ever-fixed mark

Years ago, in junior high, my biology teacher told us that girls are born with all the eggs they will ever have.

When I was in my twenties, my OB/GYN told me that being on the Pill was a good thing because it would help me to “conserve eggs.”

Since I hit my thirties, I’ve been picturing my poor old eggs, puckering and losing potency in their little carton, there on the supermarket shelf of my ovaries. (N.B.: I never did make it to high school biology.)

A few years ago, my fertility specialist told me that my miscarriages might have been caused by the advanced age of my eggs.

So what is this: Hype? or hope?

I’m the kind of person who likes to wrap things up. I drive to completion. I realize goals. I cross things off my list. It’s served me pretty well in my work life, since people actually pay me to teach them how to do it. In my personal life, not so much. (I was the single woman saying, on the third date, “Where do we think this relationship is going?”) Yes, I realize that there’s a time to lie back and allow the universe to unfold its grand plan in front of you, but as those of us who have dealt with infertility know, there’s also a time to pick up the damn phone and call the fertility specialist or the adoption agency and get things moving along.

I’m struggling with this right now. A while back, I posted that Husband and I had decided to specify a girl for our second adoption. I posted a nice little defense of this decision, feeling a bit defensive about this choice. While I knew we would be happy with a girl or a boy, I didn’t want to close off, permanently, the possibility of having a girl.

That was then–mid-April. At the time, I thought our dossier had already gone to Korea and we would be getting our referral by April 2006, at the latest. Three months later, our fingerprints are not approved and we won’t be on the waiting list for at least another few weeks, maybe another month. The longer we wait, the longer wait times are expected to extend. Our referral might not come until September 2006, and we may not meet our second child in person until 2007. The one thing that might shorten the time frame? Moving from the “girl” list to the “child of either gender” list, which is currently getting referrals 3 months faster.

I was ambivalent about specifying “girl only,” and now I’m ambivalent about changing that decision. I don’t want my neurotic need to get things done to be the main reason for changing my mind. But it’s more than that; it’s a fear of what might happen during this delay that’s prompting it. Adoption is not really a sure thing. Many things can derail it: an illness, a political situation, even a pregnancy. (And although that may sound like six of one, half a dozen of the other, it’s not. It’s horrible to have your plans for a child interrupted, even if that interruption is the possibility of another child. It’s still, oddly, a loss.) Bottom line is, the longer the process drags out, the more opportunity for things to go wrong.

So Husband and I are back to picking boy names. This is tough for two reasons. First, we’ve had our girl’s name picked out for years, since we started our first adoption process, and ever since we’ve started the process for #2 we’ve been referring to our future baby by this name. Now, that baby no longer exists, or at least the possibility of her is greatly reduced, because chances are that our referral will be a boy. But it’s also difficult because we just can’t find a boy’s name that fits. Our criteria are that the name has to be plain and common, but not particularly popular, while also appealing to us. Most of the names we can think of fit only two out of three. Try it: Herbert? Plan and not too popular, but icky. John? A plain name I like, but too common. And so forth.

Luckily, I found this awesome baby name site. Apparently, Mormons like to give their kids off-beat names. I guess when you have anywhere from ten to 45 kids, you have to get somewhat creative. Creative as in Anfernee….El Myrrh…Nephi Courage…Pledger.

In an odd bit of synchronicity, Husband and I have just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. (Clarification: We just finished reading it serially; we’re not that precious.) In the book, Krakauer alternates between the story of a brutal murder and the history of the Latter-Day Saints, drawing parallels between the church’s violent past and the fundamentalist doctrines that are resurfacing. I was absolutely fascinated by the kooky beginnings of Mormonism–Golden plates unearthed in upstate New York? God handing out conflicting revelations, like some cosmic game of “To Tell the Truth”? Equally fascinating are the weird artefacts that persist even to today’s mainstream church: Long underwear, even in the summer? Fortune-telling as a sanctioned church activity?

I told Husband that I couldn’t believe our governor comes from a religious tradition that believes that American Indians are descendants of the Israelites. Husband pointed out that most of our government believes that their prophet rose from the dead, so it’s not really that crazy, relatively speaking.

Anyway, we have a wealth of interesting boy name choices now. “Helamans Warrior” has a strong martial ring and will alliterate nicely with Aitch’s name.

