Sling Baby

At the Green Sage Coffeehouse in Asheville, NC sits a guy with a little wool cap on his head and an Eagle Creek satchel and some earthy looking shoes. He’s reading The Preeminent Guide to the Power of Crystals as Agents of Healing and Self-Transformation. I feel like I just entered the supernatural portal back to Santa Cruz, which I sometimes say is where I’m from. The portal is so wide open I can smell the patchouli oil and the Nag Champa wafting through.


I noticed some other things on my recent trip to Asheville. I noticed a lot of hipster white women with messy, uncolored hair like mine and no makeup and clogs and babies. Also just like Santa Cruz, people really like to show off their babies in Asheville. Babies in the Laughing Seed Restaurant with their dredlocked daddies and their mommas carrying them in batik baby slings. Babies in strollers in the Publick House downstairs. Babies in the art galleries, babies in the bookstore. If you weren’t thinking about having a baby before, go to Asheville and see if you still feel that way.

The idea of motherhood is something I started kicking around like a hacky sack after turning 40. Did it hit me like a baseball bat? Not really. More like a koosh ball. A gentle nudge. It feels a little wrong to admit such ambivalence about something that so many women want with every fiber of their being. But that’s the unvarnished truth of it. I want to have a baby (I think).

Paul is a rare wonder. A three-time father who’s been at the parenting gig for 16 years, he stops dead in the street to say things like, “Oh. My. God. Look at that adorable baby!” Believe me, I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a man my age who’s not just willing but eager to do the baby thing - in his case, all over again.

But what do I really want? Part of me hesitates, I think, out of sheer embarrassment at having become that cartoon t-shirt so popular on the west coast 25 years ago… “I can’t believe I forgot to have children!” After all those years and all those opinions I pronounced like they were my own original ideas: “It’s environmentally irresponsible to give birth with the world so overpopulated” was one of my favorites. “I don’t want to give up my independence” was closer to the truth.

And do I now? Some days I like my peaceful little life: my house with everything put so tidily away and my car with no fingerprint smudges on the passenger windows. I can drop $125 on shoes on a whim and eat trail mix for dinner sometimes. Plus, it's not like I'm some kind of childless hermit. Between the teaching gig on weekdays and every other weekend with Paul's three sons, I participate in raising children - from a safe little distance, but it counts.

Other times, I want to be needed in that fundamental way that only parents experience. I want to feel little fingers squeeze around my pinky. I want to teach someone how to ride a bike and a surfboard and how to drive stick. I imagine my teenager asking advice about love, and all these blunders of mine being amusing and useful to him. I even see my grown child visiting me when I’m old - which she might, if I do my job right.

I have tended always to seek adventure, collecting experiences, living for the now. And now, when I see babies, I am filled with an urgent longing, but it doesn’t come from my uterus (as it does for so many women I know). It comes directly from the same part of me that loves to try new things - ocean sailing, rock-climbing, naked jumps off of piers in Newport Beach.

Is it a good idea for someone like me to have a baby? Paul says I’ll be a good mother, and sometimes I think that’s true. Other times I wonder. Can I get away with entering motherhood as a skydiver jumping out of a plane?

But hey. Somewhere in Asheville there’s a hippie drinking chai latte while pondering the healing power of crystals for everything from diaper rash to colic. If he can do it, so can I.

What Would Mariska Do?

At 43 years old and freshly divorced, I decided to have a baby. It’s very glamorous, don’t you think? Very Mariska Hargitay. That’s how you should think of me, like a 40-something Hollywood celebrity daughter of ultra-glamorous Jayne Mansfield. Because when you think of me as a 43-year-old schoolteacher living in the Bible Belt - and not just The Bible Belt, but the crucifix-encrusted buckle of the Bible Belt - with no plans to get married, it’s not quite as enchanting.

“But I’m going to have a baby,” I thought as I lay on that gurney in the darkened room and the ultrasound tech spread gel on the sonogram wand. “I’m just like Mariska Hargitay.”

I’d waited till my period (so regular you could set a clock by it) was six weeks overdue because I was pretty sure I was in menopause. There’d been 30 months of insomnia and hot flashes and mood swings they could design roller coasters after. There’d been advanced osteoarthritis and X-rays of hand and hip, with X-ray techs asking, “Is there any possibility you’re pregnant?” We know you’re too old was coded in the apologetic explanation that inevitably followed: “We have to ask.”

