Science blogging conference today

This morning I’m attending the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. There’s a lot happening in science blogging, and some of the big names in the blogosphere are going to be there, including Coturnix, and Anton and one other, whose name I’ve forgotten. They’ve pulled together a free conference with an impressive program.
Science blogging might be in my future. There have to be ways to get the cool science stuff to the masses without relying on the popular press, which have largely abandoned the field in favor of stories that are easier and faster to write, covered by reporters who don’t have to have special interest, and which are easier for account managers to sell to advertisers.
In my recent search for good science, this place, run by NYU grad students, is impressive, but most science posts seem to be driven by individuals who want to propel their fields.
I’ll give you a review of the conference later.

Ready, aim…!

Call me naive.
I had no idea, none whatsoever, that little girls wanted to watch themselves pee.
(Let me interrupt for a second here. This is the third time I’ve edited this post since I put it up 48 hours ago. Don’t get the impression that I’m obsessed with peeing. I just want to try to get the tone right. This is supposed to be funny, a poke at my naivete and utter befuddlement of some of the less obvious details of parenting.)
Why would I? I didn’t have little sisters. I never babysat anybody, boys or girls, much less tried to potty train a kid.
Of all the baby-beware stories I heard leading up to he kid’s delivery the only pee mishaps were with baby boys. You know, wear a raincoat when you change a little boy’s diaper, etc., etc. In a way this makes sence, I mean, because it’s all out in front and everything. Nobody ever said anything about girls’ peeing.
Come to think of it, most of these stories are told by women. Maybe moms are as entrigued by their sons’ urinary escapades as dads are by their daughters? I don’t know. Maybe I’m digging myself a hole here. Maybe men are just not as involved, or they’d rather not discuss these things.
Regardless, it’s safe to say I’m learning a whole helluva lot these days.
The other night I put Myowndaughter on her toilet seat as part of the pre-bath ritual. I stepped beyond her to turn on the bathwater and stepped back into a stream of pee! What the????!!!
I figure it’s just a little slip. I clean her up, clean up the floor and the toilet seat and proceed with the bath.
Then it happens again, a few nights later.
Well, she just must not be getting the hang of it. I mean, she’s been using the toilet for many months now — not all the time, but regularly. I remember the first few times, and the puzzled expression on her face. ‘Ummm, what’s going on? Oh. Ohhhhh. That’s how I get wet. I get this little feeling inside, and it comes out … there? Hmmm.’
I think she has the hang of it now, but she’s also well into the age of exploration.
Finally, the third time this happens, I turn around in time to see Myowndaughter peeing over the rim of her training seat, and she’s looking down, watching it all unfold. Now, I’m sure she’s just trying to figure out how all these body functions transpire, where they come from and all that. But for a second, it looked like she was taking aim. Aim, for crying out loud. As if she’s trying to hit the wall! And she seems so serious.
I, of course, freak out and reach for the toilet paper, but the entire roll has been de-rolled, wadded up and stuffed on top of the toilet paper holder. This, of course, is funny to her. So while I’m trying to find the end of this jumblation of paper she’s having a great time.
Again, I thought only boys did this kind of stuff! I don’t know why. We haven’t cornered the market on ureters. Or pee, for that matter. Or even curiousity.
Well, if there’s a theme for my form of parenting it’s that I provide boudaries to protect her safety and to teach her a healthy form of respect for others. As long as she and others are safe the doors to exploration and adventure are pretty much wide open. I don’t want to damper her enthusiasm just because something annoys or inconveniences me.
I admit, this whole episode has freaked me out a little bit. Just because I never saw it coming.
But I’m over it now.
I’ll get more toilet paper.

Significant slumber

About a week and a half ago, late one night, I became a dad. Myowndaughter’s dad, more than two years after she was born.
That night, I felt like the last barrier between myself and my child crumbled. It was the first night, really, I was able to put her to sleep.
When she was 5 and 6 months old, and her Sexymom went back to work on weekends, Mod and I were on our own, from waking to sleeping. Mod didn’t have a choice. But since then, her only choice was Sexymom. She wants the Maternal One beside her when she closes her eyes.
Mod’s sleep habits are a topic for its own blog. In brief, this kid does NOT like to go to sleep, period. She doesn’t like to take naps, and at night she’ll find every excuse to stall — water, pee, poop, brush teeth, Kleenex, books, monkey, bear, whatever — even with Sexymom.
We’ve read all the books and tried all the methods, from Ferberizing to cuddling. Nothing works. Still, nothing works.
Recently, Maternal One decided she wasn’t going to stick around 20, 30, 40 minutes while Mod slowly surrenders to slumber.
If you’ve ever spent time with a 2-year-old, or a wild screeching Macaque monkey, or a wet cat that “accidentally” bumps into an electric fence (another blog), then you can imagine Myowndaughter’s reaction to this plot twist. Combine said monkey and cat with, oh, a tiger with a toothache. She wasn’t happy.
So, I stepped in.
Now, until this point, Myowndaughter wanted me around as much as that tiger wants a permanent hairdo. Aforementioned reaction was just a small taste of her objection to my pinch-hitting.
But this time was different. Sexymom left Mod’s room. I entered and there was the anticipated wailing: “Maaaaama! Mama, Daddy. Maaaaaama! Ella Maaama, Daddy.”
So, after a few minutes of this, I got up to leave … although I didn’t really know where I was going.
I got to the door, and the wailing changes pitch, and timbre, and lyrics.
“Daddy?” What’s this? You’re leaving too? “Daddy?” I guess he is. Hey!
“Daaaaaaaddy! Daaaaaaaaaddy!”
It was music to my ears. I admit, I hate to hear Mod cry more than anything in the world. And I can generally tell what’s behind the cries — exhaustion, hurt, actue fear. But with the nighttime crying, sometimes the reasons, I rationalize, are deeper. They’re about some unknown fear. I fully understand boundaries, and I’m the first to encourage and even force Mod to accomplish things on her own. But I don’t understand why we would let our daughter cry herself to sleep. Sleeping is a skill she’ll have to master, I understand that. I wasn’t good at it, and I’m still not. But Mod’s not awake out of spite; she doesn’t know what that is yet, she hasn’t entered junior high. I don’t think she stays awake because she wants to misbehave.
So, when Mod cried for me, I quickly shook off the surprise, turned around and sat on her bed, quietly. I didn’t talk to her, didn’t respond. Just sat there. After a few minutes Mod crawled under the covers and put her head on her pillow. I got up and sat on the floor — Sexymom had started gradually increasing her distance from Mod months ago, ultimately sitting outside Mod’s room. Within 10 minutes, Mod was sound asleep. I got up, winced when my ankles and knees and vertebrae crackled, and left the room.
Mod has had a very close relationship with her Sexymom. We’ve struggled with seperation anxiety. Within the past few months we’ve worked beyond that, and now Sexymom can leave the house, with Mod in my care, without so much as a whimper from the kiddo. I’ve had the feeding thing down for a while; being able to realize when Mod’s hungry and being able to find what foods will maker he happy. Getting dressed; check. Bathtime; check. Story time; check.
Tonight made the fourth time, in the past two weeks, I stayed with Mod until she went to sleep.
Check.

