Blogroll

When I'm not here, you may find me wandering the pages below. (If I'm a regular visitor to your site and I've left your link off or mislinked to you, please let me know! And likewise, if you've blogrolled me, please check that my link is updated: thisroamanticlife.blogspot.com. The extra (a) makes all the difference!)

Archives

For posts sorted by date or label, see the links below.

For posts on frequently referenced topics, click the buttons to the right.

To search this blog, type in the field at the top left of the page and hit enter.

Body: in sickness and in health

I won't lie; this body and I have had our issues with each other for many years. Body image -- sure. Physical and mental overextension -- comes with being a Type A kind of girl. I still struggle with these things, so they show up from time to time in my writing.

More recently, illness, pure but not simple, has added itself to the mix in a multi-system sort of way. And the challenges in figuring out exactly what's gone wrong are many. As problems have revealed themselves in the last few years, beginning with reactive hypoglycemia in late 2008, I've documented them here, partly to gain a little clarity on managing complex conditions but mostly to give voice to vulnerabilities I feel but don't normally share with anyone face to face. Better out than in, they say, right? (Oh yes, humor is one way I deal.)

The links below cover the different angles I've examined (and from which I've been examined) within that experience.

Travel: neither here nor there

When the person you're married to lives two time zones away, you log a fair number of frequent flier miles. And if you blog about commuter relationships, you log quite a few posts en route too.

Since we're no longer in separate places, I blog less often from airports. But we do travel -- together now! -- which is much more fun to write about. So in addition to thoughts on our years of commuting, the links below cover the places we've been as a pair and, in some cases, the adventures that have happened on the way.

Writing: the long and short of it

Why do I do it? Good question. Maybe it's not so much that I like to write but that I have to write, even when the words refuse to stick to the page. Believe me, I've tried doing other things like majoring in biochemistry (freshman fall, many semesters ago). Within a year, I'd switched to English with a concentration in creative writing and wasn't looking back.

After graduating, I taught English for a few years and then worked as an editor, which I still do freelance. In 2007, I applied and got into an MFA program at a place I like to call Little U. on the Prairie. I finished my degree in 2011 and have been balancing tutoring and writing on my own ever since.

The following links cover the writing I've done about writing: process, content, obstacles, you name it. It's not always pretty. But some part of me loves it, even when it's hard. And this is the result.

Heart: family and friends

I'd have a hard time explaining who I am without being able to talk about the family I grew up in as well as the people I've met beyond its bounds. But even with such context, it's not easy! In the simplest terms, I'm a first-generation Asian-American who has spent most of this life caught between cultures. That, of course, doesn't even begin to describe what I mean to, but there's my first stab at the heart of it all.

That's what this group of posts is reserved for -- heart. The essential parts of my life whose influences I carry with me, for better or worse. The links below cover what I've written as I've learned how these forces work within me, for me, against me, in spite of me. They anchor me even as they change me, and they keep life interesting.

Recommended reading

What do I do when there's too much on my mind and my words won't stick to the page? I escape into someone else's thoughts. Below is a collection of books and articles that have been sources of information, inspiration, and occasional insight for my own work.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

It's not nesting if it involves fleas

At nearly 11 p.m. on Saturday, when 30-somethings without kids are likely out and 30-somethings with kids are likely out cold, I'm holding a one-quart Pyrex measuring cup full of borax powder, swinging it like a censer over the living room carpet. The cat is upstairs in the laundry room, crying to be let out, but as long as the floors are coated in this fine, white dust that I'm counting on for salvation, my will isn't bending on that score.

