I had surgery. Wear sunglasses.

 So I had my first real medical intervention last week. I went in for an eye exam a few months ago, and they identified that the weird-looking skin on the inner margin of my eyelid (right up against my eye), which I had thought vaguely was some kind of combination of blepharitis, generally crappy skin, and just becoming an old lady,* was definitely not normal. The doctor did a biopsy on the spot, and that was very unpleasant - the local anesthetic hurt so much I actually shuddered involuntarily, and it turns out that having somebody cutting right next to your wide-open eye is psychologically pretty terrible. (Foreshadowing!) The biopsy indicated basal carcinoma, which is the "good" kind of skin cancer, but its location meant that I needed relatively complicated surgery. 

On Thursday I went in for the removal, having followed the instructions to wear comfortable clothes and pack a lunch. This was Mohs surgery, which is used I guess in situations where they want to take the absolute smallest amount of tissue possible. They give you local anesthetic, cut the thing out, and cauterize the wound, and then send you back out to the waiting room to wait two hours until they get a chance to analyze the tissue and see if they got everything. If they didn't, they bring you back in, and repeat the whole process. This can be repeated multiple times, though 2-3 is the standard. I expected it would be pretty awful, but I hadn't realized how bad I would feel. A friend later identified the emotional awfulness of this sort of thing as your brain forcing your body to do something your body thinks is a terrible idea. This feels right to me - every bit of the surgery felt like danger, and my poor body wanted to run away all day. They put in numbing drops that felt like poison - bleach or something that should NOT go in your eye - and then stabbed me with about a pint's worth of lidocaine, and then they put a black plastic contact in my eye to protect it, and then they did a lot of cutting and snipping and tugging around my eye, and then they cauterized my eyelid, which makes a sizzling sound, and a terrible smell, and the whole time I practiced square breathing with all my might. And then they put an enormous bandage on my eye, and I propped my glasses over it as best I could, which meant I could see only mediocrely at best, and escorted me to the waiting room, where I sat and tried not to cry. 

Cook was planning to come get me when I was done - he had offered to come wait with me, but I thought it would be silly for him to waste the workday that way, and it's not like he could help me with anything. I think of myself as a fairly resilient person with pretty good coping skills under duress, and I figured that I could manage this. Which I guess I could have, but I realized pretty quickly that I really didn't want to try- I felt so wobbly and vulnerable and miserably uncomfortable. (This was not improved by the elderly man with whom I was alone in this room. He very much wanted to talk at me about his opinions, many of which were stupid and some of which were racist in a crappy all-lives-matter kind of way and I felt filthy just from being in the same room. When they paged me back in for the second round of nightmare surgery, I actually felt relieved to escape him.) The second round of surgery - on my already-beaten-up eye - was even worse, and when I got back to the waiting room and Cook was there, I felt the most enormous wave of relief and safety. And then they paged me again, and I shuffled off to what I assumed would be a third round of cutting, but it wasn't - the second surgery had done the trick, and I could go home.  So I went home, missing much of my lower eyelid, with antibiotics in hand, my eye bandaged shut and strict instructions to keep my head above my heart, to not do anything that raised my heart rate, to not bend over, to not lift anything, to not sleep flat. 

The next day I had to go in for the plastic surgery to actually repair my eyelid. This was my first ever actual surgery*** - the kind where they make you take your clothes off and wear a gown (the nurse said I should probably take everything off, because "when you get really relaxed sometimes your bladder relaxes too, and it's a mess") and a comical hat for your hair, and you can't eat or drink anything after midnight the day before. I talked to a lot of medical staff, who were various combinations of extremely nice to me and extremely condescending.*** They gave me Versed, a sedative that immediately made me feel drunk, and wheeled me off to the operating room, where they shot me up with another pint of lidocaine and I spent an hour listening to 90s hip-hop and staring up at bright lights, watching them cut and tug and sew my eyelids. (Nightmare part 2 - I could not close that eye, even if I wanted to, I could only stare.) While the sedative (and the bed that actually had room for my arms, and the warmed blankets) made me feel somewhat more relaxed about this than the day before (though sadly not relaxed enough to pee myself), and it was physically less painful, it was a very emotionally draining morning. And then they took me off to recovery for a bit, and then I got to put my clothes on and go home, with the same strict instructions. I spent a lot of the afternoon napping, propped up on my bed. I'm not a napper, usually - it makes me groggy and nauseated - but I felt so tired and heavy, from some combination of exhaustion and sedative. Every time I moved my open eye, my other eye moved too, which tugged painfully on the stitches. 

I've spent the weekend in a weird useless state, napping and sitting and listening to podcasts, feeling uncomfortable and nauseated. Occasionally I get up and wander around, but moving around too much feels bad and woozy. My vision is weird, too - my right eye is struggling to figure out what its job is now, and what I'm seeing with that eye right now is like grey static on an old TV, which then underlies my left eye's view of the actual world, so that everything I look at is weirdly static-y looking, alarmingly similar to the way my vision darkens and fragments when I pass out. And it's oddly difficult to understand that for my right eye, there's no difference between closed and open. When I blink my left eye, my right eye sort of squeezes too, and it hurts. 

I have another surgery scheduled a month away to "open up the eye." (As best I can tell, the surgeon took the inner layer of my upper eyelid, flapped it down over the hole in my lower eyelid, and stitched everything up. The stitches will dissolve in a few weeks, leaving me with a fused-shut eyelid. In July, he'll more or less just cut across the flap. This seems like magic, and I'm very dubious about it - how does the cut surface figure out that it's a mucus membrane now? - but apparently surgeons have been doing it for a hundred years.)

