Better Make It A Double

nobody here but us chickens

bok, bok, bok, booooook!

Yes, the boys were chickens for Halloween! We took the boys over to some of the neighbors, and J and I offered our backyard eggs to some of the neighbors who signed our special chicken-keeping permit this past spring. The neighbors seemed to like that, and got a kick out of our little chickens. It's not really clear if the boys were hens or roosters, but based on all the talk about egg-laying that's been going on around here, I think hens. N said, "I am Clara, and O is Marcy!" This morning at the park, O made a little nest out of a pile of leaves and pretended to lay an egg in it. In most families, that might be considered odd behavior, but not ours! Three out of 4 hens are laying now, all except for that useless escape artist Susan. Most days we now get three eggs.

I've already eaten all their Milk Duds, and I think Daddy made quick work of the Kit Kats. Very handy, this sending the kids to the neighbors to beg for candy....

I was hanging out with Caro the other day, and discovered that her Ingrid was also going to be a chicken, perhaps a little bit because she'd seen ours. Of course, we had to go over there and take a group shot.
Caro doesn't use pictures* on her blog, so I made sure to get a shot where you couldn't see her face. N is a little obsessed with Ingrid. He talks about her all the time, and says he's gonna give her a hug and that she's his friend. O looks a teensy bit sad when he says that, poor kid.

O got a "big boy bed" today, and is sleeping in it as I write. N was kind of jealous, but seeing as he won't even let me leave his crib tent open, I think we'll let O go first with this one.

They look so cute, but I'm almost certain they'd still be yelling and jumping at 10 PM if they were let loose together at night right now. That's what was happening even while tented in before we separated them. When they're a bit more mature, we'll probably have them both together upstairs.

We've had a pumpkin shortage in the Midwest this year, so I made sure to get a nice big one early in the season. The blasted squirrels had it for lunch, the *&$% tree rats. O and I went to our local garden center to get another, and I told him he could pick it out. I was a little concerned that he'd pick a really lumpy or crooked one, but he looked at all of them for the longest time. He finally picked a perfect beauty - I was so proud of him for considering his options so carefully. Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, I put that pumpkin just inside the front door until closer to Halloween. A week later, someone pointed out a funny smell, and I picked it up to find that the back had rotted completely. Today, I tried three places, and all were entirely out of pumpkins. The garden center lady said that they're so hard to get that people are stealing them from each other's steps.

I did have some tiny pumpkins left over from the church party we had at our house, and I made tiny Jack-O-Lanterns. Grandma helped the boys make pipe-cleaner "hair". They seemed to enjoy that, and I was so relieved, because we'd been talking about making a Jack-O-Lantern all week. Whew. Remembering and anticipation are a huge part of their lives all of a sudden - which is a lot of fun, and also complicated. At least we can still eat most of their candy, since they can't count much past ten.

Happy Halloween!

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* I'm thinking of setting up a password protected section of this blog for pictures. I want to trust my readers, and I watch my stats carefully, but I'm getting more concerned as the months go by and I hear more of what's happening with some blog photos, and my boys are getting older. At some point, I think they deserve a little privacy when it comes to their image. I'll let you know, and if I "know you" through commenting, I'll send the password if you request it (not yet, though). I mention it, because now may be a good time to make yourself known if you are a chronic lurker and would like access in the future. So say hello, already!

eggs in one basket: The IVF ethics post I really didn't want to write, part III

Here I go again. There was a series on infertility treatment in our local paper this week. The last article mentioned that the clinic that did our IVF(s) is losing money because it isn’t doing the aggressive marketing that other local clinics are. Our university-based clinic had, at the time we did IVF, the lowest high order multiple rate locally, with no quads and only two set of triplets in year before we received treatment.

I still have some criticisms of how our situation was handled, in that I believe that clinics need to move toward single-embryo transfers*  in situations like mine (otherwise healthy, young, good IVF candidates),
but I think this clinic had and has the most conservative approach in town. I’m not sure it’s just a lack of aggressive marketing that’s resulting in less people choosing that clinic, because any local infertile contemplating her options is probably weighing her options quite carefully with an eye to actually getting pregnant and our clinic's pregnancy rates are very good. In fact, I think it’s kind of insulting to assume that women are sitting there looking at a bus stop ad that says Finally You’re In Charge, thinking “I think I’ll let that clinic knock me up”, as if walking through the doors of any fertility clinic wasn't, oh, Plan X.

