ever-fixed mark

On my recent trip to Chicago, I discovered that my all-time favorite radio station, WXRT, now supports streaming for Mac. This is big news in the EFM household, as we have been mourning our Lin Brehmer in the Morning for going on five years now, and only the Macs are hooked up to the AirPort Express, which allows us to listen to radio over the house speakers. When I tried it out, though, I realized that ‘XRT still forces you to use their klugey proprietary media player, which doesn’t let you use iTunes, which is the only way you can stream audio to your home speakers (and even then, you can only stream plain audio, not audio in video).

Bollocks.

But then Husband came to the rescue with another nifty little hack: Airfoil. For $25, you can stream anything over your AirPort Express. I thought it was a little pricey just to listen to Lin, but then Husband reminded me that the maximum volume of the internal speakers in my Mac is softer than baby’s breath, and therefore streaming audio through the first-floor speakers would be way cool when videoconferencing or watching “The Daily Show” downloaded from iTunes.
If you’re looking to solve this particular problem on your Mac, I highly recommend it. It was even easy to buy–just a few clicks, which I managed to do while feeding Minor, in between bites, without causing any wrath-inducing delays.

Yesterday, when walking downtown, I saw a woman on the sidewalk pushing a three-year-old girl on a push-trike. You know, one of those tricycles with a protruding handlebar that allows the parent to control the speed and direction of a tyke that may not be able to pedal or steer yet.

The girl was wearing a helmet.

Aitch has such a tricycle. Do I really need to put a helmet on him? I mean, that little girl wasn’t traveling any faster than her mother could amble. Her mother was completely in control of her. They were on the sidewalk. I can think of ten activities that are more likely to result in a head injury than riding a push-trike, and the first two are “walking” and “sitting on a chair.”

Reminds me of the kid in A Mighty Wind whose mother forced him to wear a helmet while playing chess.

So I hired someone to keep house for me. I put an ad on Craigslist and had 10 or so responses within a day. One woman was particularly persistent; she e-mailed twice, called once, and showed up on time to meet me. She has six children, so I figured she knew the territory.

I explained the job to her: clean, tidy, launder, generally organize our lives. She asked if I would like her to cook, too, to which I responded, “Hell, yes!” Then she said: “I get it; you need a wife.”

I had to literally bite my tongue to keep from lecturing her on the dangers of internalizing the sex-roles handed down by the patriarchy. I’m all radicalized from my blog-reading, now; I was sorely tempted. In the end I decided I’d rather hire her than liberate her.

Later, when I was recounting the story to Husband, I was not self-controlled enough to refrain from remarking that, had I a husband who was willing to pick up a soiled sock or dirty dish every now and again, I wouldn’t need a “wife.” This witty sally did not have the devastating effect I intended. Husband and I were recently visited by a friend who favorably compared Husband to her spouse, who has not changed a diaper or cleaned a room in several years. Now whenever I break out the big guns of spousal dissatisfaction, he says, “But I’m the best husband you know!”

This is true; he is the best. He cooks and he takes care of the kids. But he still doesn’t do housework.

The good thing about Husband is that, although he won’t do housework, he doesn’t necessarily assume that it’s my job to do it, just because I am Woman. He’d be quite happy to leave it all undone for months until we couldn’t stand it anymore and had to move. He’s not sexist, just lazy.

I know someone whose husband not only assumed that the housework was his wife’s responsibility, he was critical of how she did it. He once described to me how he would place a piece of lint somewhere in the house before leaving in the morning, then check to see if his wife had vacuumed there when he returned home at night. If the lint was still there, he would confront her with it.

If my husband ever did anything like that, I wouldn’t just divorce him; I’d take a hit out on him.

After three months at home (during which Husband and I continued to work full time), Minor is now going to our babysitter three days a week. I just wrote the first set of checks for all of our childcare arrangements and blanched at the total. It’s not a lot of money for someone to make, but it certainly is a lot of money for someone to pay. And I’m going to be paying in full for two more years, until Aitch is ready for kindergarten. Thank Dog he just makes the age cutoff for school in fall 2008.