I took off the bandage today to reveal my sad swollen shut eyelids. I have a couple of piratical patches to cover, for use in public and on work video calls, but for now, the stitches are covered by my upper eyelashes, and the eye just looks closed, like I'm constantly winking. (Cook occasionally does finger guns at me and winks back.)

This has been a really difficult experience to calibrate. On the one hand, it is a tiny bit of skin, and the prognosis is very good - the carcinoma is very unlikely to recur, and the repaired eyelid should be entirely functional (if eyelash-less). Really not a big deal at all. On the other hand, the physical, emotional and logistical impacts of it are substantial, and it all has kind of a horror movie feeling, so it feels like a big deal. I suspect it'll feel like much less of a big deal in a week or so.

Anyway, two takeaways: 

1) I really appreciate my family, especially Cook, who is taking care of all of his usual housework plus all of mine, taking care of me, and handling most of the parenting (including navigating Skipper's panic about all her end-of-year schoolwork). The kids are stepping up to pick up some of my housework and to bring me things and read to me. (Skipper is reading me an Agatha Christie book, and has taken a strong position that the British spelling of "moustache" must be pronounced "MOOstash" which makes me giggle every time.) I am really lucky to have a family that can hold me up at home, and also bring a feeling of home to me when I need it.

2) The doctor told me this kind of eyelid cancer is likely the result of childhood sun exposure. Wear sunglasses. Put sunglasses on your kids. 

*In retrospect this seems crazy - obviously irregular skin is something to worry about. But every previous time I thought something was wrong with me, it turns out to be either a) me getting old or b) me being anxious. I've never thought something was wrong with me and had it actually turn out to be something that was both wrong and actually fixable. 

**I mean, I gave birth in a hospital once, but that was a fairly high-speed event, and I was too busy to pay much attention to things like wearing a hat (or, say, shucking  off all my clothes in a room crowded with, I think, about a hundred people).

*** My surgeon has the classic surgeon's bedside manner. When I had my pre-op meeting with him, he told me brusquely that I'd probably have my eyelids sewn shut for a month and that I would never have eyelashes on my lower eyelid again. This was all news to me, and I said cautiously "I'll never have eyelashes?" and he said "Well, would you rather have eyelashes OR WOULD YOU RATHER NOT HAVE SKIN CANCER?!" And when he came to see me right before the operation, he didn't greet me at all, just walked up to me and said "You're going to have your eyelids sewn shut for a month" and I said "Hi."

Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

Summer winds down.

Hello from steamy Portland! We've been in an oppressive streak of hot days, which combined with a few days of terrible air quality to make a miserable end-of-last-week. But we survived. We try not to move very much. Skipper has been sleeping in the basement because the upper bunk in a west-facing bedroom is unbearable at her bedtime.*

Updates: 

1) We had our third weekend in a row of camping, and it was a lot of fun. The camera ran out of batteries, so I have no photographs. But it was fun. There were a LOT of my relatives, and dogs, and an adorable toddler, and there was river floating and swimming. The kids were thrilled. Duchess paddled an inflatable kayak by herself, and she loved that - she was afraid at first, and then super-pleased with herself for not falling out in one of the little rapids. Skipper got to ride in a canoe, and also was afraid at first and then delighted by the experience. And now we're home for a weekend, scrambling to catch up with all the stuff that went undone for nearly a month.

2) Duchess is gone, off in Minnesota competing in an ultimate frisbee tournament, under the quasi-supervision of some young volunteer coaches (thank you, volunteer coaches).** After the tournament, she's going straight off for a few days at a lake house with a teammate and the teammate's relatives. She'll be gone for a week total, and doing stuff that requires her to take more responsibility than she ever has before for both logistics and her own emotional and physical well-being. She seems to be having a great time so far, as far as we can glean from her cursory, infrequent communications.*** Cook and I fully expect she will return home completely converted to ultimate frisbee. Duchess was born to be part of a team,**** and ultimate has some fundamental characteristics that really appeal to her, plus she loves the people. One of her communications was pretty much a lot of squee over a player she thinks is AMAZING! 

3) Skipper has been muddling through all her activities in a storm of anger, fear, and resentfulness.  She's been struggling with swimming - she has missed so many practices due to vacations and camp that she hasn't ever really settled into it, and she still feels very uncomfortable. She has also continued to struggle with ultimate - she enjoys it but feels really uncomfortable because she's so bad at it. She went to her first ballet class today very anxious, and came through it okay. She's talking and thinking a lot now about her habitual thought patterns, though, which is potentially a very good development. (Actually, having Duchess gone is giving her a time and space to do a lot of interesting processing. Last night she asked me where love is stored in the heart - if there's like a big reservoir or what.)

That's pretty much it. We're turning the corner toward school now, and I think both kids are looking forward to settling back into it...

* I have also learned this week that Skipper is extremely embarrassed by the way I look in a tank top. I've been trying to explain to her that body-shaming is not okay, and also I'm HOT and I'm going to let my blotchy upper arms fly.

** To clarify, Duchess is now playing ultimate frisbee at an elite level not because she's good (she's mediocre, though being tall is helpful), but because teen girls who play ultimate even mediocrely are scarce in Portland, and an even smaller number of them have families who can be suckered into buying their kid a plane ticket to Minnesota.

***Either she's having a great time or she's joined a cult. I guess we'll find out when we go to pick her up at the airport.