Let it ‘no, let it ‘no, let it ‘no!

Myowndaughter came into our bedroom this morning when I was getting ready for work and said, “‘no. ‘no, Daddy. ‘no.” Her eyes were alight with wonder. She loves snow.

We recently moved to the South from the far reaches of the Northeast. Last winter, when she had barely turned 1, she would bring us her snow boots, and if she was able to slip out the door she’d go straight to her sled and take off across the yard.

This was the first snow of a very warm winter; it had come overnight and was just enough for a heavy dusting.

When she looked out the window this morning, my Sexywife told me, the first thing Mod said was “‘noman?”

And when the Sexywife came back into the house from the garage, where she tended the dogs, she found the back door wide open, and Mod plopped in a chair on the deck.

“Wasn’t it cold?,” I asked her. “Wasn’t it wet?”
“Noooooooooo,” she said. “‘no on it!”

 

Finding my footing

Dec. 1, 2005

I admit, as cliché as it seems, to counting Myowndaughter’s fingers and toes when she was plucked from the womb. I did this right after I was sure she hadn’t received my father-in-law’s nose. They were all there, all 20 digits, all perfectly normal on her perfectly beautiful little body.
Then, a month or two later, I looked at her cute little feet and made a startling discovery.
Her toes, the second and third ones on both feet, seem to share their first knuckle, the one still inside the foot part of the foot. These toes sit apart from the other ones, like two flower buds sprouting from the same short stem.
“Have you seen this? Look, look at this!” I said to Mod’s Sexymom.
She’s grown accustomed to my occasional histrionics, which seem to have increased in frequency since our daughter was born.
“What.” She said it more than asked it.
“Mod’s toes! They’re, they’re … they’re stuck together!”
“Yeah. I told you that. She has webbed toes, just like you.”
What? First of all, I didn’t remember her telling me anything about my toes, but that’s such a common theme I skipped right past it.
“I have webbed toes? What are you talking about? You’re crazy! I don’t have webbed toes.” After all, when we were in that hot-and-heavy dating phase, where we were both dumbly blinded to any of each other’s blemishes, Trish told me how “manly” my feet were. Really, it’s true. “I’m glad to be dating a man with ‘manly feet’.” She said it just like that. Why would she say that, even seized by passion, if I had mutant toes?
With Mod tottering on my knee I yanked off my shoes and socks, peered down at my size 12s, my manly feet, looked closer, tilted my head, kicked a foot onto the coffee table for a better view and there, right in front of my eyes, between the big toe and the fourth toe were two toes, stuck together.
Other foot, same thing.
They’re not exactly webbed; Sexymom was exaggerating. But the spaces between the toes in question definitely are not as long as the spaces between the others. My metatarsals merged. They were just like Mod’s, only bigger and with manly hair.
To find a part of one’s own body one never knew existed is, to be certain, a significant event for anyone. But I was 36. I’d lived with this body a long time, showered thousands of times, put on socks thousands of times, spent countless hours barefoot. Why hadn’t I noticed? I’d even had two minor procedures done on my big toes. Podiatrists had seen my feet. Specialists. Why hadn’t they said something? If I had been 19, or 20, even 25, maybe I wouldn’t be so shocked, my body would still be “young,” newish.
(I later told a friend about this. She said, “you and Ashton Kutcher.” Apparently, the pop press reported on the punked punk’s conjoined toes. Great. I had two things in common with this silly, quasi-adult bizillionaire actor — a sexy older wife and webbed toes. I must admit, I was a little flattered.)
But life had brought a lot of excitement and discovery my way in recent years. Six years ago I was divorced, after seven years of marriage. In the following two years I moved to a new city, changed jobs twice and careers once and adopted two dogs. Then, I met the future Sexymom, and a year later I was married again. Life was moving fast.
Three years after thefuture Sexymom and I married, Mod was born, early one November morning. Suddenly I was looking at, and into, a whole new life, and that life was looking back at me, and crying, and pooping, and sleeping on my chest with quick, shallow breaths with the heartbeat a hummingbird, small and fragile. Life slowed down, and I welcomed the new pace.
I was faced with new challenges, to be sure. I didn’t know how to hold a baby, rock a baby to sleep, prepare formula. I knew nothing about an infant’s demanding schedule.
The genes in my family, my father’s family, are very strong. Photos of me, my siblings and our dad all look like pictures of the same baby dressed in clothes from different decades and posed with props from respective eras.
After Mod was cleaned and warmed pink in her hospital bassinet, I looked down and saw my hair, dark and messy and abundant; my ample cheeks and little round chin; my olive skin; and my old-soul eyes, looking for answers and questions and more answers.
I’m proud of my daughter’s toes. They’re incredibly cute, even if a couple of them look a little different. And I’m still excited that after 36 years I practically found a new body part. But, I’m most proud, and amazed, and appreciative, that this little girl, my little girl, Myowndaughter, has already started teaching me something about myself.
Life as a single man, and even a married man without kids, can be very self-serving, and self-satisfying. My daughter’s life has added new dimensions to mine, outside my own needs, that I didn’t know existed. My relationship with both my parents, from the very beginning, was distant to say the least. Perhaps the greatest discovery, tipped off by my little girl’s toes, might not be that there’s another world available to me; that’s universal. What’s unique is my gradual learning that I have the capacity to live in that world.

