Halloween Typecasting

Apple Glee

We took Allison Clare to visit a local farm today. She got to pet a goat, choose a pumpkin, and share a popcorn ball with me. But as you can see below, what she enjoyed most was bringing the apples home (if you look closely, you can see she has sampled more than one).

Top Chef: Imaginary Food Category

Spring is my favorite season, but I do love fall cooking. Soups and stews and roasts--and Jewish apple cake, which may seem a little weird given that I'm the Korean daughter of an English and Italian family. But however the recipe reached us, it's a longtime family favorite, and I have always loved it. I baked one today and gave Allison Clare a little mixing bowl and wooden "foon" to play with on the floor.

I turned around a moment later to see her toddling up to the barstool in the kitchen and perching the bowl precariously on its top (which spins) to try to mix her imaginary ingredients. Somehow I found this incredibly touching--as if in all her studious watching, she had observed that you don't mix cakes on the floor; you put them up high and mix them there. A dining room chair seemed to better suit her height for her mixing and tasting, mixing and tasting.

I even managed to get a few seconds on video, an increasingly difficult task because she loves to watch herself on the camera playback, so most of our recent videos consist of her catching a glimpse of the camera, running up to it, and reaching for it while imploring "Baby! Baby!" Here is rare footage of her doing something other than that:

Rubber and Roads

--for those who are seeing them meet right now.

Any of my close friends and any number of random acquaintances--along with a professional therapist or two--know that while I was in graduate school, I was enduring the prolonged trial of a (mostly non-)relationship that was largely static, with a delicately tortuous mix of high drama, poignant agony, erratic romance, pathetic betrayal, and dark satire. It emerged, devolved, reverted, and otherwise progressed at a glacial pace over a period of eight (yes, eight) years, mostly during occasional long-distance visits and overly contemplated letters.

When I think back on it, it's impossible not to feel foolish, and I knew even at the time that I was acting unwisely, gambling on things I knew better than to trust, and hoping against my better judgment that it would all work out in the end. Even though those years, from age 24-31, saw me gain a much more accurate sense of myself and what I wanted in other respects, I knew that within that relationship, I was becoming less secure and way more fragile--in other words, far less capable of participating in the kind of relationship that I wanted anyway.

And so, part of me thinks that during that time, and especially in that context, I was definitely at my most un-Christlike, or most unlike the person that God would want me to be: I was insecure, self-absorbed, depressed, and distracted.

And yet. I also wonder if something about being driven to the edge of my own personal sanity, about being out of control of my own heart, about living in the knowledge of my constant failure and helplessness over it, might have been, in fact, honest and profoundly true in a way that is impossible to access within the much neater boundaries of the kind of healthier relationships that I am now (and was then in other cases) more careful to establish. There's something so desperate and needy, so full of heartache and rage, about the letters of Paul and even the sermons of Jesus, that suggests that they weren't people who observed wise boundaries where the heart was concerned either.

In the end, I didn't successfully battle it out, or experience some spiritual victory that anyone could weave into a narrative of the power of faith; things fizzled and drifted and remained largely unresolved. And then after a short time, I met Sam, and our being together was inevitable in a way that meant there were no other considerations; thus, I moved on, but never really experienced a specific answer to the years of prayers that that relationship or that time would be redeemed in some recognizable way. And I don't need that; I just mean to say that I never triumphed; I just endured, and did that only involuntarily and only with a lot of whining and pathetic behavior--like a toddler with a temper tantrum who never seems to give up the desire for something bad for her or learn any lesson, but just happens to be distracted by something better. Except that maybe there in the midst of the kicking and screaming and crying was some authentic expression of myself, as sinner, that my efforts at dignity and concern for appearances otherwise shield me from. So while I don't ever really want to revisit that dynamic in my life, I also wonder if that doesn't explain the cross in "crucible."

Salience

On Mondays, I come home after class for an hour or two to eat lunch and spend some time with Allison Clare before I head back for a stretch in the office. Today, I had a little errand to run--getting doughnuts for a department meeting to celebrate a friend's birthday. I popped AC into her carseat, and we went to the Krispy Kreme drive-through.

I yelled my selections into the microphone, pulled around, and paid. The attendant handed the box and waxed paper bag through my car window, and then, as we were driving off, I heard a little voice pipe up chirpily from the back of the car, "Yummmm . . . French fries."

Sigh. The child has only visited the McDonald's drive-through once or twice in her entire life, but it clearly made an indelible impression. We go to the farmer's market every week, and does she say, "Yum . . . broccoli"? She does not.

Number 1 Was Number 2

--Not for the faint of stomach or delicate of manners. Seriously, please just stop here if that's you.

My enjoyment of parenting has not at all decreased my horror at the things it calls upon a person to do. Sometimes it's like being on a reality show (I know: how sad that I would see my life in terms of television, instead of vice versa) on which the host dreams up bizzare challenges and throws them at you, earnest, willing, trying-to-be-up-for-anything-mommy.