In yesterday’s the New York Times, Stanley Fish—literary critic and former head of the English department at Duke University—deconstructed the terms “interpretation,” “intentionalist,” and “judicial activist” in the context of the then-impending Supreme Court pick. It’s nice to see someone from the world of letters represented on the Op Ed page, although the Times might think about giving someone else a turn, as we recently heard from Dr. Fish on how writing should be taught. (Answer: Have students make up their own languages.) Maybe now that Fish has moved from English to law, joining the College of Law at Florida International University this fall, the Times figures he counts in multiple areas.

In the article, Fish contends that the only valid way to interpret the Constitution is to seek to divine the framers’ intent. The text cannot stand on its own devoid of intent, he says; anyone who attempts to find his or her “own” meaning in the text is just makin’ stuff up. It’s pretty black-and-white, the way he lays it out. It all sounds extremely reasonable when applied to the Constitution, of course, especially at the end when Fish backpedals a bit and says that different people might marshall different evidence to arrive at different conclusions regarding the framers’ intentions (not so black-and-white after all).

But Fish is tricky; he’s not just commenting on the Supreme Court nomination, he’s also tweaking the nose of the lit-crit establishment, who rejected divination of “authorial intent” as a valid critical method years ago and whose bread-and-butter is “making meaning” out of “texts.” Sure, you might take an author’s historical milieu or political status or sexuality into account when discussing a text, but there’s also plenty of room for the reader’s experience. Fish does away with all that; his declaration that “authorial intent” is the only way to interpret the Constitution carries the unspoken judgment that it’s the only way to look at a literary text as well.

Fish’s remarks were in the back of my mind as I was reading Aitch Where the Wild Things Are at bedtime last night. I’ve read it several hundred times as an adult, and I love the language; read out loud, it’s very poetic. But last night, for the first time, as I got to the part where Max was made king of all Wild Things, it hit me: The Wild Things represent the seductive side of the working world, the promise of success, power, and adoration. But Max senses their danger, and their entreaty as he escapes back to his private boat is telling: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!” The better you are, the more the corporation will use you up; its love is consuming, and Max is wise to retreat to the bosom of family life.

Sure, it may have been weeks of sleep deprivation, work stress, or the hand, foot, and mouth disease migrating to my brain. But I’m pretty sure that’s what Maurice Sendak intended.

A series of minor calamities has beset the House of Wandering Barque. Not Job-style “lost the farm and now must declare bankruptcy” calamities, but acutely painful while they last nonetheless.

First, my computer is having a nervous breakdown. My precious iBook, about which I evangelize as I tote it along on business trips, has let me down. The source of the problem is the whimsically-named “kernel panic,” which puts me in mind of animated popcorn rather than the decidedly more somber image of my consulting career going down the toilet. Basically, I can’t access the Applications folder, all other operations are slow, and I can’t log in under the babysitter account. And, periodically, the kernels panic thusly:

Not pretty.

Luckily, I have several back-up PCs to take to client meetings, but they’re all PCs. I can’t use my nifty Acme pink polka dot bag, which inspires admiring comments on elevators and airplanes, upon which I enjoy telling people, “It’s only for Macs” and watching their faces fall. Now I’m carrying a lumpy black Targus like everyone else in the universe.

Minor crisis #2: Aitch is sick. He has something called hand, foot, and mouth disease, which is unrelated to hoof and mouth disease or to foot-in-mouth disease. The thing that Aitch has features a fever, general malaise, and sores on the mouth, hands, feet, and butt. Aitch has been understandably crabby, wakeful, and reluctant to eat. The trouble is that I have it, too. The adult manifestation is usually milder than the toddler version, so I’m lucky to skip the fever and the hand, feet, and butt sores. I do, however, have the mouth sores, “malaise,” and an overall achiness that may be the result of the fever, sleep deprivation, or old age.

Minor crisis #3: Work has been going gangbusters. Normally a good problem to have, but Husband has been traveling a lot and I have to juggle baby and dog care solo with a full workload. All this during 90-degree heat and 90+% humidity, leaving all but three rooms in our house uninhabitable.

But as I was driving into work today, practically comatose and wincing from the erupting sores in my mouth, a little bright spot showed itself on the miserable horizon. A thought occurred, which I whimpered to myself throughout the day whenever things got tough:

Now I can have Lin Brehmer in the morning.