Half a mile, uphill, in the …

The other day, Myowndaughter, every stinkin bit of 2, walked two of our three dogs half a mile, uphill.
She had Duke on her left and Tiger on her right, and their respective leashes in her corresonding hands, and kept these two bad boys in line for about 20 minutes. While wearing her winter mud-puddle splashing boots, no less, when the temperature was in the 70s.
I was in absolute awe.
I asked her, “want some help?”
“No.”
We’d walk a while farther.
“Want to ride in the stroller now?” I’d brought it along knowing I’d employ it sooner or later.
“No.”
When Mod says “no,” it’s usually just matter-of-fact. Short and sweet. Thanks for asking, but, no.
We walked down our street, turned left, walked up the big hill, turned right, walked past the construction workers framing houses and digging utility lines and back to the undeveloped lots. She wasn’t distracted, wasn’t tired, wasn’t intimidated. She was enjoying herself, without, apparently, giving it much though.
Later that day I drove the route, to get the mileage.
Half a mile, on her own, basically, controlling two large dogs known to bolt on occasion. She gets the toughness from her mom, definitely.
It’s amazing what kids will do.

Give me a pea!

Stepblog’s post about “>sweetness vs. badassness reminded me of a story about Myowndaughter.

Mod, every stinkin bit of 2, is a fairly decent eater, as they say. She likes spinach, broccoli, peas. She scarfs edamame. She’ll throw back fruit like a monkey. She just doesn’t always eat a lot, and sometimes hardly touches her dinner.

Being an ignorant first-time dad, this, of course, got to me. My default parental instincts are those forged by parents who lived through the Depression. After witnessing this behavior a couple of times I’d had enough. Dammit, I thought, I worked for that food, I paid for that food, she’d better eat it or … else. I thought of the “children are starving” speech but quickly dismissed it because when I was a kid the b-roll in those Sally Struthers commercials, where she shamed people into feeding children in Africa for only pennies a day, always freaked me out and I’d turn the dial from UHF to VHF as fast as I could.

So, ignorant first-time dad that I am, I tried to get Mod to eat by, of course, telling her to. It went like this:
“Eat!” says I.

“Hahahahahaha,” says she. She has a great laugh. Even a great sence of comedic timing. But that didn’t deter me.

“Come on, now, I’m serious!” (She’s supposed to know this because I’ve raised my voice.) “Eat!”

“Abbyabbyabbyabby?” says Mod, invoking the name of her favorite dog. Sometimes “Abby” has relevance, sometimes not.

“Eat!”

“Noooooooo,” lilting at the end.

I was getting nowhere, and I didn’t understand why. I would leave the house at 7 a.m. and come home at 6 at night, maybe 7 when the man put it to me extra hard. I would be hungry. Why wasn’t this ungrateful kid?

It’s too late, my fatalist voice would said, sadly shaking its metaphorical head. We’ve already started to indulge and pamper and encourage her to be a spoiled, insolent, unambitious louse who completes her life sponging off of honest taxpayers like me. That’s what happens. My dad told me so. I’d better nip this corrosive behavior in the bud.

Fortunately, the woman I sleep with, who happens to be Mod’s mother and my sexy wife, is more enlightened than I. And, more rational. And I know she objects to my behavior because she’s not saying anything. I think she secretly laughs at me. She’s with the kid all day and has to pull every trick in the book to get her to eat, nap, play nicely, don’t run out in the street naked, don’t catch the dog on fire. I get home and in 30 minutes I expect the kid to jump to attention. I expected to win a showdown with a 2-year-old when 2-year-olds live for showdowns. I lost professional show-down status decades ago. I was in over my head.

So when Sexymom got quiet I rethought my strategy. I remembered that even Ward Cleaver swallowed his words on occasion, when it was appropriate, when his own sexy wife (was she ever!) shone a light on the falicy of his logic. And, I’ve contemplated this parenting thing long enough to realize the way I was taught was really pretty crappy.

I’m mostly ignorant, but I’m not a total idiot. I see I’ve hit a brick wall — a 2-year-old brick wall who happens to be very cute. In one of those rare moments, I actually evaluate the situation and think of a solution, a complete change in course.

I wait until Mod takes a bite, on her own, then I cheer really loudly.

“Horaaaaaaaay! You did it! You took a bite!!!!! Yayyyyyyy, Mod!!!! Woohooooo!”

She’s startled. She’s baffled. Sexymom is startled, maybe a little scared.

I see my daughter’s brow wrinkle. What the hell’s gong on with the old man? He’s nuts. Let’s get him to do this again.

And she takes another bite.

“Hooraaaaaaaaay!” I cheer like I did at college football games, like the Houston Astros didn’t choke during the World Series (I know, it was two years ago, I’m still not over it), like I, myself, would have loved to have been cheered.

I actually get a positive response! She likes this craziness! She eats, I cheer. It’s fun! She takes another bite.

She pauses, looks at me, takes another bite …

I am not an idiot, but I am ignorant. I stop cheering. I figure a little applause has sent her on her way to a healthy meal.

“Dada! Hooraaaaay!”

“Oh, yeah! Hooraaaaaaay!” Phew. Nice recovery.

Mod remembers this little game the next night, and the next. For a couple of weeks, dinner resembles a political convention. Mod cheers when I eat. She cheers when Sexymom eats.

Health disclosure here — we’re not forcing our kid to eat eat eat eat. We tell her to eat when she’s hungry, and when she’s not, stop. Sometimes, though, she’d like a little encouragement, a little something to help her focus.

Now, we cheer less often. Sometimes I cheer and she doesn’t buy it, and that’s OK. But this exercise has carried over to other aspects of our daily lives — getting dressed, brushing teeth, not catching the dog on fire. There might still be children starving in Africa — we’ll tackle that topic another time — and I might still, occasionally, once in a while, maybe raise my voice. But I’ve emerged from the fog of doom — Mod isn’t going to be a louse because she doesn’t clean her plate. Foregoing second helpings doesn’t foreshadow life in a methlab.

Dinnertime is much more enjoyable, now that I’ve been ever-so-slightly more enlightened.

Jumper

Abby, oh Abby. How to explain Abby.
She’s the product of a broken home. She lived with at least two families before Trish, the missus, adopted her at only 4 months old.
Abby is a nervous dog.