**** Left alone, she's pretty much an inert lump. Put her in a team environment, and she instantly kindles into life and becomes an energetic, responsive, thoughtful, engaged participant. Take away the team, and you have a lump again. It's an amazing social alchemy. 

Tomorrow is another snow day.

Today the girls and I walked a few miles to run errands. The sidewalks, most of which are not shoveled (probably because of relationship-ending shovel-related arguments) and roads, none of which are plowed (I think because we don't have many plows in Portland, though I'm not ruling out the effect of paralyzing methodological arguments between plow operators), are covered in several inches of very hard packed-down-snow-now-converted-to-ice-after-six-days-of-compression. We all slipped several times, and Skipper fell down once.

The morning is expected to bring a lot freezing rain, and school is cancelled. Work is cancelled. This brings us to a total of three weather-related-cancellation days off work this winter, and NINE days off school. NINE.

In the good news, Skipper had a friend over today, and they played in the snow like normal healthy children,* making the most of it before it gets all freezy and melty. In the bad news, I have to go put everything absorbent in the basement up on a shelf, in anticipation of the basement getting all melty and floody.



*My strange cave children do not play in the snow unless inspired by friends. I should probably try recruiting Skipper some physically-active friends now because I suspect her adolescence will otherwise be spent in our basement in the dark.

Belated photos from the Snowpocalypse!

Duchess and Skipper attempted to make a snow person. Their snowballing technique is poor. They claim this is due to being Portland children.



Me and Cook shoveling the walk. Being East-Coasty people, we believe in shoveling the sidewalk (unlike 90% of Portland residents). We did, however, have a nearly marriage-ending argument about how comprehensive the shoveling should be,* at the end of which I stomped off and let Cook shovel alone. For hours.

*His position: Shovel all of it. And the whole walkway to the house, edge to edge. And sweep the porch clean. My position: Eh. A path is good enough. No point giving yourself a heart attack. This is basically the entire difference between us.

updates

1) I had two days at work last week that did not meet my new baseline for a successful day. One of my coworkers offered today to teach me a few exercises she learned "from a local shaman" to help me shield myself from negativity emanating from other people. I enthusiastically took her up on it. At this point, any kind of shielding - magical, physical, psychological, hypnotic, technological, imaginary, placebo, cardboard box, whatever - is something I will try. We scheduled a training session for tomorrow (right before I have to go talk with some people I really need to be shielded from). I'll let you know if it works.
2) I am continuing to Eat Less. I consequently weigh less. (I suspect that my commitment to this campaign is due to the fact that I desperately need a successful project in my life to balance my increasingly awful projects at work.) Turns out that I don't actually need to eat anywhere near as much as I thought I did in order to function perfectly well. I don't know where this knowledge is going to take me, but it's probably a good thing to know.
3) I am bullying everybody in the house into an ongoing pseudo/lite-KonMari tidying process, one small category at a time. Next weekend, stuffed animals!
4) Skipper has a piano recital coming up.
5) Duchess meets every stereotype of adolescence that you could possibly imagine. Surly? Check. Sulky? Check. Sleeps late? Check. Really wants a phone? Check. Et cetera.

6) Skipper lost another tooth.

Raising an adult

I've been thinking about parenting.* Both the kids right now are storming through growth periods, transitioning more or less into being A Grade-Schooler and A Middle-Schooler. Both these stages involve increased rights and responsibilities, and they're working out how to balance these things. I have been reading a book about the perils of helicoptering, and considering how to balance things in our family life.  In general, I think Cook and I are pretty good about giving our kids opportunities to handle stuff on their own, though of course we can do better. However, some of the cautions in the book, particularly about overscheduling and under-responsibility-ing, ring alarmingly true to me. Since reading the book, I am considering how to deschedule the girls a bit. It is very evident how much Duchess is benefiting from her free time in the afternoon (which will be somewhat less expansive when she starts Chinese one day a week next week). She loves being home alone to do homework, practice flute, and lie around reading or playing Minecraft. She listens to music and podcasts and practices being a teenager. More free time for everybody would clearly be a good thing.

I am also stepping up chore expectations a bit (though not as much as apparently I should). This school year we have a chore chart on a whiteboard, with chore cards affixed by magnets. The cards get moved to "done" when they're done, and it means much less nagging.** I've added a few new chores since reading this latest parenting book, mostly after a review of the annoying small tasks that I do that make me crazy - I realized that the kids can do many of them. The first thing I punted to them is the packing of lunches. (I think I need to next get them washing the lunch dishes, since the endlessly repeated washing of those damned small containers remains pretty much my least favorite chore.)*** This is working out okay. Not great. Okay.

The trick here is to make these tasks so consistent and regular that they become automated and the girls stop complaining/arguing/resisting. Skipper in particular is so relentlessly awful about doing chores that it is very tempting to just give up. Duchess tends to flare up, yell, cry, and then angrily do the chore very ostentatiously and then be quite pleased with herself for having done the chore. (She usually brags about it.) Skipper never moves past the yelling and crying. She's actually kind of a genius about resisting things. She ends up taking so much time and energy to do the chore that we subsequently ALL consider the chore as much larger and more painful than it actually is. While her schedule is far busier than it should be (and I'm just talking about the aftercare required by having two working parents, not an overscheduled life of extracurriculars), she has plenty of time to get her chores done if she just did them. She does not have plenty of time for extensive screaming and crying AND doing chores.****

This weekend, Duchess is gone on her 48-hour ninja adventure, and we're having an unusual stint of weekend time with just Skipper. Turns out she's MUCH nicer when she's an only child. And it also turns out that she's more willing to do chores. The presence of a sibling creates an additional energy-drain because each kid has to constantly assess the Fairness and What She's Doing While I'm Doing This. It's exhausting for them, and for me and Cook.