I think it quite possibly has more to do with demand – patients at other clinics are more likely to have a say in just how pregnant they could possibly become (and a good percentage of infertiles want twins), and they know it, thanks to Resolve meetings and IVF Connections and the like, and they’re not as likely to be told they might never carry a pregnancy to term**. They’re also not being given a ton of information about the realities of twin or HOM pregnancies. The result: more twins, more HOM’s*. The fact that the one clinic that’s refusing to transfer more than two decent looking embryos into good IVF candidates (or at least it was that way when we did IVF) is actually losing money makes me incredibly sad, because it means we’re that much further from having better options like single embryo transfers available to even those that request them. The short-term logic of capitalism will almost always trump the logic of the big picture.

I realized as I was pondering these issues that this actually isn’t much of an infertility blog, is it? After all, the boys were 5 months old when I started writing here – long after the beginnings of infertility (three long years), the failed cycles, the medical treatment, even the rocky pregnancy. That whole fine Hell is largely absent from what I write about, absent even from most of my archives. This space is a safe space for my current stage of life, as a mother of young toddlers. I don’t always remember anymore to acknowledge the terrible pain of infertility when I whine about how hard it is to take care of toddlers. I still think about it, though, and if there are any still-infertiles out there reading this – I am sorry, and I hope your Hell ends too. Preferably with a singleton, because you and your family simply have better odds that way.

Because this space probably isn’t any kind of haven for infertiles, I also can’t assume we all have a basic grasp of the facts. A lot of people think that IVF, being the “big guns” of infertility and all, is where all those high order multiples come from.

That would be entirely incorrect.

IVF has its own ethical issues to consider, to be sure, but its inherent precision makes it much less likely to result in HOM’s, and sextuplets and the like are just about impossible. The likeliest situation to result in HOM’s, if I remember correctly, is the unmonitored IUI, a first-line treatment that may just be offered right in your own OB’s office along with a $5-10 prescription for Clomid. It’s still all about money, though, because chances are, your insurance will cover that. Your insurance will also cover the costs of carrying any number of embryos you end up carrying, as well as any complications you yourself may suffer, and for much of the cost of paying for potentially lifelong medical care resulting from prematurity.

Covering IVF would, according to one of the above-mentioned series of articles***, add a half-a-percent to the cost of insuring everyone. I’m no statistician, and I don’t have access to all the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet that even that half-percent might go down if there was a significant decrease in the amount of HOM’s.

IVF still results in plenty of twin pregnancies though. The actual cost of all associated medical expenses might go down even further if folks like myself weren’t under so much pressure to have IVF work on the first couple of tries or go broke**** . Single-embryo transfers in good IVF candidates are almost as likely to result in a healthy baby as two-or-more-embryo transfers. But not quite, and there’s the rub*****. Or maybe the profit margin.

It will be a fine day when people who want to build families simply have informed access to the best options available with the lowest risk to all involved, and in some cases it's not the technology that's holding us back.

For more on infertility, echnology and ethics, you may want to check out the article In Vitro Veritas
by Stephanie Wilkinson in the current issue (Fall, 2007) of Brain,Child. Her sensitive and well-researched article about reproductive technology helped me make some sense of the several books out on the topic, including Beth Kohl's Embryo Culture, Liza Mundy's Everything Conceivable, and Peggy Orenstein's Waiting for Daisy.
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*European countries have been doing single-embryo transfers for years, and some have legislation requiring it. In young, healthy women, it seems that if you can get pregnant and carry a baby at all, you are just as likely to be able to do that with one embryo as with two – it may just take slightly longer.

**The other clinics also seem to do a better job of offering finance plans and the like.

***Which I won't link to for my own reasons, but which you can find if you go the website of Minnes*ta's biggest cities' biggest paper for about another week.

****We actually did a warranty program,  and would have gotten 80% of our procedure costs back if we hadn’t succeeded in three fresh cycles, but clearly if the clinic is losing money on that program, it couldn’t afford to give us four tries. We couldn’t have done IVF without that program (we probably would have moved straight to adoption, because there was no way we could afford both), and we also couldn’t do the program and demand single-embryo transfers.

*****Actually, even that may no longer be true. The rates may actually be fairly similar in some programs, but, as my doc said when I asked him about it, "we're just not quite that courageous yet".

 

opting out

Earlier this week, I stumbled far a field of my little blogging cohort, into the territory of highly evangelical home-schooling, having-as-many-kids-as-God-decides SAHMs. Have you ever heard of the quiverfull movement? I really have no business reading this stuff, but I am a bit of a nosy armchair anthropologist sometimes. I’m just really interested in such a different perspective, and sometimes I actually learn something. Reading the perspectives of people with whom you have very little in common is probably not a bad thing for me to be doing, as long as I remember that I’m basically on somebody else’s porch, relatively uninvited. I’m respectful—I don’t usually comment, and I never flame. I just read, and sometimes cringe. Sometimes I can’t help but kind of like some of these bloggers and their families.

