06Apr / 2018

This Pregnancy Is A Weird One

Which feels funny to say, because pregnancy in general is weird. My first kid was really a very easy pregnancy. Sure there were things that sucked (like getting really sick and not being able to take meds, awful heartburn, migraines, etc.), and people seem surprised when I still insist it was an “easy” pregnancy. There were no complications, Finn was healthy throughout, and I didn’t have any of what I consider the truly terrible ailments.

This pregnancy is being so different. The symptoms are different, which I knew to expect and yet was surprised. But the subchorionic hematoma means that things I could take for granted with Finn, I can’t do this time. The constant nausea has sucked, and yet it’s been reassuring because it means there’s still a little baby in there, especially after I’ve been bleeding. The migraines have been way more frequent and worse, maybe because of hormones or maybe because we’ve had such fluctuating weather here in the last couple months. I’ve developed really weird aversions to things that are either not easy or sad to avoid (the smell of coffee or sesame oil are NAUSEATING; looking at my dolls or doll things is NAUSEATING which eliminates most of my recent hobbies…) The bleeding and constant cramping for the first ten weeks was exactly the thing to make me anxious, and it’s one of those instances where knowing what is causing those symptoms (in this case the SCH), isn’t much of a relief, because there’s no way to fully understand what the danger is, and there’s nothing to be done.

Between my second and third fancy ultrasounds to look at the SCH, it grew from moderate to large. The fantastic news is that it’s not behind the placenta, but rather on top of my uterus while the placenta is front and center from what could be seen. The fact that it’s grown could be mean it’s growing or could mean the clot is breaking up. The size could be a non-issue and I have a full-term healthy baby, or it could lead to miscarriage or too-early delivery. Worse, the baby is healthy and happy looking in there. Every ultrasound, the baby is bouncing and wiggling around, waving those little arms and legs, making it difficult for the ultrasound techs to get a good look.

The complications are a reminder that there is still so much beyond our control and that sometimes all you can do is wait. We’re going to see a specialist in high risk pregnancies next week who will likely tell us the same thing: you just have to wait and see. What I’m wanting is not a guarantee because I know there isn’t one. I know often there aren’t answers when we want them most in medicine, and that there’s power in believing the best will happen, and also power in really thinking through all the possible outcomes so that you won’t be blindsided. Sometimes the lump is nothing and sometimes it’s breast cancer but sometimes it’s at least early stage and they get it all. Sometimes the arm tingling is a heart attack but sometimes it’s a brain tumor but sometimes you life expectancy doesn’t apply and you live beyond it. I am well aware there are no easy answers, really ever, and that even without a SCH, there are no guarantees in pregnancy. Even with Finn, something could have gone wrong, inside or out.

But knowing there’s this thing lurking over our shoulders that could very well end an otherwise healthy pregnancy makes it hard to get too excited. This is the last week of the first trimester and it still doesn’t feel like we can actually prepare for a new baby this fall. We haven’t told people, only a handful of close people, and I hide it at work. I don’t want to have to hide it at work. And if something went wrong, I don’t think I’d necessarily want to hide that we’d lost the baby. It’s more protection for ourselves, I think, and not letting it become too big a reality in our lives… just in case. It’s hard enough to see the ultrasounds and remind ourselves that there are no guarantees. Sharing our first pregnancy with the larger group also felt like we were revealing something private, but this time it feels even more vulnerable, like we’d be sharing the first part of what could be a painful time for us.

There are things I’m of course very nervous about, having a second child. Finn has mostly been a wonderfully easy child, which may be setting us up for a real difficult addition. Or Finn may be just about to hit a difficult time and we’re adding a newborn to the mix. No longer will we outnumber the children in our home, and while the good days will be even better, the bad days will be worse. But leading up to us getting pregnant, it had felt more and more like we were waiting for the next addition; the absence of child two felt more pronounced, more like an actual vacancy than just a theoretical “oh yes, someday we’ll expand.” I’m not foolish enough not to know things will be harder but the fact is I don’t really care. I’m nervous about the adjustment, but I’m not scared. Plenty of terrible things are a lot of work, but even the worst things we’ve gone to with Finn have been so totally worth it and I don’t doubt (and sure hope!) we’ll continue to feel the same. I’m certainly not a mom who would say it’s all sunshine and roses, but for me, it really has been wonderful, and I’m so excited to fill in that vacancy with the next member of our household.

