Blind spots

It's the last Wednesday in August, and the packing list for my sister's wedding is growing by the hour. With our extra baby gear and my food allergies to work around, every trip feels like camping: we haul the edibles and other supplies in and hope nothing runs out.

"We should get an RV," D. has said more than once this week. "Seriously, we'd be able to go anywhere."

After this morning's slow progress on our plan, I'm almost tempted to say yes.

Thankfully, my other wedding to-dos are waning. I've written my toast and charted the day-of schedule we'll have to get O. through. My dress and his ringbearer togs are fitted. All I have left is to assemble a slideshow of the happy couple, finalize the reception games we'll subject them to, and figure out which purse to carry. Makeup, snacks, sewing kit, hair pins, band-aids, headache relief -- where to put it all? The diaper backpack's tempting but a poor match for stilettos.

I start gathering supplies for a test-fit. "Oh come on," I mumble -- I'm out of the meds. I was at the store last week but hadn't started the packing list yet, and I'm dreading the back-to-school crowds. But O.'s already at the door to our garage, begging to go out. I don't resist. If he's willing, there's no better time than now to get the job done.

Everything these days is a job, I think as I pull out of our driveway. We are halfway down the block before I wonder if I've closed the garage door. It doesn't matter, I tell myself. We'll only be gone thirty minutes. But these endless tasks, boxes to be checked off -- it's no wonder I feel dull. I can't remember the last time I did something for myself this summer. At least, not without needing to invest as much energy in arranging for a personal stand-in to cover my absence as I was supposed to reclaim in the first place.

Four turns, six stoplights. The route is busy, but traffic moves. O. babbles to no one in particular -- is he telling me what he sees? We've been waiting for words, but even at 18 months, he has none. At his last check-up, we got a referral for early intervention services, which will start after we return. I'm relieved. Between this trip and the last one we took in March for my mother's birthday, we've spent most of O.'s year thus far in planning mode. This wedding needs to be over just so I can focus again on him, to say words like car, truck, and bus instead of accommodations, airline tickets, and aspirin. "Ya ya ya ya!" O. exclaims. I can't help wondering if the outside demands we've been fielding all year have more to do with his delays than any other cause.

I park. There are no carts nearby, so I sling O. onto my hip and start trekking to the corral at the store entrance. As I reach the end of our row of cars, a red SUV comes roaring past the front curb. It blows through the crosswalk and suddenly it's turning head-on toward me. My body freezes. Run, you idiot, the primal part of my brain says, but it's as if the rest of me can't believe the driver hasn't noticed us. Or maybe I'm afraid if I move, he'll swerve the wrong way. "Hey!" I shout. He can't possibly hear me. He goes left at the last second, swinging just wide.

I'm fuming. There's no apologetic wave or even recognition, just the hot stench of exhaust. I consider walking back to the guy's car and demanding an explanation. But I know it's pointless. He's got a wife and a kid in the passenger seats. For whatever reason, on his end or mine, I just wasn't visible.

See me, I scream silently. I haven't felt seen, I realize, in a terrifyingly long time. The work of preparing to move a pop-up habitat for so many events in this year and the last is like a scrim -- it keeps me forever busy behind the scenes and is itself so easy to look past. Not that my reasons for being in this parking lot on this day are the guy's reasons for nearly hitting me. But that don't-you-know-I'm-here moment I had in front of his bumper -- more and more, it feels like an ongoing state of being.

O. squirms in my arms. All this time he's been quiet, and I look at him for the first moment in a long minute. He's watching me, trying to read my expression, which must be anything but reassuring.

"We're okay," I tell him. But I know we both need better.

*

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

Tension

A text message from my mother buzzes my phone. She tells me I need to start deciding where to stay in Boston for my sister's September wedding -- even though the official invitations haven't been sent yet, our relatives have booked nearly all the rooms blocked for our party at the hotel where the reception will be.

I consider the price point my mother gives me for a single bedroom there and laugh wryly. I'm not shelling out that kind of money. As it is, O. will have difficulty adjusting to the three-hour time difference and he's not going to be easy to wrangle during the festivities without adequate sleep. I'd rather pay for a suite at a less luxurious place with the same cash and ensure we'll all have a better chance at getting through the long weekend without having to manage a meltdown.

Against my will, my mind turns to the logistical puzzle this next trip promises to be. We've just dealt with the months-long planning process of getting ourselves to Colorado and back for a week of skiing for my mother's birthday -- a trip whose demands far outstripped any usual holiday visits we've made with O. -- and I hadn't intended to throw any resources at our Boston obligations until, say, July. But now I'm wondering how many days we need to be on the ground, how we're going to do two cross-country flights with a kid who can handle at most two hours strapped in a car seat before he's reached his limits. I see standoffs with the beverage cart coming already.

Research flights first, or hotel? My mind spins. I feel like a satellite caught in my family's orbit, destined either to burn up in the atmosphere or circle in the void for eternity.

I reach for my laptop, perched by the sweater I've been working on in fits and starts for D. Then I set it down again. The sweater's yoke, patterned with a geometric array of knits and purls, is perfect, except for one row I've noticed near the lower left of the chest. I've miscounted on the pattern, and everything from the center to the end of the row is shifted one stitch.

There's no ripping it out. Well, there is, but I've knitted the entire yoke, cast it off, and blocked it. Undoing all that work -- it's not worth it if I can find a simpler cosmetic repair. I consider using the same color yarn and just weaving fake stitches over the mistakes. I'm not satisfied with the solution, but I give in, threading a rusty orange length of wool onto a large tapestry needle. Push it under, draw it through, push it under, draw it through. If I had more patience to spare, I tell myself, I'd do this the right way, but the fact is I don't. All the more reason not to go hotel hunting this morning.

As I study the pattern's ins and outs, trying to figure out exactly where to overweave the new stitches, I can't help thinking about our week in Colorado. How my parents insisted they wanted us to be there, O. included, but hardly spent any time with him or us. How much effort we put into finding a baby-sitter long-distance and preparing to baby-proof a condo without having to ship our own safety gear or buy it just for a few days' use on site. How challenging my parents' dining preferences were with my food allergies and how we worked our own cooking and grocery shopping into the schedule so I'd be able to eat.

We'd anticipated all of that and decided ahead of time that we'd make this a vacation for ourselves, regardless of my parents' agenda -- we'd enjoy skiing together, even if the days were limited by our baby-sitting rotations, and we'd have fun being on a dinner "date" with my family on my mother's birthday, even if I couldn't eat anything at the restaurant. But then D. got altitude sickness and a head cold on top of it and by the time the week was over, he'd lost a third of our ski time and completely missed the big dinner in question.

I'm not proud of the way we handled those setbacks. After so much effort to turn a difficult trip into something positive for us, D. and I had a whisper-screamed verbal brawl late into one of our last nights in Colorado because we'd had it with the tension between us, built up over those months of dealing with my parents' requests. Extended family politics have, in the year since O. was born, been at the root of much of our growing frustration with each other. There are other stressors, to be sure, but we keep getting stretched thinner and thinner by the same primary forces we have yet to find a way to push back against together. Instead, we prey on each other's patience because it is easier than trying to appeal to my parents for the consideration they simply don't possess when it comes to their expectations of us.

These thoughts kink like yarn twisted too tightly on my needles as I attempt to oversew the first iteration of my offset stitches. For weeks I've been unable to move past them or, at the very least, push them aside. Now, I'm caught again, distracted again. This is why there are mistakes in my knitting in the first place.

The errant stitches are still just visible to me, but only because I know they are there, behind the camouflage I'm creating, loop by loop. They will always remain, no matter how carefully I match their tightness with the cover yarn.

I sit with my disappointment, unsure whether I should keep going. The act of mending is fitting for my state of mind, but it feels emblematic of all the bending and twisting I've been doing for little cumulative benefit. The yarn slackens in my fingers. This was meant to be a project to bring pleasure to both of us -- to me for the enjoyment of the process and to D., who had been searching for the perfect fall-weight pullover season after season. How had even this become about my family?

I pull the yarn taut again. This is exactly why I have to finish, I tell myself. I need something to feel like I've finally set it right, that I am not totally powerless.

The errant stitches slowly vanish beneath the new surface I weave, leaving their trail like a faint scar. I know I won't forget they're there, but I can at least keep the rest of the world from seeing them.

*

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

A forecast

Wednesday is my second day returning to routine after being away from home for eleven and hosting my mother for another six. The light's fading, O.'s about to wake, and I'm still in yoga togs. Not because I do yoga these days but because they're wash-and-wear and slightly more presentable than pajamas.

The day started with a rush to get O. up and fed before the fridge repairman was supposed to arrive -- but he was late and the morning was an exercise in waiting, half-resumed chores and plans for a much-needed walk held in limbo. That is what the first two weeks of this year have felt like, a suspension of progress. I'm travel-weary and stiff in the joints from being cramped for decompression time, mental and physical. Though, in the name of efficiency, I've tried to skip the post-holiday recovery phase -- the type that follows overexposure to my parents -- it's clear I need it more than ever. So here I am. Poking erratically with one hand at the keys, the other in a bag of chocolate.