Anyway. Oh! The other thing I've been meaning to tell you (all of you) is that we have been trying to do Movie Nights on Friday nights. And right now there is ONE thing that we can all watch and enjoy together as a family. ONE thing. Skipper likes incredibly mild television (Caillou!) and cannot bear more than a frisson of possible danger, and Duchess still has pretty unsophisticated tastes as well (she loves a TV show called Lab Rats). Cook likes depressing, complicated movies and TV shows. I like silly TV shows. The ONE thing we can watch together is Mythbusters. That's it. Thank goodness there are so many seasons.




*I always think about parenting; I suspect I think about parenting as a way to love my kids without actually being with them, similar to my diligence about reserving books from the library for them.

** Or at least different nagging - I say "How's the board coming?" instead of "Did you brush your hair? Did you brush your teeth? Did you pack your lunch? Did you pack your lunchbag? Did you pack your flute?")

*** The girls spent a few days this summer at an expensive day camp which has a few major selling points, but key among them is that you can drop your kids off any day you want, without reserving a day, and the camp provides ALL THE FOOD. No small containers!

**** Want to know what they do for chores? Of course you do. Duchess does the family's breakfast dishes every day, changes all her bed linens once a week and cleans the toilet once a week. Skipper cleans the bathroom sink (when Cook doesn't get impatient and clean it first) and strips her own bed every week. They both are responsible for at least one irregular household chore (like organizing and cleaning the spice rack) per week as assigned, tidying their own things daily, and periodically making their room less miserably messy. They both are (now) responsible for packing and unpacking their own lunches and backpacks for school. Their non-chore daily tasks are practicing flute/piano, homework, and personal care. We need to start moving Skipper into dishwashing and Duchess into cooking...

Brief check-in

We're almost through the week! Skipper has enjoyed some elements of her camp experience, and definitely NOT enjoyed others. Today she went on a field trip and refused to participate in any of the activities. But she went! Small steps. She's been very clingy, and mostly just wants to cuddle when she's got a parent at her disposal. Skipper's happiest when her world is rock-solid, and having her daily routine changing every week is really screwing with her sense of stability, so she feels very vulnerable. She's powering through, though. She's learned some dance routines and martial arts routines at camp, and she really likes those. She puts on her hand-me-down taekwondo outfit after camp and punches and kicks very seriously.

Duchess has loved robotics camp. She is one of two girls out of the twelve kids participating, but four of the boys are classmates of hers from school, and she likes three of them, so she's pretty comfortable. They play games like "Secret Circuit," which is apparently great fun. AND they're going to have root beer floats and watch "Spirited Away" tomorrow, which is even greater fun. (The kids at this camp are the sort of kids who spend time arguing over whether they should watch a Harry Potter movie or a Hayao Miyazaki movie. As I guess you would expect from a robotics camp.)

Duchess is still swimming, before camp, and enjoying it a lot. I think she may be at the highest fitness level of her life right now, having spent the last five weeks doing 7-10 hours of fairly intense aerobic activity (swimming, kung fu, gymnastics, and ballet) a week. Between camp and swimming, though, she's very much missing loafing-on-the-couch time, so she burrows into it whenever she can.

And Cook and I are staggering through our days. Cook has a bunch of work projects he's mightily struggling to wrap up before vacation, and I have a big work surge next week  We're mostly just adjusting as best we can to having both of us working full-time - staying up late washing dishes and putting together lunches, and trying not to forget anything as we rush out the door in the morning. There's a chance my job (currently scheduled to end in October) might lead to permanent full-time employment, in which case we'll have to get a slow cooker and come up with some better strategies.

Yikes

Holy cow - it's hard having a job! I spent the day digging myself partway out from under a pile of urgent to-dos, and fielding several drop-in visitors with whom I had to meet. I have to pick up Skipper at 2:15 at her school, a 8-minute bike ride from my (temporary) office. I said goodbye to my second drop-in visitor and looked at the clock, which read 2:14. I raced over there, and caught her before she made The Walk of Shame to the office, but she was the last kid there. She was not pleased.

But it's interesting, and my mind is working again! Hurrah!

Too many snow days.

With the kids home for their second full snow day, I am beginning to feel somewhat grumpy about the snow experience in Portland. About five inches of snow fell in two separate storms, and it's been 48 hours since it stopped snowing. Temperatures have been above freezing all day today. Not only is nothing plowed (except the freeways), making the streets a sea of slushy misery, but fewer than 10% of homeowners and 30% of business owners bother to shovel their sidewalks (let alone clearing the storm drains on the street), making the sidewalks a slick of slushy, slippery misery. I know these people are not ALL physically incapable of shoveling. They may just not grasp their civic responsibility. Or they don't have snow shovels. Or they're just assholes. The residents of several properties we crossed on our walk to the library today had cleared their driveways, shoveling the snow onto the sidewalk.

We also realized that our snow gear is woefully lacking. When it only snows for real once every five years or so, your preparedness is minimal. We do have a snow shovel (because we are not assholes, and we clear our sidewalk), which has mostly been used to shovel mulch. We do not, however, have anything else, as we don't do any snow-related sports of any kind. So we set off for our family sledding expedition on Saturday all wearing rain pants (with cotton leggings underneath, except for Cook, who owns actual long underpants) and rain boots. We did not have a sled, but the pieces of cardboard we brought worked pretty well. (The leaky camping air mattress we brought as an additional "sled" did not work as well.) The kids were thrilled. Take that, fancy plastic sleds!

