Archive | March, 2007
Heart condition
Each day, by the brevity of its life, our pet tells us, I shall soon be dead. In the deepest sense, these familiar creatures are part of the hurt of living. Because dogs inflict the suffering of loss upon us, the French sometimes call them “beasts of sorrow,”bêtes de chagrin.
–from Roger Grenier, The Difficulty of Being a Dog
Since around the beginning of the beloved’s last trimester with our lil’ peanut, I have known that my dog has had a heart condition. A terminal, shorten her life to sometime far less than a year heart condition.
She has a leaky valve, which means her heart can’t pump efficiently enough. To compensate, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually it will crowd out everything: lungs, other organs, itself. She will die of congestive heart failure, or need us to help her to die, soon. Just how soon is the only thing we don’t know.
It figures that the thing she’ll die from is a heart that’s too large.
I brought her into my life just over thirteen years ago, to stem the tide of loss. In late summer, I lost my then-sweetie (though it was just me who lost her; she found someone else). Then three short weeks later my mother died. We had sensed she was dying, but didn’t know why. In mid-August, just as she was slipping into a coma, a metastasis of her breast cancer was diagnosed. She died the first of September.
I reeled with shock that fall, but by the dead of winter — and at the time, I was living in Minnesota, so it was the dead of winter — I knew I had to get me a dog. I would get me some warm-blooded mammal who was not going to leave me for a long while — not if I could help it. I would get me a little somebody I could care for, a little somebody who could see me through to the other side of this loss, and then some.
I went to a nearby shelter, and brought a friend with me so that I wouldn’t go home with the first dog who batted her eyes at me. Within a few minutes I saw a sweet three-month old lab mix, and quite naturally I immediately tried to convince my friend that I was kidding about how I didn’t want her to let me leave the shelter with the first pup I saw. She held firm. I squatted down and whispered to Maxie that I’d be back, gave her a kiss on the top of her head, and the next day I was driving home with my slinky-black wet-nosed girlie.
That year after my mother died, I would come home from just a half a day in the world — a half day in which I sleepwalked through graduate seminars, or immitated a memory of myself teaching a class, one which I’d taught with a dear friend twice before, and which provided a lifeline to continuity and community. Without it, I would have never left the house. But after half a day away on campus, I was spent. I had run out of words, or the energy to speak them. I would make my way back to the house I was living in (Eleanor’s House of Butches, I fondly call it; I was by far the feyest of the bunch). There I would gather my tail-thumping puppy in my arms, plod upstairs, curl onto the bed, and hug her. And hug her. And wordlessly hug her.
What she needed from me was exactly what I had to give; what she had to give me was exactly what I needed.
She gladly went with me everywhere I could take her. To clinic defenses and sweatshop labor protests. To university buildings, smuggled under my heavy winter coat, for office hours. To Lesbian Avenger meetings. When the weather warmed up, she accompanied me to outdoor cafés. She was my companion through the time in my life when I was most profoundly alone, most accutely companion-less. Then one by one, she endured the gradual encroachment of others into our lives and into my heart: first, the beloved; then, for an intense time, another dog; then — body blow! — our first child. Now, another baby. She has received each of these interlopers with a poignant mixture of generosity and impotence. The plight of the dog. Or perhaps more specifically, the plight of the dear, sweet, submissive dog.
In her thirteen years she has seen me through more losses than I could have imagined when I first drove her home that chilly January. She has lived longer than my oldest nephew. Unthinkable.
Precisely one week after our lil’ peanut’s birth, after climbing the flight-and-a-half of stairs it takes to get to our place, she collapsed, and so announced the beginning of this last chapter. Since then I’ve accompanied her outside on her frequent trips to pee, and then carried her increasingly bony body back up those stairs. She’s beginning even to dread that gesture of tender accomodation nearly as much as she yearns to go outside. Nights, she paces restlessly. Her breathing is often labored; she eats like a bird. I can’t know what she is experiencing, but it’s clear that she’s uncomfortable much of the time. How uncomfortable? I look at her and say what the lil’ monkey so often says to me, when I ask her something she can’t answer. “You tell me.”