I didn't think of writing as exercise, once upon a time, but after these weeks away from the practice, I know it's my form of meditation. I've missed it not because it's pleasurable -- hell, it's hard going most of the time -- but because I'm much worse off without it. Congestion of the mind is killer, and time with my family generates exactly the kind of cloud that stifles me, confuses me. I'm surer of who I am when I'm away from the voices that continue to try to raise me. For that reason alone, I don't think I remember starting any year with a clear head since leaving home -- most Januaries in my memory hold the spillover of December's return to old nests. Ones that are good for short visits but are, for longer, inhospitable.

I've always wanted the beginning of the year to be what so many people seem to enjoy -- a natural time to take stock of what's in store for us. I've peered into the months ahead, though, and it's looking extra foggy. It's a big year for family get-togethers -- more milestone birthdays, a wedding, and all the prenuptial events on top of the usual holidays. It would be an understatement to say I'm approaching all of it with trepidation.

But the year also promises to be an exercise in this exercise -- writing through it all. In recent years, I've dodged the page because I hated the truths about my family it forced me to examine. Can't you write about anything else? I wondered. Shouldn't you just give up on the subject?

How can you leave what follows you, defines you, whether you wish it to or not.

I don't know. But I suspect this year will offer plenty on the matter to think about.

Those busy, busy feet

Before O. was born, we brought home a tiny pair of cowboy boots that D. had loved when he was little. They'd been stored by his parents for years, waiting to be handed down when the occasion arose. A few weeks before O.'s arrival, I set them on the bookshelf in his bedroom, thinking they'd be cute and figuring they wouldn't be needed for at least a year.

O. decided he was ready to walk two weeks ago.

At nine months old this week, he's gone from taking tentative steps to running headlong from one end of the living room to the other. There are slips and stumbles and wipeouts, of course. But our fearless little man has managed to get his legs under him in less time than it took for him to be ready to leave the womb. Consider me gobsmacked.

He entertains himself by toddling in circles around the couches -- following a similar path as the one D. used to wander with O. in his arms when O. needed soothing to sleep. Now these are routes for wide-eyed exploration. Does he realize he's retracing his steps? I wonder as he zips past for the nth time, a favorite stuffed toy rattle in his hands. He pauses only to exchange the jingle of soft bells for the remote control's novel buttons that light up when pressed -- or mouthed. Though he's going nowhere, he moves always with most urgent purpose.

The more speed he gathers, the less forward motion I seem to be able to make on my own roads toward -- well, anything. I know it's normal, but I feel scattered (even with breaks for mug cake). On the wish list of personal projects: work on hand-made Christmas gifts, sort through clothing for donation, reorganize closet, print wedding photos. Yes, wedding photos! We have yet to do that since we got married seven years ago, and now with so many shots of O. also in the queue, I fear it will never happen. His baby book has more in it than our wedding album. In fact, I'm not even sure if we have a wedding album ...

It's odd, that need to get something done. That's all I want, really, to finish something and, if I'm lucky, enjoy the process involved. Maybe the problem is in wanting an end at all -- but I can't turn everything into a love-the-journey thing. Sometimes you really do want to think about and be delighted by the destination and be done with getting there. Holiday travel comes to mind -- preparation for all that is taking priority now too. If you think baby-proofing our own house has been an adventure with an early walker, consider the grandparents' homes we'll be visiting. They're definitely not ready. Thinking ahead of what our families need to know -- and conveying the information effectively -- is my new responsibility.

So here I am, trying to stay one step ahead, to get somewhere, though on some days, I know O. isn't the only one running in circles. He just doesn't mind.

*

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

Treats for the overbooked

The fourth-quarter time-crunch is making itself known early this year.

Somewhere in my heart, I love fall and the winter holidays that follow. But for the last several years, the final months on the calendar have felt overstuffed with commitments I've been less than eager to agree to. This one is no different.

Maybe it's the fault of the airlines that make it impossible to enjoy a brief trip for Thanksgiving with our extended family -- an itinerary for a long weekend has now stretched to nine days in a very non-baby-proof house because tickets at a better price couldn't be had for a shorter stay. And maybe it's my giving in yet again to D.'s ambitious plans to transform our front porch into a spook alley of sorts for Halloween, requiring trips to Home Depot and Radio Shack for staging supplies and subsequent test runs with the setup. Add to this that dead fridge we've been working around since the middle of September; a work trip D. took earlier this month, leaving me on complete baby duty for a week; and the head cold* and food poisoning D. managed to get (the latter not because of our dead fridge but from some baaaaaaad catering), extending my round-the-clock call shift to cover not just O.'s usual demands but also D.'s sorry state of affairs.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I'm out of enthusiasm for the remainder of 2013, but I feel like a curmudgeon. Isn't this when I'm supposed to be getting excited? Baby's first Halloween? Turkey Day? Christmas?

I'll get there. The fridge is finally working as of this morning, after six weeks' hiatus. Hooray for no longer living out of a cooler and being done with twice-daily ice pack changes, no thanks to the repair service's obscenely backed up bookings. As if there wasn't enough changing going on in this house ...

What holds stress at bay for me is carving out time to (1) read, (2) write, (3) knit, and (4) bake. Given the demands of most of October, (1) has been occurring in the middle of the night after O.'s 1 a.m. feeding -- fifteen minutes before I make myself get back in bed -- and (3) has been an intermittent affair where, if O.'s playing happily by himself, I steal ten minutes to knit one row of a sweater I'm making for D. while keeping an eye on our busy little man from the couch. Obviously, (2) has received short shrift, though I've gathered plenty of ideas during the morning walks D. and I have been taking with O. -- that half-hour before D. leaves for work is essential check-in time for us and a built-in brainstorming window. Maybe, just maybe, now that our fridge insanity is over, I will get a few precious minutes back in my day to put text on the page.

As for (4)? Well ... it's hard to bake much when you can't store large quantities of milk (alternative or otherwise) and eggs or their substitutes. What's a girl with cake-lust to do?

Leverage the power of the microwave.

Several months ago, I stumbled upon a recipe for single-serving mug cake on the internet. You put the ingredients in a mug, stir, zap, and voila! Dessert for one. The version online used the aforementioned refrigeration-required ingredients, but I figured out how to tweak the concoction and get rid of some fruit that was going to go bad without a good chill. Double bonus! It's the small victories, no?

I'm sharing because this little five-minute treat got me through the last month and a half. If you like your chocolate dark and rich, this is all kinds of molten goodness. And if you prefer your cake on the vanilla side (or apple-walnut, carrot-coconut, ginger-peach, cardamom-pear, blueberry-cinnamon ... I could go on), I have adjustments. Just ask.

Gluten-free Chocolate Mug Cake
Serves 1 frantically fridge-less curmudgeon, with or without germ-laden husband and teething 8-month-old

1/2 very ripe pear, skin removed, or 2-3 tbsp applesauce or leftover baby food puree, any vegetable
1/8 c garbanzo flour or brown rice flour
1/8 c baking cocoa
3 tbsp water
2 tbsp chocolate chips
1 tbsp sucanat or brown sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Several generous dashes of cinnamon

1. If using pear, cut into chunks and heat in mug in microwave with olive oil for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Stir to mush. Otherwise, place applesauce or baby food puree in mug and proceed to step 2, no heating required. Seriously, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, green beans -- I've used them all. No fridge, remember? I couldn't let that stuff go to waste.

2. Add all dry ingredients with exception of chocolate chips. Add water and, if not already used when heating pear, olive oil. Stir well, then add half the chocolate chips to the batter and distribute throughout. Sprinkle remaining chocolate chips over surface.

3. Heat in microwave for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 minutes, depending on the wattage of your machine (ours is pretty weak). If you like your cake really molten, err on the lesser side.

4. Dust with additional sweetener if desired (I found the chocolate chips were enough to carry the rest of the cake). Enjoy, preferably in a location where neither husband or baby can distract you for five blissful minutes. It's worth every second.

* Despite all the complaining, I am enormously grateful that by some miracle, neither O. nor I caught whatever D. got. It really is the small victories.

Positive

It is one year from the day the pregnancy test comes back with a YES+ on its little liquid crystal screen, and we are not, as I'd been planning, about to get on a plane to Florida.

To clarify -- I didn't decide upon learning we were going to be parents that I wanted to observe the first anniversary of said news by hitting the beach. It is sheer luck that on the morning before our trip, I happen to be scrolling through the pictures of O. on my phone, looking for a recent one to e-mail to a friend while I wait for the breast pump to do its business. I notice how long the photo stream has gotten, images predating even the Great Elimination Diet of 2011. Time to clear out the clutter. But then the picture of that YES+ flashes by and I pause. One year tomorrow.