Has anyone else out there with two kids in day care thought about the relative windfall that will result when both are finally enrolled in public school? On that longed-for day in…fall 2012? (!)…when I get to stop writing those checks, it will feel like I’ve won the lottery. What will I do with my money when I stop spending it on daycare?

I fantasize about hiring a housekeeper, and I’m not talking about a bi-monthly cleaning. I want Alice: someone to cook, clean, do laundry, go shopping, and pick up the detritus strewn in our collective wakes every day of our lives. This is the stuff that kicks my ass, stresses me out, and drains my time. This would make me happy.

Then I had a radical thought. Why wait for 2012? If I took the time I spent picking up each day and devoted it to work, I could bill enough to pay for the housekeeper, and then some. But I couldn’t just rush out and place an ad on Craigslist as soon as it occurred to me. I was pretty ambivalent about the concept of having a maid.

Americans have a funny attitude toward domestic service. Many middle-class people have a cleaning person who comes in periodically, even if they have to cut other luxuries to afford it. Relatively few people, though, have someone cleaning up after them daily. Money is a big reason, of course, although it’s not the whole reason–plenty of people spend the equivalent on travel or nice cars or stereo equipment.

I think it has more to do with our work ethic and class structure. Hiring a maid seems like an admission of extreme laziness or as a pretension to a social class occupied by Hiltons and Buffetts. I think most middle-class Americans would feel strange hiring someone to pick up after them on a daily basis because they secretly know that they should be doing it themselves. Having a maid is undemocratic.

It was not always thus. In the nineteenth century, if novels can be taken as evidence, even the lower middle classes employed daily servants. (Remember Hannah in Little Women, in which Jo and her sisters were always decrying their poverty?) In England, at least, middle-class homes employed servants right up to the World War II years. By the ‘fifties and ’sixties, when the women were back at home and labor-saving devices made homes easier to run, the practice was falling off a bit (although the Bradys still had Alice). By the ’seventies, though, more women were entering the work force; in the ‘eighties, with all that disposable income, the pendulum should have swung the other way, but it didn’t.

I’ll be in the vanguard of the domestic outsourcing revolution. The lazy, wasteful, undemocratic domestic outsourcing revolution. I’ll let you know how it goes.

A phone conversation between Husband and me while I am in Chicago.

Me: How’s Aitch doing with his toilet training? Did he poop yet today?

Husband: No, he hasn’t—Christ on a cracker, what is this mess?

Me: What is it?

Husband: Looks like he pooped on the floor of the bathroom.

Me: Did he poop in his pants and then take them off in there, or did he go into the bathroom because he had to poop and just not quite make it?

Husband: Aitch, did you poop in your pants and take them off, or were you trying to make it to the potty?

Aitch: [unintelligible]

Husband: He’s not telling.

Me: Well, can’t you tell from the–

Husband: –poop splatter?

Me: Exactly!

Maybe we should spend a little less time with “CSI” and more time toilet training.

In the five years I lived in Chicago, I don’t think I ever ventured to the end of the Edens Expressway, where the highway suddenly veers west and then turns northward into the I-294 tollway. This week, I spent hours and hours traveling from one northern suburb to another along that road, which is lousy with tollbooths. Most of them are unmanned, so I found myself repeatedly accosted for one dollar in change, a demand that I, eight times out of ten, was unprepared to meet. I had no recourse but to go right through the tollbooth those eight times, where cameras no doubt took eight pictures of my license plate and sent eight tickets to the rental car agency, the charges for which will be applied directly to my credit card, times eight.

One of my colleagues likes to tell what is supposed to be a funny story about me and a tollbooth. It was another trip to Chicago; this time, we were driving together from Indiana to O’Hare at the end of a business trip. We stopped at a big toll plaza on the Dan Ryan, and I threw some change into an automated toll booth. This booth had a gate, and the gate refused to open. I threw more change, and nothing happened.