Then I look up and make eye contact with death, who’s been patiently sitting over there all along, thumbing through last week’s unread Sunday paper.
Friends say I will know when it’s time. I hope so. For my sake, and of course more so, for hers, I hope it’s the bus.*
* What this metaphor means, here.
Quality assurance
Q: Can I wipe the smoothie off your mouth, honey?
A: That’s okay, I can just clean it off with my tongue.
What the Berkeley Parents are chewing on this week
The Berkeley Parents Network is a mammoth online community of fellow travellers, kvetchers, generous direction-givers, cranky back seat drivers, kibitzers, kindly saviors, passionate idealists, well-informed pragmatists, and diggers out of the mud. Pretty much like this town, only the parental, wired slice of it.
Officially, they’re “a grass-roots, volunteer-run organization of more than 17,000 parents who live in the Berkeley, California area.” Here’s their FAQ. Their website is an archive of over fifteen years of conversation, but because the group’s voluminous correspondence is managed by volunteers, they restrict membership (and thus newsletter subscription) to parents in the local area. With one exception: parents whose kids experience night terrors, regardless of where they live, can post advice on the website. They field and post advice from all around the globe on this one.
A raft of newsletters go out weekly, chock-full of items ranging from announcements of upcoming events to childcare resources to summer camps info to plumber and pet psychic recommendations. Hell, when the Weblog Awards business heated up, I even sent in a Show yer local pride and vote for my blog, if you read it & like it plea, but as fate would have it, it only got posted after the Awards business was mercifully over.
While all the newsletters are helpful, the Advice one makes positively addictive reading. The themes are clearly rooted in parental life, but as you can see from this most recent week’s topics, pasted below, the network has long since become an all-purpose digital fence over which folks chat up just about everything.
“Tips for having more energy and being less cranky” sure speaks to me today, as does “Having a Second Baby – Feel sad for the first!” On General Principal I refuse to admit to having “Birthday party stress” (though unfortunately I may not be immune from it), and at the moment I am on my knees thanking the goddess that it’s not me (at least at the moment) whose “Child keeps getting bitten at daycare.” I don’t want to read the responses to “Can we afford to come home?” since it may make me realize we can’t afford to keep living here, the socio-political epicenter of my soul. That’d be a shame. The most inspirational topics in this week’s Advice newsletter were “Conflicted about possible Down Syndrome baby,” (22 responses), “Husband wants more free time” (20 responses), and “Sleep training at 15 weeks” (18 responses).
Because they’re usually so jumbo, the Advice newsletters are circulated over the course of two mailings (A-L and M-Z). Then the material gets archived onto the website by volunteers with a dedication that rivals that of a bunch of monks hunched over their illuminated manuscripts. This index page shows just the tip of the archival iceberg. Basically, if you’ve suffered any kind of parental dilemma, from the ordinary to the extrraordinary, someone else has too, and chatted it up over this digital fence.
So pop yourself some popcorn and pull up a barcalounger whilst you peruse what folks were wondering and advising on this past week. (Following the advice item is the number of responses it netted.)