I remember taking the picture, not out of sentiment but out of a need for proof. I knew the battery in that digital dipstick would die long before I'd believe that we were really and truly going to be a family of three, so I snapped the shot and filed it away like a secret. During that shaky first trimester, I let it whisper its promise to me when I worried O. wasn't going to make it. Yes, it's real. Yes, you can handle this. Not just yes, but YES+ you will get through whatever may come.

One year later, I'm making a mental game plan on how to space out the pumpings en route to Troubadour Dad's destination birthday celebration so I don't completely drain the pump battery before I can find a wall socket on our layovers. Life before O. is practically unrecognizable.

I notice the text message from my mother after I've finally chosen a picture to send: "You need to call me right away if u can." I brush aside my momentary irritation with the random shorthand pronoun in the otherwise normally typed sentence. What's this about? I tap the phone's screen to dial my mother's cell. Dread mixes with the feeling of hunger in my gut. I'm always hungry these days. But the thought of granola and coffee (quarter caf) slips down the list of priorities as I wonder if something has happened to my father.

There is no reason to expect such a thing today. But the alarming lack of detail in the message leaves me fearing the worst. You don't text someone the news that a loved one has suddenly taken ill or become victim to some other misfortune -- you call. But we're two time zones apart, and it's barely 7 a.m. in Seattle. I imagine my mother, worried about waking us up but also trying to manage whatever it is that's so serious it can't be conveyed in writing. I wait for the first ring at the end of the line in Texas, eyes scanning the half-packed feeding supplies on the kitchen island. Disassembled bottles and nipples and cleaning supplies wait to be sorted into various carry-ons. I'm hoping they'll all fit. But is my father all right? Was there some kind of accident? Stroke or heart attack?

No -- just a wannabe hurricane raining on his birthday plans.

I'm simultaneously relieved to get this news from my mother and thoroughly exasperated. Couldn't you have just followed up your message with something along the lines of "change in travel plans"? I think to myself. I check the time on the text. It was sent a half-hour before I received it. Plenty of opportunity to add some clarification.

We chat about Tropical Storm Andrea while I make the coffee and toss oats, nuts, a dash of oil, and lots of cinnamon into a bowl. I stick the works in the microwave on half power, fingers flying over the buttons on autopilot. My mother wants to reroute everyone to another destination so we can at least observe my father's birthday as intended. It won't be the same, of course -- my father's been looking forward to heading out with the same sea captain he's been fishing with almost yearly since I was in high school -- but it's the gathering of the clan my father wants more than anything else. And even I can't say no to him, despite all instincts screaming otherwise. O.'s feeding problems make it nearly impossible to get five miles from the house, much less three thousand.

"Yes, I'll take a look at the options," I say to my mother. "Yes, I'll get back to you when I have more information."

Yes, yes, YES+. I have to laugh at the message in that photo, tossed into this alternate context. In truth, I'm not sure which gears to shift to make a new plan work at this stage of the game. It's certainly magical thinking on my mother's part that we'll be able to find affordable tickets, but having strategized on the level of a military maneuver to get O., the pump, and me to Florida and back, I'm not about to pull out of trip-prep mode until we are sure there's no way to convene, whatever the new location. Chez Dr. Sis and Marketing Sis in Boston? My parents' place in Texas?

I'm not an optimist by nature, and if I ever was one, the events of the last three months have certainly had their chance to turn me. It's less crazy-making to consider what might go wrong with O. and plan accordingly than to tell yourself the other shoe has dropped already and to stop worrying, to expect some kind of relief.

But it could always be worse. At every stage of the game when things have gotten worse, I've reminded myself that I should have been grateful for what was working. Maybe this is why I still believe we're going to get on that plane to somewhere the next day. I still have my plan -- it just needs some tweaking to accommodate a new destination.

*
I'm linking up today with Mama Kat's weekly Writer's Workshop. Check out more stories and essays by clicking the button below!

Highs and lows

Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on? Screech of microphone feedback. Hi! We're still alive over here. Surreptitiously nudges door of bedroom closed to hide ground zero: perpetually full laundry hamper; half-unpacked suitcases; stack of unread magazines and library books; and spit-up rags draped over portable crib, infant rocking seat, and end of (still) unmade bed.

Where was I? Oh, right. O. is thirteen fourteen fifteen almost sixteen weeks old, a good bit past the halfway point to the day we can start introducing him to solid food. (In the name of all that is holy, that day cannot come soon enough.) I'm still pumping up to ten times in a 24-hour period to get him fed, which, per our calculations, is about 7 hours attached to the machine, plus time cleaning pump parts in between each use. Which means this is literally a second job -- the first being to feed the same milk to O., do his oral therapy, change his diapers, play with him, get him to nap, and, of course, love the heck out of him.

Attempts at essay writing have been laughably fragmented, kind of like most mental processes I assail with the grace of a zombie these days. But to provide an update, I thought I'd offer some high/low entertainment for the few who are still checking in here to make sure we haven't completely fallen off the earth. (By the way, you all mean the world to me and the shadow of my former self who misses this space more than I have words even on less sleep-deprived days to use to express my gratitude.) So, for those who've been asking how we're doing ...

High: O. is turning into quite the social little guy. He discovered the world at around ten weeks old and started cooing at everything. Somewhere between an owl's hoot and a dove's cry, his little invitations to converse go out to people and inanimate objects alike, and when he gets a response, his delighted smiles are so enormous that they almost don't fit between his ears. That's made introducing him to others hugely rewarding -- and it's motivated me to keep making lunch dates with pre-baby friends, even if getting out of the house requires precision organization and timing as well as a good bit of luck to make it to an engagement and back before the next scheduled pumping.

Low: Pump schedule anxiety. As you get off by a few minutes here and there throughout the day because you wanted to go have some social time or run errands that you'd otherwise have to depend on your husband to do (which means he'd have to do them after work, depriving you of any time together before you have to go to bed), you're suddenly out an hour or more of sleep because you have to shorten the time between pumping intervals overnight to play catch-up. That sentence probably makes no sense whatsoever if you've never had to do pump schedule math, but just trust me when I say it sucks (ha!) to have to choose to give up even more sleep time, when you already get so little of it, or accept the alternative -- living in near-total isolation five days a week. Hard to say which is more detrimental to one's general mood since the former continues to deplete serotonin, which you need proper sleep cycles to make, while the latter just makes for a very lonely existence. And no, listening to your husband snore in blissful oblivion in the same room while you pump does not count as time spent together.

High: Did you know dark chocolate has been shown to promote serotonin production? I've been leaning heavily (no pun intended) on this brand* of tasty goodness to keep the sleep deprivation from pulling me completely under.

Low: I've been leaning heavily (pun intended) on the aforementioned chocolate. I don't have much baby weight to lose, but it's not going anywhere as long as I'm going through a few bags of these morsels per week ...

High: O. has discovered how to bring his fists to his mouth and keep them there, which means he can self-soothe for much longer periods of time. Hello, three-hour naps!

Low: O. is only successful at self-soothing when he's on his tummy. Putting baby to sleep unsupervised on his front is a big no-no until he can roll over. Enter three-hour sleeping baby-watching sessions. I have nightmares about infants who find creative ways to asphyxiate (self-strangulation with swaddle blanket, among others) the moment someone takes an eye off them. While this is not nearly as great a threat in real life, O. has managed to get his swaddle inside out and up over his head in the throes of slumber:

Note too that he was aligned with the long axis of the crib when I put him down and was able to rotate 90 degrees on his back (how?!) also while asleep. I hope this doesn't mean he's going to be a sleepwalker.

High: Two Skype accounts + two laptops + USB camera = instant video-equipped baby monitor. Skype even puts a video window on your computer screen when you've minimized the application but still have a call in progress. Guess what I'm watching right now as I type. Indeed, I can now take some advantage of O.'s developing nap schedule to do things like exercise. Yes, the laptop is perched on the elliptical at this very moment -- we're big fans of multitasking these days. I wonder if I can also pump while working out on this machine ...

Low: Protecting the nap schedule means even less opportunity to go out. Disturbing your baby's daytime sleep on a regular basis can supposedly lead to poor sleep at night, which is the last thing we want to encourage, and already we know O is much more difficult to get to sleep whenever he gets overtired. Of course, O.'s longest wakeful period happens to occur right before rush hour traffic begins, and you really have to want whatever it is you're going out to get if it means you risk being stuck away from home for way longer than you'd anticipated. Lunch dates may soon give way to afternoon coffee dates. See pump schedule anxiety.

High: Since O.'s become more successful at getting his fists to his mouth, he's done some good work on his jaw to loosen up the muscles. We're now getting him to latch much better, even though he's still not efficient enough to take a full meal on his own. This device, which has a reservoir he can drink from simultaneously at the breast, is helping us. Recently, O.'s occupational therapist increased our "homework" from two nursings a day with the feeder to four, with the goal of eventually doing every nursing this way until we can wean him off the feeder as well. There is hope! I can't believe I can say this after so many weeks of feeling that there wasn't.