She’s adopted some weird habits, like clutching a fleece blanket with her front paws and sucking on it for hours. When she gets really excited she holds said blanket, sopping wet with slobber, in her mouth and dances around in circles, wiggling her body and whipping her tail around so viciously she almost takes her own eye out. She looks like a bug of some kind doing a mating dance. She snorts — since the slobbery blanket blocks her airway — wrinkles her snout and curls her gums so it looks like she’s trying to laugh. She’s a black lab-hound dog mutt, with big floppy ears, a little head, chicken-bone legs over wide, webbed feet, and a penchant for barking. She’s not a slim girl, either. Abby’s got a big ol’ butt, oh yeah! She tips the scales at close to 70 pounds. She’s a wiggling, snorting, snarling, laughing, slobbering, ridiculously happy bowling ball on four legs with a tail. She’s a canine semi, fishtailing.
You can see why she’s my daughter’s favorite of our three dogs; the other two, a border collie-husky mutt and a stubborn golden retriever, who both passed AKC good citizen training, aren’t nearly as amusing. I’m afraid this is foreshadowing my daughter’s tendency to gravitate toward the “bad crowd.” Abby’s always the one getting into trouble. Maybe it’s because her name is yelled and muttered so frequently that it remains one of my little girls favorite words, a full year after she started uttering any words at all. “Abby” substitutes for almost anything — verb, noun, vegetable or mineral, person or thing.
“Why are you taking your diaper off?”
“Abby abby.”
“How ’bout we go to the playground?”
“Abby!”
“What do you want for a snack?
“Abbyabbyabby!”
“Time for a bath!”
“Abbyabbyabby.”
“Who colored the new tile floor with blue Crayons?”
“Abby!”
Abby is also a paradox.
Trish blames Abby’s weight on being “fixed” too early. Removal of the dog’s — whatever vets take out of female dogs to prevent the formation of other dogs — has created a permanent, insatiable appetite. One time Abby snatched a loaf of bread off of the kitchen counter, and in no more than four seconds devoured all the bread, leaving a small hole in the plastic wrapper, with the twisty thing on. The other day she ate a ham hock — a whole ham hock — out of a neighbor’s trash can. Who throws away a whole ham hock that’s not turned utterly nasty? If we don’t stand guard at feeding time, Abby would eat her serving of premium-brand dog food, then eat Tiger’s and half of Duke’s and beg for more. We’ve had her on diets — less food, reduced-fat food, even a green bean diet — one can of green beans a day to create “bulk.” The only bulk it created was left in wet messy piles all over the back yard. Still, she gains weight.
But she’s not the kind of overweight being that lolls around all day. Oh, no. She’s the kind of big girl who’s light on her feet. She’ll fetch the tennis ball until my arm wears out. She’s quicker than a greyhound at the sight of a cat. She’s caught squirrels, actually chased them down like a lion taking down a wounded baby wildebeest. When she barks, her front legs come off the ground.
But it’s the fence jumping that’s most amazing.
It started not long after I moved in, come to think of it. Trish and I joke about creating a blended family, like the Brady Bunch — I had the two boys, Duke and Tiger, she had the girl, yada yada. Yeah, I know it’s sappy. We’re nearing middle-age, we’re allowed to be sappy. By most accounts we all got along great, right off the start. In fact, Trish and I owe it to Abby for finally bringing us together, in a romantic way, because I helped take Abby to the pet ER late one snowy night in my SUV after Abby ate rat poison. And Trish was so grateful … but that’s another story.
Anyway, long story short, Trish and I date, I move in (hey, she had a house, I had an apartment, it was an economy of scale), suddenly there were three dogs in the backyard, not one.
We started coming home and finding Abby on the front porch, just lying there with a leash beside her. How the hell did she do that, we wondered. There’s a good fence, there are still two other dogs in the yard, what’s going on? A neighbor told us she had seen Abby trotting along her yard, headed back to ours. She had gotten out, gone halfway around the block and made her way to our front porch. Presumably she pulled one of the leaches off of a post where we kept them and stayed on the porch until we got home. This was summertime. In Nashville. It was 90+ degrees. She left the backyard, where there was water, where there were already cool holes dug in the flowerbeds, to sit on the porch, pant and wait about nine hours for us to come home.
We knew her route, but we couldn’t figure out how she busted out. So we spied on her. We actually told Abby goodbye, got in the car and drove away, except when the car was out of view of the backyard I got out and sneaked back into the house. Trish staked out the corner. We had to do this more than once, because the first couple of times Abby got out before we could get into position. We honed our plan, like a SWAT team, and one day, sure nuff, within 10 minutes of our pulling out of the driveway Abby scaled the back fence. It was a wire fence, a hog-wire fence for those of you with farm experience. She put one paw over the other and flopped over the top.
I erected, in one of my fool-hardy, single-man projects of the kind most engineer-wannabes perform on weekends, a huge privacy fence. It stood 10 feet tall on one end and, because of the yard’s slope, more than 12 feet at the other end. This was more than a fence. It was the Berlin Wall constructed out of Home Depot’s finest cheap pine treated wooden fencing.
Didn’t work. She kept escaping. She was Steve McQueen’s character, Capt. Hilts, in “The Great Escape,” continually breaking out of the compound, only to be stuffed back in with a stupid ball to chase.
So, we moved out of town a little way, to a house on an acre lot. The back yard was massive! Surely she’d be happy.
She wasn’t.
She jumped the fence I spent about $800 and many sweaty hours installing.
So, we moved again, this time to Maine.
Well, there were other factors involved with moving 1,500 miles from our homeland to frozen Yankeeland, besides our dog getting out of the yard, but I actually thought Maine would do Abby good. Cold, crisp, clean air, the no-nonsense of New Englanders to impress upon her the impracticality of getting out of a perfectly comfortable backyard. … And with all the snow we’d be getting, we installed a five-foot chain-link fence. With a regular old four-footer, like she was used to, and a foot of snow, why she’d just walk over the damned thing. That probably would have ruined her pride. But five feet to scale, and a few extra pounds I tried to pack onto her by fudging on her serving sizes, no way she’d get out. We even had a mild winter; no more than 8 inches of snow accumulated at any one time.
She got out.
She’d wedge that tiny little head between the frame of the gate and the fabric (that’s what all us guys accustomed to talking fence construction call the actual fence material), lean into it with all her weight and push her way through. Then she’d walk to the front porch and sit there.
We put her on Prozac. We bought a bottle of pheromones that plugged into an electrical outlet and released good karma all day.
Didn’t work.
So, we moved again. To North Carolina.
Yeah, sure, again there were other circumstances at work, but I thought, hey, back to the South, where she’s comfortable, she’s not getting any younger, or thinner, surely she’s ready to retire. If not, the long, hot, humid days ought to wear her down. We moved into a new house in a Planned Housing Developments, one of those Poltergeist neighborhoods that’s sprung out of a cow pasture, where all the fences have to be the same damn thing — scallop-topped privacy fence. This means it’s five-feet high at the posts and swoops down to four-and-a-half feet in the middle. On one side of us there are huge, intimidating German shepherds — no way Abby’s going over that side. Along the back there’s new construction and a bunch of men every day talking foreigner with screaming loud tools and swinging big sticks at a house; she ain’t going there. In front, ah in front, a quiet cul-de-sac, with only four of the nine houses, other than ours, occupied. It’s boring out there. The back yard is big, with a rare cluster of big mature trees that weren’t bulldozed. And there’s a deck that sits off the ground, and under the deck is cool, cool dirt. She should be happy there.
She’s not.
Within a few weeks we started coming home and finding Abby … you guessed it, on the front porch.
By now, after three cities in three states in five years, she’s 7 years old and turning grey.
She is also very determined. She is undaunted.
By now, at least, she doesn’t care if we see her escape or not.
The architectural requirements in the hood call for the fence to stop at the back corner of the house. We have a gate there. We also have a big window in or den looking at that gate.
Abby’s amazing. She jumps to the top of the gate — four and a half feet high — clutches the gate cross bracing with her back claws, hooks her front legs over the top of the gate, pushes, pulls and scrambles over.
She amazes our neighbors. They think it’s a really neat trick.
I think it’s a pain in the ass, because at this house her blanket and the leashes were locked away in the garage. So, maybe to satisfy an oral fixation, maybe because she’s a little over protective of Trish and Ella, who are home all day, she bit the man from the electric company come to survey the house next door. Bit him good, too, drew a drop of blood.
It’s bad enough that we’ve knowingly broken a major covenant by having more than two dogs, albeit with the developer’s written blessing.
But biting? That shit’s not funny. She’s done it before, when she’s felt threatened, or when she’s felt that she needed to protect Trish. But that shit’s going to get us thrown out of our new house on all of our asses, and it’s going to drain our bank account to pay legal fees, and we’ll have to sell our paid-off German-built station wagon and Japanese-built SUV and buy a beater Geo and a used, two-toned double-wide, circa 1982, and fill our pantry with Ramen noodles and Vienna sausages. Our kid will have to wear generic diapers and drink generic-brand purple kool-aid stuff out of ancient McDonald’s Grimace glasses we bought at a yard sale. She’ll learn how to pick the food out of the trash cans that hasn’t been eaten, much. Trish will lose her nursing license (I don’t know why, just because) and she’ll have to go to work emptying medical waste at the free clinic two towns over. I’ll of course loose all dignity, all self-confidence and I’ll spend the days watching the Game Show Network (of course we’ll have DishTV and a 42-inch LCD TV), drinking warm Miller and waiting for the government check. The dogs will probably be happy with this arrangement, because they’ll have to stay inside all the time (can’t afford no fence) and they’ll take over the mix-matched Goodwill sofa and loveseat. The boys, that is. Abby, well, Abby went to live on a farm where she can chase rabbits and swim in creeks all day. That’s what we’ll tell Ella. Oh, we’ve starting lying to Ella to mask our pathetic reality.