Almost 3-year old Aggression 2
Arrangements for toddler while giving birth to 2nd 7
Baby singing in crib 4
Baby-sitting fees for teens 1
Behavioral Optometry-light therapy 1
Bird Themed Birthday Party 1
Birthday for twin boys turning 13 1
Birthday party stress 12
Brachial plexus palsy 1
Can we afford to come home?? 2
Car accident 2
Childs allowance and spending 1
Classes for 16 mo old – How much is too much? 3
Conflicted about possible Down Syndrome baby 22
Crying mommy 3
Daughter-in-law doesn’t hold newborn 1
Dental work on infant? 4
Depression while taking care of 2.5 year old boy 2
Dislocated hip during labor and delivery 4
Do we need a financial advisor? 2
Earthquake advice! 7
Fast Fix For Nail Fungus? 3
Going back to the land 1
Having a Second Baby – Feel sad for the first! 12
Hitting from 19mo old 1
Home birth for first-time mom 1
Home too dry 2
How do you build wealth? 1
How to find household helper? 1
How to help 6 yr old lose weight? 6
How to raise only child 2
Husband Fed Up with Cat 9
Husband wants more free time 20
In laws attending all kid’s games 8
Infant formula without corn syrup? 1
Judgemental mother-in-law 1
Learning how to nap 2
Losing Weight While Pregnant 10
10 month old wakes every hour every night 3
19 month old hitting everybody 2
3 1/2 year old won’t drink 7
4 week old can’t get milk out of bottle 5
5 mo old rolling over 1
6 y.o. sits in corner and won’t play 1
Making new friends in Marin 3
Middle-Age Spread??? 3
Mold and humidifiers 1
Month-long Europe trip with toddler 1
Moving Out of State with Newborn 1
Moving forward after miscarriage 1
My child keeps getting bitten at daycare 4
Nanny Filed for Unemployment 1
Nervous about dermoid cyst surgery 3
Non-allergenic dog 1
Normal social behavior for a five year-old? 2
Old friend ”labeling” my son 1
Organic Milk 6
Other: Unsolicited Good Advice 1
Pack & Play as a Crib? 1
Paid Family Leave — intermittent 1
Panic attacks during 3rd trimester 4
Passover holiday for nanny 5
Paying nanny ”over the table” 1
Playdate idea 7
Post-partum reality check? 3
Power struggle with 7 mo old? 1
Private Investigator investigating me! 1
Regional Center or Private OT? 2
Separation anxiety in 3 yr. old 1
Sleep Training at 15 Weeks? 18
Sleep problems 4 year old 1
Special gift for 2nd child 1
Thank You etiquette for thank you gifts 3
Those damn bpd helicopters 4
Tips for having more energy & being less cranky 5
To fight or not to fight for grandmothers estate 8
Toddler Always Hungry 1
Waterless grass 3
What to do with an old, old cat 8
What to do with small inheritance 2
When did your baby shift to one nap? 6
Where should I put money for retirement? 2
Whole-house humidifier? 1
Worried About My Small Toddler 4
Weekend bonus shot, 03.10.07
Special cousins double-team the lil’ monkey with hello kisses, Berkeley, CA.
What’s a special cousin, you might ask? Here, find out!
Terms of engenderment, or The “buddy” question
As seen on the tot lot playground.
The other day, at our neighborhood tot lot, a dad was pushing his toddlerish child in the swing next to me and the lil’ monkey, who, per usual, was heading into her second hour in the saddle, showing no signs of fatigue, though her lower extremities must surely have been tingly-numb by then. I know my arm was. She was singing DaDa-ist songs to herself, as she is often wont to do, and my mind (and ears) had occasion to wander to the neighboring swingers. In the (relatively) short time he was next to us, I heard the dad use on his kid the diminutive “buddy” as well as its slightly less frequently employed cognates “pal,” and “my friend.” Now I ask you, to which biological sex of kidling, based on your own experience of the usage of these terms of endearment, do you think these diminutives were directed?
Wait, I’ll answer for you: a boy.
Boy kids are buddies. Girl kids are — well, in my own anecdotal experience, they have been lots of things, but rarely buddies. Oh, don’t even try to offer up as an example Kristy McNichol’s character Buddy in the 1970s TV series “Family.” It only goes to prove the boy-association of the term. Everyone who was a then-tomboy and future-lesbo watching that show back then knows just what I’m saying. Even the rest of y’all know what I’m saying.
I think we can take my anecdotal experience as pretty much on the mark, and then go on to try to puzzle out what that means that we tell boys they’re our “buddies,” and ask what role that selective form of address plays in boys’ socialization as little bouncey rubber toughies. In what I’m sure will be a life-long quest to ensure both our kids have maximum elbow room to become whomever they wish to become, I am compelled to not let these differentiations drift by unexamined, as if they were inevitable, or harmless, or even in objective service to absolute biological truth. Some may well be, and I’ll learn tough lessons about the power of nature over nurture, I’m certain. But the language we use in addressing the wee mites falls in the realm of nurture. So these are hairs I gotta split.