Let me explain. Lin Brehmer is a disk jockey at WXRT, a terrific independent radio station based in Chicago. I listened to Lin neary every morning of the three years I lived in the city. It’s hard to quantify Lin’s appeal—he seems like a nice, musically knowledgeable, mildly funny and personable guy who’s a complete pleasure to listen to. (He had the distinction of interviewing Bono early in his career and calling him “Boh-noh.”) When Husband and I decided to move to the northeast, the loss of Lin was actually the one thing that gave us pause in our decision. For years, WXRT’s parent company, Infinity Broadcasting, has evilly resisted streaming on their website. Finally, they’ve relented, but they use a proprietary plug-in that works only on Windows. Thus, I haven’t been able to access WXRT in the morning through any of the Macs in the breakfast area. But now that I have my loaner laptop installed in the kitchen, tomorrow morning is going to be Breakfast with Brehmer, baby.

Incidentally, WXRT is where I first heard the great “Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues,” where the titular line, originated by Kurt Cobain, was repurposed to such great effect.

As I am still commuting to Cambridge on a near-daily basis, I’ve had a lot of time to think. You can only return phone calls for so long on a car trip. Since there have been so many reports lately about the dangers of cell phone use while driving, I’ve been trying to cut down on my talking time anyway. I still read and respond to e-mails on my phone’s browser while driving, though; I haven’t seen any reports about that!

(By the way, have you noticed that the term “cell phone” is being edged out by the more Euro-correct “mobile phone” or “mobile”? I don’t approve, mostly because of the multiple pronunciation options. ‘mO-b&l (phonetics are Merriam-Webster’s) is the traditional American way to say it; ‘mO-bEl is a nice hillbilly variant; but -‘mO-bIl is gaining ground among the Euroscenti. I’m suspicious of words containing long vowels in every syllable, causing syllables to be emphasized equally. It’s just not the American way. We’re big schwa fans here in North America. It’s what distinguishes us from the other languages. Mobile, however, is vastly preferable to “hand phone,” a term I first heard in Indonesia that sounds vaguely dirty. On German TV, I once heard a commercial where this was shortened to “handy.” Please, let’s not go there.)

Where was I? Oh yes, too much time to think on the commute. During my travels in and around the construction zone that is Cambridge, I’ve observed that there are two local construction firms that happen to bear the same names as my family name and my husband’s. Now, I grew up with a somewhat uncommon surname, so I still get a little charge out of encountering my name in public–say, emblazoned on the side of a semi. And when I drive up behind two trucks lane-by-lane displaying my maiden and married names on their respective mud flaps, I have to admit it tickles me a little bit.

So, on one of my recent long, slow commutes, the sight of these trucks prompted a reverie: What if the Maiden Name and Married Name companies were warring firms, and their two scions, like Husband and I, fell in love, defying their families? It would be like an updated version of Romeo and Juliet. We could set it in the early days of the Central Artery project, when lucrative construction contracts were up for grabs: Big Dig Story! I can see the climactic balcony scene relocated to the Zakim Bridge. How romantic! Alas, the show, like the much-vaunted public works project, would probably run overlong and overbudget.

But, wait: what if Husband and I really were long-lost descendents of the Maiden Name and Married Name families? And what if we were the only descendants, and stood to inherit the vast pile that these companies are surely making on the Big Dig? That would be something. There’s probably a little organized crime involvement there, so there are some ethics issues, but nothing we couldn’t get around, I’m sure. After all, some day it would all be Aitch’s.

And they’d be telling that story for generations: “And that’s how that little Korean boy grew up to become the head of the newly combined Irish-Italian mafia.”

Only in America.

Some notes on Aitch’s recent linguistic development:

As Aitch adds more words to his vocabulary, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to us that the adoption agency pulled a fast one. We think that Aitch came not from Korea but from Canada. His “au” phonemes are sounding suspiciously Canuck, so that he’s hanging aboot the hoose and such. Even worse, we think he’s French-Canadian; his “no’s” are imperiously Gallic: “Non! Non!” He’s also fascinated by the sound of anyone speaking French. Would it ruin the cachet of our international adoption if it became known about town that our son comes from the Great White North?