I cringed especially hard, though, when I read a post on of all things, lipstick. It makes me laugh to think of it, because this post was by a Southern, suburban, home-schooling, George Bush loving, property and gun rights espousing mother of 6-and-counting, and what I had a hard time with was her perspective on lipstick. Her take on things is that we women simply owe it to ourselves not to let ourselves go. We should not use marriage, or even kids, as an excuse to go out into the world looking all dumpy and unadorned. The world, not to mention our self esteem, requires that we blow dry our hair, put on the ol’ makeup, don appropriately supportive nipple suits undergarments, keep our homes "shining" and bless everyone with our very best. We may, she alluded, even owe it to God. She herself accomplished this with big Southern hair, lots of Aquanet, stock in her favorite mascara company and, I kid you not, a pink velour training suit. Because we also need to go to the gym so nobody needs to see our flabby asses. It all begins by putting on a little lipstick, feeling that little boost, and making a commitment to make ourselves and our homes the most beautiful places that they can be. This, apparently, is the hospitality demanded by Christ himself.

As far out of field as my little pink-suited straw pony may appear, I believe that her sentiments are echoed somewhat more subtly in a lot of places. I just read an article on how to be a mom and still be hip, and I’m not sure the final message, though sans religion, was all that different. Don’t let yourself go just because you have less time. You’ll have better self esteem if you take the time to look your best. Get your body back.

And even more subtly: you owe it to the world.

I’m sure that if being hip, fashionable or even just doing one’s hair is really important to you, that it provides some measure of self esteem. This thing is, I’m just not up to the challenge. I don’t care enough. I’ve really always been this way, though I’ve tried harder at other points in my life. It’s just not that important to me to have really nice clothes, and I can’t make myself wear uncomfortable shoes. My hair is often mussed and unruly, and the practical easily wins any kind of argument with hipness. Since I don’t watch TV and avoid most pop culture outlets anyway, I’m hopeless when it comes to keeping up with fashion.

Do you remember, though, when you were in high school maybe, how ridiculous past fashions looked in pictures? Honestly, how could people have worn those seventies fashions? Then, as adults, these same fashions, followed by a resurgence of eighties fads, came back. We all had to get used to them again, and like lemmings, embrace them anew, pay good money to wear them. I feel like a curious thing has happened since we gave up the TV: almost all fashion looks absurd to me. Fifteen years from now, I think we’ll look back and see those tiny sweaters that end above the ribcage, gauchos, and the like, and we’ll gag to see it. I just buy my practical shirts and pants in what I perceive to be flattering styles and colors, and try to stay the hell out of it. Every now and then I see something I like, buy a bunch of it, and then two years later realize everyone else has moved on. Yet I can’t really make myself care. I could go for the crunchy, artsy look, but I can't even try that hard, and I don't knit.

It gets worse. I occasionally slab on a hint of foundation and a little lipstick for an important meeting or something, but I’ve given up makeup almost entirely. My body is different since the boys were born, but I’m trim enough and healthy, and I simply don’t care that my ass sags. If I went to the gym, it would be for a nice relaxing swim followed by a soak in the hot tub. I don’t always shave my pits, though I bow to social expectations in the summer. I’ve ceased highlighting my roots. I wear flannel nightgowns to bed. If you caught me in the middle of yard work, you might find me in torn up jeans, two gloves abandoned in two different parts of the yard, dirt under my fingernails, and straw in my hair. You’d probably also catch me in a great mood.

My self-elected exemption from my expected female role extends to my home. My home is fairly clean, somewhat picked up most of the time, and comfortable. If you drop by, I can easily find you one of several varieties of tea, you can put your feet up on my furniture, and if your kid pees on my floor, so be it. I may fold some laundry while we talk. My home is not uncluttered and spotless, ever. Not even just before company, in fact, one really big change for me since having the boys is that my house is more consistently clean and picked up, but never perfectly so. You can always see my floor, but stand around long enough and I’ll hand you a sponge, because there’s always something to clean or organize.

Really I feel pretty OK with all of this. I resent the expectations sometimes, especially at work, where I am sometimes almost required to wear pantyhose and makeup and the like. But being a mother has made me a little more able to embrace just being myself, because that self actually seems pretty suited to this stage of my life. There are some things I try really, really hard at. Communicating well with my kids, raising them in a healthy environment, working on my marriage, trying to do something decent for something larger than myself, being a good friend, serving God. I am a perfectionist sometimes, in my own way. It just doesn’t involve hairstyling, couture, fashionable home décor, or lipstick. People who are an important part of my life just have to accept this about me.

What that means for me, is that I’m sometimes grateful when friends lower the bar a bit in these expectations, show up for a playdate in well-worn jeans and an old sweater, or even better, invite me over and fail to pick up the bathroom before I come. When that happens, it is an invitation to me that it’s OK to focus on other things, that friendship doesn’t require competition in personal appearance or home décor. Seriously – aren’t some of you kind of grateful when a friend has a messy house and still thinks it’s OK to have you over?