Low: More frequent nursing = erratic, delayed pumping + clogged ducts + more nipple damage. We're forever trying to walk the line between getting O. more nursing time and not injuring me to the point of increased infection risk. Unfortunately, we're battling what we think is thrush. I'll spare you the details, but if you're fighting the same fight, there are some decent (though scary) resources available on what you're working with -- consider yourself warned if you really want to go looking. Latching is, to the say the least, way more painful with all of the above going on. One step forward, two steps back. We now log additional time running pump parts through the dishwasher (three cycles daily) and sterilizing every set by steaming it in the microwave afterward.

High: Out of sheer frustration with the limits of being attached to a pump 7 hours a day plus all the extra cleaning time, I've gotten shockingly adept at pumping in unusual places and situations, even with O. in tow. I can now set up and use the pump entirely on my own in a public location (with the help of two nursing covers) as long as there is a flat surface I can set the apparatus on and a safe place to put O. so I don't have to hold or wear him (assuming he's amenable to that in the moment). I have also figured out how to nurse and pump simultaneously to address, at least some of the time, the conflicting demands of maintaining milk supply and getting O. more latch time. I feel like a one-woman circus every time I have to do either of these things, but I'm also weirdly proud that I have developed working solutions to get around these rather sizable situational obstacles. A car adapter even makes it possible to take the show (literally) on the road -- we managed to have our first road trip as a family over Mother's Day weekend. It was just 200 miles to Portland to see some good friends of mine from college, but it might as well have been twice the distance, as it took twice as long to get there with our various stops to dig out or put away pump parts and milk storage supplies. Fortunately, after a few rounds, we started to develop a better system, but it still needs some streamlining to be space-efficient. I think the pumping equipment occupied more of the seat than I did for most of the ride, which won't work for longer trips.

Low: Speaking of which, we have been somewhat arm-twisted into going to Florida for Troubadour Dad's destination celebration in honor of his 60th birthday next week. Feting this occasion will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, which we certainly consider to be a good thing. Working out the logistics of said trip, however, has been a nightmare. There is that whole problem of space limitations when pumping on a plane (and we thought the front passenger seat of a car was a squeeze!) while simultaneously juggling a lap child. There is also the fact that breast pumps, as medical equipment, are subject to certain FAA rules and individual airline policies. The hospital-grade model we had rented isn't permitted for use in flight because it only works when plugged in. Because our airline does not wish to be liable for any passenger's medical needs because of power loss or failure (the outlets on planes are sometimes turned off by the pilot at certain points during flight, according to our airline's Special Assistance desk, which handles queries from folks like us), I had to spend the last several weeks chasing down a hospital-grade rental with a battery that could be recharged and would last for more than a single pumping. I found one after a lot of research (hey, what is overnight pumping time for?) but its battery had been run down so badly that it wouldn't hold more than 15 minutes of charge when I tested it at home. Which meant I had to find more time to take the whole mess back to the renter and have them send it to the manufacturer to exchange for a new pump. See pump schedule anxiety. Oh, and let's not even think about how we're going to make that schedule work across two 14-hour travel days ...

So there you have it -- apologies that it's taken a month to write. We are zeroing in on our departure date with alarming speed, which means I should be using this time to deal (further) with trip logistics. Tips for air travel with an infant and/or taking a baby to the beach are very, very welcome! (Please ... forewarned is forearmed.) I have to say, as the ringmaster of this Cirque du So-Lait, I never thought things could get this crazy. The silver lining, I suppose, is that when O. either figures out how to breastfeed well or he's old enough to get his nutrition in other ways, getting through a normal day, with or without travel, will feel so much easier. At least, I'm counting on it!

* The experts recommend that you consume dark chocolate that is at least 70 percent cacao, and I haven't determined if this product qualifies as such, but given my food sensitivities, this was the only option available to me. If you're dealing with postpartum slump and can consume something clearly marked 70 percent cacao or more, do it!

Scenes from around the table, part 1: boys in the house

This is the first 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.

For the first time in three decades, I will not be with my parents and sisters for Christmas. D and I made the decision last year to begin alternating the winter holidays with our families to make travel less hectic and the time we spend with each side more enjoyable. This year, Christmas falls to his kin, so Turkey Week is for mine.

Even if it's our last Thanksgiving before parenthood, it promises to be quite different from previous gatherings, if only for a few changes already anticipated around the table. Marketing Sis, the youngest of us, is bringing her fiancé to our parents' home for the first time, and Dr. Sis, the one between us, is slated to work the holiday in Boston while we congregate in the Texas panhandle. Then there's me, a week into this baby's final trimester. I'm guessing the familial anticipation for this much-wanted grandson/nephew will be hard to miss during our stay.

Dr. Sis's unavoidable absence aside, I'm looking forward to having a different sort of holiday as D and I wait in Denver on a layover Thanksgiving morning. Not counting the grandson/nephew, we will be three couples instead of three daughters, my parents, and my husband. Somehow, that balance feels better to me than that of holidays past, where as much as D has been part of the family, he's still also been that solitary in-law and we as a couple have had trouble reminding my parents that we are a couple.

I suspect too that my father will appreciate having the fiancé, whom I'll just call N, to even out the gender ratio while the women in the house are extra focused on all things baby-related. Don't get me wrong -- my father was so excited about becoming a grandfather that he told practically everyone in his town within days of receiving our news, including the random woman cutting his hair. But baby shower plans are understandably less interesting to him, especially since my mother and sisters are keeping them traditional -- female guests only.

N and Marketing Sis will be on our second flight, so D and I watch for them, taking guesses at what my sister, who has a passion for fashion, will be wearing. "Fuchsia scarf for sure," I say. "And either jeggings or a bold-print skirt."

"Don't forget the knee-high boots," D adds, smiling at my own sneaker-clad feet.

As much as I wish I were wearing my favorite boots to dress up my jeans and cardigan, Seattle's heavy November rains and the panhandle's occasional freak snowstorms are not suede-friendly, so I've left them at home. And the bright red and purple scarf I've chosen to add color to my otherwise neutral-toned top is folded into a pocket -- it is in the mid 60s outside, and the terminal, heated against more wintry temperatures, is oppressively warm, threatening to dissolve even the most smudge-proof eyeliner into a streaky mess. Only I didn't put any on this morning, figuring it would smear anyway while I was trying to sleep on our 5 a.m. flight. I know I'm going to feel plain next to my sister. But comfort, especially while traveling, is harder to come by these days, so I remind myself that I can always change when we get to Texas. Though most of what I've brought is still hardly designer label and the thought of putting on makeup when I'm already melting has little appeal.

It doesn't matter, I tell myself. In a few months, when you'll just want to be able to shower in between baby feedings, you'll laugh at yourself for even thinking about any of this.

It's true, but the thought intimidates me. I may be the least feminine of all the women in my family because of my stubbornly practical streak (and my tendency to balk at fashion's price tag), but it doesn't mean I like the threat of getting plainer with motherhood.

I'm jolted out of my thoughts momentarily as N, a tall, blond analogue of D, arrives, scanning the rows of low-slung vinyl for us through sleepy-looking eyes. We wave. My sister is nowhere in sight -- must have had a line at the restroom, N says -- so we begin the customary exchange of flight-related chit-chat while we wait for her: did you get out on time? run into any weather? sleep at all? Both D and N are Midwesterners from the same hometown, so I'm not worried they'll run out of conversation, but I do observe N surreptitiously to see how at ease he is. With the two of us, pretty relaxed. The stutter he's always had, which I imagine gets worse with nerves, is minimally apparent. I wonder how he'll do around my parents, though. For his sake, I am glad that D has already gotten them used to having a son-in-law around. Not that my parents were uptight, exactly, on D's first holiday with us, but a boy? Under their roof? (Never mind that we were married already.) How much do we feed him? What do we offer him for entertainment? What do we talk to him about? Will he understand and respect our customs even though he isn't Chinese? All questions that my parents asked me in some fashion before our arrival that Christmas six years ago. I'm not sure if D picked up on their anxiety then, but I knew it was there and felt somewhat responsible for keeping him from treading into any territory that might turn their worries into disapproval. I wonder if my sister has given N some pointers, as I once gave D, for navigating the family landscape. After our own experience, I find myself feeling a little protective of their well-being as a couple, even though I know they will have to find their own way with my parents.

When Marketing Sis finally appears, D and I are right on all counts -- scarf, boots, and skirt -- but I hardly have a moment to laugh about this before she is homed in on her nephew, a hand on each side of my abdomen. "Hi, baby," she croons, as if she's been talking to him like this for an age, even though this is the first time she has seen me since I got pregnant. "Oh my god, your boobs look fabulous!" she says to me.

