Happy New Year from Chicago

Where the lox will fuckin' jack you, dude.

Merry Christmas from Arkadelphia, Arkansas

Job Woes

Somehow, after doing well in college and grad school, I make less money than ever. I like what I do -- teaching writing to college students -- and I'm good at it, but it's messed up career. For the past few years I've been an adjunct professor at a state college. The good things about the job are that I love the work, I love the students, and I have good benefits (or we'd never be able to afford Dr. Baby Factory). The bad things are the 2+ hour commute (that's each way, via subway, train, and bus), the irregular hours, the excruciatingly low pay, and the semester-to-semester uncertainty of employment.

In the fall, I get up at the crack of dawn (usually before that) to teach Freshman Comp for the better-paying Humanities Department; in the spring I stay up late to teach evening classes for perpetually-broke Continuing Ed. I'm finishing a semester of 4-class days: 8:30, 10:30, 2:30, 4:30. This spring, I'm teaching long, late classes on Mondays and Thursdays. If we finish early, I might be home by 10 or 10:30, though we should really go late enough that I wouldn't be home before 11:30.

My fall boss just offered me an 8:30 section of Freshman Comp -- nice of her! Adjuncts don't often get the spring sections of that class. But, ye gods, the thought of leaving the house at 6:15 and getting home so very, very late...I just don't think I can swing it. We could use the money -- I don't see how we'll buy more sperm if what we have doesn't get the job done, let alone put money away towards motherhood -- but I think working those hours will leave my body too messed up to conceive.

I have to call her this afternoon with my decision. Ugh.

(Anybody in the NYC area need a great writing teacher? Or an editor, a writer of video scripts for social work interventions, a test-prep writer?)

This is your brain on holiday cheer

Thanks brain. Good morning to you too.

This morning I woke up out of a terrible baby-related anxiety dream. In my dream, I had a newborn, but for some reason I hadn't been able to find it for about a day. (!) Most of the dream was a fruitless search for the baby. I was convinced that the baby might be across the street at MIT in the astronomy building, but when I got there there was a big conference of therapists going on. One of these therapists wanted to know why I was so upset, and when I told her she shouted at me that my children were not her problem. Okay.

Then I spent way too long going up the down escalator in a Christmas store.

Finally back home, I found the baby, dead due to my neglect. At this point Baby Mama woke me up. Apparently I was making unhappy noises.

I don't have time for you problems! I'm a therapist

WTF head? That was uncool.

She's Learning

From time to time, I chide Sugar for not having much in the way of the gift of the gab. It's unfair of me. After all, she's Polish. Our ancestors may have had in common their unrelenting diet of cabbage and potatoes, but while my Irish forbears were spending their winters thinking of something suave to say to the girl next door (and starving), hers were busy staying out of the way of commuting armies (and starving).

But let it not be said that I withhold credit where it is due.

Last night, while I was performing my evening ablutions in the bathroom, Sugar made a remark from the other room to the effect that the wedding had been a stressful experience. (Stressful? Why, all of our parents were here to help! And we got to organize every little thing they did!)

"Excuse me," I reminded her, "That was the HAPPIEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE."

A pause.

"No," she replied, and I waited to pounce. "Being married to you is so much better."


My wife: I think I'll keep her.

Last Night

I dreamed last night I was in my garden, in back of a house I don't own. I was quite covered in dirt when I noticed a long curve of something coming up from my left hip. I pulled it up and, as I was surprised to discover, out of my groin, which hurt but also felt satisfying. "Ah," I thought, "an old vein. Must have gone bad. Forgot I'm supposed to be pulling those out." But when I shook the dirt off and looked again, it was a tough runner of grass, which had evidently grown into me and rooted.

All of which is to say that I woke up with cramps.

I don't mean to complain about that. For one thing, I wasn't thinking I might be pregnant this time, since I ovulated on the weekend of our wedding, which was beautiful timing for poetry but lousy for a trip to the Baby Factory, with all the scheduling and defrosting and spiking of my cervix that entails. For another, the cramps aren't that bad. In fact, the five periods since my horrible HSG have been the five least painful I can remember. I used to spend three days or so every month nearly incapacitated, popping Aleve until my stomach hurt, often swearing, sometimes writhing, rarely passing out. Now the pain almost goes away with Advil. My theory is that much of my pain was because my cervices -- despite having, in principle, twice the potential to admit blood -- were so circuitous and given to clenching that the blood couldn't get out, leaving my uterus Very.Angry. Now one entrance has been, to quote the note on my chart that I read over a nurse's shoulder, "perforated," and it's not so dramatic. (Unfortunately, even that side is still tough for the catheter to negotiate, which is why the new note in my chart says I'm to have Valium the next time we try to knock me up*.)

At the HSG, Dr. Baby Factory told me that my tubes were open, though the cysts on my ovaries still left him calling my endometriosis "significant." I could have surgery for it, if it was bothering me, or just try to get knocked up and hope for the best, if it wasn't so bad. I am, as previously noted, generally opposed to knives wielded at my person, so I politely declined. And then my cramps all but stopped!