But after six weeks and Paul’s observation on a camping trip (“Are your boobs getting bigger?”), I did an OTC pregnancy test. I did it right in the pharmacy bathroom with Paul pacing and waiting in full view of the teenage boy from whom I’d just purchased the kit. (One of the great advantages to being 43 is that when you buy things like Super Size tampons and Preparation H and pregnancy tests from pimply-faced cutie pies, it isn’t embarrassing. At least, it isn’t embarrassing for you.)

But even that big, fat, positively iridescent blue + sign didn’t convince me I was knocked up. I still kinda thought it might be menopause. I worked at an elementary school where 75% of the teachers were 25 and a half. I’d attended no less than seven baby showers in the past six months and the common query bandied about by the mid-life moms of teenagers - “When are you going to have a baby?” - was never directed at me. No, in practically the same breath the matriarchal 50-something was leaning conspiratorially in with the pink, plump mother-to-be, dispensing wise words and glancing askance at me there fanning myself from my latest hot flash and nodding, “I’m glad to have THAT behind me!”

Yeah, you can’t be pregnant, you skipped that part, launched straight into the Change of Life, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 gift cards to Babies ‘R' Us…

And when Ultrawoman inserted her magic wand the next day at the doc’s office and said, “There’s the heartbeat,” I almost asked, “Whose?” But there I was, all Mariska Hargitay, the most glamorous first time forty-plus mom in history, holding hands with my boyfriend (already a father of three) like we were still teenagers ourselves staring at a black and white picture of our baby, the size of a grain of rice.

It was a grand feeling.

For two weeks I just glowed like a Hollywood celebrity and rubbed my imagined bump and read all the hospital brochures and thought of spectacular baby names and pictured myself in cute frocks and Danskos, pushing a baby jogger. I pushed from my mind questions of how to pay for amniocentesis and a private birthing suite (and college). I pushed, pushed, PUSHED from my mind the inevitability of telling my parents and the look of incredulity that would no doubt cross my principal’s face. I just walked around for two whole weeks and glowed and thought “I’m having a baby! I’m really doing this! I’m having a baby!”

I wondered, how did Mariska Hargitay break it to her dad?

Before I could figure that out, I miscarried.

And suddenly, I was just a frumpy, childless 40-something from the suburbs again, a washed-out middle-aged perimenopausal screwup with a LOT of gray hair and ten new pounds to lose.

On the plus side, there was a tiny glow of Mariska left inside of me. I may be too old with just one ovary, but the life I've lived has taught me that there is no obstacle I can't conquer. Sure, I’m a late bloomer. But I may just have a baby yet.

Seven

(Note: Lately, I've been wanting to write about the past. I think it might be going somewhere. I've decided to post it here to see if I get any feedback. If you read this, please comment!)


I met Seven at the bus stop on the corner of 19th and Lincoln.

“Seven?” I thought I’d misunderstood. I was 23 and living in a tiny fourth floor walkup in the Mission District. My high school friends had names like Shannon and Laurie and Peggy. My roommates since graduation had been Nancy, Susan, Linda, and Terri – a name rendered exotic by a simple “i” where a “y” should have been. My life had really just begun.

“Yeah,” she said, with a pop to her gum. She coiled one of her long dreadlocks around her finger and stared down Lincoln, wistfully. She wore a shapeless sundress the color of dry grass, some sandals that I think were made of grass, and a colorful, inky tattoo on her right arm. “My parents were, um, these hippies? And they tried and tried and tried for a really long time to conceive? And they’d, um, given up, and so they were like so surprised when my mom got pregnant and, you know, felt lucky, so…” gum-pop-hair-twist for emphasis: “they named me Seven.”

It wasn’t my usual bus stop. Ordinarily, I rode the L or the M home from San Francisco State, but ever since the earthquake I’d been avoiding undergrounds. Not that I’d been stuck on one in the aftermath. I'd just been at school. I don’t think I even knew I was afraid afterwards. My life just plodded along as mundane as ever and I quietly avoided subways.

“Where is that bus?” Seven said. She looked at her wrist, where there was no watch. “If it doesn’t come in the next 30 seconds, I’m thumbing a ride.”