"Thanks ... ?" I say. I'm not at all surprised that Marketing Sis has no qualms about announcing this at full volume, but I leave a mild note of did-you-really-just-say-that-in-public in my response for the benefit of N, who, to my amusement, seems intent on pretending he hasn't heard a thing. He may be comfortable with us, but girl talk at its most physical is still an untouchable arena. ("He'd like to hang on to the delusion that we shit gold and rainbows," Marketing Sis once told me.) I, on the other hand, am more thrown by the ease with which my sister lays her cheek against my belly while telling the baby that she is his aunt -- I'm not used to having people touch me this way, as if the so-called bump is there expressly to be rubbed -- but I'm over it in a second. She is my sister. We've slept in the same bed half-naked before, so this is actually less intimate. And it's totally endearing to listen to her falling in love with a baby she can't even see yet.

Our flight is announced. Marketing Sis gives the baby one last pat and then we're headed down the jet bridge, into the promise of a Thanksgiving that will be like no other.

For more from this series, please click here.

Calling all savvy shoppers

I know, I know. I said I'd be more active now that I'm feeling better. It wasn't a total lie, but yes, much of the activity has been more elsewhere than here. I suppose if you could have seen the state of the Troubadour house at the end of 17 weeks, you too would have wanted me to deal with that mess first. So that's what I've been doing in the last month (when not also planning four major trips for weddings and holidays that all have to happen before we get to 36 weeks, but that's for another post).

Fortunately, I had some help with the cleanup. Our laundry room has a new resident -- a much-needed washer to replace the cantankerous 15-year-old one that came with the house, one that refused to drain every third use and would only take loads half its capacity because it was so badly unbalanced (broken ball bearings may have been the culprit). In one day, I did five rounds of serious laundry that would in the past have amounted to thirteen -- ten initial loads plus about three rewashes for the ones that didn't empty during the rinse cycle. And we wonder now why we didn't make the replacement sooner ... ! Forgive me for going on about this, but I'm in love.

The baby gear industry, I suspect, would like me to fall equally head over heels for about 10,000 other products it's been informing me of daily. (You don't want to see my inbox.) When the influx of ads and offers began, we'd already started the process of researching the items we'd need to have ready for February -- a place for baby to sleep and a car seat are the only large-scale absolute necessities -- but the lists of other stuff the industry would have us believe we can't live without are a bit overwhelming. I'm doing my best to ignore the propaganda, but I do take recommendations from anyone who's actually a parent. What did you find was really worth having around in those first months? What, in the fog of sleep-deprivation joys of new parenthood, did you love/swear by/thank yourself for buying?

Feel free to go into as much detail as you'd like. Of course, the name of the product with a simple thumbs-up like the one we got from our baby at Tuesday's doctor visit will also suffice.

All the time in the world

The little red barn we're looking for is tucked within an industrial park just outside Portland.

"Huh," I say, peering at the GPS to make sure it hasn't led us astray. For two midwesterners, the idea of a barn brings up images of rolling fields and long gravel drives under great expanses of sky with hardly another structure in sight. Instead, this building sits on a tidy asphalt parking lot -- a small one at that -- minutes off a local highway lined with warehouses and strip malls. But this is the place: Bob's Red Mill, an intermediate destination on our way to Oregon wine country. We're at the beginning of a much anticipated getaway weekend that happens almost to coincide with our dating anniversary -- 13 years.

Our first date isn't exactly at the front of my mind as D pulls into the parking lot. That night, three weeks before our high school graduation, we caught an early movie and dinner at a diner in the same plaza. Then, arms around each other, we stood on the sidewalk -- rather, I balanced on the curb, D on the blacktop one step down -- for 45 minutes while other restaurant patrons came and went. We'd hugged, but neither of us quite wanted to let go afterward. So there we were, arms loosely draped over shoulders and waist, as if we'd been doing this forever and could keep right on going until time ceased to exist.

Time is on my radar so many years later on our way into Bob's. We've gotten a late start from Seattle, and the wineries we're hoping to visit, still some 40 minutes away, will close soon. I don't want D to miss out for what is really just a grocery trip, but it is our only chance to stop here this weekend before we continue on to the B&B we've booked.

"There's no hurry," D says, reading the worry in my eyes as I check my watch. "Let's go find you some goodies, okay?"

The cherry-bright storefront trimmed in white and the honey-colored timber bracing the roof from within gives the entry a quaint feel. I expect checkered tablecloths and butter churns, ladies in big aprons, hay bales. But instead, there are aisles of shelves lined with dry goods packaged in colorfully labeled cellophane or brown paper. All of the store's grains are ground and packed in the company mill down the street -- hence the industrial park. I scan the hanging signs. Gluten free, one of them reads in clean-lined capitals. This is why we've come here.

I've been experimenting for months with alternative baking since the end of the elimination diet, sifting through allergy-friendly cookbooks from the library for recipes I can adapt to my new normal. Our new normal. D's gone almost completely gluten-free at home to help keep our kitchen a clean zone. Among other replacements for conventional flour, ground garbanzo beans have been an excellent discovery, but the bags at our local grocery store are tiny, enough for two or three little loaves of bread at best. Enter Bob's, which sells in bulk. Normally, we'd order from the company by mail, but since we're passing within such a short distance this weekend, we can't argue with the savings in shipping by picking the goods up ourselves.

We find the bean flour. And the brown rice flour and gluten-free rolled oats, items that have become staples in our pantry. D pulls the largest sacks from the shelves and hefts them into a cart with ease; each lands with a satisfying thump. Our cargo may be on the order of cents per ounce, but I feel suddenly rich. In this space, I'm a baker with options again rather than somebody who has little reason to walk down the flour aisle at our local grocery. We peruse the other nearby novelties: amaranth, teff, sorghum, tapioca. Corresponding recipes from my recent research dance through my head, better than any sugar-plum visions.

I catch D watching me, a tender happiness in his brown-eyed gaze. I know he knows this stop is a treat for me, but to see how much it pleases him to give me time here makes my heart flutter. The look in his eyes is the same he wore so many years ago, standing on the sidewalk as the sun began to sink and we pulled a little closer to each other to ward off the dusky chill. "Seventy-five pounds," I whisper, my eyes on the flour but my mind suddenly taken over by the memory. "Pretty amazing."

And, as if on cue, D slips his arms around me, perfectly content that we are hugging in the middle of a grocery store while other customers come and go. "I know, sweetie," he says. "I know."

Mother knows best

On New Year's night, the final evening of our holiday visit, my mother and I are the last ones standing in the kitchen. D is in our room down the hall getting ready for bed, and my father, after a weekend of being on call, is sound asleep. We keep our voices low so as not to disturb them, but my mother, finally alone with me, makes her whisper more purposeful.

"You know, now that you've changed your last name, ours will be lost forever in your family."

Before this visit, D and I agreed, should anyone start to ask me about my health -- a challenging subject, given all the questions we still have and the skepticism we often hear from my family about the kinds of testing and treatment we've pursued -- that I would go find him, bring him into the conversation, so that I would not have to defend our choices alone. I don't expect an attack from the angle my mother takes, though, as she scrubs at her wok with her hard little hands. Leaning on the granite by the sink, I am suddenly vulnerable. I can tell she's been waiting to talk to me on my own.

Where is this coming from? I wonder. And why now, five years after my name change became official? Maybe my mother is thinking of the family we've wanted to start for so long but have held off on because of my health, how our children will bear only D's name instead of his and my father's. Or it's my writing, the essay I had published in the fall but never mentioned until this visit. I used a pseudonym as it was, unwilling to place my name, maiden or married, on the work -- because the subject was so difficult for me to write about, much less discuss, I didn't want anyone to find me just yet for further questions.

I wouldn't have brought up the essay had my mother not pressed me so hard to find out what I was really going to do with my life instead of tutoring as I have been. What are your goals? she'd asked.

"Putting something together that I actually believe in publishing," I said, which, without a detailed plan attached, was an only somewhat satisfying response. Whatever my mother's reasons now for raising this other concern about lost legacies, I feel her disapproval like a blast of west Texas wind carrying the smell of cattle ranches from the next town down the highway.

I know I shouldn't respond -- there can be no good outcome from midnight conversations about family differences -- but so much of my writing is tied to this very issue, the knots in our relationship I am forever trying to untangle by examining them, sentence by sentence. I've chosen to be published under a pseudonym not just to give myself privacy but also to protect that process of personal and relational inquiry, taking on a persona whose name won't be recognized by anyone who knows my family. This way, I can write without fearing their real-life loss of face. Not that I expect my parents' friends to read the kinds of literary journals I'd submit my work to, but in this electronic age, I am searchable, linkable, forwardable, potentially viral.

My writing persona, regardless of her name, needs protecting too. To use either of my surnames is to be who they imply I am: wife, sister, daughter, with everything those identities carry with them. Not that I wish to deny those aspects of my life experience, but I am more than all that. I am other thoughts and questions and indeterminacies that do not yet know how to bear up under the labels automatically bequeathed or contracted to me. For now, then, it is easier to shed these names temporarily and just be me, with a pseudonym as a neutral placeholder where it would be inconvenient for someone to address me simply as "she" or "you."