Not a lot to say.

The rain has begun; the freakishly un-Portlandy sunny October weather is gone. 

I have realized that the thing I find most interesting and rewarding right now is working with individual kids* at Homework Club. Apparently I should chuck all my educational investment and become a school counselor. Or something.

Skipper is slightly happier at school, but she really dreads the terrible, unstructured time at recess. Having been known as Track Girl** at a school where I spent 5th grade, I am very sad to hear that she spends a lot of her time walking around the playground alone. We haven't heard anything from Murphy lately, though, and her sleep patterns seem to be settling back down a bit. So that's good. I've been reading a lot of books with titles that combine the words "parenting," "anxiety," "sensitive," and "worry" in a variety of ways. Some of them are somewhat helpful.

Duchess is pretty excited about turning nine. She's excited about everything, actually, and chooses ways to express her excitement that are calibrated to maximally annoy me.*** She's really good at it.

I recently applied for a job for which I am extremely well-qualified. I hated doing the application. Every minute of it felt masochistic and terrible. No doubt character was built, but it hardly seems worth it.

That's the news, mostly. 

Also, here's what we're reading right now:

Skipper: Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

Cook: The Aubrey-Maturin series, when he has time between work and volunteer commitments.

Me: Far Away from the Tigers

Duchess: Pi in the Sky and The Robber's Daughter

*This is ridiculous, but I had never really thought about how it would feel to get negative feedback on every single thing I did at school. (Granted, I later had that experience in a job, but at least I had some banked-up self-esteem to carry me along through that.) Grading spelling tests for Duchess's class every week has made me recognize how brutal a bad assignment looks after it's been corrected. On some of those tests, I have to write out the correct spelling of every single word. I can't imagine what a pummeling it would be to get back sheaves of paperwork every week that were covered in corrections. I don't think I'd be able to keep going to school, honestly. These kids are brave.

**I didn't walk around the track ALL the time - in the winter I made a lot of very small snow people and snow houses in the open space inside the track. I did enjoy the snow people, though I would have much preferred having human friends.

*** It's all about me.

More ranting

You guys! It's happening again! Not even two weeks into the school year, and I'm already finding myself weeping (WEEPING!) in conversations about the state of public education, and the way in general that we fail, as a society, to support kids. Ugh.

Miscellaneous:

• Duchess is missing her classmates who have gone off to the magic TAG school. She is once again on the top of her class, academically, and ready to coast along for another year of not trying too hard. I'm ready for another year of feeling sad about her schooling.
• I saw one of the Homework Club kids I worked with a lot last year. She's excited that this year she's going to be early to school instead of late every day, because a different adult is dropping her off. She's a decent kid. I want her to make it.
• A friend of mine has taken in foster kids who have some developmental delays - nothing serious, and it all seems like the consequence of early neglect, rather than inherent deficits. The little one, after just a few weeks, is making huge strides - she's still young enough that her elastic little brain can compensate. I don't know about the big one. I want them both to make it, too.
• I met a new parent at Duchess's school who actually transferred her kids there from another district on a No Child Left Behind waiver. (The receiving school has to accept the waiver, so she couldn't get her kids into one of the better PPS schools, but she still felt that getting into our school was a huge improvement from where her kids were.) She is amazed by the level of parental involvement, the quality of teaching, the attitude of the kids, and the general feeling at the school, and is thrilled to have her kids there. This reminded me that, in spite of my feelings of despair about Duchess's school, there are many, many, many (many) schools where kids are much (much) worse off.

After all the Talented and Gifted hubbub last year, we decided not to push to get Duchess nominated for TAG identification. However, this fall, I have reversed myself, and decided to go ahead and nominate Duchess. I had three experiences that led me to the decision. First, as part of my Big Volunteer Thing I've been doing at Duchess's school, I've been calling enrichment programs, and I spoke to a staffperson at one excellent, super-expensive program who said "Oh, we do lots of classes at your school, for TAG kids!" Second, I recently learned about a cool-sounding math class, offered by that very program, that took place last spring in mornings before school. Duchess would have loved it. It was only open to TAG kids, and it was free. Third, I had a conversation with a woman, a parent of older kids, who has worked with Duchess in school, and respects her reading and analysis chops. We talked about the ethical ugliness that is TAG, and her experience as a teacher and a parent, and she said "You've got to get Duchess identified as TAG."* So I went and picked up the forms. There's a nomination and testing process that will unfold over the year in some mysterious way. I told Duchess (from whom nothing like this can be hidden, as she is way more persistent than Harriet the Spy) that no matter how the test identifies her, we will continue in the conviction that she is awesome-identified.

It just all, as you (very well) know, makes me furious. Nearly every kid in the school would benefit from a cool math class at least as much as Duchess's TAG classmates. While the TAG screening test is explicitly designed to be accessible for kids who can't read English well, so in theory it's a great way to identify kids from all backgrounds who have intellectual aptitude, the fact is that the kids in Duchess's grade who are receiving TAG resources are all middle-class-or-richer kids. TAG resources are offered not just to TAG-identified kids, but also to kids identified as "TAG-potential" which means that they didn't get a qualifying score but had strong "advocacy" scores (as rated by their teachers and parents) and work samples. Guess which kids are likely to have strong "advocacy" scores and work samples? I know plenty of kids at Duchess's school whose parents, for many reasons,* aren't going to nominate them for anything and aren't supporting their homework and school activities to encourage them to produce strong work samples. Those kids would benefit from cool math classes as much as any kid. The program should be called Talented and Gifted and Having Pushy Parents.