I wish there was some kind of code we women could have with each other. Something along the lines of: I won’t worry about the state of my house when you come over if you don’t worry about the state of yours. I think a lot of us would be getting together and supporting each other a bit more if we could get over having to have everything look perfect. It really is freeing, and I’m getting closer to the point where having someone over for dinner could be something other than a major stressful production and instead be more casual and spontaneous.

Not having any kind of natural interest in or inclination towards the fashion world leaves me with little reason to participate. My friends seem to put up with me, and J is quite similar anyway (favorite winter piano playing attire: olive green long underwear, holey wool sweater and a wool hat). Fashionable clothing costs real money, and usually has to be purchased new, usually originating in Third World countries. Basic, practical, passable clothing can be found in thrift stores for a fraction of the price, and while I’m there, I can pick up most of the kids’ clothes too.

So I’m letting myself go. My teeth are brushed, nails trimmed, my face is freshly scrubbed. My clothes are clean, and neat, and the colors are flattering. My house is basically clean, comfortable, warm in winter and cool in summer, and I can genuinely offer extend all kinds of hospitality in it. But that’s all anyone’s gonna get, because I’m opting out of a contract I never signed up for.

No highlights, no heels, no lipstick. Just me.

sharing place

 

N watching O fall into the flower bed:

“Ollie, watch out for those marigolds!”

We've been having a lot of talks about the difference between ordering and asking, without much success. O responding:

"Those are not marigolds! Those are zinnias! Those are marigolds. And these are morning glories!" (He got them all right.)

O amazes me with his eye for detail and ability to remember names of things. He knows several birds by call and/or sight, many herbs and plants and as you can see, flowers. He’s very interested in know what comes from what – milk comes from the “uddas” of cows, but somehow, so does butter, cheese and yogurt. That’s all a bit confusing to him, I think, but he gets the general idea. He’s really excited by books that explain things like this – Pancakes, Pancakes! by Eric Carle is a bit hit, as it explains all the things that go into a pancake and where they come from. O can tell you that the farmer milks the cow, the milk goes into a pail, the pail goes into a tank, the tank gets emptied into a tanker truck, the truck goes to a factory, the milk goes into the cartons there, and then the cartons go to the store and then we buy them “wif da money” and bring them home. It's amazing what he'll tell you when he can get a word in edgewise, as his brother talks so much faster and often that O doesn't often get to finish his thoughts.
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N, giving me a very serious look after I politely moved his bunny aside so I could set my plate in front of me to eat:

“Mama. Please don’t bother my bunny.”

N, upon watching me get dressed in the morning:

“Mama is putting on her nipple suit!”

What if Vict*ria’s Secret started calling them that? Do you think they would sell well?

A week ago, I took the boys to get their haircut, to the library, and then to eat at Chip*tle. It’s times like these that I realize how many milestones we’ve hit lately. Getting a haircut was no big deal at all – each boy just crayoned while waiting his turn or waiting on his brother. Afterwards, we made a potty trip, and walked back out to the car. No strollers, no diapers, no diaper bag. At the library, we had to pay for a lost board book, and the boys waited in line with me for 15 whole minutes. They sat on the carpet and played with stickers and a piece of paper and then flipped through their new books. They were quiet as church mice. Even a couple of months ago, waiting in line with the two of them for that long would have been all but impossible without the stroller, and perhaps on a crankier day it would still be.

Another milestone on this library trip was the fact that we had an armload full of books, and only a single one was a board book. The rest were all picture books with real stories, in much better shape and in much greater variety than the beat up board books we’ve mostly brought home until now. There is a whole huge section of our local library we haven't even touched yet. Oh, the possibilities.

N said: “

We need to leave some for the other children! They might want some too! The library is a sharing place!”

What a wonderful thing libraries are - can you imagine if someone just invented them now? I wouldn't be surprised if people would think it was a pie-in-the-sky idea, that it would probably never work. What would would people want next? Public schooling? Universal health care?

One of the books we brought home was a Halloween book, which turned out to be much scarier than I’d thought it would be at first glance. That night, about a third of the way into it (with some on-the-fly editing from me already), N flipped the book shut, set it aside, and said “That one’s all done!” Oops. We're dealing with a lot more fears lately - talk of monsters, and "scawy things", and O in particular is terrified of going through the Lo*wry Tunnel, of all things. 

A little reader participation question – (and you can’t answer this if you already know because I told you) What are the boys going to be for Halloween? Take a wild guess and leave it in the comments below.