Still, it’s pretty amazing, the way Abby clears that gate. And she’ll do it again and again and again. She jumped out about five times one day, within an hour, before Trish started making her jump back in and she finally tired out after two or three more of these futile exercises. Last weekend, I was upstairs, in our bedroom, which is on the end of the house where this gate is, and I hear paws scraping and clawing over the gate. I opened the door, shouted “get back to the yard!” and looked down to see her stop, turn around, hang her head and wander back to the gate, then scramble back over. And getting back over has to be a lot more difficult, and it must require a lot more effort, because she doesn’t have the benefit of the gate bracing, which she uses as a kind of 2-by-4 platform, because it’s on the inside.

Oh, I’ve had my run-ins with Abby. We have the traditional step-relative relationship. She’s messy (she poops as close to the house as she can, she doesn’t go out into the yard like the boys), she tugs on her lead during walks, she darts after cats and squirrels, she’s an obsessive eater and blanket sucker (has to be fleece, too) and she’s a pain-in-the-ass escape artist with a mouth that’s a legal liability and a nightmare of the poorhouse waiting to happen. I’ll yell at her, and play up the alpha male bit to intimidate her. I’ll curse her and wonder why, oh why didn’t she eat just a little bit more of that yummy warfarin.

And then I’ll come home from work and listen to Ella tell me that Abby went to the grocery store and bought strawberries, and Abby painted a blue picture, and Abby Abby Abby. This dog is my little girl’s heroine, most beloved animal in the world and maybe her best friend. No matter how many people Abby bites when Ella pulls her tail or squeezes her ears (which we strongly discourage) she barely winces. And then I’ll walk into the garage (Abby’s solitary confinement), and that nasty dog will grab that stinking old scrap of fleece and prance around, and swing that big ol’ butt and whip that tail.

The reality of life

The reality of life

May 17, 2006

It’s twelve-thirty in the morning. I’ve spent the past hour going over in my mind my wife’s death, as she lay beside me, warm and soft, and very much alive. I’ve reviewed her final moments, her final few breaths. They won’t be in a hospital, not if I can help it. They will be at home, in her beautiful sleigh bed, its mahogany warmth curling around her, nestled in her pillowy down duvet. Where should our daughter be? Should she be beside her, snug against her breast, as close as she could physically be to the one thing in her world that has most signified love and life? Or would it be more appropriate for her not to be there, but at one of my wife’s friend’s, playing with our friend’s children, removed from her mother’s struggle to avoid dieing and be left with remembrances, though they may be vague as she grows older, of her mother’s very vibrant life? Where will I be? Will I be strong enough, emotionally put-together enough, to be close by? Will I have to be far removed, insulated physically and, with a few valium, chemically?

Trish, my wife, is not dying, not in the sense of an impending doom, not in a way that wouldn’t naturally and slowly exhaust her life in another forty-five or so years. She is the epitome of health, very seldom sick and never complaining of an ailment even if she is ill. But she’s fourty-ish, and a week ago she went to have a mammogram.