I’d been waiting at the stop for 20 minutes when she strolled up. This was after riding one bus already, down the traffic-ridden and stoplight-laden 19th Ave. If this bus ever did come, I’d be getting off at Haight and Fillmore to wait for a third bus that would take me to within a seven-block-walk of my apartment. I was doing the math in my head - I’d already be nestled inside my sunny yellow apartment if I’d just taken the L-Taravel - but as it was, it’d be dark before I walked past the projects even if the bus came in the next 30 seconds - when a blue panel van pulled over.

“Are you going anywhere near Dolores Park?” Seven demanded.

“Sure,” the driver said. He leaned across the passenger seat and yanked on the handle. The door fell open. “Hop in.”

Seven looked back at me as if we hadn’t just met a minute and 30 seconds ago and said, “Are you coming?” I looked at the driver. He was old - at least 35. Messy hair of no particular color, like the sand on Ocean Beach. Unshaven, t-shirt full of holes. He smoked a cigarette that looked hand-rolled, smelled like herbs but wasn’t marijuana. I’d recently lost several nights’ sleep over Mark Harmon’s made-for-TV portrayal of a serial killer who preyed on college girls and still I climbed in the van.

I had to crawl over the passenger seat (“That side door don’t work,” Ted Bundy explained with a sinister grin) to get in the back, where I sat on the floor amidst drop cloths and 5-gallon buckets. The empty Corona bottles clanked and rolled as we pulled away from the curb. “Where you girls from?”

I never got to answer. When you have a name like Seven, there’s no off switch. Her life story gushed out of her. The hippie parents, the infertility, growing up at Mt. Madonna. It was the first time I’d heard the words “home schooled,” “vegan,” and “ashram.” I had recently dropped the yoga class I was taking as an elective because I couldn’t stand to sit still that long. But I tried to work my way into the conversation anyway. “I’m a vegetarian.”

Seven whipped her head around. “Do you eat chicken?” Her tone was accusatory. “I can’t stand people who call themselves vegetarian but still eat fish. I have never in my life tasted an egg. I would rather freeze to death than wear leather.”

Luckily, Seven didn’t wait for my answer, so I focused on how all the likes and ums went away when she was being self-righteous.

Ted Bundy - whose real name was Steve - turned out to be a house painter. “Will you roll me a cigarette?” Seven asked him at the stoplight. It occurred to me that she was flirting. He whipped out the papers and the tobacco. He was sprinkling in a little of a grayish looking leaf when the light turned green and somebody behind us laid on the horn. “Is that sage?” Steve rolled and licked and nodded simultaneously. “I love the taste of sage in a cigarette.” She was batting her eyes! Steve flipped open his Zippo with one hand and flipped the bird out the window with the other. Seven inhaled deeply and gestured toward me. “Want one?”

I shook my head, more embarrassed about that than I’d been about being a chicken-eating vegetarian. She’d said she was 17 - an emancipated minor - so I was the elder and yet, there’d never been any question that it would be me squatting in the back of a panel van getting smacked around by empty Coronas.

When this potentially-lethal-yet-ultimately-uneventful van ride ended at 16th and Dolores, I realized something: This was my life story. Find yourself in social situations where you compare yourself to the nearest female and always, always, come up short. She was an only child - I was an only child. She was a native Californian - I was a native Californian. Our parents, I knew from Seven’s epic version of herself, were exactly the same age - the older father, the younger mother, transplants from another state. How was it that hers migrated from Montana to follow the yogi Baba Hari Dass when mine moved from the Colorado Rockies to buy a tract home in suburbia and raise me to be a singularly uncool, flesh-eating, leather-wearing nonsmoker?

Oh, how I longed to have a different kind of life story. But the coolest thing I’d done so far was move to San Francisco, and all around me were examples of how that just wasn’t going to be interesting enough.

In Praise of Adventure Running

There are reasons I haven’t been writing.

Mainly it’s because I’ve been running.

Running is pretty much my life now.

Running?

I mean, apart from teaching, which of course fills up most of my life and has the most compelling stories attached to it. Unfortunately, we all know what happens to teachers who make grave errors in judgment and actually write about their students on public spaces like blogs and facebook …

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/1291477.html
(in case you don’t)

And then there’s Paul, with whom I spend as much time as humanly possible and with whom things are going wonderfully well, and oh my gosh we are in love and we have so much fun together and our relationship is so fantastic…

but I’m pretty sure reading about my relationship would make even my closest friends squeamish.

So all there really is to talk about is running, and I've read that reading about running is boring, so let me just apologize now because I'm sorry. It's all I've got.