Hint: they’ll be the same thing, and it is something found in real life.

separation anxiety

Caro's Ingrid started preschool this week and her feelings about it resonated with me. Ingrid, who is the same age as my twins, is going to preschool for a couple of mornings a week. My boys go to MOPS for just two hours every other week, and I'm always a little obsessed with what they did there exactly. I peek carefully through the window before they see me or the nursery worker says "here's mommy!" I scrutinize the little coloring sheets they carry out with them, and ask them questions in the car on the way home, stating with the open-ended kind, and resorting to yes/no's when that doesn't work. I don't get much, just an equivocal comment here and there, sometimes days later,  the toddler collision of real experiences and imagination leading to statements like "We had crackers for snack. And then a dinosaur jumped up on the table and ate them all!" 

All this is new to me because we haven't done any kind of daycare. It's just, well, a little disconcerting to simply relinguish them in this way, to people who understandably don't have time to give me a play-by-play of their every activity. My little boys are starting to have experiences that are beyond my purview, even if it is only in carefully chosen, nurturing settings. They bring home words and concepts that are clearly from outside our sphere - words like butt and smartypants and dude, games involving races and jumping and yelling "hooray!"

What gets me too is the nice things their teachers say. "They're so sweet to each other"  or "so polite", "so cooperative" etc. Really? They are? Does this reflect that they actually learn from me and J and take that into the world with them, or that I'm ineffective at getting them to be kind to each other, polite, and cooperative? Will I ever know? That isn't how I'd describe their behavior at home lately. It's not horrible, this two-and-a-halfness, this minute-to-minute seesawing between regression and autonomy, but it's not always pretty. N and O can be absolutely tender with one another, and chatter back and forth almost every waking moment. They can be so cooperative as to help set the table, clean up all their toys, help each other find something, say an evermore consistent "please" and "thank you" and put on their own coats and many of the rest of their clothes, though often backwards and inside out. They also argue, whine, and fight, throw fits, refuse to cooperate, and test every limit. Every day. So far, though, they seem to be on their very best behavior out of my sight, which is, well, interesting.

One thing hasn't changed, apparently. Since he's been tiny, N's been mad if I'm gone for more than a typical workday. At his worst, after I was gone for an entire day and a half, he refused to even look at me and acted mad for days, our connectedness frayed for a bit until he finally either forgot or forgave me. He was about 20 months old then, I believe. I left for church retreat at 8AM this past Saturday and came back after bedtime that evening. The following morning, he was crabby with me, wanting only Daddy to do this and that. He seemed OK at church, but after we came home, he started screaming over a trifle, and screamed and sobbed for a good half hour. "Hold me!" "No mama, let me go!" He screamed much worse if I stopped trying to hold him, even though he resisted it, so for a while I held him as he thrashed. It went on for what seemed like ever, and then it was gone. He got up and walked to his booster seat. He ate lunch happily, and told me he loved me as I lay him down for his nap. He's been especially sweet since, grabbing my hand and holding it against his chest, leaning back against me as we read together and grinning at me, just saying my name with a sigh as he walks by, Bunny in hand.

O is going through his own little separation woes, wanting to be rocked and held all the time (I''m a baby! Noooo! I'm not a baby anymore!), crying at times when I leave for work. This is new from him, and it kills me a little to see him so sad. I'm mostly happy to rock, and soothe, redirect and reassure. Between O's almost forty pounds often draped against me or filling my arms, his head leaning heavily on my shoulder as he stands on my folded knees, and N's aggressive "affection" involving pinching and head-butting and pushing (none of which I tolerate, though I try hard to find other ways to connect with him), it feels a little like they're trying to crawl back into the womb.

It's hard to reconcile all that with the version of themselves my boys bring into the world with them, mostly pretty self-assured, cooperative, even polite. If "separation anxiety" as a useful term weren't already taken to describe the experiences of small children, it would be a pretty good description of my own state of mind.

I'm also so very grateful to these wonderful people who take such loving care of my children in my absence, so grateful that we'd all be embarrassed if they knew it. It's a beautiful feeling, to know that my kids can have experiences without me and do just fine, even quite well; that their care no longer requires the constant attention of someone with whom they'll necessarily have a permanent relationship. The world is full of people who wish them well, from MOPS,  the library, our school system's excellent Early Childhood program, to our close-knit church and friendly neighbors. I think that for now, home is still where they work out most of the messy stuff, the conflicted feelings, the fears and the ambivalence. I hope that it will long be a base from which to make their way into the world, and that they'll someday share a little about what they find there.

signs of winter

The Eloi*se Butl*er Wildflower Garden, the beautiful enclosed garden where the boys and I have spent several mornings or afternoons, is now pretty much closed for the season. There is one last weekend day that it should be open, and I think we’ll go, but after that, just like every year, the garden will be left to the native flora and fauna until spring, as sure a sign of winter's coming as anything. The 15-acre garden and bird sanctuary, the oldest in the nation, is a bit of a lovely secret. It is surrounded by a high fence and a lockable gate on either end, tucked away in an also beautiful park that has clear views of downtown, but looks like it could be far from any city. J and I were married in that park, in a wooded glade under a giant burr oak. We had our reception at the top of the hill behind it, in a building built in the 1920’s by the Works Progress Administration.