It has been six days since the discovery of flea "dirt" -- the blood meal that fleas excrete like little pepper grains -- in our cat's coat, and seven since our vacuum happened to break down. Impeccable timing. While we're fortunate to have caught the problem very early -- our indoor-only cat almost certainly picked up the fleas from an indoor-outdoor cat whose house she shared while we were traveling over Christmas -- I'm still kicking myself for not having the vet treat her on a preventive level, knowing the risks of boarding her with D's friend, the owner. Never mind that said owner failed to mention that he suspected his cat's flea treatments hadn't been working. I try not to think about what we could have done differently and concentrate on getting the borax distributed evenly over the carpet. And here I was a week ago, just hoping to get the vacuum repaired in time to do a once-over on the house before this baby's arrival.

Would I call that pre-flea impulse nesting? Not really. That instinct everybody keeps asking me about is there, but only so far as the preservation of future sanity goes. Of course I want to get the baby room furniture assembled; the baby laundry washed and folded; the extra meals cooked, labeled, and frozen -- so I won't have to do it once the baby is here. But no, I'm not scrambling to organize my sock drawer by brand and color or alphabetize the spice cabinet.

In the name of making more space, I would love to purge our closets of clothes we haven't worn in several years, books from long-finished college classes that we haven't been able to resell, electronics that are obsolete enough to be laughed off Craigslist. While we've gone as minimal and practical as possible in deciding what we truly need or wish to have for this tiny person, who promises to outgrow it all quickly enough, the sheer volume of what other well-meaning friends have been sending us in the last few weeks is beginning to threaten our storage capacity. Or at least the limits I currently believe in maintaining -- yes, there is always a way to make room, but is that really a practice I want to embrace without reservations when this child will be accumulating things wherever we are for the next 18 years?

These thoughts scroll through my mind as I swing the glass back and forth, back and forth, over the room D has helped me clear of all furniture except the couches. The next morning, I will vacuum with our freshly serviced vacuum, hoping that the borax will have desiccated any eggs or fleas overnight. It's not the kind of purge I envisioned, but the irony of it is almost funny. Not funny enough, though, to keep me from asking why this now, of all things?

I finish dusting the carpet, set the heavy glass on the stairs, and massage my aching hand. It's advisable to work the borax into the deeper fibers, so I make a slow circuit of the room in blue running shoes turned gray from their coating of powder. The cat mumbles to herself upstairs, giving up on me for the night, and it's finally quiet. I've been lucky not to have the raging insomnia so many women have told me is part and parcel of the third trimester, but I am on this evening a little too overcharged to want sleep -- I'd just welcome the chance to sit. Still, the room goes on, suddenly much larger as I make myself side-step, ankle to ankle, around the perimeter, working my way back toward the stairs.

Just let this be done, I think, tempted to turn my methodical pacing into a mad grapevine. There are too many other things I'd rather be doing to prepare not just our home but my state of mind for this baby. But to give in to that desire -- to give up my controlled march so I can get some control back elsewhere -- is the paradoxical opposite of surrender. Maintaining this slow dance is the very act of yielding that I know I'm terrible at. And I'm about to bring into the world a little being who will need me to do just that -- ignore the closets, the old books and electronics, and the mental space they occupy.

So I traverse the room, step by step, carrying us both across the powdery landscape I've committed to tamping down. And I tell myself that nesting for me may be clearing out the detritus of old lives. But only so that I can take on this new one.

*

I'm linking up with Just Write this week. For more stories and essays, click the button below!

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Scenes from around the table, part 3: needles and threads

This is the third in a series of posts chronicling our last holiday season before baby arrives -- as they say, life is never the same afterward, so in the interest of capturing a few snapshots to remember this time, here are some jottings from moments that have lingered with me over a multi-destination Thanksgiving week.

As the sun fades from the kitchen mid-afternoon, my mother furrows her brow at the knitting draped over her knees. The two pieces of a cowl she's trying to put together with three needles are a jumble of burgundy loops at the row where they should join, some strangely tight, others oddly loose, in a stockinette pattern that should be completely even. She mumbles to herself as she peers at the instructions, counts by twos in Cantonese along the width of the cowl and then utters with dismay, "I'm missing a stitch!"