And now I am a Pushy Parent, and I'm feeling pretty shitty about the ethics of being a Pushy Parent. I hate that I am trying to extract more resources for my own already-very-lucky child, out of a limited pool of resources. My kid has everything she needs to thrive, and I'm greedily grubbing for more, because I can, and because I want more for her. This goes against my belief that not only is it in our benefit to support all the children in our community, so that they will thrive in our community and make it a better place, but that we have a moral obligation to help them flourish. I go around and around on how to address this. I can't not try to get Duchess everything I can -  I'm a primate, after all, and this is a competitive world. As with most things, the current situation means that my refusal to take stuff for her just means more resources for OTHER privileged kids. But I have an obligation to do something about that current situation. I just don't know what, yet.

Anyway, Duchess is determined to be rich when she grows up, TAG or no TAG. We recently listened to a podcast identifying the most lucrative college majors. She listened to the top ten majors, and decided on naval architecture (#7, I think), as it is the best fit with her already-identified career hopes. She's going to be a naval architect during the day, and an author at night (writing great books while cuddled up with her husband and her Great Dane - she's fairly detailed in her planning). Skipper decided that she'd go for #1, petroleum engineering, since she has no strong preferences yet. I didn't say anything about how I feel about petroleum engineering; I'm pretty sure I won't have to worry about it. Of course, Skipper is also planning to have seven children,*** so she's either going to have to be rich or not work at all.



* Note the language. I've got to get her identified - I think that zeros in on everything wrong with the system right there.
**Stress, language barriers, cultural barriers, poor health, lack of time, and other factors, including the assumption that it doesn't make that much difference, which is the assumption under which I've been operating.
*** Duchess is holding fast to her determination to have no children at all. Having watched Skipper be born, she definitely doesn't want to give birth, and she says it's clear that kids are a pain in the butt. I feel kind of bad about this, as I'm the one giving her this impression with my apparently negative attitude about parenting, but it seems that Skipper has no such qualms.

Only 14 more years of school to go.

The first week of both-kids-at-public-schools is over. I am exhausted. I'm actually temporarily grateful that I don't have another job besides logisticking my kids. This month, I'm picking up all the Blonds from school three days a week (O is in Duchess's class, and L and R are in kindergarten at Skipper's school), so I spend a lot of time trudging between my home and the two schools with children in tow.*

I also spend a lot of time preparing lunches and then cleaning lunch containers. I had forgotten how much I hate that. All those damned tiny containers! And those moms who raise the bar by preparing their children adorable and healthy lunches! Duchess is always coming home talking about her friends' delicious lunches.** I managed to pull off a reasonably successful lunch program this week, thanks to the discovery that if I cook a whole heap of leftover-grain/tofu pancakes and freeze them, I can send them in Skipper's lunch with a little ketchup on the side. Win-win! She eats something moderately healthy, and I don't have to scramble every day.


Next week we'll be back to peanut butter sandwiches with sliced apples and carrots on the side. I may just start flinging all the food, without containers, into the lunch boxes and let it all rattle around together...

Anyway, I have been told that girls stop eating food at school altogether in middle school - what a relief!



*The five kids are physically similar enough, and variable enough in height, that we look plausible as a family. People give me pitying and/or condescending looks.
** When she's not talking trash about friends who bring junk food in their lunches. I have mixed feelings about this - I feel that it's good to choose healthy food, but I also feel that it's bad to judge other people for THEIR choices, given all the complex factors affecting food choice. Once she said to me "Kid X's parents must not love her very much. She gets cheetos in her lunch!" and I cringed in shame. She's gotten better about it, but I dread to think what she says to kids to their faces.

The Problem with Portland

I wrote this a few weeks ago, and didn't post it because it's such a huge self-pity wallow, but now I figured, what the heck. Skip to the photos if you don't have the stomach for a huge self-pity wallow! 

I'm looking for work again. And I got onto Linked In this morning. Now I'm feeling overwhelmed by a very familiar feeling of inadequacy. When I tell people that I have been looking unsuccessfully for work for years, they tend to wave it off and say "Oh, you're smart and educated; you'll get a job."* But... I don't have a job. I haven't been offered a job in FOUR YEARS. I'm smart and educated, but in Portland, smart and educated is a baseline. The place is brimming with people who are smart and educated AND __________ ( Fill in the blank with at least one of the following: adjectives: creative, charming, energetic, skilled, persistent, confident, ambitious, attractive, etc.). I don't have any ands. I need an and!

This also applies to my non-working life. Portland is also brimming with people who are doing amazing and interesting things in their spare time. They may not be making money off it, but they're gardening and building robots and woodworking and pickling and painting and brewing and sewing and cooking and canning and learning trapeze tricks and learning to code and whatnot. Portland makes me feel like I'm performing inadequately at every single facet of my life. I can't even identify a thing I'd like to do - I have no dreams, no visions, nothing I really love to do.***  Damn you, Portland! If I wasn't surrounded by people who are so obviously doing cool stuff, I'd be much happier being an essentially inert person. Or if I was at least making money, even if it was at a boring inert-person kind of job. As I'm not earning any money, I'm at a bit of a loss for sources of self-worth.

This is obviously a seriously counterproductive line of thought. As I wisely tell Duchess, there's always going to be somebody who's better than you, and that's not a bad thing. I certainly enjoy spending time with people who have cool stuff going on, and they make Portland a wonderful place to live. And, you know, I'm smart and educated. I'll get a job. I'll work on my and.

