Good news! It’s been a year now since I last got pregnant, not that that worked out, and I think I may actually finally be mildly interested in getting pregnant again! After the miscarriage I was stunned, then overwhelmed with the move, then apathetic and frankly too busy at the beach to care, then in a bit of denial, and now a little ready.

Not that it matters, since I won’t. I mean, hello, we’re in the middle of an international move. Sweden’s national health plan also won’t cover your pregnancy if it starts before you get enrolled. And just a few months after getting there I’d like to start an intensive year-long course in Swedish, after which I’ll need to go through the teaching (re)certification process. And then there’s the renovations we want to do. And passing the Swedish driving exam. Plus learning how to drive manual. That last one’s like a full-time job. Not really a good time to see about creating new life to care for.

But Little Girl’s three-and-a-half already. And let’s see, we wait another year-and-a-half or so to try, I get pregnant in a reasonable time-frame, I actually stay pregnant and don’t have to start over, then the baby’s born…I don’t know, that’s a lot of math, but that’s a really long time from now! Little girl’s car seat will totally have expired by then. I don’t want to buy a new one! I don’t think you realize how expensive that thing was.

And I’m starting to like babies a little bit (blame our one friend here; she has a two-week-old that never cries! It just gurgles and grabs your finger! Aww!). I’ve looked at old videos of Little Girl, too. She was so cute! If you leave breastfeeding out of it, maybe babies aren’t so bad! They can’t run away when you want to cuddle them!

Even if I decided not to do such a hardcore Swedish language program, which is my main mental obstacle to getting pregnant in the next year-and-a-half, Husband isn’t anxious to have babies. He wasn’t with Little Girl, either–it wasn’t an unbearable need for him like it was for me–though of course she’s the absolute center of his life now. Her fleeting preschool whim is his command. I’m not worried about that. He’d get on board.

But there are a lot of potential pitfalls here. The isolation of a new baby (not that I had that with Little Girl, but I have no idea about Sweden) wouldn’t be a good combo with a new country with a foreign language. Hello, postpartum depression! And Husband is having a hard time finding a job there (he’s been looking) that doesn’t require a lot of travel. Can you imagine–winter dark and cold, preschooler with cabin fever, no friends, stupid incomprehensible language, can’t drive, half-finished kitchen, bathroom with no bathing apparatus, all alone in the countryside, fussy newborn who fears and loathes my breasts? Holy shit.

That’s the worst-cast scenario. Maybe things could go differently. It’ll be a while before it makes any sense to roll the dice on this one, anyway. But it feels a little healing to want to hold a baby, even if I still have to hand it back immediately if it starts to even look like it might want to fuss.

2009 has been rather dramatically unpleasant for us. I even kept a list of reasons why:

high-risk and expensive pregnancy
extended and expensive miscarriage
weird and expensive horseback-riding situation
moved
moved really quickly
got rid of most possessions
left friends
left good teaching job
Husband traveling all the damn time to Europe
Husband commuting five hours every week
Husband work stress
my work stress
realtor problems
lost lots of money selling house
cat Tang died
Husband car accident
moving to Sweden stress and worry
roofing scam
lemon dishwasher
driveway problems
lost my glasses
constant construction/yardwork etc. noise in neighborhood
beach house living weirdness with mom
chronic arthritis pain
grandmother’s Alzheimer’s decline
granddaddy’s strokes and decline
money continually going away
two speeding tickets
broken washing machine, useless dryer

Nothing on here about Little Girl, though. So that’s good. On to 2010! It has its own massive set of risk factors, but I guess it might be okay.

Little Girl received that dress, size 18 months, as a hand-me-down at birth and I’d never found occasion for her to wear it. My mother keeps her in a constant supply of fancy clothes (they may secretly be a campaign for us to go to church; it must be working as we are going to the Christmas Eve service for the exclusive purpose of showing off the red velvet holiday dress my mom got Little Girl). Then I hit upon my plan, brilliant but frustrating (aren’t they all?) of requiring us all to wear “ocean tones.” The bottom part of my outfit was not successful so that’s why we’re cropped at the waist. We didn’t get one photo where we all looked our most attractive, alert, and cheerful, but since I’m the one who does all the work relating to Christmas cards, I picked the one in which I looked best. That’s the rule. I also get to claim all the change I come across when doing laundry.

By pushing my craftiness to the limit I was able to produce a dress and crown for Little Girl to wear to celebrate the Swedish Christmas holiday of Luciadagen, or Santa Lucia Day. The particulars and wherefores of this custom are not especially clear to me, frankly due to a lack of interest on my part, but I understand that in Sweden the oldest girl of each family, on December 13th, wakes up the household at some godawful hour of the morning wearing a white dress with a red sash and a crown of greenery on her head lit with candles and carrying a tray of coffee and special buns called lussekatter. I also believe there’s some special song involved.