I think it would be fair to say that the location represented the fact that J and I can find God anywhere, but perhaps most easily through witnessing the vast abundance of creation. A church building can’t contain that in the same meaningful way for either of us, though the group of people assembled that day certainly represented what we knew then as our family, related or not. Coming back to the place we were married is a joy – alone or together, and we’ve done it often since that June day seven years ago. Now we’re usually accompanied by two little boys who don’t yet understand the significance of that place for us, but seem impressed by its beauty all the same.

The garden is just behind that glade, up a hill and on the other side of a marsh inhabited by bullfrogs and wood ducks. I think people go to the garden in hopes of seeing a riot of many kinds of flowers – all that abundance in its glory, like you see in the wildflower calendars. In fact, that isn’t really what you find there—Minnesota not being Switzerland,exactly, or even Montana.

There are wooded areas, a small marsh, hills and meadows. There are many flowers, rare and common, buzzing with insects. There is a spectacular view at the very top of the highest hill. But what’s really spectacular about this garden isn’t the grand canvass of trees and flowers, but the details. The wild ginger, the mushrooms on rotting logs, the insects that you know must belong to some native plant, but that you’ve never seen before. My boys start to giggle every time they go through the gate, because the path is so springy from the thick layer of wood chips, spread carefully by volunteers to keep us on the path and prevent damage to the garden. The garden is a reminder to me to look – to let down the defenses we city dwellers need to survive the constant assault on our senses. The first thing I usually notice is the wonderful smell of decaying leaves. As I walk, I notice birdsongs, the texture of bark, lichen, and rusty tannin pooled in the marsh, the tiny detailed flowers that would never show up in a landscape photograph.

None of that takes any explaining to my boys – they don’t know how not to see and listen and observe, at least for now.

I love to think about the garden in winter. It must be beautiful covered in snow, its paths unmarred by heavy human footsteps, the birds and other animals growing a little bolder every week as we leave them be for awhile. It must be quite a shock to them when the gates open up again in the spring. When those gates open, we’ll come again, delighted to see the shoots of green promise under the trees and all over the meadow, careful of the birds as they worry over their young, and happy to stretch our legs and amble a bit after a long Minnesota winter. Meanwhile, I’m very grateful to visionaries like Eloise Butler and Theodore Wirth —people who made efforts and choices on behalf of  what might happen even after their lifetimes. When my boys are a little older, I hope to teach them about that too, because that was another reason J and I chose this particular park for our wedding. It represented what could happen if a group of people sacrificed and made an effort on behalf of something for a greater purpose than only our perceived immediate needs, having a longer vision than that of our own lifetime. That is, after all, what we do when we set out to build a family.

 
Isaiah 55:12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

 

apron strings

 

After the boys went to bed this evening, I set out to make a butternut squash soup. Turning up the radio dial to the evening NPR news, I peeled three good-sized squash and ran the peeler down the squash in long motions away from my body, like a cook’s Tai Chi. Two of the squash were young enough to be full of moisture, beading up and cleaving its stickiness to my fingers, which I wiped on my apron. The older squash was a bit on the ripe side; when sliced lengthwise through its midsection, its inside was a surprisingly riotous orange. Lopped from the vine months ago, it wasn’t as thick from the inside as the others, as if it had folded in on itself just a bit as a price for thirst. The two young squash and the older one made a brilliant jumble of yellows and oranges as they mixed together in the waiting salted water. I love cooking a beautiful soup when I’m not too tired to do anything other than get a reasonably balanced bunch of calories on a plate. Either way, my hands usually need wiping.

 About that apron. I am a part time stay-at-home mother of two toddlers. J and I have no childcare, splitting it, hour-for-hour, more or less evenly between us. I work part-time, but I also do most of the housework and all the evening meals. I do the work that’s been largely women’s work for many generations, getting my hands dirty in any one of a number of ways in the process. To me, an apron is a tool of my trade, an acknowledgment that this is real life—these messes down my front but not on the nice work shirt underneath the apron, this ever-present place to wipe my hands, for my kids to pull on, hide underneath, even ask for their own. It is also one loaded piece of clothing, a symbolic 1950’s set of shackles, of women stuck in front of a hot stove, serving their husbands, and biting their tongues. As a fellow feminist writer friend came over for a play-date this afternoon, I found myself somewhat sheepishly taking off and putting aside my apron as I spied her walking up to the house with her daughter.