Now as it happens, I’ve returned to work outside the house this week (ha HA! just in time for the sleep deprivation to begin to manifest in hallucinations! “What’s that behind the copier?!! Duck everyone! Duck and cover!! Oh, no. Never mind. Don’t even listen to me. Go on with what you were saying.”). But so where ordinarily I’d be able to humor my desire to obsessively research the larger topic of gender socialization as it plays out in terms of address for girls and boys in early childhood, and maybe season this post with some Learned Wisdom, now I plain can’t squeeze in the time. Circumstances call for me to become a far more efficient quick sketch artist these days, and I’m sure it’s just as well. (Redundant repetitiveness begone! Indulgent loquatiousness, meet the bullet point!) I can note, though, that feminist linguists (and one must say they are cunning) have already made the case for how normative gender-training positively drips off of language, from the very first application of it upon fresh human beings, and all the way down to the smallest particle of speech.
We know language matters, period. And an innocuous diminutive like “buddy” brings with it meanings we are associating with our boys, intentionally or not, when we use the term on them (and not on their sisters). After spreading out some of those meanings for us to look at and cogitate on, I’ll just end with a flurry of questions, since that’s all I can do these days on so little sleep (e.g., “Sweetie? Did you feed the garbage and take out the dog? Or did I? And if I did, why did I?”). Here are some connotations “buddy” holds for me:
-
• a buddy is a friend, (and therefore an equal, as opposed to a younger, physically and emotionally dependant being whom we are entrusted to protect);
- • a buddy is rough-and-tumble;
- • “buddy” floats around nearby “buddy boy,” which, though I am hard-pressed to find an etymological tract on it all, definitely feels to me to be the linguistic equivalent of a slightly-too-hard sock in the arm: a good natured, but watch yourself kind of address.
A gloss on the denotative meaning of buddy confirms the above, and points out that it is speculated to have originated as a variant on “brother,” and was “long associated with coal miners.”
So here are some of the things I wonder: Do fathers use this term in reference to their sons more than mothers (generally, if not even stereotypically speaking)? If so, what might it be about a father-son bond that (general, if not stereotypical) men feel that inspires them to insert this good-natured wedge between their parental selves and their boy children? Why would any of us do this? Is it the rip-tide of conventional language use that pulls this word out of the mouths of those of us who don’t intend — consciously, at least — to make our boy children into durable equals? Or do we really want them to grow up faster than their sisters, and tougher? And, more importantly, do they?
He smiled! He smiled!
The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be
as happy as kings.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses
O, I was going to write about how we’re in the weeds here, as they say in the restaurant business. And with a performing artist in the house, you know we got a lot of laboring years in the restaurant business to draw from. Why the weeds, you may ask? In our brief experience with it, a second wee mite brings an EXPONENTIAL increase in childcare needs, not an arithmetic one. Quite in contrast to adding a second dog, which did entail merely an arithmetic increase in care. (Otherwise, I’m happy to report to all you dog-totin’ dykes out there — and we all are issued dogs upon coming out; the toaster thing was just a joke for TV — all the insights gleaned from being a human companion to a dog have been right on the money.)
Have I noted in these pages that the lil’ monkey threw her naps overboard like about six months ago? Have I? Because that might factor in here. The whole “nap when the baby naps” thing is C-R-A-P when you got a toddler with insomnia bopping around the house armed with a fork and on the make for unprotected electrical outlets. Okay, mostly she reads and draws and makes powdery messes with baking flour, but the point is that the moment either of us dropped off to sleep, she totally could begin to skewer the outlets. She totally could.
Then I was going to write about how sad it is to have a six-week old infant get the croup, and how sad it is that we had to haul him off to the ER in the middle of the night for treatment thereof, which included a shot of steroids (!). I was hoping for a bookish kind of chap, but am now bracing for the Butchenator. [Ed note: The lil' monkey, upon clapping her eyes on that image, said "He looks like a cheeseburger!"] Ah well. He no longer barks like a seal, and it cleared up his bout of infant acne, bada bing, bada boom!
Then I was going to write about his post-croup, husky Brenda Vaccaro for Playtex Tampons voice. O, sad sad, the husky-voiced infant.
But all these laments have to go to the back of the queue, because instead I have to sing out to the heavens that He smiled! He smiled!
I’m as corny as Kansas in August!
[Musical fans may follow along with the lyrics here.]
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