But, well, I can’t hide it much longer. I guess people just think I am suddenly getting very large, or that I’m hiding it well with billowy shirts, but this time around my body was ready to poof out. Instant tum. My jeans stopped fitting basically the week we realized I was pregnant. First pregnancy I wanted so badly to show and didn’t really until like 22 weeks, and this time around it was like 9 weeks, this time when I’m trying to hide it, which feels so wrong for this little baby. It feels like there’s security in being known, even though that’s not true.

Anyway, tomorrow is the last day of my twenties and I wanted to focus on something positive. This pregnancy has the scary stuff, but the positive part is that otherwise the baby is healthy and I’m really excited to someday tell this little one what a bug they were while I was pregnant with them, making me worry like this.

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01Apr / 2018

Restless

In the fall it will have been twelve years since I came to Boston for school. I found the idea of Boston enticing when my 7th grade math teacher missed the first week of school so she could drive her son to college in Boston and I thought how wild, how exotic that was, that you could use college as an opportunity to start a new life like that. I came to Boston in 2006, sight unseen, and here I still am, despite some feeble plans during college to move to London when I graduated. Then I met my boyfriend-now-husband and there you go. Here we still are.

Not because we’ve refused to leave. But I guess because the way life does, every time one of us has been interested and willing in the past to move, the other hasn’t been. So we’ve stayed here, sort of waiting for adult life to get started and guide us to where we’ll spend the next chapter of our lives.

And yet here we are, 1 kid in, another on the way, both in careers, and as I’m approaching my 30th birthday I’m beginning to accept that this is it. This is adulthood. You just kind of figure it out as you go and over time realize that along the way you learned about federal tax exemptions and health insurance deductibles and how to fix a broken chain in the toilet.

On one hand, I’m fine with this. In general, I love Boston. I love that it’s a liberal bubble where I don’t have to assume there are guns in the houses of any children my son goes to visit. I love the history and the culture and the quick access to beautiful state parks and that people walk and use public transportation to get everywhere. The schools here are good, if not great. There’s a part of my that feels like we could be very happy being here forever.

But the other part of me shies away from the idea of having found our forever home. I’ve always been so restless and nomadic at heart; am I really settled in only the second place I’ve ever lived? Not to mention that it’s expensive. Expensive. Even with both of us working, we’re finding it difficult to afford the type of house we want, and I’m not willing to compromise with a condo or no yard or too few bedrooms. I can’t get away from my Texas-established notions of real estate price and space. Houses here are far older and poorly heated and rarely cooled. And expensive. I only get two budget line-items in before I realize we could never afford to live on only one income, even without buying, and while I’m not sure how long I’d want to do that, it’s something I’d love to have as an option while our children are young. Because did I mention childcare is expensive?

If it hasn’t been obvious from just these couple of blog posts, I feel a deep sort of melancholy about my life right now. Some of it’s pregnancy hormones. A lot of it is winter and having been cooped up inside for the last 5 months. I used to consider myself a total introverted, indoors-y person, but either I’ve changed or it was only ever so long as I had the option. I crave sunlight and outdoors and activity and adventure. Because we haven’t traveled much in the last two years (you know, having a baby and then saving for a house), there are a lot of ways in which I feel like I’ve put my life on hold. And it’s dragging me down.

There are some non-major-life-change things I’m doing to address that. I’m volunteering for more things –like the panel I spoke at, and in a couple weeks I’m going to speak at a college too. I’ve coerced my family into doing a vacation this year for honestly the first time in ten years and I’m SO excited about it. In the event that we can swing it, I might do another summer vacation with husband and toddler just to get one in before we’re a family of four. I’m even getting a fitbit for my birthday in the hopes that focusing once again on my health and activity, especially as the weather starts getting better, will help. Of course there’s a chance I’ll be put on bedrest at some point with this pregnancy due to a subchorionic hematoma that’s apparently growing.

So that’s another part contributing to it, I’m sure. Not just bedrest, but remembering the recovery last time, and knowing that this time my maternity leave will be spent in our little 2-bedroom apartment over winter. Maternity leave with Finn was a dream April-July. It was beautiful. We were at the park almost every day. We went walking every day. It was incredible. This time I will be cooped up once again in this cold, dark apartment with two children and two dogs. The things I’d normally take a toddler too will be too germy to take a newborn to.