Anyway, check out this only-somewhat-uneven haircut I just gave Skipper! She initially angrily described it as "stupid short!" and said she hates me for cutting it, but she's coming around. So I'm pretty good at giving my family not-terrible haircuts for free. That's almost like earning money. Hurrah for me!

Also, here are a few crappy photos of our last car-camping trip. Duchess was off at sleepaway camp (which she loved), so Skipper got us all to herself, including our college friend GG, whom she adores.

We went to the Bonneville Dam fish hatchery, where we visited Herman the Sturgeon, and a stuffed bear in a box.

So, you know, things could be a lot worse. When your biggest problem is being surrounded by interesting, dynamic people, you really don't have a problem. And when you get to do stuff like visit enormous fishes and walk around in a forest with friends and family, life is pretty sweet. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start an exciting small business called "Not-Terrible Haircuts for Kids," and I need to set up my Pinterest account.



*Pro tip: Don't say this to your unemployed/underemployed friends. We know you're trying to make us feel better, but it actually makes us feel even shittier.**
** Hey, maybe I should start a business providing advice to people about how to talk to their unemployed/underemployed friends!
***Except reading. I really love reading. If only I could get paid just to read. No, not to read and then write about it. Just to read. That's all.

Athletic injuries

Duchess did her Run for the Arts this week. I went along to tally laps and cheer, and it was great fun. Duchess ran 2.75 miles in half an hour,* and came home with shin splints.  She is making a very big deal about it. She also has little rug-burns on her feet from kung fu. My kid is getting injured in sports! I feel that this is both very exciting and possibly an indicator that she needs a more balanced training program. I suggested that she start running a few miles before school every day, and lifting weights...

*I thought this was impressive, but a handful of kids ran three miles, and one fourth-grader (from a family of serious runners) logged a whopping 4.5 miles. Kids, man. They're crazy.

Bullying vs Life is Like That

Recently, Duchess has been collapsing into tears after school pretty regularly. This is not all that surprising; Duchess is a creature of highs and lows, and the effort of maintaining an eager, focused attitude all day at school usually yields a whiny, low-blood-sugar slouch home. On the walk home, she reports all the Terrible things that happened to her that day. Usually, she can be reminded to consider all the positive things that also happened, and often concedes that yes, in general, the day was pretty good, EXCEPT for one or two bad things. However, she's been having a harder time doing that lately, and her enthusiasm about going to school is waning. I'm not sure why, but she's definitely reporting more occasions when other kids have hurt her feelings or embarrassed her publicly.

She's not being bullied. I don't think a lot of Official Bullying happens at her school. Mostly what happens, as far as I can tell based on my observations and reports from my very unreliable informant, is garden-variety power plays, the kind that a teacher might not notice, might not be able to easily identify the culprit, or might decide isn't worth the time to address. However, those can be really unpleasant, and hurtful. Duchess is thin-skinned and extremely concerned about her social reputation, and I am increasingly concerned that she is an inviting target for bullies of all stripes. It's very possible that she won't be the middle-schooler I imagine - a six-foot-tall thirteen-year-old with glasses, a loud laugh, and the tendency to burst into tears at any real or imagined insult - but if she is, she'll be temptingly vulnerable to anybody looking to hurt somebody.

I'm probably being too sensitive, not to mention borrowing trouble. Cook, who was a tall, skinny, shy kid with huge glasses and a dorktastic penchant for short shorts,* says that he didn't feel bullied or tortured-by-garden-variety-meanness at any point in school. There is also the school of thought that people are just crappy, and kids need to learn how to cope with it. Sometimes when Duchess describes the small cruelties of her day, I respond with more or less a shrug. People are crappy. We just are. I do believe it's theoretically useful to learn how to cope, because someday you may find yourself working for somebody who enjoys perpetrating garden-variety meanness on their coworkers.**

However, I was subjected as a kid to a substantial dose of garden-variety meanness,*** and the only coping skill I learned, as far as I can tell, was to retreat into my own head. This coping skill, it turns out, isn't terribly helpful for a healthy life, and it hasn't helped me handle meanness as an adult. So...yeah. Maybe instead of letting kids all develop their coping "skills" on their own, we should encourage them to identify and discourage garden-variety meanness. I don't know if it works, but wouldn't it be nice if it did?

Anyway, Duchess is fine. She's not joyfully devouring her life the way she had been doing, but she's still charging along with gusto. I think her coping skills may already be better than mine, for all that they involve a lot more crying.


*Oh, the photos. 
**Or at least, I imagine this is possible. In theory.
*** I was short, fat, liked to read, and had stunted social skills. Either kids in my schools were bigger assholes than Cook's classmates, or his introvert's gift for listening to people (and making them feel heard) was more beneficial to his social life than he realizes. My class in middle school was so dysfunctional that we actually had a therapist (have I mentioned this was a private school in Connecticut?) come in to work with the whole class. The only thing I remember from the group therapy sessions was one girl telling me in front of everybody, as part of some kind of honesty exercise that was presumably supposed to be helpful, that she felt sorry for me because I dressed so badly.**** I also remember that I actually felt this to be a positive interaction, because hey, she felt sorry for me!
**** I have a long, noble history of dressing badly. My very best outfit, circa 1982, was a purple velour tracksuit, worn with a lavender t-shirt with white fringe across the chest, and it's all been downhill from there.