Across the table, I set my own knitting on my lap and wait to see if she wants help. For the last hour, my mother has been going back and forth over the same few rows, taking out mistakes only to add other ones, and it is all I can do to let her continue without intervention -- getting more involved risks disrupting the balance we've managed to achieve on this visit so far. No fights or gross misunderstandings, as we are prone to have at least once per trip.

We've been talking, certainly -- just light conversation about nothing of great importance. Unfortunately, I suspect the more she speaks, the more errors she makes in her work. Neither of us would win contests for being able to walk and chew gum. But my gradual retreat for her sake from the chit-chat in our knitting circle of two hasn't seemed to prevent her from gabbing on, interrupting herself only to exclaim over new tangles.

This time still, she returns to counting, trying to determine where her stitch has fallen, so I go back to the little blue sweater on my own needles. The piece I'm working on has been growing at a creep, not because the pattern is hard but because the numerous cables are slow-going. I think of the intricately textured baby vests and cardigans Nga Po, my mother's mother, used to turn out so quickly for all of her grandchildren and have to marvel at her skill. No patterns, no guidelines, just intuition. "Nga Po could look at someone else's work and duplicate it, even resize it," my mother tells me whenever we talk about her mother's talents.

"Nga Po taught you to knit, right?" I ask.

"The basics," my mother says. "She was so patient. Whenever I messed up, I'd take my work to her and she'd help me fix it. Every time, no matter how tangled up. She was so good too -- I don't know how she could figure out where I'd made my mistakes, it was so bad sometimes!"

I, too, can only wonder how my grandmother could see the often deceptive logic of stitches meant to twist, cross, double, or join in their over-under fashion to produce the leaves, diamonds, and other figures she'd create in an evening -- frequently while playing mahjong -- for the tiny garments she'd send us. I try to picture her, the same two lines between her eyebrows that are now between my mother's, as she peers at my mother's needles. She holds the mass of yarn in both hands, her long fingers gently stretching the web of loops and holes that spell out their secrets in a script only she can read, and suddenly the point of one needle flicks into action. It noses into the heart of a row, fishes up some length of yarn, the other needle grabs it and begins to work in tandem, and like magic, the tangle is transformed. It has happened too quickly for me to see what she's done, but there's the panel of knits and purls, whole again.

This isn't the only moment in which I've tried to draw my grandmother's quiet presence near during these months of preparation for motherhood. Because the beginning of this pregnancy was shaky -- there were questions about the baby's viability around 7-8 weeks -- we waited as long as possible before telling our families our good news. So in the first trimester, while we watched anxiously for signs that we could breathe more easily, I placed my grandmother's photo on my nightstand. Please protect this baby, I asked her, a mother of six, before turning off the light at the end of the day. While I've never practiced ancestor worship as her generation did, the idea that she was always a guardian to the integrity of her family -- the thread that drew it close even in her old age -- made her seem a natural confidante for my worries. And, of course, all the questions and hopes and bizarre hormone-induced dreams I'd wake up to the next morning, unable to share them yet with anyone else.

Now in the darkening kitchen, there is only the whish of one needle against another -- my mother has stopped talking; her error must be serious. I glance at the clock. The following day, we are both slated to head to Boston, where my sisters are throwing a baby shower for me, and neither of us is packed. But I resist the urge to go fold my clean laundry for the trip while my mother's concentration deepens.

There is much I wish I could talk about with my mother while we still have this time alone together -- all that I kept between me and my grandmother's picture, to start with, and the roller coaster of anticipation I've been on as this final trimester has begun. In Boston, we'll be busy with shower preparations -- more cooking, at the very least -- and my sisters will be there, of course. Not that I'm not looking forward to seeing them, but my mother is an even more scattered person when all of us are gathered. Like this woman who can't help putting more tangles in her knitting just because we're talking, my mother is practically impossible to have a real conversation with in the presence of all three daughters. She'll ask one person a question and in the same breath turn to another to comment about something else before the first can answer. I find myself stepping away from her attempts to divide her attention in this fashion because it feels petty -- and futile -- to want her to focus for once on each of us, one at a time.