She dreaded the procedure, the indignity of having a stranger cup and shape her breast into a cold, mechanized, painful eye, scanning her for signs of physical failure, cellular invasions against which she is largely unable to defend herself, and utterly, and perhaps blissfully, ignorant of. Until that machination of man’s inquisition suggested otherwise.

I was home from work that day and we — our daughter, Trish, who is eighteen months old, and I — dropped Trish off in front of the hospital. We waved goodbye and went to Home Depot to kill time. When we returned, the radiologist had finished early and Trish was waiting for us. It had not been too uncomfortable; the clinic had a new machine and the technician was kind. But there was a lump, a cluster of calcium that the digital camera detected. It was probably nothing. Benign lumps are not that uncommon in women, and the new highly sensitive imaging devices detect the smallest distortions, often leading to unnecessary, but still worrisome, false positives, things that need to be checked out through what medicine calls “invasive” procedures. Trish hadn’t felt a lump. She’s a nurse, has been for twenty-two years. She knows her body well, and takes good care of it. I’ve worked in or around major academic medical centers for eleven years, as a newspaper reporter and in public relations. We both were aware of the commonality of diagnostic anomalies.

Today, the clinic called. The lump needs to be biopsied. Trish called me at work to tell me. She sounded worried. She’s known several women who have had breast cancer. My own brother’s wife battled the disease a few years ago. But in plenty of women, calcium deposits are normal and harmless. Lumps are benign. I reminded her of this. “Yeah,” she said. “Angela has had to have these biopsied many times.” But she wasn’t thinking of her best friend, or other women she knew who didn’t have cancer. She was, uncharacteristically, thinking of herself, and she was afraid. Trish is usually a very positive person. It’s me who worries, who stays awake nights fretting over insignificant details about work or whether or not we should paint the den. The clinic could take the biopsy Monday morning, almost a whole week away, she said. Trish awoke from a nap, and Trish ended the call.

I tried to file the information at the back of my mind. It was no big deal, this happens all the time. I let other tasks fill in my forethoughts, busied myself with work. But where some people have water-tight valves in their consciences to regulate the flow of uncertainties, I have a tired, rusty faucet, letting doubts and fears seep around the seems and dampen otherwise blissful days and nights. What will I do if the calcium turns out to be cancer? Just eight months ago I had uprooted us from our home in the South and moved us fourteen-hundred miles to small-town New England so I could sail on a new career tack. Now we’ll have to move back to the South, closer to Trish’s family in Kentucky, closer to her friends, where she would be comfortable. (My mind was off and running, skipping over the imagined hurdles on an unrealized track.) We would have to find a small house, something affordable, because I couldn’t spend a lot of time working. I would call an old boss and ask for whatever job was available. Trish would die, and we would have enough money from insurance and from her investments, to sustain us for a while. I wouldn’t remarry, I’d be a widower dad, a bachelor father. But how do I take care of my daughter, alone?

In the course of the afternoon, between phone calls and setting up appointments, and answering emails, I had fast forwarded through my wife’s cancer surgery, chemo, radiation, her death and the funeral and wound up taking my then five-, eight-, ten-, twelve-year-old daughter (I played this out like a disaster drill, preparing for all possible scenarios) to soccer practice by myself, cooking her dinner by myself and then sitting myself down beside her at the kitchen table to do homework, surrounded by photos of Trish. It’s been a tough struggle, but we make out okay; we’re happy, we have each other. This gets me through the afternoon.

But tonight, in bed, I couldn’t bypass past the maudlin thoughts to a happy time. I rolled over and put my arm around my wife, placed my hand on her small belly, made soft from pregnancy. We’ve been married only four and a half years. She waited until late in life to marry; I waded through a first marriage and a divorce and dating until I found someone I fit with. Trish loved our wedding. And she loved becoming a mother three years later. Becoming pregnant had been a dream of hers, since she was a little girl. It didn’t come easily for us. After eighteen failed months of fertility, we had given up Trish. We took a vacation and, like so many other stories we eventually heard, nature took its course once we relaxed enough to let it. Trish’s lean body gradually plumped. Her small breasts grew round, filling out shirts she never had before, much to her — and my — delight. Her stomach had been taught, toned, a flat stretch of muscle and skin any image-obsessed Hollywood actor would kill for. It grew slowly, oblong lengthwise, from top to bottom, the skin stretching tighter, a miracle of the human body and a metamorphosis of body and spirit. Trish loved being pregnant. She never had morning sickness, and worked until the day before she delivered our daughter. She was a glorious new mother. Her breasts delivered milk, and our baby latched on right away. I often think of the image in the final scene of “The Grapes of Wrath,” and marvel at how a woman’s body produces sustenance for life, the fluid of survival, containing everything necessary for a human body to grow until it can care for itself. I know Trish believes deeply in her duty as a mother, and I know she feels a deep spiritual appreciation for the blessings of being a mother. She thanked God that her breasts wept, that hormones flowed through her body in new and different formulations. I remember now that she had also said being pregnant would reduce her risk of breast cancer.

Trish and I have had a very loving relationship, despite some very pointed, very sharp difficulties, many of which were caused by highly accelerated anxieties, like the ones I feel tonight. But having our daughter changed our world more than I could ever have expected. Trish is an excellent mother, and our little girl loves her mom immensely. At five months, she was saying, quite distinctly, “Mama.” She spoke this first word the day Trish went back to work, when Trish was five-months old, spending twelve-hour shifts at the hospital on Saturday and Sunday so Trish wouldn’t have to attend daycare. I quickly learned how difficult being a parent really is. That first morning, Trish left the house at six-thirty. Our daughter woke up around seven. I retrieved her from her crib and sat her on a queen-sized bed in her room, a remnant of the former guest room, so I could gather the items to change her diaper. Two seconds later I turned around to see her tumbling off the bed. I got a hand under her, and she landed on her shoulder and started wailing. This was the beginning of my attempts at flying solo as a father. A few weeks later she started crawling. One weekend morning, after Trish left for work, Trish crawled through our house saying “Mama?”, from the kitchen to the living room, into our bedroom, around to Trish’s side of the bed. It was the most pitiful, and determined, sight I had ever seen. If her mother was in the house, she was going to find her.