When we started trying to get pregnant, we’d just begun shopping for a house, figuring the timing would work out on everthing. It still could, maybe, if we really fought for it. But we decided we didn’t want to fight for it right now, when it would add some big stress to our life, even if it would ultimately solve some of them too. That was before this pregnancy started sucking my energy in a way the first one didn’t. Even before we were pregnant though, I was already having doubts. The area we were looking is probably the right area for us to look. It’s as close as we can get to the city while still maybe coming close to affording the space we want. The schools are mostly great. Lots of young families. But it’s also a lot of big scary changes, and we’ve never lived in that area, and it’s far enough from where we are now that it would be a move. And when I say we could afford it, it would be tight. Really tight. We would be choosing a house over a lot of the things we do/have now, and we already don’t live extravagantly.

The reality is that greater Boston area may not really have the perfect place for us, because we need to compromise on some aspect –move further out (even worse commute), stay close (expensive and less space). But I also started thinking that what it was just premature? I’m glad we did all the footwork to get our finances in order, get some mortgage estimates, discuss our budget and what we could afford. But who’s to say the next year or two doesn’t harbor some big change that will drive us to some place that fits us better? For someone who is not religious and doesn’t believe in fate, I do tend to follow gut instincts when it suits me to, as if there’s some other force that gives us little hints now and then. Change has become less frightening to me over the years –welcome, even– and so this didn’t feel like “change is scary” gut warnings, but more like “it’s not feeling right, so hold off a bit.”

Where would we even go? I have no clue. I’ve been at my company a long time now and have accepted that my career is capped there –we have a flat structure, no money for nice raises, and I swing hard from liking my work to questioning if this is really what I want to be doing with my life because I don’t always love it. Maybe I rarely love it? I don’t know. It’s hard to say that any one thing is the thing you’re unhappy with when there’s a general sense of restlessness. Because the fact is too that I’m a little career-lazy right now. I don’t want to start over at a new company. What I really want is to take some time off while we have young children and explore something completely new –like consulting or writing or English tutoring, I don’t know. What would drive us to a new city would be a new job, but I just can’t think of what would excite me enough to want to uproot us, or for me to give up the perks that I’ve got at my current job, or would be worth Frank leaving the job he really likes. And I know full well that becoming a stay at home mom (if we could even afford it, lol) would not answer the question I’m really asking here: ok, I’ve been an adult for a while now, I’m married and have a kid and a career, I’ve experienced some life, so who am I? What do I want to be doing? How do I want to define happiness in my life?

I don’t know. I’m rambling. A second baby will certainly shake up our lives but not in the way that will help the areas I’m restless, I don’t think. Maybe as the weather gets better and as we clean out/rearrange our apartment to give ourselves more space, maybe all of these things will help clear out the cobwebs. Maybe it all just boils down to a restless winter and sunshine will help me identify the areas in our life we want to commit and the areas in our life we want to shake up and that will be enough for us to find peace and happiness. But then it will be winter again and if nothing has really changed… I don’t want five years from now to still be saying “if only we had made a big change last year.”

Well, I should clarify, there ARE aspects of my life that bring my great job, and I don’t feel in general like a failure or disappointed in my life or myself or anything like that. More like I’m having writers block for the next chapter and am not sure what to do with the characters or where I want it to go next. I’m extremely grateful for both the things I have lucked out with in my life and the things I’ve worked hard for. Motherhood in particular is so much more wonderful than I had even hoped. I’m just… restless.

This blog post has been about literally nothing. You’re welcome, internet.

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26Mar / 2018

Raising A Feminist Boy

Here’s what’s been on my mind today.

Before having children, my husband and I talked at length about how to raise a warrior girl (despite my complicated relationship with the perception of women as warriors because I very much do not feel like a badass warrior woman, but I digress.) We were ready to introduce a daughter to all activities but let her choose her way, to support her in whatever off-beat or nerdy ventures she showed inclination. We were prepared to encourage her through crappy sexist encounters and reassure her that bossy and sassy are superpowers that you just have to use for good.

What we really weren’t prepared for, through our deep discussions about the Bechdel test and female representation in video games and problems with traditional gender roles, was raising a boy. The need for female empowerment doesn’t go away, and obviously there are things we instantly understood would be important to teach him: how to be an ally on all axis, that it’s ok to have and share emotions, that gender and skin color and ability should not define how he feels about the people around him. But what’s harder is figuring out how to navigate a world in which we are uplifting and supporting our daughters without leaving our sons behind.

An early interaction with a group of friends had a deep impression on me. When our kids were all maybe around a year old, they were playing together, grabbing toys out of each others hands, sometimes upset by it and other times not. At one point my son took a toy from another little girl, and the little girl cried in response. Her mother scooped her up and immediately began joking, “Did that boy make you cry? I’m so sorry. Never trust a boy. Boys are awful.”