All the more reason to talk now, though from the harried look on my mother's face, this isn't the time either. But just as I start to tuck my work back in its bag, my mother lifts her knitting from her lap, turns it left and right, and shakes her head. "This is a disaster," she says. She leans across the table, holding out her needles. "C, can you be Nga Po for me?"

I'm momentarily thrown by her almost plaintive tone. In an instant, that image of my grandmother holding my mother's tangled yarn comes back to me, and it is at once endearing and painful. It's idealized in my imagination, I know, but it's the quintessential picture of a mother-daughter moment, the little girl at her mother's elbow, trusting that she will make everything right. I've missed having that trust in my own mother, especially throughout this pregnancy. Not that she would have had any way to influence the outcome of this baby's life in his first tenuous weeks, but on an emotional level, I needed to know she would be an ear that would truly listen. Which she hasn't been for so long partly because I've been too skittish to try confiding in her, afraid of being hurt by her response, distracted or otherwise. Again, it's the risk of misunderstandings I shy away from.

After a second, I take the mess of stitches from my mother's hands and lay the work on the table, stretching it apart in search of an answer for her. I don't have my grandmother's knitting intuition, but I do have the pattern my mother's been working from. I lift it from the seat next to her and scan the instructions for clues.

"So you put one piece on top of the other and knit across the rows simultaneously to join them?" I ask, looking at the half-completed graft.

"Yes, but then I realized I had dropped the stitch and needed to undo the row again," my mother says.

This has to be where the problem lies. Sure enough, I can see that my mother has started to unravel the row properly on one needle's piece of her cowl but not on the other. In fact, she's dropping or twisting her stitches each time she tries to separate the pieces further, hence the wild variations in her tension. But how to fix this? I can't even begin to trace where the errors originate. Reluctantly, I explain what I've figured out. "I'm sorry I can't tell you what to do next, though," I say.

But my mother's hands now spring into action. "I know what to do," she reassures me. And with the point of a needle, she works column by column, sometimes fishing up a length of yarn, sometimes untwisting a loop and returning it to her other needle, and suddenly, like magic, the tangles are transformed. There are her two panels of knits and purls, whole once more.

"Finally!" my mother says. "I would never have understood what to do if you hadn't explained the problem to me."

I laugh in amazement. "I thought you needed Nga Po to do the repairs!" I say.

"No," my mother says. "I can fix it once I know what I've done wrong." She pats the soft wool and then puts her needles down.

We are neither of us experts like Nga Po. But maybe that is what I need to remember more often about my mother and motherhood -- to trust that she may surprise me with what she does understand when I'm least expecting it.

All the same, I don't pursue any deeper conversation for now. As we both roll up our knitting for the day, it's enough for me that we've solved this practical problem together. That we are a mother and daughter still at peace.

For more from this series, please click here.

*

This post happened to coincide with a prompt from Mama Kat's weekly Writer's Workshop. Check out more stories and essays by clicking the button below!

Mama's Losin' It

Saturday, January 5, 2013

We interrupt this series

... for a small update. One that looks to weigh about 4 pounds and seems to think an early arrival might be in his future, per yesterday's ultrasound and non-stress test (both unscheduled, but I woke up with signs that indicated a call to the OB was warranted).

Holy hydration and couch-boundedness, we are so not ready for this baby yet!

Everything to do with the baby himself looked good at the perinatologist's office -- he happily performed his little breathing exercises for us to see, wiggled and squirmed with abandon, and kept his heart rate at a thoroughly reassuring level through contractions I was apparently having fairly regularly but could not yet feel. Today -- well, I can feel them, but some of that is surely from heightened awareness.