Sick day

Duchess is sick. She woke up in the night complaining of stomach pain, which Cook and I assumed was gas or constipation. It's pretty hard, with Duchess, knowing if she's dying or just being very dramatic. She likes to look at herself in the mirror while she moans in agony. Anyway, we weren't terribly sympathetic, and I was very grumpy and tired when she finally threw up around midnight. I made her a pallet in our room, which turned out to be super-convenient when I could just reach over without even getting out of bed and hold her hair while she barfed in a bucket on the floor every two hours for the rest of the night.

Currently she's lying on her pallet (she drank a sip of ginger ale, fetched along with saltines and sport drink from the convenience store by Cook on a pre-work trip, and she promptly barfed it right back up), listening to a random story I dredged from the internet.* Skipper is playing with the pretend kitchen, organizing fake food and chanting "Too much, too fast! Too much, too fast, too much, too fast, too much, too fast..."**

Last night I went to a mandatory meeting for the language-immersion school a few blocks from our house. We entered Skipper into the lottery for their preschool program, which she would start in September. What I learned at the meeting is that the school community is much richer than Duchess's school community, presumably because parents have to lottery their kids in, and therefore are more likely to be well-educated and/or affluent.*** They have fulltime PE and music teachers! There is a teacher AND a teaching assistant in every kindergarten classroom of 28! Parents raise over a hundred thousand dollars a year to supplement staffing and materials! As I sat there listening to the principal, I felt both covetous and resentful on behalf of Duchess's school. Why should this public school have so much more good stuff than another public school less than a mile away?



* My tablet is reading to her, you see, while I ignore her. Technology is a great parenting resource!
** I don't think I said anything along those lines to trigger the phrase, but you never know. Actually, that's kind of Skipper's feeling about the world in general, so it may be a kind of protective mantra of hers.
*** If you lottery into a slot in the preschool program, your kid is guaranteed a slot in the kindergarten the following year, so you're more likely to get into the school than if you try to lottery into kindergarten. The preschool, however, has tuition involved, so if you can't afford to pay for that, you're screwed. (There are scholarships, but it's pretty easy to be too rich to qualify for those but still not have extra cash to pay for preschool. For example, if one parent is unemployed. Ahem.) This makes it even more likely that the kids entering kindergarten are richer than your average bear.

The future

Lately, between hopelessly submitting job applications, volunteering too much, not cleaning enough, and watching bad TV, somehow I keep finding myself reading articles about the new economy, in which adults need to be continually reinventing themselves, connecting with new people, learning new skills, switching jobs, etc. It's all so... dynamic. I am feeling the opposite of dynamic. I don't WANT to be dynamic.  I don't want to have to be selling myself on twitter and tumblr and foursquare and a million things I've never heard of just to participate in society. I don't want to be continually networking. I just want a steady job that I don't hate, and that pays more than the cost of childcare.* And I want to be able to retire before I die. (Assuming that is, that I ever get a job again. I may already be retired. Mission accomplished!)

This vision of an entrepreneurial world in which everybody is nimbly working the angles and positioning themselves for the next big thing  - I don't know, it sounds to me like a 20-year-old's** vision of a great place. People get damaged and set back all the time, and people are sometimes stupid and often stodgy. There has to be space for the cautious, the late adopters, the damaged, the sensitive - the rest of us. (Or maybe not!)  I'm having a hard time imagining what the world is going to look like in ten years, or fifteen,***** and I'm often afraid that it's just going to run over me and/or people I love.

On the other hand, the lesson I know I should have learned by now is to take things one day at a time. It has to be enough to be alive now, to be safe and warm and (mostly) clean, to know that we are secure, to have friends and family who will back us up when we need them. The kids are very effective at bringing me back to the immediate moment, with their demands and their dramas. This morning, for example, there was a big drama about a blister. I'd like to keep things in a state where a blister can be a big drama.


*If I had guaranteed access to cheap, good childcare, I would feel a lot more entrepreneurial. (Or at least as entrepreneurial as I am capable of feeling, which honestly isn't very.) Republicans, are you listening? Give me universal single-payer healthcare and decent affordable childcare, and I promise you I'll start a business. 
**Not me when I was 20, though, because even though I was oblivious, I wasn't nimble or entrepreneurial even then.
*** This also ties in to my ongoing perplexity about what skills and tools the girls need to acquire now to prepare for their adulthoods. Computer engineering? Hand-to-hand combat? Beekeeping? Robotics? Construction? Negotiation? Aeronautics? Sharpshooting? Beats the hell out of me. I am, however, almost 100% sure that it's not going to be musical theater, which is what Duchess is interested in at the moment. 

Holidays

So! The kids are on break, officially. And I am leaving my job after this Tuesday. THIS TUESDAY. So I will also be on break, indefinitely. I feel great about this, in many ways, enormously relieved. In other ways, I'm feeling terrified. My biggest immediate issue is that I really, really, really don't want to take the kids out of childcare, because if I then get a job, they won't be able to get back in to their programs. Skipper confessed the other day that she likes everything about her preschool, except for one kid who hits her. I don't want to take her out of there. Duchess loves kung fu more than anything else in her day (and she loves pretty much everything in her days), and I don't want to take her out of there, either. We'll go on as we are for a little while, and then retrench. Essentially, I need a job in order to keep my kids in childcare.

My biggest long-term issue is my deep fear that I will never find another job. I'm going to try to ignore that for a few weeks, long enough to eat a lot of cookies, watch the kids revel in Christmas, and enjoy the tremendous pleasure of listening to Cook and Duchess play holiday songs on the piano. Life is sweet.