But that's not the answer to the question my mother is really asking on this night.

Why couldn't you have kept our name? It's a loaded question because it immediately implies that I did not choose as I should have (consider why did you change your name for comparison). The differences are minute, but words and meanings are my territory; I can't help being attuned to the subtexts in my mother's query even if she doesn't realize they are there. Why the clannishness tonight? I'd like to ask in return. I glance inadvertently toward the guest bedroom, confused by my mother's sudden coolness toward my husband. I'm hurt on his behalf.

And then it all comes out. Suddenly she's on to our financial arrangements (joint), our career decisions (too much in favor of D's advancement and not mine), even our past marital problems (the particulars of which she can only guess at since I don't share them -- and she is, of course, largely off base). It is all I can do to parry with fragmented sentences in the face of this onslaught. "You give him too much control," she says at last, still at a whisper but eyes blazing, angry for reasons I can't fathom. Do I just run?

I wish I had.

Cornered by so many accusations, I lash back. "My marriage isn't like yours," I spit. "The choices we've made have always been ours -- not just D's or mine."

The argument deteriorates from that moment. I've found the bruised places in her heart, and everything she throws at me from then on is more of the irrational -- which I don't recognize until long after I've met her barb for barb. I am terrible at refusing to engage.

That is what I need to learn, though, because the boundary that marriage establishes between me and my parents is a necessary one. Like my decision to use a pseudonym to separate my writing persona's role from the roles I have to take on in real life, my decision to limit the information I provide about my married life when my mother asks is protective -- young marriages, like young writers' identities, have weak places, foundations that need work. The protection that such a boundary affords as D and I contemplate starting a family of our own has never been more important.

But the price of maintaining that boundary is clearly something I didn't completely anticipate. If anything after this ambush, I've learned that much of what my mother thinks of my marriage is what she assumes about it, perhaps based on her dissatisfaction with her own, because I've left her with little real information to take its place.

Still, some of her last words to me on New Year's night tell me that the alternative -- sharing it all to prevent so much misunderstanding -- will be more costly. "We'll never be able to have a heart-to-heart," my mother says, "because you won't let me be honest with you."

As long as her idea of a heart-to-heart is for me to accept unconditionally her opinion on anything I share, I'd rather keep the details to myself.

Sense and sensitivity

The smell of fresh biscuits is wafting upstairs from the kitchen in my parents' house in Texas. We've been coming here for the end-of-year holidays only since 2006, so the room I'm writing in -- a loft above a garage -- is not the one where I used to wake up to the promise of butter, flour, baking powder, milk, and salt, in those perfect, golden, flaky proportions that are my mother's standby recipe for daughterly bliss. It's just a loft with an elliptical machine in it, and I cycle along, willing myself to recall the tender center of this favorite baked good, how it releases a ribbon of steam when it first breaks open under my much younger fingers.

The last few years have been an adjustment -- first, the limit on sugars and starches after I became insulin resistant, then the limit on dairy and gluten after those food sensitivities came to light. I can choose to ignore these inconvenient circumstances -- nothing truly dire will occur immediately if I eat from the tray my mother has just pulled from the oven -- but I know it's unwise. At the very least, I'll feel sick and be less able to enjoy this time with my family. So I soak up the memory of warmth and comfort that the aroma brings back.

But the coziness of a different kitchen in a different time fails to materialize. I'm needled by earlier moments from the morning. "Can you butter the tray for me?" my mother asks, as I am about to leave the kitchen in search of a writing spot. "Oh, there might be flour on the counter. You can touch that stuff, right?"

I tell her it's fine -- I can wash my hands -- but then, as I clean the baking utensils left in the sink, I hesitate before setting the sponge back on the edge of the basin. "Is it okay to put this through the dishwasher?" I ask. Without a thorough soaping and scalding, a good quantity of gluten particles can stay lodged in the fibers.

"Oh, it'll never get completely clean," she replies, waving a floury hand, as if whether the sponge goes through the machine isn't important. I know she doesn't mean to be cavalier, but a flood of resentment at what feels like her insensitivity rises in my chest. Just because the sponge can't be sterilized doesn't mean I can't take the measures with it -- or anything else in her kitchen -- that will decrease my exposure to what makes me sick. It has only been a day since my arrival, but the few things I've asked her not to do for food I will eat -- like using wooden cutting boards, which are porous and also harbor gluten easily -- she's done anyway.

I wonder whether to say anything. When I do remind her, she makes the excuse that this is all new to her, which I understand. But she makes no move to apologize.

Am I wrong to feel hurt? I ask myself. Don't be so -- well, sensitive, part of me says in reply. Still, the scent of my mother's biscuits, hanging in the air of the loft, refuses to transfer the pleasure I wish it would.

Unplugged

I'm not totally off the grid these days, but it feels like it after our two-week Thanksgiving trip, which ended with the discovery Sunday evening that our refrigerator had died during our absence and left its rather pungent ghost behind. Not the warm welcome we were hoping for! Everything I'd been depending on for the last few months of allergen avoidance -- organic meats amassed on sale and frozen for later use, homemade soup stock, all the gluten-free baking I'd done -- had to be tossed.

This elimination diet thing is getting a bit too literal for me.

After a day of research, we chose a new fridge last night, which will be delivered tomorrow, but until then, any foods that need chilling are crammed into a cooler on the back porch. Believe me when I say I'm counting the hours until the delivery truck shows up.

With the exception of this electronic snafu, our Thanksgiving was a good one. D and I spent the holiday and then some with his family in central Illinois -- we're trying to alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas with his parents and mine so that we don't have to do one marathon multi-city trip at the end of the year. So far, I think I like the change. We did throw in a small road trip to visit D's brother and sister-in-law in Michigan, where both are graduate students, but that was a relaxed six hours in a borrowed family minivan with leg room, rest stops, unrestricted access to personal electronics, and no worries about someone else's seat back reclining into my lap.

Of course, the view was a lot less impressive than it might have been by air, but the road did offer some scenic gems. Seriously, how can you not appreciate the comic irony in strip malls like this one?*

* I have no idea who took this picture -- we didn't have time to stop to take one ourselves -- but I am thoroughly impressed that Google, using only a search string that contained the names of the stores shown and "strip mall Indiana highway 30," was able to provide me a link to a discussion board where this image was posted.

And then I got a job

Not the first thing you expected after a vacation absence, right?

It wasn't what I expected either. But a week before our departure, a posting landed in my inbox offering the chance to work as an online tutor. True grammarian wanted, the ad said, flexible hours available.

I was a little skeptical about the quality of the employer, given the odd (read: unorthodox, bordering on misspelled) abbreviations elsewhere in the text, so I asked Marketing Sis if it looked legit enough to consider -- my goal was to start earning a wage through some form of teaching while still trying to balance that commitment with my own writing, among other necessary fall projects D and I are working on. So when Marketing Sis's magical search skills didn't turn up any employee complaints (or evidence of a scam), I threw together a resume and sent it off. Look at this as a chance to get your feet wet, I told myself, and if it ends up being disastrous, you can always walk away.

The business, it turns out, is owned and managed by one woman out of her home on the opposite side of the country, from which she contracts tutors all over the U.S. for students primarily on the East Coast. She failed to notice my Seattle address and called to interview me two days later at 6 a.m., without any prior contact to schedule said conversation.

I have to admit, I'm not swift to wake up and probably sounded a bit bewildered when I answered, fearing a close relative had gotten sick or injured. But when the woman quickly made her disdain known -- "Do you even remember sending me your application?" she asked, perhaps in response to my silence after she'd introduced herself -- I snapped to attention. Simple oversight, I thought, as I explained the time difference, after which the woman was effusively apologetic. So I padded downstairs from the bedroom, D still half-asleep in the darkness, and took her questions in my pajamas.

"You'll be tutoring students who need help on the grammar section of the SAT exam," the woman explained, which sounded manageable enough, even attractive. Subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, parallel construction -- I'd always enjoyed the rules of syntax, thanks in part to my own middle-school grammar teacher. The orderliness of language that she'd revealed, the characteristics of each part of speech, the algorithmic ways of determining the functions of each word in a sentence -- I loved all of it. Could I teach it? Oh, yes.

So I left for Hawaii, agreeing to start work within the week of my return.

Given my long silence since the beginning of October, I'm sure you've guessed at this point in the story that the job has turned out to be much more of a commitment than I believed it would be. Not because I have that many students -- there are just four -- but because my employer is more disorganized than, say, a five-paragraph persuasive essay with no thesis statement and randomly collected statements of fact instead of substantiated arguments. Teaching materials? Sent the day of my first tutoring session, minutes before it was supposed to begin. Oh, and did I mention that this woman decided during my absence to assign me some SAT writing students? My feelings on teaching essay writing to college students have been, at best, mixed -- comp instructors, breathe your collective sighs with me! (And then think about doing what you do, only with high schoolers. Mm hmm, specifically what I didn't want this job to be.)