I'm home for now with strict instructions to be a lazy slob -- the perinatologist's words, not mine! -- all weekend. Since we'll be at 35 weeks on Monday, my regular OB won't stop labor if it starts in earnest at this stage of the game as the research indicates infants of this age do better out rather than being forced to stay in. So D is running loads of laundry and helping me cook some extra meals (I season, he does the heavy pan lifting). Both tasks were in the plan for the weekend already, but now it feels extra important to make progress on each just in case ...

Time to refill my water glass and go focus on something else. We'll be back to our previously scheduled program shortly (I hope!) with part 3.

Oh and um, Dr. Sis? Marketing Sis? That shipment of baby stuff from the lovely shower you threw me in Boston -- I'd send that sooner rather than later if you can swing it. Please and thank you ...

Posts by date

Posts by label

Air travel Airline food Allergic reactions Astoria Awards Bacteremia Bacterial overgrowth Baggage beefs Bed and breakfast Betrayal Blues Body Boston Breastfeeding British Columbia California Canada Cape Spear Clam-digging Colonoscopy Commuter marriage Cooking CT scans Delays Diagnoses Dietitians Doctor-patient relationships Doctors Eating while traveling Editing Endocrine Endoscopy ER False starts Family dynamics Feedback Food anxiety Food sensitivities Gate agent guff GI Halifax Heart Home-making House hunting Hypoglycemia In-laws Intentional happiness Iowa Journaling Kidney stones Knitting Lab tests Little U. on the Prairie Liver function tests Long Beach Making friends in new places Malabsorption Massachusetts Medical records Medication Mentorship MFA programs Miami Monterey Motivation Moving Narrative New York Newark Newfoundland Nova Scotia Olympic Peninsula Ontario Ophthalmology Oregon Oxalates Pancreatic function tests Parenting Parents Paris Pets Photography Portland Prediabetes Pregnancy Process Professors Publishing Reproductive endocrine Research Revision Rewriting Rheumatology San Francisco Scenes from a graduation series Scenes from around the table series Seattle Sisters Skiing St. John's Striped-up paisley Teaching Technological snafus Texas Thesis Toronto Travel Travel fears Traveling while sick Ultrasound Urology Vancouver Victoria Voice Washington Washington D.C. Weight When words won't stick Whidbey Island Why we write Workshops Writers on writing Writing Writing friends Writing in odd places Writing jobs Yakima

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

It's not nesting if it involves fleas

At nearly 11 p.m. on Saturday, when 30-somethings without kids are likely out and 30-somethings with kids are likely out cold, I'm holding a one-quart Pyrex measuring cup full of borax powder, swinging it like a censer over the living room carpet. The cat is upstairs in the laundry room, crying to be let out, but as long as the floors are coated in this fine, white dust that I'm counting on for salvation, my will isn't bending on that score.

It has been six days since the discovery of flea "dirt" -- the blood meal that fleas excrete like little pepper grains -- in our cat's coat, and seven since our vacuum happened to break down. Impeccable timing. While we're fortunate to have caught the problem very early -- our indoor-only cat almost certainly picked up the fleas from an indoor-outdoor cat whose house she shared while we were traveling over Christmas -- I'm still kicking myself for not having the vet treat her on a preventive level, knowing the risks of boarding her with D's friend, the owner. Never mind that said owner failed to mention that he suspected his cat's flea treatments hadn't been working. I try not to think about what we could have done differently and concentrate on getting the borax distributed evenly over the carpet. And here I was a week ago, just hoping to get the vacuum repaired in time to do a once-over on the house before this baby's arrival.

Would I call that pre-flea impulse nesting? Not really. That instinct everybody keeps asking me about is there, but only so far as the preservation of future sanity goes. Of course I want to get the baby room furniture assembled; the baby laundry washed and folded; the extra meals cooked, labeled, and frozen -- so I won't have to do it once the baby is here. But no, I'm not scrambling to organize my sock drawer by brand and color or alphabetize the spice cabinet.