“Mama,” and the newly arrived “Mom,” will probably always be Trish’s favorite word. Most days, she doesn’t let her mom out of her sight for five seconds without asking for her. If Trish walks out of the room, “Mama?” If Trish steps outside, “Mama?” When Trish wakes up, in the middle of the night or after a long nap, it’s “Mama?” As long as she knows where her mom is, she’s OK. She can play by herself for long periods of time. She’s very outgoing; she recently entertained an entire plane full of people when the aircraft was delayed in Philadelphia. But our little girl has struggled with separation anxiety probably more than average; maybe not. We haven’t forced her into many situations without our being present. We haven’t had many babysitters, simply because we prefer to be together. Our daughter says two words clearly; one is “mama,” the other, a recent acquisition, is “dada.”

I unwraped my arm from Trish’s waist and turned back to my side of the bed. Everything’s just fine, I said. Everything’s going to be fine. There are no problems. Trish is completely healthy. She would not allow herself to be ill. She can’t be. Even if the lump in her breast becomes rapidly reproducing, mutant cells, I’m going to be one of those husbands who remains positive. If we have to go through cancer treatment, we’ll go through it. I’ll shave my head, like my brother did when his wife went through chemo. I won’t dwell on the mortality statistics. I know cancer oncologists. I know breast cancer surgeons. Some of the best in the world. People like them would not let Trish die. And I will not, after her cancer is killed, let my mind be preoccupied by the nagging worry that nobody is ever “cured” of cancer, that remittance is always a possibility. I won’t go there.

But it’s my little girl’s voice saying “Mama?” that seeped into my fears tonight, that finally cause me to sob. I bit my lip to keep the cries from leaking out, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from shaking. I had to breathe deeply to keep up with the sobs. Those pictures I imagined, the ones in which I’m strong and defiant? Now my little girl is in them, and she’s asking for Mama. When we’re at home, and Trish is in the hospital, she’s constantly wanting Mama. This is an incredibly powerful fear I have, this fear of being without Trish, alone as a parent. And there’s a separate fear of what Trish would have to struggle through. Anxiety creates demons that otherwise don’t exist. I have fought them often since I was a young child. The fear that the demons might appear — irrational but painfully vivid imagery — is almost as bad, almost as debilitating, as being in the demon’s presence. It has occurred to me recently that I might have passed on the tendency toward anxiety through my DNA to my daughter, hence her need to be held close to her mother more than other toddlers her age, her need, still, to awake in the middle of the night and cry, or plead, endlessly until her Mama rescues her from the isolation of her crib and sleeps beside her in our large guest bed.

And, so, the natural progression of these fears, these physical, mental and emotional energies wasted on the impossibly unknown and the improbable, led me to imagine what it will be like after Trish dies. The death, the funeral, are bad enough. What about the life ever after? What about the quiet morning two weeks after we have scattered Trish’s ashes in a garden, when my daughter awakes gripped by the choking realization that her mother will never again hold her, that when she pleas, “Mama?” her cries will never be answered satisfactorily.
I’ve been through enough therapy to understand that this isn’t about our daughter, or about Trish. In fact, I’ve amazed therapists, very skilled professionals, with a detailed clarity of self awareness and the ability to name my fears. I know what this is all about. But I also know it’s not entirely about me, that my daughter is her own person and that she has, and will have, her own distinct fears. You know what? It doesn’t help. Not much.

Perhaps as a distraction, I allowed myself to think of the deaths of other people I’ve been close to. I was too young to really know my paternal grandmother, but I remember the day of her funeral, how I stayed home with my other grandmother because I was too young to attend. My paternal grandfather died before I was born. But my mother’s step-father was probably my first hero, a former Marine with the globe-and-anchor tattoed on his forearm, who fought at Guadalcanal and forever battled his own demons. I remember the last time I saw him, how I was playing coy, as a little boy of nine, shying away from telling him goodbye at the nursing home. Early the next Saturday morning the phone rang. I was too sleepy to answer it in time, and when I finally picked up the phone I only heard a dial tone. A few minutes later it rang again. This time my mother was in the house. She answered it, and within seconds was saying, “No! No! No!.” I pleaded to know what was being said. “Will’s dead,” she said. I screamed. For at least a year I grieved, very heavily. I blamed myself for not telling him goodbye that last time I saw him, for not hugging him as I normally would. What had gotten into me that day? Had he grown so well that I had completely forgotten how sick he had been, how I had been awakened in the night when the ambulance crew entered our house (I was living with my grandparents then) after he had a heart attack? Had I dislodged all the memories of seeing him lie sick, attached to wires and tubes, in the VA hospital time and time again? By five years old I knew about diabetes, heart disease, gout, and I knew which medicines my grandfather took, how much of each and when. I knew he had to put the tiny nitro-glycerin tablet under his tongue and let it dissolve. I knew there was candy in the freezer in case of a diabetic episode — I didn’t understand why, but I knew what to do. I had been instructed on how to call for an ambulance in the event I was left home alone with him and he suffered another heart attack. All that slipped away one morning when I had been silly, and that had been my last chance to love him.

Twelve years later, when I was still a struggling college student living at home, my grandmother died. She had been the quiet matriarch, the mortar that held together the fragments of my family — my divorced and depressed mother, my raging sister, my ineffective and aloof brother, my aunt and cousins and my sister’s small children. We were poor, poor pieces of people living poorly in a small town, my grandmother’s hometown. My grandmother’s Social Security checks, and her financial shrewdness, helped us all survive. But age and illness fogged her mind. I forget the specifics but there was a financial discrepancy of some kind — she had written a bad check, or she had given someone money — and I was a cosigner on her account. A letter had come in the mail — maybe it was a notice of insufficient funds. I scolded her over it. I told her she had to stop doing things like that. She looked at me very simply. I was her favorite, the youngest of her grandchildren. She adored me, spoiled me, called me Son. And, most often, she had the only welcoming lap I could crawl into as a little boy. My very strong and determined grandmother had, by this time, been restricted from driving, her last piece of independence, because my mother had sold my grandmother’s car and bought a truck, which my grandmother couldn’t drive. She had suffered her own serious health problems recently. She was reduced to watching reruns of Perry Mason and Gunsmoke all day, and the mindless game shows she wouldn’t have paused for just ten years earlier. She looked at me very simply and said “alright.”

The next morning, a Saturday, my young nephew, who lived with us, woke me up and said, clearly, calmly, almost as if he’d expected it, “Grandmother’s dead.”