I’m up to 30 miles a week now. I’m running so much that I think about running even when I’m not actually running. My google searches involve treatment of blisters and rehydration and “getting into flow” and what kind of socks don’t slide down inside your shoes after running for 180 minutes straight.

I spend hours and hours (and hours) on walkjogrun.com searching for routes of ever-increasing mileages.

It's just plain challenging to find a place you can run for 14 miles without getting bored (or hopelessly lost) (or run down by traffic) (or all three).

Last weekend, Paul (that’s the fantastic-relationship-Paul, the oh-my-gosh-we-are-so-in-love-Paul) went with me to Rock Hill, a town about an hour away where I had to take a 2-hour essay test for my teacher certification while he sat in the car grading papers.

Then we went on an adventure run.

I think adventure runs might be a way to take the boredom out of running. Adventure runs are risky because you are running in a new place, a place you have not experienced before. Often you can't map an adventure run on walkjogrun.com so you have to do a lot of guessing. You might get lost or it might, in some other way, not work out. You certainly can't count on a consistent pace or heart rate, the standard ways of assessing the success of a run.

And this is especially hard for someone like me. Committing more than six hours a week of my life to training is hard enough. Knowing that I have to get in a 14 or 16 or 18-mile run every weekend for 10 weeks makes me nervous. So it's pretty imperative that the long run go according to plan because it takes so much motivation and energy to just get myself out the door for those three-hour epics that even the slightest mess-up will throw off the entire training plan.

Instead of running, you could just as easily find me sprawled on the couch eating an entire package of Oreos while watching 12 hours of Law and Order Criminal Intent.

To say I have just the thinnest grip on my commitment to this whole stupid idea of running 26.2 miles is the honest truth.

We went to this place called the Greenway, a park with a system of 35 miles of trails. We did our 14-mile run on these twisting, turning, uneven trails through the woods. We got lost and we found our way anyway. At first I tried not to get my pretty Asics muddy; I didn't start having fun till I gave in to the bog. We got splattered and tired of suspension bridges. The first one was a charming diversion. We galloped and giggled across, trying to bounce each other with heavy footsteps. After half a dozen of these unstable, squirming traverses, I started to cringe when I saw one in the distance. On the last one, I think I could actually hear my calves screaming.

But Wow!

What a difference from running on the street. No exhaust, no car noise, NO MP3s! Not even a nanosecond of boredom. Just us and our total concentration, our total immersion in the experience.

Well, that, and the screaming of my calves.

B, M & E

Observation: We humans have a bizarre compulsion to segment our lives, to treat them like pies, sliced and divvied. What I’ve been trying to figure out lately is why?

I think it starts in elementary school. Reading teachers teach sequencing, and a kid’s ability to recognize and label the parts of a story in order is – according to a leading panel of experts – a really important indicator of comprehension.

As important as grasping beginning, middle and end is, it’s not very easy to teach. Either kids get it or they don’t is what I find, but are we teachers happy with that? No. Because it’s “a really important indicator of comprehension,” we drill and drill and drill so that the average kid starts eating, drinking and sleeping beginning, middle and end and this in turn haunts him for the rest of his days.

That’s my theory, anyway.

Here’s the other thing I’ve noticed. Most first graders get it the first time – at least they get the first and last parts, because those parts are easy peasy. “What happened at the beginning?” you ask after closing the book, and even the child with the gnarliest case of attention deficit disorder who’s just heard The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the first time can tell you with gusto, “There was a tiny egg!”

“And what happened at the end?” you press on, and a chorus of voices shouts definitively, “It was a beautiful butterfly!”

Oh, how your heart soars – you are the world’s greatest reading teacher! Just look at this roomful of 6-year-olds so thoughtfully responding to a book!

Then you ask, “How about the middle?” and all bets are off. “He eats an apple!” “No wait, first he eats some cake!” “Hang on, when did he eat the watermelon?” “What about the stomachache? Isn’t that in the middle?”

The middle is where I reside now, and it’s a mixed-up big ole jumble of confusion in here.

It is vast and infinite and yawing like a ship on a turbulent sea.

It's not totally unpleasant, but sometimes it bugs me.

It's irritating because back in the beginning - sort of - when I was in what is lately referred to on NBC and in John Mayer lyrics as “quarterlife” – I thought I’d have it all figured out by now. But the older I get, the less certain I become. One small example: In elementary school I was a spelling bee champion. In my twenties I remained someone to whom lawyers and doctors and even doctoral candidates frequently turned in lieu of a dictionary. This morning I was correcting some second grade spelling tests and just wasn’t sure anymore how to spell anamil.