In the name of making more space, I would love to purge our closets of clothes we haven't worn in several years, books from long-finished college classes that we haven't been able to resell, electronics that are obsolete enough to be laughed off Craigslist. While we've gone as minimal and practical as possible in deciding what we truly need or wish to have for this tiny person, who promises to outgrow it all quickly enough, the sheer volume of what other well-meaning friends have been sending us in the last few weeks is beginning to threaten our storage capacity. Or at least the limits I currently believe in maintaining -- yes, there is always a way to make room, but is that really a practice I want to embrace without reservations when this child will be accumulating things wherever we are for the next 18 years?

These thoughts scroll through my mind as I swing the glass back and forth, back and forth, over the room D has helped me clear of all furniture except the couches. The next morning, I will vacuum with our freshly serviced vacuum, hoping that the borax will have desiccated any eggs or fleas overnight. It's not the kind of purge I envisioned, but the irony of it is almost funny. Not funny enough, though, to keep me from asking why this now, of all things?

I finish dusting the carpet, set the heavy glass on the stairs, and massage my aching hand. It's advisable to work the borax into the deeper fibers, so I make a slow circuit of the room in blue running shoes turned gray from their coating of powder. The cat mumbles to herself upstairs, giving up on me for the night, and it's finally quiet. I've been lucky not to have the raging insomnia so many women have told me is part and parcel of the third trimester, but I am on this evening a little too overcharged to want sleep -- I'd just welcome the chance to sit. Still, the room goes on, suddenly much larger as I make myself side-step, ankle to ankle, around the perimeter, working my way back toward the stairs.

Just let this be done, I think, tempted to turn my methodical pacing into a mad grapevine. There are too many other things I'd rather be doing to prepare not just our home but my state of mind for this baby. But to give in to that desire -- to give up my controlled march so I can get some control back elsewhere -- is the paradoxical opposite of surrender. Maintaining this slow dance is the very act of yielding that I know I'm terrible at. And I'm about to bring into the world a little being who will need me to do just that -- ignore the closets, the old books and electronics, and the mental space they occupy.

So I traverse the room, step by step, carrying us both across the powdery landscape I've committed to tamping down. And I tell myself that nesting for me may be clearing out the detritus of old lives. But only so that I can take on this new one.

*

I'm linking up with Just Write this week. For more stories and essays, click the button below!

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Scenes from around the table, part 3: needles and threads

This is the third in a series of posts chronicling our last holiday season before baby arrives -- as they say, life is never the same afterward, so in the interest of capturing a few snapshots to remember this time, here are some jottings from moments that have lingered with me over a multi-destination Thanksgiving week.

As the sun fades from the kitchen mid-afternoon, my mother furrows her brow at the knitting draped over her knees. The two pieces of a cowl she's trying to put together with three needles are a jumble of burgundy loops at the row where they should join, some strangely tight, others oddly loose, in a stockinette pattern that should be completely even. She mumbles to herself as she peers at the instructions, counts by twos in Cantonese along the width of the cowl and then utters with dismay, "I'm missing a stitch!"

Across the table, I set my own knitting on my lap and wait to see if she wants help. For the last hour, my mother has been going back and forth over the same few rows, taking out mistakes only to add other ones, and it is all I can do to let her continue without intervention -- getting more involved risks disrupting the balance we've managed to achieve on this visit so far. No fights or gross misunderstandings, as we are prone to have at least once per trip.

We've been talking, certainly -- just light conversation about nothing of great importance. Unfortunately, I suspect the more she speaks, the more errors she makes in her work. Neither of us would win contests for being able to walk and chew gum. But my gradual retreat for her sake from the chit-chat in our knitting circle of two hasn't seemed to prevent her from gabbing on, interrupting herself only to exclaim over new tangles.