I sat there, waiting for one of the attendants to notice, but the minutes ticked by and no one came. A big line formed behind me, honking. A man got out of the car behind me and tried to lift the gate. He broke it, leaving a gap wide enough for me to drive through. I did, but I was worried that the camera had captured my license plate and the authorities would assume that I had destroyed the gate. The funny part of this story is supposed to be my extreme distress at possibly being charged for ruining the gate.

At least, that may be what happened. I don’t remember this incident at all. The reason I don’t remember is because I found out the day before I left on the trip that I was having my second miscarriage, and I spent the whole trip dazed and nauseated. I may have overreacted about the gate; more likely, I didn’t, and my colleague is just trumping it up for the sake of the story.

The first few times he told that story, it brought back the unhappiness of those few days like a punch to the gut. To have him poking fun at me for how I behaved when I was just barely keeping it together was doubly injurious. The next few times he told that story, I pointedly said, “Oh, right–that’s the trip where I was having THE MISCARRIAGE and feeling so rotten.” I thought this might sensitize him to how I felt about the story, or at least embarrass him into shutting up, but he hasn’t taken the hint. Now when he tells it I just clam up and hope he’ll drop the subject quickly.

He’s not an insensitive guy, and I know if I approached him and said, “Look, I hate to be reminded of that time. How’d you like me to make jokes about the day when one of your kids died?” he would get it immediately. But I never feel like broaching it out of nowhere, and when he brings it up, I’m paralyzed.

Funny, the things that get you. Some people can’t stand to see pregnant women. For me, it’s a goddamned tollbooth.

A few months ago, two good friends of mine relocated from Bali to Chicago, after almost fifteen years living abroad. They’ve been planning this move for a long time, because you don’t just pick up and move all your furniture and your two-year-old halfway around the world without putting some thought into it.

Since they first broached the subject of moving, I think I’ve been more excited about it than they have. They are sad about leaving the beautiful island they’ve called home for so long, apprehensive about how socially conservative the climate here has grown since they’ve been away, and disappointed at giving up their lifestyle, which included a live-in housekeeper and plenty of opportunity for travel. I, on the other hand, am thrilled that they will be close enough to visit and jealous that they get to move to my favorite city. I keep talking up Chicago, telling them how much they’ll love being in a big, vibrant, diverse city. They react as though I’m saying, “Don’t worry, the re-education camp will be loads of fun!”

Last night, I visited my friends in their new home. They’ve both teachers, so they had that stunned beginning-of-the-school year look that I remember so well. Moving and starting a new teaching job may well be the Perfect Storm of emotional upheaval. It brought back horrifying memories of my first day teaching in Florida, when I found out that my first paycheck would be delayed a month, and I only had enough money for two more weeks; my first day teaching in Tunisia, when I had amoebic dysentery and discovered that the faculty toilets were strictly “bring-your-own-toilet-paper”; my first day teaching in Pennsylvania, when I noticed one of my students carrying around a copy of Mein Kampf.

You would think that in the fullness of time, I would be able to chuckle softly over those memories, but looking at my friends’ tired faces, I couldn’t help blurting out, “Man, I don’t miss this at all.”

Five years ago today, I was getting back to work after a slow summer at my new consulting gig. My new project was finally starting, and I got up early to prepare for a teleconference that afternoon. I was working in my office on the third floor of my house, registering the bright blue sky showing through the skylights, but too happy about having some productive work to mind missing a beautiful day on the beach.

I had the radio on and heard the news about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Visions of 24-hour O.J./Gulf War news coverage flashed in my head, and I quickly turned off the radio and shut down my web browser, not wanting to be inundated with reports about a wayward Cessna. I worked for another hour in productive silence when my mother called to make sure I was not flying out of Boston that day.

“Why?” I asked, not getting the connection between some private pilot’s suicide in New York and conditions at Logan.

Then I turned the news back on.