Since we’ll be attending an extended family get-together on that date (my family, obviously, since we’re in the US) I decided to torture myself by arranging for Little Girl to do this herself–complete with hand-made accouterments. But in the afternoon, and without the fire on her head, and with the buns in a bag and not on a tray, plus no mysterious song. Making the dress was such a trial (the crown was actually kind of fun) I deliberately measured it too large so as to save me from having to sew another one for a few years.

To make this event extra-stressful, I waited to inform Husband, who is sick and a big baby about it, of his requirement to make the complex saffron-infused, cat-tail shaped buns until this evening. I’m not sure how they’ll turn out, but the nice thing about putting on this performance for neophytes is that they certainly won’t have grounds for complaints as to the authenticity of the affair or the texture of the buns. Maybe rock-hard is just how they like to eat things in Sweden. Who would know?

We’ve had a roof leak much of the time we’ve been here. (It took me a while to figure it out; I just kept thinking Little Girl had had an accident, since the leak is in her bathroom). We’ve had it fixed. It still leaked. We had the roofers out again. It’s still leaking. Apparently the roofers suck. And I can’t get them back out here to work on our roof–they keep lying to me and blowing me off. (I feel like the person who complains that the food is bad, and the portions small. But I really want the same company to fix it because, you know, I already paid them to do so. Surely they know how and are just being lazy).

My keyboard has started randomly, intermittently, of its own volition, typing series of Ts. I have to reboot to get it to stop. It’s so frustrating. And kind of freaky.

Next week I have to go take care of my grandparents while my mother has a little vacation. I’m happy to help, but I’m not actually able to do so. I can’t get them to take their meds. I can’t get my grandmother to use her walker. She won’t let me change her (I know, change!) or dress her. My grandfather won’t let me cook for them. And Little Girl always gets into trouble for doing regular little-kid stuff. But if it makes my mom feel better, I’ll go. But it’ll suck. Mostly I don’t think my grandmother knows me anymore, and when she does, she just gets pissed I’m living at the beach house, and keeps asking me when we’re leaving. That or she, in her forgetting-how-to-walk Alzheimer’s way, will keep fleeing whatever room Little Girl and I are in, confused by us, I guess. And they’re both so complainy and sad. But we’ll go.

I have too much work and I can’t get it done and it’s performance review time so I can’t say no to tasks and I keep volunteering to do shit I don’t have the time or interest to do and it’s really stressing me out.

As per my mother’s request, we are getting a new driveway here. After much prep, the concrete should be poured tomorrow. I am not altogether thrilled with how it is turning out, though I think it’ll be fine. The problem is that it’s all on me since I’m the only one here. I had to get bids, I had to pick one, I had to get approval from the architectural review board, I had to work on the plans, I had to answer all the questions (“Where do you want the 4-inch sleeve?” Uhhhh…), I have to live through the work. Sometimes I really wish Husband were around more. For the roof situation, too. Partners are useful.

As a sub-topic to that, I am super-excited about the landscaping opportunities the new driveway (which is in a different place from the old one) will provide, but then we only have a few months more here and they’re mostly in winter so it’s sort of like the gardening version of blue balls–all anticipation and work and no payoff. And that’s no fun.

Our one friend here is about to have a baby and so we’ll be down to no friends at all, since obviously she’ll be in the newborn hole for at least six months.

I’ve been trying to eat really, really well, and tonight I was compelled to purchase donuts. I ate two. (Little Girl had one and a half). They weren’t even good. Now I’m irritated with myself.

Let’s see. There’s more, but they’re in the vein of “I have to move to a beautiful country with a high standard of living and omigod peanut butter is expensive there!” and “My toe hurts” so I’ll just stop.

We’ve been here over half a year and only made one mother/daughter friend combo. Our social life is a far cry from what we had before, and sometimes, like right now, that makes me sad. I’m pretty sociable, and Little Girl is, too. I’ve said it before: I miss our old friends, and I miss having friends in general. I can get by okay by talking to my friends on the phone, but it’s just not the same as getting together with another parent and his/her kids for playdates, park trips, picnics–the assorted pleasant activities you do to entertain small children and oneself.

It’s not that we haven’t met people. It’s not that I haven’t made an effort. Mostly I think it’s that we’re here temporarily, and when people find that out, they don’t want to make an effort to get to know us.