This time still, she returns to counting, trying to determine where her stitch has fallen, so I go back to the little blue sweater on my own needles. The piece I'm working on has been growing at a creep, not because the pattern is hard but because the numerous cables are slow-going. I think of the intricately textured baby vests and cardigans Nga Po, my mother's mother, used to turn out so quickly for all of her grandchildren and have to marvel at her skill. No patterns, no guidelines, just intuition. "Nga Po could look at someone else's work and duplicate it, even resize it," my mother tells me whenever we talk about her mother's talents.

"Nga Po taught you to knit, right?" I ask.

"The basics," my mother says. "She was so patient. Whenever I messed up, I'd take my work to her and she'd help me fix it. Every time, no matter how tangled up. She was so good too -- I don't know how she could figure out where I'd made my mistakes, it was so bad sometimes!"

I, too, can only wonder how my grandmother could see the often deceptive logic of stitches meant to twist, cross, double, or join in their over-under fashion to produce the leaves, diamonds, and other figures she'd create in an evening -- frequently while playing mahjong -- for the tiny garments she'd send us. I try to picture her, the same two lines between her eyebrows that are now between my mother's, as she peers at my mother's needles. She holds the mass of yarn in both hands, her long fingers gently stretching the web of loops and holes that spell out their secrets in a script only she can read, and suddenly the point of one needle flicks into action. It noses into the heart of a row, fishes up some length of yarn, the other needle grabs it and begins to work in tandem, and like magic, the tangle is transformed. It has happened too quickly for me to see what she's done, but there's the panel of knits and purls, whole again.

This isn't the only moment in which I've tried to draw my grandmother's quiet presence near during these months of preparation for motherhood. Because the beginning of this pregnancy was shaky -- there were questions about the baby's viability around 7-8 weeks -- we waited as long as possible before telling our families our good news. So in the first trimester, while we watched anxiously for signs that we could breathe more easily, I placed my grandmother's photo on my nightstand. Please protect this baby, I asked her, a mother of six, before turning off the light at the end of the day. While I've never practiced ancestor worship as her generation did, the idea that she was always a guardian to the integrity of her family -- the thread that drew it close even in her old age -- made her seem a natural confidante for my worries. And, of course, all the questions and hopes and bizarre hormone-induced dreams I'd wake up to the next morning, unable to share them yet with anyone else.

Now in the darkening kitchen, there is only the whish of one needle against another -- my mother has stopped talking; her error must be serious. I glance at the clock. The following day, we are both slated to head to Boston, where my sisters are throwing a baby shower for me, and neither of us is packed. But I resist the urge to go fold my clean laundry for the trip while my mother's concentration deepens.

There is much I wish I could talk about with my mother while we still have this time alone together -- all that I kept between me and my grandmother's picture, to start with, and the roller coaster of anticipation I've been on as this final trimester has begun. In Boston, we'll be busy with shower preparations -- more cooking, at the very least -- and my sisters will be there, of course. Not that I'm not looking forward to seeing them, but my mother is an even more scattered person when all of us are gathered. Like this woman who can't help putting more tangles in her knitting just because we're talking, my mother is practically impossible to have a real conversation with in the presence of all three daughters. She'll ask one person a question and in the same breath turn to another to comment about something else before the first can answer. I find myself stepping away from her attempts to divide her attention in this fashion because it feels petty -- and futile -- to want her to focus for once on each of us, one at a time.

All the more reason to talk now, though from the harried look on my mother's face, this isn't the time either. But just as I start to tuck my work back in its bag, my mother lifts her knitting from her lap, turns it left and right, and shakes her head. "This is a disaster," she says. She leans across the table, holding out her needles. "C, can you be Nga Po for me?"