But of course, given my experience, the woman "thought I'd be perfect" and went ahead with the plan without asking if I cared.

I've spent the last week putting some safeguards in place to keep my sanity from leaking out my ear, but let's just say that there's still plenty I need to do in order to get more timely information from my boss before each tutoring session -- and prevent her from transforming my job description any further. I've promised myself that I will live up to my new duties, but I'm drawing the line at further unforeseen demands.

As for our Hawaiian vacation: it was a getaway better than any we could ever have imagined. More on that trip -- which deserves so much more than passing mention -- once I get my work-life balance back.

Nine weeks

That's how long I've been on this crazy elimination diet.

Yes, I chose not to write about the testing while it was ongoing -- it was life-consuming enough that I needed this space to think about other things, like what I've been examining through my most recent series of musings. I plan to continue adding to that, but more intermittently now that it's established (for me, as a commitment through habit of thought).

In the meantime, I'm beginning to get the much-wanted answers I'd been looking for. Preliminarily, we've determined that dairy products from cows do not love me, as much as I love them. Goat dairy is kinder, but ambiguously so. Eggs lie somewhere in between on that spectrum. Corn and soy are friendly.

Today I will complete one of three different gluten trials, and then we will suspend testing until our return from Hawaii. Our original plan was to be done with all the trials before the trip -- this Thursday! -- but because the dairy tests worked me over so thoroughly, I needed a lot of extra recovery time between each of them, which pushed our testing timeline much further into the fall than I'd anticipated.

I'm a mess of mixed feelings about it all. Relieved to have results at last, some of them quite definitive. Frustrated but resigned to the fact that more testing has to continue when we get back. Disappointed that the dietary limitations we've discovered so far will mean some significant changes to our original vacation plan.

I'd wanted a true getaway, where we'd have largely unstructured time to lie on the beach with a stack of books, bob around in the ocean, catch some tropical sunsets, feed ourselves on inexpensive local cuisine. We can still do plenty of all this -- but we'll have to be vigilant about what I eat that I haven't personally prepared (don't get me started on the pervasiveness of dairy in commercial foods, but do check out this site if you need guidelines for your own dairy sensitivities). And we'll need to cook some food as backup for moments when we're unable to find something that works at those mom-and-pop restaurants (or roadside stands) whose plate lunches or noodle bowls we were so looking forward to sampling. I guess it's the dream of being totally carefree -- not having to think so hard about what needs to be done ahead of time or what contingencies we ought to anticipate -- that is looking more and more unrealistic, and it makes me sad.

Still, I'm determined to be over this by the time we leave. This trip is meant to celebrate our surviving much, much worse. Like, say, all of 2010; the residual aftermath of an extended thesis year; the accumulated tension from the two-year commute that changed us both indelibly.

So I'm making a plan now, to minimize the mental effort we'll have to put in when we arrive. Grocery stores? Located. Cooking facilities? Secured, through our bed-and-breakfast hosts. Restaurant menus? Downloaded and vetted. Restaurant staff? Where practical, already contacted to ask if they can accommodate my dietary needs.

I hope, hope, hope that it all pays off. We may not get to throw caution to the wind, but at least these preparations will let us use the majority of our time to relax, rather than spend it on pesky logistics ...

Scenes from a graduation, part 4: limits

Hello! As you may have noticed, the writing's slowed down here -- we are in the midst of a heavy rotation of back-to-back visitors. (Our friends and family know the best time to come to Seattle is in summer, when the sun is out.) We're nearly done with B&B duty, though, so please stay tuned for more!

Dinner is easier -- just family. Although this is the first time we've all been in this city together, most of us have visited my sister enough individually to have dined with her at the place she's chosen for this evening, one known for its seafood. We settle in at the table together, laid with heavy silverware and votive candles, as if we've been doing this for a lifetime.

In a way, we almost have. Fine dining -- whether it's while traveling or at my parents' house -- is what my father has come to enjoy, of very little else, in the last fifteen years, so this is what we do with him. He cites his busy hospital schedule as an excuse for his lack of hobbies. I look at Almost Dr. Sis, who'd usually rather be out -- alone or with friends -- than in on free afternoons and evenings, and know my father's limits are more a product of temperament than anything external.

I'm an admitted homebody. And maybe, just maybe, if I'd become a doctor myself, I would be, like my father, too exhausted to do more than eat. That I resemble him in many ways -- habits, aversions, quickness to anger -- has been undeniable all my life, as much as I've been dismayed as I've grown more and more aware of these similarities. On a scale of predictable to spontaneous, we both skew away from the impromptu and, as a result, miss out on the joys of surprise, happenstance, discovery. Or so I believe, when I see the tension in his small, dark eyes, which mirror my own, as a well-laid plan goes astray.

My father is also, more often than not, testy and demanding, intolerant of change or other people's differing opinions. When these tendencies are at their worst, he's able to clear the living room at home just by walking into it, each daughter conveniently finding a reason to disappear, if only because conversation among us is impossible -- too likely to invite a lecture or judgment from him, born of his need to be in control. Left alone, then, he dissolves into the couch cushions, remote in hand and laptop on his knees, lost to their steady stream of I'm not sure what for the rest of the night, save for our evening meal together. Even then, the news blares from across the room. We try to ignore it; he does not.

I see what he misses -- and what I miss -- because of who we are, and the fear that I will become him tightens around me like a straitjacket. It's irrational; I know I have a chance at a different life than he may ever have because I do see, do fear. Still, when I'm feeling frazzled or inflexible, I have to remind myself that I'm not my father's carbon copy, even as I resist and moderate the tendencies we share, perhaps more rigorously than necessary.

For more from this series, please click here.

Scenes from a graduation, part 3: projection

In the auditorium of a local hotel, finally done traveling for the day, I slip into a cushy ergonomic chair that rotates. This isn't theater seating; it's conference hall seating. An enormous projection screen dominates the front wall, and the School of Medicine's glossy logo has been carefully applied to the wooden podium beneath it (removable decals, I'm guessing). Individual ethernet jacks and power outlets, built into the console table stretching across each row, make me feel like I ought to fire up my laptop to take notes. But we -- Troubadour Mom and Dad, my youngest sister and I -- pull out cameras instead.

Of course, we're not here for a lecture. This gathering of parents, siblings, children, other relatives, and friends is like Class Day from our undergraduate commencement festivities, a smaller celebration before the next day's all-graduate ceremonies with the lawyers, the engineers, the MBAs, and so forth. Tonight, a class-chosen faculty speaker will bestow light words of wisdom, a classmate will offer humorous reflections on these last few years of training, there will be a few awards, and then we'll all disperse for heavy hors d'oeuvres. My sisters and I share the same alma mater; I wonder if they also feel a certain déjà vu as we wait for the proceedings to begin. But maybe the conference room setting is too different to them. Class Day, so many years ago, was an outdoor folding-chair affair that, in Almost Dr. Sis's case, took place in a downpour.

I have to laugh a little at myself, always seeking the structure of things, the bones of each new experience. Is it just my way of handling the unfamiliar? Perhaps -- the parallels underneath, analogous armatures, ground me. But it is also a way of remembering, better to secure the details. For our family, there will be no other sister who passes through this medical program or any other. One chance, then, to enjoy these moments for what they are.

The soon-to-be graduates process in, the men in suits, most of the women in dresses. Academic regalia is reserved for the next day. I have not yet seen Almost Dr. Sis since arriving -- does she see us? No time for her to look up, but we follow her with both eyes and camera lenses.

I don't snap any shots, though. The pictures I might get would be blurry, I realize -- the camera on my phone isn't the best for subjects in motion -- and I'm happier without the filter of a viewfinder limiting what I can see. I lean forward, watching my sister in a soft white frock, glossy like meringue, cross into her assigned row.

It turns out that she is in charge of presenting the class gift this evening. As she steps toward the podium, the screen behind her suddenly lights up -- the audiovisual crew working this event has zoomed in, and my sister's head, now ten feet tall, smiles back at us in startling digital glory.

And I can't focus on her, the small woman in the flesh at the microphone. Her slight movements -- a nod, a turn, a tilt of the chin -- become giant ones on the screen. I'm reminded for a moment of Dorothy's audience with the Wizard of Oz. Of course, my sister and her video image are identical, unlike the thundering puppet head and its master, but the projection is still a bit disturbing. So dramatically magnified, it draws the eye away from the real person below.

But isn't that the point of it? I think. To help us see better, to allow us an enhanced point of view?

Maybe. I feel like I'm losing something, though, if I ignore the woman standing right in front of me in favor of the bobbing on-screen head. I can't watch both. I try to anyway.

*

The hors d'oeuvres at the reception are, indeed, heavy. Fortunately, to save me from eating too much, there are scores of my sister's friends to be introduced to. Some I recognize from my last visit a little over a year ago. Others are mentors I've heard of only by name.

