much longer than I had imagined it would. I guess that it was only a couple of weeks, just like the Dr. said it would be, but it felt like a really, really long two weeks.

So, there was that. Surgery is a bitch, and I'd never had surgery before, so it came as a bit of a shock. But, what the hell, in the grand scheme of things, what's a few weeks? It came, it went. No real big deal, except, perhaps, to Natasha, who had to take care of me and both of the kids.

We went camping the first week in June, and I remember that although I had almost phased out the pain killers, I did take a couple that weekend during the trip, I suppose because camping is a bit of work, at least physically. In any case, the appendectomy was basically behind me. Unfortunately, what lay ahead was the worst arthritic flare up I've ever had

It started on that Sunday night, after we got back from camping, and I can see by looking it up on a calendar that it was June 8^th. It began just as it has on other occasions, with swelling and a fairly sharp pain on the top of the left foot, from the little bony point to where the leg starts. There must be some joint in there that seems particularly menacing to my immune system. Forces get mobilized, and by means of the miracle of immunological effectiveness and efficiency, the menacing invaders are repelled without prejudice.

Or, they would be if they were actually invaders. In fact, it's actually just one of the hundreds of joints connecting two bones in my body. Just trying to do its job. Doing a decent job of it, too, as far as I can tell. A clear cut case of immunological brutality. A vicious, and unwarranted attack on a poor little joint working hard and playing by the rules. What can you do, though? That thin white (blood cell) line cannot be broken, at least not without leaving yourself vulnerable to actual attacks from real menacing interlopers.

I limped around for those first few days, in a fair amount of pain, perhaps equivalent, but not necessarily noticeably more intense that some other flare ups in the past. A few days later, though, it worsened.

The pain spread, and intensified. The self-styled keepers of my health and well-being apparently deemed it prudent and necessary to enjoin in the battle joints adjacent to the original in a line up to and including the big toe. They also redoubled the concentration of their efforts, with a corresponding increase in the amount of swelling, and a resulting amplification of the pain.

Walking became almost impossible, and I was returned to status of invalid, laying on the couch, and in need of help for basically everything and anything. I hopped to the bathroom, but that was about it. The only help I was able to give to Natasha was to let Lupe sleep on me. I tried to help with Ruby by engaging her, but was pretty bad at it owing in part to the painkillers I was now back on and in part to the general grouchiness brought on by the constant pain. The low point came one evening as I lay on the couch, trying to get comfortable.

I couldn't. And what created the fulcrum in my mind upon which the idea of the pain could leverage itself into multifarious incarnations, was this; I was forced to confront the fact that the reason I was having such difficulty was because the weight of the quite light fleece blanket was enough to cause an excruciating amount of pain to shoot through my body, like a lightning strike directly into the pain centers in my brain. I almost started crying, but not from the pain itself.

Not that this was the most painful moment, or was in some other way the necessarily emblematic moment. Perhaps it was just the most ridiculous moment. In any case, it was the moment.

The moment upon which was born a newfound depth of understanding of the beast of chronic pain. The frustration. The helplessness. The hopelessness. The distraction. The, well, the pain.

I would guess that it was June 14^th or 15^th when this occurred, and it's now July 10^th. My Father's Day post recounts getting the killer steroid medication, which made it quite a bit better, but I am still limping slightly, and I still feel a really sharp, red hot needle stabbing kind of thing in my big toe if I bend it too much.

So, I feel like I've had a little taste of both a bout of intense pain as well as some lesser nagging pain in the course of the last few months. I would have said, before these last few months, that I couldn’t imagine having to live with real, long lasting chronic pain. But now, I think that I can imagine it. I can’t yet say that I feel as though I have truly experienced it, but I think that I now have glimpsed enough to have an inkling of what it might be like, if not for others, at least what it might be like for me.

It seems the easy way out, somehow, to talk about it in standard metaphors; it's like being adrift in the ocean, fighting to stay above water; it's like walking endlessly across the scorching sands of the desert; it's as though I am falling through a tunnel, a fading light glowing in inverse intensity to the pain itself.

But it feels nothing like any of these. It feels anti-poetic. Above all else, it feels. For someone who has so steadfastly lived a life inside his own head, this is a strange irony. I know that the pain is a result of the nerve signals that travel through my body causing a corresponding reaction within my brain, which in turn creates the sensations that I experience. I know that studies show that placebos are surprisingly effective in suppressing pain, and that even more interestingly, covertly administered morphine is far less effective than when the patient knows they are getting it. I know that this implies that, regardless of the signals sent to the brain, that pain is generated in and lives in the head.

So, here, is the strange irony; the pain is one of the few experiences capable of taking me outside of my head, and forcing me into the moment, into the experience itself. This sounds like a wonderfully zen-like gift of awareness, of being in the moment. The problem, of course, is that the moment is filled with pain. It actually feels like distraction, yet it isn't. I am distracted from the ability to think about the experience, but I am by no means distracted from experiencing the moment itself. To the contrary.

In my lifelong quest (or at least my adult life) to get out of my head and into the world, to actually experience the world, this is jolts me there. Fantastic. Perhaps I was better off in my head. Or, at least I was until conspired with my immune system in an awful, and awfully devastating alliance against me.

Not that I am complaining too much. It really wasn't all that great in my head lo these many years, what with the existential angst and such. This is worse in it's way, sure, but it could also be so much more worse. And in addition to being a bit player in Ruby's World, I have the opportunity to really bond with the super smiley boy laid out before me as I embark on the paternity leave.