One year old

40 weeks.

Yesterday, Chris and I kept looking at the clock. “At this time last year, we were checking into the hospital.” “Now we’re deciding whether to take the Cervadil or not.” “Now we’re switching rooms.” “Now you’re going out for a beer and a sandwich.” (That one was Chris.) Abby was born at 3.37 in the morning on July 14th, and all I could feel was relief: it was over. According to books and movies, I was supposed to have a moment when everything changed. I was supposed to take one look at the tiny, screaming bundle lying on my chest and suddenly realize that the world was full of danger, that my life counted for nothing in comparison with this little life that I now had to keep safe, I was supposed to be blindsided by love for this stranger that I had just met. I felt none of those things. I felt relief, but I also felt recognition. When she was lying on my chest moving her head from side to side with those so-familiar jerky, stretching movements like she couldn’t figure out where she was and what had changed, I recognized her. I recognized the way she moved because that’s how she moved when she was inside of me. I knew her tiny limbs already. I didn’t need to meet her, because I already knew her.

About 7 hours old.

As those hours changed into days, I lost some of that feeling. She was a difficult baby at first, and when I was holding her at three in the morning as she screamed unconsolably, as I desperately, ineffectually tried to get to her nurse, I felt completely alien from the creature who needed me so intensely without even knowing it, who knew only that something was wrong. The first night we were home from the hospital, I wandered the downstairs with her all night as Chris slept upstairs to rest for an interview for a job that he didn’t get. She cried and cried, and I cried. I looked at our table filled with flowers and cards from our loving family and friends and I sobbed, because those cards and flowers were full of hope and congratulations, and I hadn’t slept in three days and I just knew, from the bottom of my heart, that I couldn’t do it. And I had to. I had never experienced that feeling so profoundly, that lethal “and” rather than “but”: I could not do it, and I had to.

Crying, as usual.

Little by little, of course, imperceptibly, it changed. We figured out how to get her arms through her onesies. Nursing became routine and comfortable. She started enjoying her baths. She smiled, and then laughed. She sat up, and then stood. She reached for toys, then learned to drop them, and bang them. She ate a banana, and then a mango, and then lentils, cheese, meatballs, crackers, strawberries, blueberries, hummus, and quesadillas. She figured out how to take things out, and then put them back in. She scooted and then crawled. She said “Dada” and “Dog.” She took a step and then a few more. She slept through the night. She waved when we said “Bye-bye.” She learned to hug her doll and then us. She gave kisses. And now when she nurses, she smiles and pats my face.

Before she was born, I resented a little that she would have Chris’s name, since after all the work of carrying and bearing her, I hated to think that she would take another name and lose her connection with me, in name becoming part of a different family. We even thought about giving her both our last names (I didn’t change my name), but decided in the end that she would just have Chris’s. I wanted her to have that connection with her father, of course, but I also realized that it was because I bore her that she didn’t need my name. Even now, she doesn’t like to be too far away from me; she doesn’t say “Mama” because, to her, she and I are still hardly two separate people. I look at her sometimes, when her face is very close to mine, and I recognize that I will never know another person as intimately as I know her. Next year will change that. She’ll grow up and away from me, from both of us, and while I can’t wait to see that happen and to see her day by day become even more herself, I am so grateful for this year. I grew her in my womb and on my breast; she is the child of my body and my heart. And this year, she was mine.

Frankenstein’s couch

It may not say much for my taste, but I’ve always liked the fashions of the 1870s because, not in spite of the fact that they look like upholstery: pleats, cording, heavy swags–love it.

Upholstered dresses, mid-1870s.

Making curtains into dresses, of course, calls to mind two famous cinematic (or novelistic) scenes: Scarlett O’Hara dressing up in drapery to go seduce Rhett Butler, and Maria Kutschera dressing her charges in drapery to, as it turns out, seduce Captain von Trapp. The critical commonplace (“critical commonplace” is what people say when they’re about to use a scholarly cliche) about women’s fashions of the mid-nineteenth century is that they restrict women’s movements as a symbol of restricted social roles, and that the upholstered fashions are symbolic of the way that women were supposed to be decorative rather than useful–in theory, at least, if not in practice. That’s why Scarlett’s use of curtains is supposed to be (I think) subversive: it upends the idea that women are supposed to be decorative by literally using curtains in order for Scarlett to do something extremely useful, when the men have all failed her. She’s performing being decorative in order to get the money that she needs: it’s an amplification of what women were “supposed” to be doing and I think is supposed to point out how absurd that is.

Anyway, my predilection for upholstery-inspired fashion is the only explanation I can offer for this:

A little blurry, but the only decent backside picture.

I don’t know what possessed me to think that this fabric would make a good romper. I wanted to make some rompers for Abby because she has a hard time crawling in dresses, and, well, rompers are cute! So, I spliced together the Sadie Shirt and the Big Butt Baby Pants and came up with something that can really only  be termed a monstrosity.

She’s been taking some steps!

Every once in a while I look at it and think, Hey, that’s not so bad. And then I see the look on my husband’s face and determine that, actually, it is that bad.

She's still pretty cute, though.