I'm momentarily thrown by her almost plaintive tone. In an instant, that image of my grandmother holding my mother's tangled yarn comes back to me, and it is at once endearing and painful. It's idealized in my imagination, I know, but it's the quintessential picture of a mother-daughter moment, the little girl at her mother's elbow, trusting that she will make everything right. I've missed having that trust in my own mother, especially throughout this pregnancy. Not that she would have had any way to influence the outcome of this baby's life in his first tenuous weeks, but on an emotional level, I needed to know she would be an ear that would truly listen. Which she hasn't been for so long partly because I've been too skittish to try confiding in her, afraid of being hurt by her response, distracted or otherwise. Again, it's the risk of misunderstandings I shy away from.

After a second, I take the mess of stitches from my mother's hands and lay the work on the table, stretching it apart in search of an answer for her. I don't have my grandmother's knitting intuition, but I do have the pattern my mother's been working from. I lift it from the seat next to her and scan the instructions for clues.

"So you put one piece on top of the other and knit across the rows simultaneously to join them?" I ask, looking at the half-completed graft.

"Yes, but then I realized I had dropped the stitch and needed to undo the row again," my mother says.

This has to be where the problem lies. Sure enough, I can see that my mother has started to unravel the row properly on one needle's piece of her cowl but not on the other. In fact, she's dropping or twisting her stitches each time she tries to separate the pieces further, hence the wild variations in her tension. But how to fix this? I can't even begin to trace where the errors originate. Reluctantly, I explain what I've figured out. "I'm sorry I can't tell you what to do next, though," I say.

But my mother's hands now spring into action. "I know what to do," she reassures me. And with the point of a needle, she works column by column, sometimes fishing up a length of yarn, sometimes untwisting a loop and returning it to her other needle, and suddenly, like magic, the tangles are transformed. There are her two panels of knits and purls, whole once more.

"Finally!" my mother says. "I would never have understood what to do if you hadn't explained the problem to me."

I laugh in amazement. "I thought you needed Nga Po to do the repairs!" I say.

"No," my mother says. "I can fix it once I know what I've done wrong." She pats the soft wool and then puts her needles down.

We are neither of us experts like Nga Po. But maybe that is what I need to remember more often about my mother and motherhood -- to trust that she may surprise me with what she does understand when I'm least expecting it.

All the same, I don't pursue any deeper conversation for now. As we both roll up our knitting for the day, it's enough for me that we've solved this practical problem together. That we are a mother and daughter still at peace.

For more from this series, please click here.

*

This post happened to coincide with a prompt from Mama Kat's weekly Writer's Workshop. Check out more stories and essays by clicking the button below!

Mama's Losin' It

Saturday, January 5, 2013

We interrupt this series

... for a small update. One that looks to weigh about 4 pounds and seems to think an early arrival might be in his future, per yesterday's ultrasound and non-stress test (both unscheduled, but I woke up with signs that indicated a call to the OB was warranted).

Holy hydration and couch-boundedness, we are so not ready for this baby yet!

Everything to do with the baby himself looked good at the perinatologist's office -- he happily performed his little breathing exercises for us to see, wiggled and squirmed with abandon, and kept his heart rate at a thoroughly reassuring level through contractions I was apparently having fairly regularly but could not yet feel. Today -- well, I can feel them, but some of that is surely from heightened awareness.

I'm home for now with strict instructions to be a lazy slob -- the perinatologist's words, not mine! -- all weekend. Since we'll be at 35 weeks on Monday, my regular OB won't stop labor if it starts in earnest at this stage of the game as the research indicates infants of this age do better out rather than being forced to stay in. So D is running loads of laundry and helping me cook some extra meals (I season, he does the heavy pan lifting). Both tasks were in the plan for the weekend already, but now it feels extra important to make progress on each just in case ...

Time to refill my water glass and go focus on something else. We'll be back to our previously scheduled program shortly (I hope!) with part 3.

Oh and um, Dr. Sis? Marketing Sis? That shipment of baby stuff from the lovely shower you threw me in Boston -- I'd send that sooner rather than later if you can swing it. Please and thank you ...