It all started yesterday afternoon, at the pediatrician's office, which as I've written about before, I love to visit for well-child checkups. As always, they were solicitous and kind and tolerated my relish in telling them about AC's new developments and miniature accomplishments. But she'd been having this low-grade fever that had spiked to almost 104, so the doctor wanted to check for a possible urinary tract infection.

Doctor: Of course we don't want to have to catheterize her to get a sample, but we do have this . . . bag . . . that she could . . . wear.

Me, tentatively: Um, she does use the potty . . .

Doctor, excitedly: Oh, that's much better! We'll do that.

Me: Well, she doesn't do it every time . . . [In truth, she does it maybe once or twice a day, but it's pretty erratic. She makes the potty sign regularly, but often doesn't want to stop playing to follow through, and we don't want to make it into a battle until we're ready to potty train her in earnest. Hence my distinct hesitation about my ego writing checks a 19-month-old body couldn't cash.]

Doctor, clearly having moved on in his relief and excitement: Oh, we'll get you some cups, and you can just bring it back in the morning!

And that is how I ended up locked in the bathroom for an hour this morning with Allison Clare, her feverish and VERY confused and unhappy about being stripped naked (but also bemused and pleased by being plied with more cups of juice than she has ever been permitted in her life 'til now), and me desperately trying to keep a sterile urine cup within inches of her while keeping her from grabbing at it and contaminating it. I basically chased her around the bathroom and tried to clean up and/or keep her from splashing in the three small puddles that I didn't catch before she finally consented to go on the potty, at which point I nearly cried with relief and elation over the successful "capture" and self-pity at what my life had become.

The title of this post refers to the fact that this incident involving Number 1 is the Number 2 most horrifying experience I've had in parenthood, the first being the time I was at Barnes & Noble 40 minutes away from home, out for the day with AC as a 3-month-old, sitting in a corner of the cafe, nursing her discreetly under a wrap, when I felt something dismayingly warm and wet on my leg and realized she had had an enormous, blowout breastfed-baby poop (for the uninitiated, that means it was roughly the color of mustard and consistency of yogurt) that had exploded up the back of her diaper, leaving a gob about the size of an ice cream scoop on my pants, there under my serene nursing cover. I stayed calm, let her finish, and tried to plan a strategy that would allow me to unlatch her without smearing it all around, get her back into the stroller without transferring the mess from her onto the stroller, and get us both with our gear from the cafe to the restroom without making it totally apparent to all the nearby bookbuyers that I was covered in human excrement.

That incident was definitely number one because of the public situation, though this recent one was a close second because of an added stressor, which was that I needed the urine sample within a short window of time: after teaching my class, before her nap, so that I could get it up to the lab before they closed for the weekend and be back in time for all of us to go out to another appointment. Like I said, it's been like a reality show around here, bizarre twisty challenges and all.

Autumn

This season feels shrouded, overcast with some heavy pall. A few weeks ago, a colleague's wife died suddenly; she was just a few years older than Sam. Her gentle-souled husband is left to do--what? start over? In middle age, after working his whole adulthood building a life alongside her? I'd just had a conversation with him about the bathroom he'd finished remodeling in the house they had just bought, and about his new hobby of baking bread. And then there we all were at her memorial service, in black.

And just this past week, we learned that another endlessly generous friend has gotten some very, very bad news from his doctors. The spring we bought our house and ripped open all its walls and ceilings, he came over to offer some advice on how to solve a tricky wall-rebuilding problem; later that afternoon, unexpectedly, he returned with a couple of wood braces he had built in his shop, let himself into the house with a quiet "Hello" (we were all open doors then), and set about rebuilding our wall for us. Just because he thought it looked like we were having a bad day. We were, but it was one in a couple of months of bad days, and what I remember about that one day, and even about that couple of months, was this act of kindness and others like it.

I was thinking about these things, and about a couple of friends of friends who have lost or may be losing children, when we were in church this morning. Allison Clare had been running a very low-grade fever for a while, off and on, and then she had surprised us by sleeping until 10:00 a.m. Saturday morning. (Which, you know, leaves you 98% elated and 2% worried about whether she'll be okay when you finally go into her room.) I'm pretty sure that she was just worn out from a busy week, but it did make me think, there in church, about how what we love most tenderly is perhaps the most fragile and absolutely the most irreplaceable. Or it seems to be fragile, because the eternal is represented in flesh so undeniably, relentlessly perishable.

For me, I don't think that what faith provides most significantly is the knowledge of how to live my life (as I think a theologian would affirm), or even the power to do so (as a charismatic would promise). To be honest, I think I'm muddling through on both counts. Sometimes, I'm self-righteous or proud about how I'm doing it, which is certainly no credit to what or whom I believe, and other times, I just feel confused or skeptical or cynical. Sometimes I'm pretty sure that my faith is so insufficient that it doesn't even change me, that I'm no better than I would be without it--which is not to say that God isn't good or present or powerful, but rather to comment on my own smug slothfulness.

But here is the one thing that my particular, peculiar, rickety faith gives me that nothing else in my self-centered little world could: the hope that if I lost Allison Clare, I would see her again.