Which I get. Which is why I only just last week told our one friend that we’re moving to Sweden. We’ve been getting together frequently for months (they had just moved here, too, so she was just as eager to swap phone numbers as I was when we met at storytime at the library), but I just never brought it up, and since the move is one of the big things going on with me, that means we talked a lot about her instead, which made her like us even more. You know how everybody likes to talk about themselves.

When I finally did inform her we were “thinking” about moving to Sweden, it was calculated. We’re firmly friends now. She’s heard about the difficulties we’ve had living in a family house. She knows Husband’s unhappy with commuting five hours each way every few days and wanted a new job. She knows he has a big family. It sort of made sense in the narrative of our lives I’ve disclosed to her, even if the idea of the move as a new theory is false. She wasn’t surprised to hear it. They’re even thinking of not staying here permanently themselves. Maybe she was hedging the same way I was.

All this time I was uncomfortable with keeping our plans from her, for not being authentic, but I wanted Little Girl and I to have some buddies even more. We needed them. As it happens, we just met a new mother/daughter pair that could potentially work out great, too, but I’m not sure I even have the energy to try to strike something up, though we did exchange numbers. I really liked the mom, which makes me even more discouraged: why make friends if you just have to leave them, anyway? We don’t have much longer here. Maybe I’ll should save up my friend-making efforts for Sweden, where it will be even more difficult to connect, for so many different reasons. But is that any way to live? Putting off happiness for convenience’s sake?

Husband and I both work from home. He’s physically in the office three days a week, and I am physically in the classroom three hours a week, but for the remainder of the time for him, and about 20 hours a week for me, we’re laboring over our laptops at home. Of course, he works during normal business hours, while Little Girl and I go to storytime and put away the laundry and whatnot, and I generally toil away from bedtime (8 PM) until, occasionally, the early morning.

That totally sucks, by the way. Since Little Girl doesn’t nap, that means I don’t get that much-vaunted “break” during the day, and then I don’t really have any free time at night, because even when I cut myself some slack on my research job, I really ought to be preparing for my class, the curriculum for which is entirely new and up to me. I am often pretty tired, too.

Work is even busier for me right now (both jobs) as I’ve been asked to create and present an in-service to the other instructors on, basically, how to be as totally awesome an ESL instructor as I am. This comes as a result of my recent teaching observation, and is of course wonderful and flattering, but is a whole extra bunch of work and stressful to boot.

And things with my research job are basically fine, but right now there’s a joke about my doing “participatory research” into the use of a newly-popular mind-altering substance among the VPs (all I said was maybe we should add it to our list of substances youths abuse if it’s common enough even I’ve heard of it!), and plus I’m having to hammer out this contract with this really problematic vendor we have to use for stupid political reasons, and I also realized that I really ought to be higher up on the totem pole, job title- and compensation-wise, so I’m gearing up for my arguments on these points in my upcoming performance review.

So with all this my work is spilling into my days, which equals Little Girl in front of the television, because no other method of keeping her quiet during conference calls or careful parsing of phrases in important emails works as well. And that’s the exact opposite of how I want work to fit into my life. I want it to be this thing I do she knows nothing about, that affects her in no way, while nevertheless affording me monetary and self-esteem gains as well as an increased feeling of security and progress and, well, fulfillment in my professional and intellectual lives. I want to be an attentive full-time mother but also something of a career woman. Keep dreaming, Antropóloga.

1 vague geocaching intent
0 geocaching experience
0 geocaching plan
1 fussy three-year-old
2 lazy dogs
0 strollers
0 containers of water
0 snacks
0 maps
and…
1 faulty motherfucking GPS device

This post writes itself, right? You can probably even infer the huge fight in the middle of nowhere after wandering around for two hours and arriving absolutely nowhere.

There’s a happy ending: Husband can run really fast, so he finally went and got the car so we didn’t have to drag ourselves all the way back, and then later we used his cell phone, which has GPS that actually functions, to, uh, drive to the spot, two miles away.

Little Girl today noticed our dog, Loki’s, penis. This has only served to heighten her recent desire to discuss genitalia and who has what. And why. She’s in that phase where she wants to know the whys and wherefores of everything.

–Loki has a penis, why?
–He’s a boy. Just like Daddy!
–He’s a boy, why?
–Some people are boys and some are girls. Girls have vulvas and boys have penises.
–Why some people are boys and some people are girls?
–Because we need some to be girls and some to be boys.
–Why we need that?
Uh…

And so forth. This usually continues until I use some phrase with which she is unfamiliar, like “Because that’s the social norm!” (that was about leg shaving) and she has to stop and think about it for a minute. I do try to give her real, comprehensible answers as much as I can, and encourage her inquisitiveness, but it isn’t always easy.