My own lot is not particularly pitiable. I am respected in my workplace; I have a dishwasher and a clothes dryer, and a feminist husband who pulls his own and then some. My boys see me cooking dinner every night with my apron on, but they see that too. J works more; I do more housework. It’s all pretty fair, pretty equitable. But I manage the details, all the invisible details. I don’t always feel like I’m doing a very good job of it all, and that’s not a great feeling, but the worst part is its invisibility.

The doctor’s appointments.

The house maintenance.

The managing of family events (his family).

The pet appointments.

The car maintenance.

A fair bit of the worrying.

It may sound like I’m complaining about my spouse, but I’m not. To blame my frustration on him would be missing the fact that I bring a fair bit of all upon myself, and that it’s a fellow mom who calls me up and asks me what I’m bringing to a family event involving his family. I can’t force him to worry more, or to be more uptight about what the house looks like, nor do I want to, at least most of the time.

What I want is for all those details to be a little more visible, accounted for, and respected. I want to believe that if I worked full-time too, I’d be able to shed some of these responsibilities. I know in my head that I would, but it doesn’t always feel that way. It feels like I’d have to fight for it, like these are the things I’m supposed to do because I’m the mom, but it isn’t J telling me that. It’s our whole popular culture, the same culture that makes a trend out of cooking masterpieces at a time when many of us are struggling to find the time to cook at all, that holds up Martha as a standard when we have less time to get it all done than our mothers did, because we're working as well as taking care of our homes and families. The same culture that makes dads who try to help or take care of kids out to be sweet but ultimately incompetent oafs, their antics set to canned laughter on sitcoms. I’m not laughing. I find it a bit ironic that instead of shedding the actual housework, the women of my generation have discarded the apron, the most visible tool of that trade, as if it were a quaint, faintly oppressive relic even as shiny, rarely used sets of expensive knives sit upon many a career woman’s counter top and stay at home moms are encouraged to think of themselves as CEO’s of their households.

Please. I don’t need corporate-lingoed empowerment. I just want a place to wipe my hands and a family that notices that nothing around here happens all by itself.

I am a messy cook who prefers un-mussed hands, and wiping my hands on my apron is a comfortable and practical gesture. I have 6 or 7 of them, well-worn, well-used, any one of them thrown in the laundry heap at the end of the day smelling like nutmeg, curry, or the day’s soup. Would I raise more enlightened sons with a dirty shirt, with food that seemed to magically appear on the table? This is work, every part of it, from helping my kids learn to resolve conflicts to scrubbing the slop off the floor on my knees, getting up just in time to stir the soup and turn down the burner before it boils over.  I want my boys to get their own aprons and take up their places beside me at the kitchen counter, behind the vacuum cleaner, pushing a mop, learning to cook and clean and do all the things that must get done somehow, by someone, in any household. My kids will not leave this house as unprepared to deal with the realities of domestic life as my husband was. I also hope that these experiences will be joyful for them in some way, that somewhere in the domestic sphere of life, they’ll find a specialty, an interest, an area of true competence.

Despite the shortcomings of his domestic upbringing, J is actually a great example to N and O as he fixes them elaborate breakfasts in the morning, letting them crack an egg, add the herbs, or help flip a pancake. My two little men and one grown man cook and clean together every morning. My boys are still so eager to help and learn, and any inner conflict I might have about donning a blue and white striped smock for hours at a time as I get all my work done is more than made up for when I watch my boys grab the sponge from the counter after dinner and attempt to help clean up the mess, the inevitable mess of real life. More power to us all.

And they're off!

We have a couple of high-energy boys these days. Here's a half-hour at our local park, part of a futile attempt to wear them out:

"Mama! Watch me jump!"

O prefers to scale the outside of all the playground equipment, climbing right up and over the walls rather than using the ladders or stairs intended for that purpose. He has a knack for making the other parents look at me (mom) and say only, "wow".

I can see straight to, uh, the other side of the playground!

I'm still picking sand out of his hair...

is that a song in your pants, or are you just happy?*

For me, the magic of these days so often lies in language. Our boys talk and talk, mostly still to listen to themselves try out new words, new syllables, syntax and emphasis, but sometimes to ask a question, tell me something, to say “Look at this Mama! Watch me jump!” I love this —this direct communication, being talked to back after a couple of years of first one-way words and then parallel verbiage. I think that watching them learn to talk, and to enjoy language, and its counterpart, music, has been one of my very favorite parts of being a parent.

Related is their eager, joyful love of books. All day long we hear the phrase “Let’s read a book!”, or “Shall we read a book?” or, “Read this one to me please, Mama?” They bring books to bed, sometimes tucked in right alongside their stuffed animals, and in the car, I check my rearview at red lights to find two boys eager turning the pages, right side up, from left to right, “pretending” to read the letters or doing their best to remember the words. They remember quite a lot, and a lot of what they talk about in general comes from books.