Aitch has also picked up an odd habit of adding an “ee” sound to the end of many of his words: to wit, “Uppy,” “Downy,” “Juey” (juice, normally pronounced “ju”–or, come to think of it, is it “jus”? hmmm). This really annoys both Husband and me, maybe because we are quick to pick up on it on our own speech: “No, you can’t get downy, you have to finish your juey.” I’ve tried to listen carefully to the words Aitch chooses to inflect to see if my little Noam Chomsky is using it is any kind of linguistic marker. So far, he attaches it indiscriminately to nouns, adjectives, and interjections, although not so far to verbs. Then, I thought maybe this sound was not grammatically indicative but perhaps a grammatical element in itself. In Arabic, for example, you can add “sh” to the front of a noun to turn it into a question, and a variety of suffixes to a word to indicate a direct object, so that the simple noun “ism” can become the question, “Shismik?” or “What’s your name?” But Aitch’s “ee” does not appear to have any intrinsic lexical value. After close study, I can only conclude that it indicates urgency. In other words, he tends to use it when he’s whining, with a rising tone that sets my teeth on edge. Like tonight, when I tried to take him to bed: “Noeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Three months ago, when we had Aitch evaluated by Early Intervention, the nice ladies told us that he would be busting into two-word combinations any day now. Well, he’s almost two and he’s still speaking in resolute one-word sentences. He does name everything he recognizes, including each individual car on the road, and sometimes the one-word sentences relate to one another. The other night, to keep him distracted while changing him, I began talking about the soup he was going to have for dinner, and he said, “Soup. Bowl. Hot?” Definitely a train of thought there, but not quite a phrase. Hot soup bowl, Aitch! Hot soup bowl! You’re so close!

He is showing remarkable strides, though, in spatial reasoning. He knows his way around town, which he calls “downtown,” which is just so cute and urban of him. If we decide to try an alternate route when he has his heart set on the library or the coffee shop, he lets us know about it: “Cookie? Cookie?” He does it in the car, too; when we cross the bridge into the next town he starts calling for “Wobby,”the lobster at the fish market on that road. I find this kind of intelligence rather remarkable, although as Husband pointed out, even Dog is able to recognize his usual route.

Last week, though, I was driving Aitch on a few errands. I had been out of town for a few days so I wasn’t up on all the latest additions to his vocab. I pulled into the strip mall that contains the liquor store, when I heard from the back seat, “Wine? Wine?”

I wonder how he learned that while I was away?

Greetings from Newark! The quality of my travel destinations is deteriorating rapidly, isn’t it? Is this what the Jeep was trying to warn me about? At this rate, by next week I’ll be checking myself into accommodations in…well, it’s hard the think of a way to end that sentence that’s worse than “Newark.” “McLean,” perhaps?

To add insult to injury, I’m at an Embassy Suites, which is the absolute worst hotel design concept ever. The lobby is a small, damp water park, with paths meandering through it any direction but direct and an annoying fountain running around the clock. All the hallways are open to public view, there are windows in the rooms that open onto the hallways, and the elevators are see-through. It’s as though the morality police deliberately set out to design a hotel that would discourage indiscreet behavior. Note to self: do not book Embassy Suites for affair.

Tonight, I’ll be heading home for the weekend, and thus have been planning my Aitch-entertainment strategy, which now has a new prong. Two weeks ago, it was extremely hot, and in a fit of pique (because I am forty years old, pay taxes in a reasonably high bracket, and still do not have central air), I joined an outdoor pool. This was no mean accomplishment, because there are few outdoor pools on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Our Puritan forebears did not leave us with a robust tradition of aquatic sports. So we have to travel eight exits down the freeway just to take a dip, but it was worth it.

The center has various pools and a “sprayground,” a patch of concrete with different types of fountains and other water effects. It was worth the cost of membership just to witness Aitch’s glee as he ran through the sprinklers. He was literally dancing for joy as the water jets rose up in a circle surrounding him. He ran, danced, laughed and shouted for about an hour, after which he was content to sit docilely and eat his lunch. After lunch, he quietly explored the principles of conservation by pouring water from one container to another, one container to another in the wading pool as I sat there and watched.

It was brilliant. It was also weirdly suburban. One of the reasons I’m in this boat — the forty-year-old-mom boat — in the first place is that I was so fearful of giving up my independence, my life, myself, AND MY CITY APARTMENT that I was slow to marry and reproduce. I have always wanted to experience marriage and motherhood, but I have studiously avoided the suburban lifestyle that such relationships seem to spawn. I had this fantasy of urban motherhood that could sort of be maintained as long as I was living within walking distance of some sort of downtown and never set foot in a mall. But an afternoon at the public pool with a thousand other parents in the same age and tax bracket has blasted that fantasy right out of the water.

Get it? Water.