I was shocked. It truly took me a moment to comprehend what she had said, and by that point our other friends had laughed about boys and girls and moved on, before my brain could even catch up. I spent the rest of the visit feeling like I had utterly failed my son. Because no, boys aren’t awful. Well, really, boys and girls are both awful and both wonderful, and just like it’s harmful and hurtful to reinforce stereotypes for little girls, it is for boys too. Casual jokes like that can normalize judging and detesting people based on gender, especially when everyone laughs, furthering alienating the person at the punchline. I know the mom was joking, and does not think boys are awful, and she did later message me apologizing for it when word reached her I was upset. No one there believes my son is awful. I believe her apology was sincere, and I don’t hold it against her. We’re all trying to get better at this because we’re trying to be better and it takes time to unlearn habits. Maybe I would have made a joke like that without thinking and it was just hearing it from someone else’s mouth that raised the flag for me. Making a joke feels like it should be a safe space, but jokes can harm people too. And while our 1-year-olds certainly didn’t understand the words, they WILL understand the words long before they understand nuance and context and satirical humor. They’ll be impacted by the words long before they can examine what such jokes do to their identity and relationship with the world. I don’t want my son to ever be uncertain whether someone is joking or actually thinks he’s awful, certainly not just because he’s a boy, anymore than I would want a daughter to.

This ushered in an era of discussion for me and my husband. I have no answers from those discussions. But it means we now have a different lens to our dissection of patriarchy and all the ways it harms our children, because it focuses on all genders, not just male or female, and not just binary. I know there are going to be instances we are unprepared for again, but at least we can make sure we’re doing what we can now to cut out toxic masculinity and model the types of relationships we want any son or daughter of ours to grow up with, as best we are able, adapting our behavior as we realize new ways we’ve been made complicit. Painting my son’s toenails pink when he asked me while I was painting my own was a non-decision. Explaining to him why the attention lavished on girl groups for activities he may also like will be a deeper conversation. As a woman it’s definitely personal to me to make sure that gender equality is moving forward, but as a mother of a son it’s important to me to make sure that our boys, who are good and promising and can help the world be better alongside our daughters, don’t pay for the sins of the patriarchy that was established long before they were born. They’re hurt by it, too. The future isn’t female, it’s non-gendered, but to achieve that we have to amplify female voices for a while until we can achieve that balance. We also need to address the toxic masculinity that’s still hurting our boys and men (and everyone, really…), if we’re all going to move forward together.

That’s not to say the attention we’re lavishing on up and coming female role models is bad. It’s awesome! And I’m glad my son will be surrounded by that, by a more diverse face of success. We make a point to buy diverse children’s books, we don’t believe colors or themes or glitter are gendered, and we don’t believe in gendered toys (though he has still, of his own accord, gravitated towards trucks and cars, which is a-ok! equality means kids can play with whatever the hell they want!) The conversations will sometimes overlap with what we’d have said to a daughter, and sometimes will be specific to helping our son navigate a world built with a narrow definition of manhood and success that we don’t want him burdened by. There are different pitfalls for us to watch for, different situations to be prepared for, but all with the same goal in mind.

That was not the only time someone has said something hurtful or uncomfortable. I’ve had mothers of daughters assure me that maybe I’ll get a girl on the second try, as if there’s something unworthy about having a boy, as if we can do no better than just inverting the sexism that has led to the murder of so many baby girls. We’ve certainly caused discomfort, I’m sure, when we’ve not hidden our distaste for things that weirdly sexualize small children (onesies with “ladies’ man” or “future stud” on them, for instance) or reinforce toxic ideas (“boys will be boys” makes our blood boil) or decline to even jokingly marry our son off to the daughters of friends (who’s to say he’ll even like girls?) Now at least we’re better prepared to stand our ground and call out harmful conversations around our son as we see them, so that he knows as soon as he begins to understand that stereotypes are wrong, that his behavior defines who he is (not his gender), and that we always have his back if he’s feeling bullied or confused or uncertain about his role in the world.

He’s two. We haven’t even begun to navigate these waters yet. But I find it’s nice to step back sometimes and take stock of how truly unprepared we are. You know, so we can laugh at ourselves later.