When we visited my parents recently, I asked what the book situation was, if we could perhaps visit the local library. My mother said there were plenty of books—a dozen or more. Knowing that this would not nearly be enough, I brought a stack of lightweight books, about 15 or 20, and we read every one several times on that trip.

Books are their window to other worlds, to new words, to things unseen. Books contain language their parents don’t use, phrases they hear anew, concepts we would otherwise fail to acquaint them with. Books are partners in what we want for our children: an introduction to the stories of their religious tradition, knowledge of places and people different from what they will see, a love of prose and poetry. The slightly sad sigh at the end of a good chapter just before the lights go out, flashlights under the covers, excited waits for Scholastic order day at school, trips to the library where we all go our respective ways for a little while, coming out with our arms loaded with possibility, car trips during which our sanity might have a slim chance of surviving were it not for the bin of books between the boys.

These days, N and O have a ridiculous amount of books. It is the one area we are perhaps a bit indulgent. They may go to bed by seven, have a limited amount of carefully chosen, mostly used simple toys, and no TV at all, but books they have in spades, many canvas boxes and half a bookcase full, almost all accessible to them, almost all read regularly. Good, healthy food, nice parks to visit, lots and lots of books, and lots of time with their parents. What more could they want, for now?  What more could I want?

Another aspect of their language development I am enjoying is their sudden appreciation for nuance and whimsy. An appreciation for incongruity came much earlier—a hat worn backwards and crooked can put a one-year-old in stitches—but now they can ride on the fantasy of an idea, only stated. On Sunday morning, O was starting to pitch a fit because he didn’t want to wear a particular pair of pants. We didn’t have a great other option for him and were running late, so I got his attention and told him I’d sing a song into his pant leg so he’d have a song with him all day. He liked that idea and did a little dance after I got his pants on. A few hours later, I picked him up from Sunday School, and his teacher excitedly told me that O got up in front of the class and did a little song solo for everyone. He saw me as we were talking, ran up to me with a huge grin, and said, “Mama! I have a song in my pants!”

This afternoon, N was playing with the key fob to our new Foc*s station wagon, and set off the alarm. I turned it off, but of course O wanted to do it too. I told him that he could press my belly button and make daddy beep. Daddy went along with this, and soon we were all pressing belly buttons, or beeping, or both.

Being rewarded for a little creativity like that comes early to parents of multiples; it just changes shape over time. In the beginning, it means nursing one baby in the sling while changing the other one’s diaper, or nursing on the toilet, while on hold with the appliance repairman, while using one foot to entertain the baby in the bouncy seat. Sometimes it  means nursing inside the portable playard, because one very mobile baby is always done well before his brother.  It means figuring out complicated logistical patterns over many developmental stages and realizing, one fine day that your kids just follow you down the hall to where you’re going; that suddenly, they sometimes play their own games for twenty minutes at a time before they need you. By that point, we ought to be credited some kind of degree in creative logistics.

Then language takes over—real, back-and forth communication--and the part of parenting that is about their twinhood is no longer so much about the physical challenges, but about their relationship: how they make each other laugh, egg each other on, instigate, imitate, and collaborate. They wrestle, and even fight, bicker like old marrieds, hurt each other’s feelings, and try out new insults as fast as the language is acquired. They are also each other’s refuge, offering consoling touches, kind words, good company, and an intense common understanding.

Our boys’ new relationship with language is part of what make books so very appealing right now. We used to connect physically in everything we did together, in the hours of nursing and rocking and holding that are part of babyhood. Now they can to the bathroom entirely on their own at times, without me having to do a thing. They set the table, and set their dishes on the counter, pick up their toys, and hang up their jackets. They run all over the playground and our yard without me needing to touch them, and they even climb onto their car booster seats and adjust the seat belts. Reading books, though, is an intimate experience. Each boy has a knee to sit on, and I have an arm around each of them as we read. They lean heavily into me and into each other, the bottom of my cheeks against their temples, me smelling their still sweet heads. It is almost the only time we sit like this, but we do it many times a day. We are a book-consuming octopus, all arms and hungry for words, together, reading rhymes, pointing out details, asking questions, barely still fitting together in our rocking chair, but reading and rocking still.
 

Despite the intensity, the extreme unreasonableness and the constant state of disequilibrium two-year-olds reside in, I really love this stage. What could be better than watching a child learn all about language, something so very close to my heart?

*I wrote a draft of this last night, and meant to save it as such. Instead, as I was finishing, half-asleep, I accidentally published it, many spelling and grammar errors, rough edges and all. My apologies for the sloppiness. The horror...