I had been out late the night before, and when I came home I passed by her bedroom. I could see her sleeping. I thought I should go in and apologize for being firm that afternoon. I should tell her I love her. But I didn’t.

Some time in the early morning, but after my mother went to work at five thirty, my grandmother had gotten out of bed, probably to go to the bathroom, and collapsed dead on the floor. It was probably an aneurysm that struck her down, quickly and mercifully.

Shortly before that time, on another Saturday morning, my mother woke me and told me a friend of mine from junior high, who had moved away when we were in high school, had died. He and I stayed friends, but our interests diverged. I visited him once. I went with other friends to his funeral, and when I saw his father, a kind and soft-spoken Southern Baptist preacher, the man seemed surprised. He said, “Why, if Steven had known you would be here,” and he broke down crying. If my friend had known I’d be there, what? He wouldn’t have died? If I’d only visited the other times he had invited me? If I had stayed in touch with him as closely as our other friends had? What? Was this yet another missed opportunity to exercise some magical power I had to deliver a kind word and extend someone’s life?

Then, more recently, there was my dog, Paco. Paco and I had a lot in common, I thought. We had both escaped my mother’s short leash. He was sporting and playful but he had his anxieties; he barked incessantly if he was left alone outside, a characteristic that incensed my father-in-law, at the time, during holiday visits. Paco took ill the day after the fourth of July, 1998. His illness puzzled our vet. We transferred him to the vet school an hour’s drive from our house, but by then it was too late. A rare auto-immune disorder gripped his throat, immobilized the muscles that contract to swallow. Paco aspirated his own fluid and died of pneumonia.

We had driven to pick him up — on a Sunday — to bring him home so our local vet could euthanize him on his bed, in his house. But our car had a flat tire, and the spare was flat. We called our insurance company to initiate a rescue, but the company didn’t call a tow truck like they were supposed to, and we were delayed getting to the clinic by several hours. By then, Paco was too weak to move. I held him — he at least was on his bed — and he looked up at me, his eyes vague, watery, as if pleading with me to end whatever it was that had taken control of his body. Days before, he had looked like he wanted to come home. On his last day, he simply wanted his life to end. I hugged him as the vet injected his body with morphine. Like in the movies, he took one last deep breath, sighed heavily, and was gone. His bladder relaxed and he wet his bed. That was it. We made arrangements for his body to be cremated. A tow-truck driver drove us the hour back home, and since he picked us up at the vet clinic, late on a Sunday, he knew our predicament. A vet student had put Paco’s bed into a trash bag, and the tow-truck driver gave it a few quick panicked glances; I imagine he wondered if he were driving home two young people with their dead dog in a bag. That, at least, offered brief levity. I mourned that dog more than I had mourned any person, and that, I think, led to the end of my first marriage, nine months later. My wife, at the time, couldn’t relate to my grief. Or, she couldn’t express it. When I met her, in college, her mother had died the year before, the day after her paternal grandmother’s funeral. She never cried about it. Her father had recently retired after 32 years in the Marine Corps. She, and her brothers, were expected to suck it up and get on with life. I think Paco’s death exposed in her something that she didn’t want to face. We divorced within nine months.

I recalled these intimate death encounters quickly tonight, running through their familiar scenes as if fast-forwarding through old home videos. At the end of the tape I again hear my daughter, “Mama?” I wonder how much I should lean on Trish’s family, her sisters, for support in raising our daughter after Trish dies. Would Trish want me to involve them more or less than I would? Would she want me to involve her girlfriends, some of whom she’s known and loved for twenty years? Would she want me to remarry? Does she think I could handle raising our daughter alone? What are her fears?

I felt Trish roll over toward me. She knew I was awake. She knows me well, knows the demons I fight off, knows where they come from. I convinced myself that the best thing to do at the moment was to get out of bed and write this down. I call myself a writer, but these days I don’t write much of anything that’s of any significance. But this, this could be the most troubling event of my life. I know of no other outlet, at twelve-thirty in the morning, than to write. If I stay in bed I’ll only keep Trish awake. She has enough to worry about.

So, three hours later, I feel like this exercise has helped. I have jumped years ahead, fallen back a few decades, revisited parts of my life that include others’ deaths. Parts of life are very sad. Parts are unrealized sadness. Many parts, for me, are fears. But fears, anxieties, hearing my daughters’ cries when she’s fast asleep and seeing myself at a memorial for Trish, sleeping beside me, lying in rest in the beautiful catholic cathedral where we were married, those are not unlike the fog of imaging on diagnostic tests. It’s best that those images, or imaginings, are penetrated, extracted, examined, to determine what’s real. And whether what’s feared is alive and threatening, or benign, it will be dealt with, just as every day ticks off minute by minute, until it’s tomorrow, until it’s a memory, sweet or sad.

At the moment, Trish lies sleeping in our comfortable bed, in our comfortable house. We have three dogs, asleep in the basement, and, for now at least, our daughter sleeps peacefully. That’s the reality of life.

Ahem

I have stepblog to thank — or to blame — for getting me into this. She’s been bugging me … I mean, she’s incredibly encouraging, and persistant, and has clued me in about this whole blogging thing. I thought all bloggers were 21st-century Marsha Bradys writing “Dear Diary, today the captain of the football team smiled at me!” I imagined adolescent and post-adolescent techies and gamesters electronically pawing each other for hours on end while the future of the world’s most developed civilization sifts out of their hands.

This is where StepYoda has shown me the force, the force of really excellent writing, insightful, meaningful, entertaining — from her blog and some of those she’s linked to.  She might be a techie, and she might be a gamester, but I know she’s helping preserve the future as a solid parental unit, because I read her updates down this primrose path. And, she’s my age, and it dawned on me that I might be lagging a bit too far behind my peers, technologically. Suddenly I see a whole new crowd of bloggers.

So, this is my feeble attempt to keep up, to stave off stodginess and keep stride with my fellow scribes.

I chose the rather ambiguous “This old porch” for the title from a Lyle Lovett song that, to me, laments the past, celebrates the present and tosses a little spite at those who cheered against us. And, it was the best phrase I could think of at the time. But I did grow up with an old porch, and although the view from mine didn’t exactly present the scene I would have wished, I can imagine how I would have liked it to be.

This old porch overlooks my personal landscape. I can see how I got here and what’s on the horizon. Expect it be heavy on fatherhood and family, because that’s what’s happening just inside.