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22Mar / 2018

No Title

The word enough is one that has somehow felt very personal to me my whole life. Genug, in German, for some reason one of the words from my high school studies that has remained with me and pops into my head on a weirdly regular basis. I don’t think there’s any deep secret meaning here: I think it’s because my entire life has felt like a quest for feeling of being enough. Of doing enough. Of reaching that point where you’ve had enough and kick into gear some major change. At some point I shifted from wanting to be the best to wanting to be enough and find even that seems just beyond my reach.

People had such high hopes for me as a child. I had such wild dreams for myself, dreams which seemed absolutely achievable because I was driven and bossy and loud enough. But life changes you. I expected life to make me louder and harder and stronger and often I feel it has only made me quieter, smaller, and more afraid. I don’t think I’ve disappointed people’s hopes for me, but neither have I blown past them. Instead I think there is still a pause, a wait-and-see because I’m not so old that I can’t do something impressive still that will make people say, “Aha! Yes! We knew she’d so something powerful because she was such a strong child, so smart, so ambitious.”

The fact is that my life is nothing like I envisioned it as a child. I’m known to talk about how perfectly ok I am with that, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that you can’t predict life and in order to be happy, you have to be willing to redefine success and happiness for yourself, and adapt your path based on where the wind blows you. I thought I’d be a writer living abroad. Instead I am married, a mother of one and counting living in a rented apartment and working in the business of video games, a job that sometimes brings me great joy and other times great stress and doubt. A desire to belong, to have friends, has softened my quirkier edges that I always valued, and my hearing loss has stolen a lot of my spontaneity and independence. It has not resulted in a number of friends; in fact my social circle is very small, and trying to expand it leaves me mired in social anxiety and self doubt, questioning what I have to offer.

I am not a great wife. I’m a decent mother but mostly because my kid is pretty great on his own, and though I find that being a mother is my favorite thing I’ve ever done, but it does not fill in the holes I feel in my identity the way I always expected. I have hearing loss that affects my life more than I ought to let it but not enough that I feel like part of the disability conversation. I am not politically active enough, or educated enough, or charming enough, or pretty enough, or accomplished enough, or creative enough. The things I used to define myself by, I have come to realize are not unique or special, or I have not kept them up and have fallen back into the masses of not good enough for that thing to be mine. I thought I saw myself so clearly but it was only the protected, still water of adolescence, and in the ever churning water of life, I don’t see anyone. I don’t know who the chaotic outline of a person is, other than a composite of opinions that aren’t strong enough, or skills that were sampled but not developed enough, or dreams perhaps I didn’t fight enough to hold on to for the sake of adapting.

When I was younger I wanted to write. I did write, notebooks upon notebooks, then pages and pages on the computer. Stories begun and abandoned because I could never find just what I was trying to say. I believed that in time I would come to find my voice, my message, my identity, and then I’d be able to write that. And as the years passed by and I didn’t find it, I thought perhaps I’d find it somewhere else. In travel or in sewing or in my job or in motherhood. I have still not found it. I am less certain with each passing year who I am or what I’m even looking for, doubting that there’s even an answer, less and less certain that I am still solid enough to take hold of any identity at all. Did I miss it? Was I simply too passive enough when purpose has crept close? Was I too focused on the wrong sorts of opportunities and now am too lazy and comfortable to take the necessary leap to find my perch? How do I know another perch would be anything different than this one?

I spoke on a panel about designing games for diverse audiences. It was thrilling. Though I doubted my right to be on the panel, and my ability to speak about decisions I did not make alone, and my worthiness to even be heard, it was wonderful. It finished and before anyone even spoke to me, it felt like the first worthwhile thing I have done… in I don’t know how long. Long enough that I don’t remember the last time I felt proud. A thing that I care about but that also other people cared about, and spoke to me about afterwards. They didn’t find my unworthy to be on the stage. I may not have made any earth-shattering points, but they found me to be enough for the time-being. I temporarily felt like enough, like I had done something that mattered, in some small way. For a moment, I felt solid.

In a world filled with conflict, I find I grow tired at the prospect of confrontation, and it has made me shrink to protect what small, mundane things I can. Things that I cannot protect my son from loom large over our heads, problems that I wanted to help solve and now feel hopeless to, watching in awe as others take the helm. I can accept that I have not found my place on this ship yet, but I worry I may never find it. What is my niche? Where do I belong? What will bring me joy and satisfaction and solidity? Who am I, and when will I feel like I’m doing enough, like I am enough? Perhaps the worst thing we can do is convince our children that they’re special, because what terrible pressure to put on them to actually be so.

This isn’t a funny writing, but it’s sincere, so at least there’s that.