At any rate today’s main topic was about everyone’s equipment. She’s been getting the various elements and purposes of her own personal anatomy straight in her head, and her interest extends to those around her.

–I need to see Loki’s penis some more. Where he put it?
–Well, Loki likes to keep that private. So we don’t look at it a lot. It’s just for him. Just like your vulva is just for you. It’s private.
–It’s private, why?

She sees her father and me naked a fair amount; typically after we swim in the ocean, or at any rate wear our bathing suits at the beach (which, yes, the week before Halloween we were able to do, despite my recent dithering about The End of Summer for All Eternity), we all shower together. She has no interest in her father’s personal area except insofar as it relates to his getting to stand to pee, which she considers the height of awesomeness, and is something she frequently mimics. “I Little Daddy! I pee pee standing up!”

And tonight was her pièce de résistance. She managed to straddle her little potty, facing the wall, and really and truly pee standing up like daddy. I’ve never seen such joy. We were very proud. What a talented and curious little girl!

Three years in and I’m as yet unable to refer to Little Girl as my daughter. I can say, “my kid,” “my little girl,” or her name, but absolutely not “my daughter.” I am somewhat taken aback when other people call her my daughter. Of course she is, but…do they have to use that word?

And in what I think is the same vein, it weirds me out if someone refers to me as a woman. Sure, I’m female, but “lady” or “[Little Girl's name]’s mommy” or [Husband's name]’s wife” or my name are all much less discomfiting. Actually the wife thing may be a little alarming, too. Can I just be me?

Normally with a post like this I’d do some self-analysis and come to some conclusions, but really I can’t quite figure out why I have aversions to these perfectly common, perfectly accurate terms. And it’s not really a problem, just a quirk. I don’t, like, correct people who use them. But I wonder. Are the words perhaps too generic for me? Too grown-up? Threatening in some way? Do they refer to someone else in my head? Am I having identity problems? Am I a goofball?

It makes sense, of course. We’ve had a hard year. Husband’s had lots of work worries; I got pregnant to mixed feelings; we realized we had to move out of our neighborhood, newly plagued by crime; I had a lengthy, expensive, painful miscarriage; we sold/gave away many of our belongings and had the rest packed away; we moved; we sold our house and lost a shitload of money; we’re in limbo until the next move; Husband is gone more than half the time for work.

So I’m not surprised that Husband and I are, let’s say, less than delighted with each other these days. We’re having a hard time getting along, being friends, liking each other. Usually my prescription for this kind of situation is more sex, but like I said, he’s gone a lot, and the master bed here in the beach house has this weird bed frame where the headboard is a shelf with all these knick knacks on it and, well, it just makes things ungodly loud. Plus I am all freaked out about getting pregnant again which is also an enthusiasm-damper.

I’m sure any couple in this situation would be testy. I hope once we’re settled in Sweden–and perhaps after his parents, with whom we’ll be living for a while, move out–we’ll get back into some normal relationship mode, that’s not only switched on the four days of the week, max, we see each other. We’ll feel like a team instead of the combatants we sometimes find ourselves these days. And it’s not all bad, now. Today we’re buddies.

It’s just that sometimes, horrifyingly, I’m content to see him leave, and I don’t miss him when he’s gone.

I received some important mail today. My passport came back from the Swedish embassy and in it is a VERY fancy sticker, all in Swedish. I had no idea what it said so I googled some of the bigger words and…it looks like my Swedish residency permit, a permanent one, has arrived! This is really fast, people. It’s supposed to take half a year to ten months, and it took just two.

I’m not gonna lie: I thought about, uh, not mentioning it to Husband right away. Because now it’s here, we have no major obstacles to moving.

Sure, there are the unbelievably complicated requirements for our pets to complete, rules I’ve studied for hours and still don’t quite understand, though I have determined that we need to take our pets to a special vet, three hours away, for a special microchipping, and then have special bloodwork samples sent to a special lab in Kansas, and that’s only the beginning. And Husband is having trouble finding jobs to apply to, not so much because they’re in short supply, but because all the ones in his field require lots of travel, something we’d all rather he’d avoid, having had our fill of it: it’s not good for Little Girl and it’s not good for our relationship. (And excuse me if I don’t feel like moving to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language and then having Husband traipse freely around Europe and I have to figure everything out all by myself). And we were hoping to go after the bathroom renovations were finished there, and to arrive not too long before our stuff, which will take six weeks to ship.

