“I’ll have that for you right away” and other dumb stuff I say

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.

Review

The last few weeks have had me reviewing translated reports of research findings. For work, obviously; it would be a horrible hobby. Coincidentally, the last few weeks have totally sucked.

I’m comparing hundreds of pages of text that basically go like this, but I have to read them in English and Spanish:

Slightly more [redacted]-ineligible youth experience [bad things] due to [other bad things] (47.0%) than their [redacted]-receiving counterparts (40.0%), even though the difference in [how much of the bad thing] was not statistically significant (÷2 = 2.45, df = 1, n = 1,094, p > .05).

And I can’t skim, either, I have to make sure it’s exactly perfect in all APA format and numerical particulars, for both language formats, and also keep track of certain vocabulary and phrases we need to be consistent, and other really boring things. The project is ultimately related to providing needed services for physically and mentally ill children, but it’s hard to feel buoyed by helpfulness when I’m mired in how many spaces are after each period and how exactly did we decide to translate the 18-word name of the program again?

My favorite part is that no one is ever likely to read these documents. Even if they tried, readers would find them so boring and repetitive they’d give right on up pretty quickly. I bitterly envy all who have the option of not reading this stuff.

Other people’s children

In my ESL class I’ve got a handful of au pairs from Europe and Latin America. I have to keep myself from pestering them with questions about their jobs because when they do share tidbits about lives with their host families it is beyond interesting to me–in fact, it’s downright titillating. It’s like some real-life Nanny Diaries, complete with distant, wealthy, indulgent parents (who have vacation homes just one hour from their regular homes!) with cross-cultural highlights and domestic service worker abuse. Plus it’s absolutely surreal when we can compare notes about the weird children’s librarian in the area who does storytime (since he just transferred from the library they go to to the one we do).

Tonight they were venting about how hard it is to have to work when they’re sick. What pricked my ears is that what they were calling work–taking care of little kids–is what I do for, well, definitely not work; actually, for me, my basically full-time mothering is pretty fun, and I certainly don’t get paid. It’s neither entertainment nor occupation. It’s just my life. It’s my default. And since it’s all under my control, if I’m sick, I can let Little Girl watch her favorite video, a Swedish thing about a cow and a crow that I imagine she would be happy to watch all her waking hours, for indeed all those waking hours, if I feel like it. I make a million little decisions all on my own every day about how to raise my little girl, and it’s all up to me.

But not for the au pairs. The parents, their employers, have decided, say, the kids can only 30 minutes a day, and since these women (really they’re all in their late teens, so I’m gonna have to change that to girls) have all the responsibilities of mothering and none of the agency, for often twelve hours a day, they have to work. They can’t have a lazy sick day. They can’t take off, because then who would watch the kids? Certainly the employers are too important to miss work. And the au pairs can’t decide how to discipline the kids. They can’t decide what activities they want to take the kids to. They put the kids to bed, even if the parents are there. And then they’re supposed to shut their caregiving selves off and sit quietly until their rooms until it’s time to make breakfast.

Once upon a time I was a nanny, though I didn’t live there, and I recall acutely the trapped, impotent feeling of waiting for parents late to arrive home from work. It felt so unfair when it turned out they’d just been out shopping, like they were using my time, even if it was compensated, against my will and contrary to our agreement. There were schedules that weren’t mine to follow, norms to uphold that went against my grain (like letting the baby cry herself to sleep). I felt guilty taking the kiddos to do the errands I had to that could only happen during the day, like the DMV. Whenever I looked at my old driver’s license pic I recalled, down out of the frame, that my hands were each gripped by a smaller one.

They had fun that day, playing I Spy in line, but they weren’t my kids. Perhaps their mother would have preferred that precious day of growing up to have been spent some other way. With Little Girl it’s completely automatic, not to say unavoidable, that she goes everywhere with me, and I think it’s good for her to participate in society along with me. But then she’s mine, and I’m her social director, and I love that our lives are entirely enmeshed, and I’m there alongside her taking in her experiences and helping her to understand them. No one else would or could, no matter how long the instruction sheet, replicate that with her. Certainly no one to whom it was just work, something they only have to do, not get to do.

I’ve yet to hear a caring word about their charges from the au pairs, or something that even individualizes the kids they’re with so many hours. The events of their daily lives are so alike to mine and yet their motivation and enjoyment so different, it’s like some skewed mirror that reflects back only a faint and colorless outline of my life with Little Girl. I guess my take-home message really shouldn’t be “non-parental childcare is bad” but rather “these au pairs and/or their situations are kind of shitty.” Still, learning how those girls feel about caring for other people’s children makes me so grateful I’m the one caring for mine.

Art for the blind

And…we’re back. Actually, we were back in the wee hours of Friday, and then that day I had a big conference call, and then the start of my new class, the response at enrollment for which was so vast that I’ve been asked to tack on more hours to accommodate the students. And we did so, so much on our trip to Seattle–mountains, beaches, skyscrapers, libraries, fountains, attractions, parks–that it’s a bit overwhelming to recount. Then there’s the special comedic chemistry my father and I create when together, leaving us laughing so hard we’re almost silent, stomachs aching, buckled over, or on all fours, on the sidewalk, concerning Little Girl.