Except. Now that I'm keeping better track of my cycles, I'm wondering if this insane GI awfulness I've been having occasionally for the past few years isn't secretly some kind of endo. It doesn't happen every month or usually during my period, but it has happened the past two months, both times a few days before my period started. Remember when I thought I might have super-early morning sickness but them decided it was the stomach flu? That. It happened again this month, on Thanksgiving (so I couldn't eat anything)**. Basically, what seems to happen is that my colon stops advancing (uh, TMI, sorry, but you are reading this because of my hoo-has, so only kind of sorry), I fill up with gas, and I lie on the floor writhing and screaming for 12-24 hours until things move along again. I went to the GI doc some time ago, pooped in lots of cups, and got told that probably I had injured myself getting food poisoning, that things were out of whack, that I should take pro-biotics and hope it got better, which it sort of seemed to, but only sort of. Now I'm wondering if the real issue could be that I have endometrial nodules on or near my bowel that get inflamed and mess everything up. I have a call in to Dr. Baby Factory to see what he thinks of this theory, but I know that the answer is likely to be that there's no way to tell without surgery.

Did I mention how I don't like the cutting? Oh, and how I'd like to get one with this TTC business already and stop having to hurry up and wait?

Did I also mention that the weather has turned cold? How about that this is my last night of 30, and that when my mother was my age, she was about 3 days from going into labor with me, after two endo surgeries and several more years of TTC?



*Which -- and believe me, baby-watchers, I am as impatient about this as you -- won't be until mid-January, at the earliest. Not only am I most likely to ovulate on the day we set off on our annual Middle-Western Odyssey, making timing a clinic visit stressful, but I would also, on balance, like to be drinking at New Years and also not weeping over getting my period while snowed-in at Sugar's parents'.

**but still had a nice time, because my super-awesome cousin was visiting. She was the most compassionate 18-year-old EVER about how sick I was, sadly because she was been so very much sicker with endo herself for the past couple years.

At The Last Minute

This has to be quick (and therefore long), because I want it done in time for Mel's Show and Tell, but I promise I'll get you more wedding stories sooner or later. Tonight I want to show you our bouquets.


A devoted and determined and diligent friend I met at the community garden -- let's call her the Plant Whisperer -- made them. The Plant Whisperer is no amateur in this department. She works as a celebrity stylist, and her portfolio has like every famous person I've ever thought of in it. Her apartment is stuffed with amazing things, from bajillion dollar silk curtains a rich client tired of to a Louis the something-or-otherth vest that Andy Warhol tossed her way. I call her the Plant Whisperer because however impeccable her taste and impressive her client list, her skills in the garden outstrip them. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden just traded 90 year-old peonies to our garden in return for her fairy foxglove seeds, because, frankly, the alpine garden she's established in the corner of our old building lot is better than theirs.

Months ago, she asked me to send her a list of flowers I like, and I did nothing about it, in part because I'm lazy and would find a way to postpone breathing if I could, in part because I was determined at that point that the legal business was no big deal -- the real celebration will come in the spring, when our friends can come to a big party. Three days before the wedding, my mother just happened to forward me an email she'd sent to old friends, telling them we were getting hitched:

I hope they'll carry flowers.

Mama always has been good at finding that B in subtle. She checked in via phone to be sure I hadn't missed it.

Sugar and I had invited our parents and two friends from our respective early childhoods who have ended up living within blocks of us, hundreds of miles from our hometowns. I called my "womb buddy," who'd offered to help with flowers, but it soon became clear this was asking a lot. Womb Buddy is a Soil Engineer and terrified she'd screw this up. I wasn't expecting much -- a grocery store bouquet with a ribbon from home? -- and I thought the Plant Whisperer could at least supply the name of the flower I don't like. She did (alstroemeria), and immediately took charge of the whole project, sending me home with ribbon swatches to hold up to our dresses, enlisting another garden stalwart and all-around prince to drive her to the flower market at 5:30 am, and ultimately coming up with this:


Bigger here.

I still can't believe we had something so beautiful to carry. They were stunning. I couldn't have even imagined something so lovely. The roses came from an established bush in the community garden, so we'd have something "old." The heather made me feel less bad for forgetting the Scottish tradition of a silver coin in my shoe (though Mama says my blood was Scottish enough). The dark red peonies reminded me of Sugar's grandmother, who grows them and who couldn't travel for the ceremony.

The leather box in the photo is from the Plant Whisperer, too. We carried our rings in it. It's a replica of an opera glass case belonging to Napoleon's wife, Josphine, and so it has Sugar's and my shared first initial J embossed on it.

And as if all that wasn't enough, she's insisting on naming the new peony at the garden -- the one she got in return for her seeds -- after us.

It all makes me think about grace. Grace is like all of this: something you get despite the fact that you could never deserve it.