I realize that none of this adequately addresses the compulsion to segment with which I began tonight. Let’s just chalk that up to the wandering mind of the mid-lifer. (I am starting to understand why everyone I knew in the 1990's who was in their forties was on medication.)

I’m hopeful that by the next time I post on this blog, I’ll have figured out what it is I was trying to say.

P.S. I know, I know, what does this picture have to do with anything? But can you believe that Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island was recently busted for possession of pot? It doesn't warrant an entire blog post I don't think, but it was worth a mention.


(She's taller than I thought she'd be.)

Spring Break, Austin Style

My best friend Winnie the Flight Attendant got five days off in a row that coincided with my Spring Break from teaching, so we took off Monday morning and drove to Austin. We headed straight for SoCo – that’s South Congress for you uninitiated, where stylish cafés and second hand boutiques and psychedelic costume stores with names like Lucy in Disguise With Diamonds line the avenue. We shopped happily among the hepcats and dudes before eventually checking into the downtown Hilton, where we nabbed a $250 room for 90 bucks a night thanks to priceline! Shazam.

A nasty storm blew in overnight, but that didn’t stop us from setting off on foot Tuesday morning for the Whole Foods at 6th and Lamar, which could just as easily be called Nirvana. Not only do they have the most glorious grocery displays and an organic produce section I want to kneel reverently before, but they have the equivalent of a mega mall’s food court, just for health nuts. They’ve got sandwiches with names like “The Barton Springs” – free-range smoked turkey and brie on an organic whole grain baguette with sprouts and organic greens and a nutty fig sauce. They’ve got a sushi bar where all the fish is certifiably sustainably caught. They’ve got a healthy taquito bar and an organic fair trade shade grown coffee bar and a brick oven pizza kitchen and a salad bar and an Indian buffet and … well, I'm ready to move in, right into that store if they'd only let me.

By the time we finally got out of Whole Foods, the dark clouds were roiling and looming again. Winnie wanted to find the Buffalo Exchange, the be-all-end-all of thrift stores. After inquiring as to its whereabouts and being undaunted by the checker’s disbelieving stare when Win said we’d be walking, we set off.

Four hours and approximately five miles later, we got there. In between, we summited the highest peaks in Austin (compared to flat Corpus Christi, this is significant), trekked across the UT campus (where we decidedly did not blend in with the pierced and dyed 20-somethings), and endured the arrival of a cold front (an hour-long deluge with 30-knot gusts that we sat out in a Jack-in-the-Box watching drenched college kids try to make it to class despite being underdressed and disumbrellaed).

After the rain subsided, the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees, yet still we trekked, not unlike zealots on a religious mission. As the sun began to sink low on the horizon, I finally stopped dead in my tracks and said, “Winnie. I’m cold and I’m done. Let’s go back.”

She turned around with a gleam in her eye and said, “But we’re here. We’ve found it.”

And we were and we had.

Perhaps the arduousness of the journey tinted my view, but man, did that store have some cool clothes in it! Over the next three hours I was able to completely revitalize my wardrobe with highly original skirts, utterly unique dresses and distinctive tops that altogether cost less than $200. The store is so progressive and PC that they rewarded us for bringing our own shopping bags. We gave our 5-cent tokens to a spay-neuter nonprofit organization that also cares for abandoned pets. (Austin, you're my people! I'm telling you!)

To celebrate the success of our venture, we drank Chianti and feasted at a Mediterranean restaurant, took a bus back to the Hilton, warmed up, changed outfits and headed to 6th Street, where we barhopped and listened to some really good blues. At a bar whose name I can’t recall, the band’s harmonica player insisted on buying me shots of Jack Daniels which I insisted on drinking. Eventually, the bar closed, and the harmonica player and drummer tried to talk us into breakfast. But the harmonica man’s suggestive wink was unappealing, so Win and I gracefully declined, walked ourselves back to the Hilton through the rain and soaked up the alcohol with granola bars and giggles.

Maybe the two best things about spring break as a newly single forty-something are (1) the amazing capacity for endurance sports I’ve developed over the years (need I insist that hiking four hours through inclement weather to try on clothes for another three falls into this category?) and (2) the guiltless knowledge that all the free Jack Daniels in the world deserves nothing more than a “thank you and good night.”