There is one woman whose face gives me a double-take. The wire-frame glasses, the slightly upturned nose, the sandy curls, front teeth that peek out below a thin upper lip with a bit of mustache, and that raspy voice with a New York accent -- she is the doppelganger of a professor who has sat on my thesis committee for two years. The woman at Little U. is the sort of person who invited my research methods class, which she also taught, over to her house for potluck on the last night of the semester, just before I moved back to Seattle.

The woman at this reception supervises a group of medical students who travel each summer to run a clinic in South America. I realize my sister introduced me to her on my last visit, at a coffee-shop planning pow-wow for one of those trips. The woman doesn't remember me -- and I don't expect her to -- but the memory of her warm hug from that first meeting comes back as I greet her now. She is effusive, pouring forth compliments about my sister, this class, how special they are to her. It's impossible for me not to remember my own professor's words from potluck night, the same sort of praise overflowing from her in uncannily similar tones.

I'm not looking for these parallels in this moment; they've somehow found me. But for once they aren't grounding. In fact, I realize, I wish not to see what I see this time because it's made me aware of the other comparisons I can't help making -- between the path I chose, to write, and the path I rejected, to become a doctor myself. At one point, that was what I truly believed I wanted to do.

The need to be present for this rite of passage, then, the importance of getting here. You wanted to see what could have been, a voice whispers in my ear, and I recoil.

Don't, I hiss back silently, guiltily. This isn't about you. I glance around the circle my family has made around my sister and the woman who continues to effervesce. Good -- they haven't noticed the extra head I've suddenly grown, or the conversation I'm having with it.

For more from this series, please click here.

Scenes from a graduation, part 2: compromises

To my relief, the electronic monitors at O'Hare have no abnormalities to report. There's just enough time to grab a salad from one of the vendors on the walk between Terminals H and G, call D to let him know all is well, and fall into line at my connecting gate.

I am, short of my footwear, dressed for the evening reception we'll be heading to directly from the airport -- no time to change -- so I'm careful as I poke my fork into the chicken and greens in my lap, wary of wayward dressing drips. Though I would have preferred one of my favorite dresses, a soft silk whose pattern reminds me of thin washes of gray ink with occasional streaks of butter-yellow watercolor, I've opted for darker wool slacks and a pink paisley blouse. Still pretty, but slightly less feminine -- at least, as it feels to me. But I guess that's the point: in pants, I can stride, even run if I have to, without having to worry that my skirt has rotated or hiked itself into unladylike territory.

As I eat, I make note of the things I have to do when I land: call family, find bathroom, apply makeup, change sneakers to heels, unpack purse from luggage, transfer wallet and phone. The makeup and purse are already within easy reach toward the top of the items in my backpack, the shoes at one end of my suitcase. The heels are low in case I have a lot of walking to do with the heavy bags. I am, if nothing else, extremely practical.

I know, though, that my mother and sisters will all be in dresses tonight, that this will bother me even though I resist the feeling adamantly. This -- blouse, slacks -- is what is comfortable for me on this 2,500-mile travel day, and yet, in their company, it will leave me not ill at ease but something like it. As if my lack of willingness to do as they would -- just wear the dress -- is indicative of some personal deficit in the quality all Troubadour women ought to have, a tolerance for inconvenience in the name of feeling our outward best.

I picture the gritty airport bathroom stalls at my final destination, the acrobatics of changing in that narrow space with luggage to boot, and I know I will feel anything but my best -- inside or out -- after attempting a transformation there. I'll be meeting my sister's doctor colleagues and doctor professors, whom I'm mildly intimidated by, at this evening's reception, and I'd prefer not to be fighting a case of the cranks after playing public restroom Twister. So, gaping toilet? Questionably sanitary walls on which to hang so many dry-clean-only garments? Given my choices, I'd rather feel the needling sadness of being conflicted over how I look, sadness that I can't just be confident in this fairly inconsequential decision, rather than feeling certain frustration with trying to be more than I'm able. Just for today, anyway.

For more from this series, please click here.

Scenes from a graduation, part 1: getting there

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling my whirlwind second half of May -- there was too much to put in a single post, and the trip generated much for me to think about, so here's the compromise: a story in parts. For the entire series, please click here.

My suitcase gapes at me from the bedroom floor and I wonder if the zipper will close. Nine days of clothing for three different cities with three different climates and three different kinds of celebration -- this is what I have to pack within the confines of a single carry-on.

My first stop on this trip is Almost Dr. Sis's graduation from medical school, which promises to be cold and rainy. Very rainy. Here in Seattle, we're used to mist and drizzle, but in the Midwestern town where she's lived for half a decade now, there are thunderheads gathering and a long sweep of heavy gray downpour following behind.

On this Friday afternoon, I've just tucked a pair of wool slacks into place -- it promises to reach the mid-40s in the evening, though we're in the latter half of spring -- when the phone rings. It's my mother. "Our connecting flight was canceled and we're driving from Chicago," she says, with irritation. "Can you look up directions for us?"

I can hear my father at the wheel in the background naming interstates. "Do I want 290? 294? Ask her which one, which way -- " His agitation rises with what I'm guessing is each passing road sign. They are on the arteries that skirt O'Hare, circling blindly.

My mother tries to address my father's question before I've even had a chance to grab my laptop from the bed. He doesn't trust her answer; they bicker. I fumble at the keyboard, calling up maps, the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand on end. The memory of previous car trips from childhood: my mother misreading directions, their ensuing fights, my sister and me shrinking small and silent in the back seat with our younger sister, still a baby, between us. My hands work faster now as their voices escalate.

"Here," I say. They're too busy arguing to notice. "Mom. Mom." No answer. In my own home, two thousand miles away, their presence is suddenly too loud, too close. "WILL YOU BOTH SHUT UP ALREADY?"

Silence.

I wince, expecting even now, as an adult, a sharp reprimand from my father for my tone of voice, but maybe only my mother has heard me clearly -- she is the one holding the phone. I plunge ahead before either of them can say anything, offering exit numbers and mileage estimates in lieu of an apology. "It's about seven hours," I note.

"We'll make it in less time," my mother assures me. "You know how Dad drives. By the way, he wants to know which flight you're on tomorrow."

I suppress a sigh, knowing my father is worried that I'll end up in the same predicament -- except with the graduation ceremonies scheduled for Sunday morning, I'll have much less of a window to get from Chicago to my final destination. It matters. My father, a doctor himself, will be the one to place the doctoral hood on my sister, a moment that, to me, feels somehow essential to witness in person, though there will be professional photographers and videographers to capture it all. And I wonder, suddenly face to face with that truth, why it should be so. Of course I am proud of her. But it is more than just being present to let my sister know, more than sitting in the same room with her for this long-anticipated, hard-won induction into the professional circle my father has been a part of for many decades. What is it? I ask myself. And -- with even more curiosity, as I suspect it is for different reasons -- what is it that makes my presence so important to him?

There isn't time in this afternoon to muse, only to finish packing. "Can she take the red-eye tonight?" I hear my father ask.

"No, but I'll look into bus options for tomorrow afternoon, just in case," I promise.

*

On the jet bridge the next morning, I check my seat assignment: 10A, on a window. When I can, I pick seats with a view; it helps with the tendency toward motion sickness both my sister and I have inherited from my father.

As I step into my row, however, I'm greeted by a solid wall. No porthole, not even half of one like some seats get when they happen to fall between windows. Just a beige expanse of siding. I peer at 10F on the opposite side of the aisle; the oval pane there throws light back at me, ordinary as can be.

I feel, not surprisingly, closed in against this blank barricade. I check the status of my next flight on my phone; still on time. But this flight, the captain suddenly tells us over the intercom, will be delayed. Chicago's still having weather.

D has my flight information and instructions to be near his phone around the time I'm supposed to land at O'Hare, in case he has to make a quick bus ticket purchase for me online. Will I be able to make my connection? Will there be a connection to make? I turn my frown to the wall to my left. I can't see what's on the other side, can't see what's to come.

*

It is the first flight I'm taking from Seattle after finishing my thesis, and for a moment, when we finally leave the runway, I'm a little giddy. When the flight attendant announces that we may now use approved electronic devices, I will not need to wrestle my laptop from my backpack and attempt to write. The goal I've been working toward for four years is all but done; only Little U.'s approval of the document -- formatting compliance, verification of my committee's signatures endorsing the final submission -- is pending. Perhaps by Monday, I tell myself, the day my sisters and I will fly to Texas to spend the middle of the week at our parents' home.

But as I speed toward the thunderheads in Chicago, without a view and without the deadlines I've been so used to, I'm forced to sit with my new lack of purpose. It's only transient, I know. Still, I envy, just a little, my sister's waiting future. A residency at a prestigious hospital in Boston is the next step for her. What the experience will hold is certainly unknown, but it's better defined than the summer I have before me. The plans for whatever I choose to do next with my life still wait to be constructed.

The plane banks as the captain adjusts our trajectory. I turn automatically to the window I don't have and feel my stomach protest. A quick glance to the right, to the view I can steal from 10F. It's limited, but it's better than nothing.