But basically the move could, potentially, be only a matter of weeks away. We won’t do it that soon–for one thing, I have a teaching contract through very early December to complete–but it’ll probably be earlier than I’d imagined, and during the middle of winter. As with selling the house, though I’d purposefully and mindfully set all this in motion, the reality of it is freaking me out a bit. I’m moving to Sweden, you guys! Ack!

I have a cold. It sucks. I’ve been in bed a lot. And I’ve realized that much of the time when sleeping my hand is up by my mouth. Specifically, my thumb is near my lips. I’m guessing this might be a comfort holdover from back when I sucked my thumb before my grandparents put quinine on it and got me to stop. I sucked my thumb last night to see if it still had the magical happy-making powers for me it has for Little Girl (though we’ve gotten her to do it a bit less all-consumingly often), and the experiment was distracting rather than soothing. Anyway, back to bed. I’m just happy I had the good sense to get sick on the weekend when Husband is here to keep Little Girl busy so I can stay in bed and read! When that’s the case, illness is almost like a vacation.

We’ve come to visit my hometown for a few days. I like to try to visit pretty regularly–it’s only a few hours away–and plus I was getting pretty lonely with Husband gone for basically a month straight. And since soon enough I’ll be very far from my family, and my grandparents are in poor health, I try to see them since I can.

But while I know my mom likes us to come, and my stepfather seems to, despite the fact that this time I brought every last one of our pets (though we’re down from a high of seven to merely three), and my grandfather does as well, the visits are not actually that enjoyable for my grandmother.

Her Alzheimer’s advances apace, and she’s now wheelchair-bound when she leaves the house (for restaurants and doctors’ visits) as she can barely walk, and she’s starting to mix up fantasy and reality. Recently when watching an old Western (the TV is always, always on there), my grandmother began to weep because she thought that my grandfather had had a baby with an Indian princess in the film. I’ve sat with her while she thumbed fumblingly through a magazine which she started to see as an old scrapbook, and she kept trying to connect the images–ads featuring bananas, pictures of people riding bikes–with events from her past. And the fact was that she had turned to that magazine rather than talk to me, sitting right there, ready to visit with her, since holding a conversation can just be too taxing for her.

And sweet-faced Little Girl is pretty overwhelming. My grandmother will get peevish about some little, innocently little kid thing she is doing–pretending her fork is an airplane, examining a small, pre-existing rip in her placemat–and scold her and try to wrestle the item away from her. Little Girl requires rationalizations for these kind of interventions, and doesn’t understand why she’s getting on her case. She’s learning that she just has to do whatever my grandmother says when she’s worked up, even if it doesn’t seem fair or reasonable. My grandmother simply can’t be reasonable anymore, after all. When they enjoy each other, it’s brief and simple, as when they’re playing with stuffed animals, or clapping along to the fight song from the state university’s football team as sung by an animated plush bulldog, or Little Girl climbs up on her knees for a hug. So we keep visiting, looking for those moments.

Not to mention that being at my mom’s means I don’t have to come up with any meals.

You know sometimes, you read a post, and the comments are all, “you brought me to tears, that was so ___” and I always figured that for hyperbole, maybe a figure of speech. But then I read something about how women on average spend 2.5 hours a week crying, and wondered. Is crying really that common? I was pretty hysterical when I realized my cat, Tang, who just died, was so sick, and I had cried a bit (maybe about ten minutes?) the night before the surgery for my miscarriage.

In fact, I can tell you about every time I’ve cried at least since getting married: when my rabbit was killed; a bunch of times during all the infertility stuff; the newborn phase, mostly for breastfeeding reasons; and weaning. That’s it. Evidently, compared to most people, that’s not a lot.

I understand each tear contains the hormones related to the emotional upset, and shedding them releases your emotional burden (I’m glad this is a blog and I don’t have to find a citation for this assertion–but I read it somewhere respectable enough). It’s possible I just don’t get as emotional about things as others, but more likely that I’m just not showing it. I’ve had enough therapy to realize that it all stems from my problems with my mother. With her, my way to assert myself was nonchalance. Whatever, mom, it doesn’t matter what you say. I was all about the sangfroid.

Husband can’t stand this about me. When we’re arguing and I’m being condescending about his upsetness instead of being hurt myself, he thinks it means I don’t care about whatever the topic is, or his feelings. That’s not true, but I also can’t let myself show any vulnerability. The way I was raised, showing your feelings was the quickest way to get them pummeled further. So now, for the most part, I do sadness as anger, and injured feelings as brittleness.

I’m trying to teach Little Girl it’s okay to be sad, but I know actions speak louder than words. Maybe her father–who is never afraid to show his feelings–will be her guide there.