Since that last hour of innocence, the news has been on constantly. Today, when the gorgeous weather evokes memories of five years ago even more than the date, I’m trying to separate how I really feel about the attacks from what the media and the government, for different reasons, have been telling me to feel. I do feel shock and horror and sadness for the victims and their families. What I don’t feel, particularly, is fear. I was very afraid when I heard the news about the last plane crashing in Pennsylvania. The reports were relentless—it felt like plane after plane was falling out of the sky. But that was the last one that day, and the last one so far, five years later.

In the time between late September 2001 and today, I’ve flown an average of four times a month. I have not been afraid to fly, or rather, I have been far more afraid of pilot error than terrorism. It’s not that I’m naive enough to think they won’t try again; I just think that my chances of being caught in the next hit are very small, just as they were the first time.

The truth is that we are at war with terror, but terror is not really at war with us. The terrorists do not intend to disrupt our way of life; they are not sufficiently angered by gay marriage or working mothers to make the effort they would need to make to sow fear in the general population. If bombs were exploding at every other cafe and checkpoint, as they do in Iraq and Israel; if snipers were haunting every shopping mall; if chemicals were being released on subways, I would be terrified. My life would change. But these guys don’t want to do the groundwork or suffer the losses that that kind of organization would require. They want to make a huge splash, with little risk to those at the top. They want to make their plans from the relatively safety of a cave, and do something that will impress their terrorist friends and investors.

It’s the media and the government who have tried to instill in us a low but constant level of perpetual anxiety. Vote for me, or the terrorists will win. Watch us, or the terrorists will win.

No one wants to walk around ignorant of the facts, like I was for that quiet hour five years ago. But sometimes it’s good to turn it off and think for yourself.

I guess that’s what I’ll be doing as I move through security at Logan today.

We’ve come a long way with Minor on sleep. By my account, we’ve progressed through the following stages:

Week 1:  Only slept while being held upright

Weeks 2 - 5:  Would fall asleep in car seat on floor while being fed bottle, depriving me of maternal sensation of holding and rocking baby to sleep

Weeks 6 - 9: Might fall asleep in car seat, stroller, or Bjorn, but each night was a crapshoot.

Weeks 10 - 11:  Fell asleep easily and permitted transfer to crib but woke every 45 minutes

Week 12, Days 1 and 2:  Fell asleep, angelically, while being held, rocked, and sung to; permitted transfer to crib; slept 4 hours at a stretch

Which brings us to the time period spanning Week 12, Day 3 to the present. Minor flails.  He takes a bottle nicely but struggles to be held upright as soon as it is over, and he flails. He slams his little head down on my chest:  left, right, left, right. He arches his back and throws out his arms as though parting the Red Sea, and cries. He flops back down again and digs his microscopic yet strangely sharp nails into my neck. He thrashes his head. If I hold him on his back or face down, he cries. Sometimes he burps, but then he goes back to flailing.

When this happens, my Id, Ego, and Superego have a little dialogue (trialogue?).

My Id says, “Dude…” (because Ids are male; what else would they be?) “…dude, this has gone on long enough. Bail. Just put him down and let him scream. What’s the difference if he’s crying in your arms or alone in the crib? You could be getting so much else done. Or having a glass of wine. Dude, totally do it.”

My Superego sounds like Maude Flanders channeled through Dr. Sears. “Your baby needs you! You must hold him and comfort him through this. What kind of a mother are you that you can’t hold on for another half hour? You can’t abandon him to cry alone in the dark! Think of the chiiiiildren!”

And my Ego rationalizes, “Well, holding him for an hour hasn’t worked, so maybe he needs to be on his own for a bit to fall asleep. If he’s still crying after five minutes, you can go back in, and it probably won’t scar him for life. And if he does learn to fall asleep on his own, bedtimes will be less traumatic for both of you.”

So, basically, my Id wins, but my Ego couches the reason in rational terms. And you know what they say about rationalizations.

The thing is, long after the outcome is decided–Minor passes out in a minute and a half, vindicating me, or he continues to scream, vindicating Maude–the debate continues to rage, rage in my head. “You’re a good mother.” “You’re a bad mother.” “You’re good enough—considering these conditions.” On and on–the guilt.

I think I need to Ferberize the voices in my head.