I’m going to detach the pants from the bodice and see if it works as a shirt–although, I cut the neckhole too big, so it may just end up in the “quilt” pile. That’s how I steel myself to cut into fabric: I promise myself that someday I’ll make a quilt out of all the scraps. As you can see by the mess on my floor in this pre-bias taped version, Abby located that bag of scraps.

What else can she destroy?

To say nothing of the fabric, I think my skills have not quite caught up to my vision. Maybe stick with other people’s patterns for now, hm?

Alma Mater

Here I am on my old college campus, sitting outside my very first dorm. If you had told me as a freshman that a decade later I’d be nursing my baby on that same bench where (sorry, parents) I used to sit and smoke, I’d never have believed it. But there I was.

FO: Debbie Bliss Sun Dress

So, this is not actually my FO: it’s my mom’s, from this pattern (Rav link). And here she is, taking Abby for a walk in it:

Funny story. One day when I was sick, my mom taught me to crochet. I was about eight years old and obsessed with the nineteenth century, so I really took to it. Eventually she taught me to knit, too. For years and years, I clung to a narrative, that I believed she’d told me, in which her mom had taught her how to knit, and then she’d taught me to knit–you know, a real female tradition that I’d become a part of.

I told my mom that story once and she cracked up laughing. You see, she’d learned to knit from a book.

My fingers are crossed that Abby will want to learn, so when she tells people that same story it’ll be true.

Pioneer Days

Growing up, I could never figure out the geography of my hometown. I could get everywhere I needed to go, but I had no idea how the parts of the city fit together to the point that, if you showed me a map, I’m not sure I could have found my house. When I moved to New York, I made an effort to navigate the city and build map in my head, so I could tell you how the parts of the city related to each other–where SoHo was in relation to the Upper East Side, for example, or where Midtown turned into Hell’s Kitchen. I did the same in LA. As I got to know the city, it started to feel like a coherent whole rather than a bunch of discrete neighborhoods.

All that is a long-winded introduction to the surprising thing I read the other night in By the Shores of Silver Lake, the book I was reading to Abby before Chris started White Noise. I’ve read the Little House books so many times that when I read them to myself I don’t so much read as glance at a page in order to remind myself what happens. So, it’s been a real pleasure to read them aloud and force myself to get through every single word on the page. And I was struck the other night to read Pa say something about the folks in Yankton.

Yankton!

In my slight obsession with all things pioneer, I’ve also watched HBO’s Deadwood about three times, and Yankton, as the county seat (I think?) comes up a lot. According to Wikipedia, Deadwood is set in 1876-1977 in Deadwood (naturally), SD. In 1879, the Ingalls family moved from Minnesota to De Smet, SD. So what that means is that this:

Was going on at almost the identical time and location as this:

I know a lot can change in two years, and Deadwood is partly about how different the town was at the end of 1877 than at the beginning of 1876: law and order come, and their good friend corruption. And the show is set just before the Dakotas become a territory, while the Little House Dakota years are set right after that. But still! Moments like this–realizing how near Laura Ingalls might have lived to Al Swearingen–make history seem like a coherent whole. Can you imagine if history were taught as a set of narratives rather than a list of discrete dates and names? To me, that makes history real–and MEMORABLE–in a way that no AP textbook can.

[On looking at this now, I realize that the Garth Williams illustration is from Little House on the Prairie, which I believe is set in the late 1860s. But the point is the same.]

Miniver Cheevy, born too late

Sometimes I have very clever ideas. I also like to spin elaborate possible futures for myself whereby I make my fame and fortune based on these ideas. Pre-Internet, I probably could have gotten away with some of them, but an excess of knowledge requires an excess of due diligence. Here are three things that I invented recently that turn out to already have been invented–in some case, quite a long time ago:

JoJo’s clothing

In the shower the other day, I had a genius idea for a line of baby and toddler clothing upcycled out of thrifted materials. The line would allow me to keep sewing (cheaply) after Abby had grown out of wanting me to sew for her and maybe even make a little money. I chose the name “JoJo” because it sounded kind of cute, and Chris sometimes calls me that. To make sure that I wouldn’t have any competition, I googled “JoJo’s clothing.” Lo and behold, someone else had THE EXACT SAME IDEA: upcycled toddler clothing. Let me repeat that. EXACT IDEA AND NAME.

Discontinuous double plot

I was merrily using this term in my dissertation, very pleased with the notion that I’d invented a new phrase, when I figured I’d better run in through Google Scholar. Lo and behold, someone already invented it. (I couldn’t pull up the same result on Google Scholar just now, but trust me, it’s there.) I can still use the term, obviously, but I now have to replace the introductory phrase, “what I have been calling,” with “what Joseph Allen Boone calls.”

Evidence-Based Parenting

A play on my favorite type of practice, “evidence based practice,” this phrase encompassed for me the type of parenting that relies heavily on studies published in places like The New York Times. (I’m susceptible to this type of parenting myself.) I had all sorts of plans to make a website that would serve as a gathering place for these parents, with book reviews, discussion boards, all sorts of lovely things. I Googled it, and lo and behold … yeah, you can guess the end to this one.