For example: During one morning walk through the neighborhood there was a donation truck for a charity for the blind making a similar route, driven by a gangly, hatted, plaid shorts-wearing guy listening to NPR. Some people had left collections of items out for him to pick up, and we passed one tidy box of electronics with a little hand-lettered sign: BLIND.

I peeked in: They’ve got some good stuff in there.
Dad: You could say you were blind if anyone asked.
Me: And I just walked by, and happened to see these items and the sign?
Dad: Maybe Little Girl is your specially-trained seeing eye toddler.
Me: That I carry? What, does she direct me by flinging her body in one direction or the other, causing subtle shifts in my movement?
Dad: Maybe she communicates with you with American Sign Language.
Me: Right, that makes sense, since I’m blind.
Dad: Look, they’re donating a picture! For the blind to put on their walls and enjoy!

Protected

A few months ago the company I work for was bought by another company and the named changed. Now there’s an acronym in front of the old name. For the life of me I have not been able to keep straight what the new name is. I know I keep saying it wrong in one way or the other, which is awkward on conference calls, and when the IT people recently had to reset my password and they used the company name in it and I was so completely unable to type that password correctly–was it CF or FC??? which one was capitalized???–and clearly too stupid to look it up, I ended up locking myself out of my computer from putting incorrect passwords in so much and I had to contact IT all over again. You can bet they love me over there.

So finally I created this handy mnemonic to help me remember the name of the place that employs me: if you say the acronym like a word, it can kinda sound like “isasyif.” Like “it’s as if.” So now I can remember my damn password if I just chant, “it’s as if this job leave me with no free time.” See? Easy as pie. And next time I update the password, which my company seems to ask me to do ever other time I log in, I’ll just use this handy technique, and create Ih2cmpatgt, or “I hate to change my password all the goddamn time,” which I mutter frequently enough I surely can’t forget it.

Unbalanced

When Husband is abroad for weeks at a time, I frequently get emails like, “Place sucks, everyone is an idiot,” followed by phone talks that consist largely of his venting about his unhappiness about his work. Meanwhile I am torn between sharing what we’re up to with not wanting to make him jealous (e.g. “We went to the playground and then rode the free trolley around and then did some window shopping and then danced to some live music and then fed the turtles under the bridge and then walked on the beach with the dogs, and that was all after 5 PM!).

Everyone he’s surrounded by is really into this macho work-is-everything attitude that’s anathema to Husband. I mean, he’s brilliant and hardworking at what he does, but at the end of the day he wants to put it aside, go home at a reasonable hour, and be with me and Little Girl (if he’s here), or take some pictures, or play on the internet, whatever. But whenever he’s not working at home, and particularly when he and his co-workers are all in Europe, he has to put in 12-hour days and then several more each evening at bars, at restaurants, hanging around with these men, most of whom he not only is tired of seeing all the time but doesn’t even like to begin with. This evening (his time) he had to go out with the big wigs, despite plans he was excited about to photograph an abandoned mine, where they boasted about all the birthdays of their children they’d missed, made fun of the mere 38-hour work weeks of the staff there, and shared wisdom like, “You can always get another wife, but you can’t get a new career.”

Being the main money-maker around here, Husband just has to put up with that crap for now. But I’m not sure what he’s more excited about with regards to relocating: being closer to his family, or having an excuse to quit his job.

The results are in!

Where did you meet your husband?

Aha, well, there is an official answer and a truthful answer. The latter is more interesting of course. Online, but more than that: this was the early days of the chat service ICQ, where you could push a little button and it would raffle through all the tens of thousands of users online at that time, and connect you randomly with one. And I got him. I actually think that’s rather fatefully romantic but people tend to make funny faces when you say you met online, hence the pseudo-fake version.

Do you have a job already lined up in Sweden?

Indeed no. I originally went to grad school for what I went to grad school for under the theory that it would make me employable there, but it turns out I’ll have to do a few more years of schooling to complete their requirements, and then they’d still rather hire Swedes. More importantly, Husband doesn’t have a job there yet, either, but then he also hasn’t really looked. It should be several months before I get my residency permit and there’s no point looking before then. (It’s been suggested I keep my telecommuting research gig when I move, but I understand I’ll have to pay taxes in both countries, and that is just too appalling.)

What’s the funniest thing Little Girl has done recently?

She really likes for me to pretend to be the little girl and for her to be the mommy. So I ask her for something, like “Mommy, can I please have some milk?” and she always grins slyly, shakes her head, and says, “Not right now.” Cheeky.

Have you killed any tourists yet? Have you seen the ones who let their toddler wander off again?

The toddler-losers seem to be enjoying the TV in their rental most of the time, though I did see a boy from there biking around once. I have to remember not to scowl at the tourists when they come creeping by, checking out my neighborhood, dozens of people, from all appearances, crammed into their SUVs. I mean, they’re just trying to have fun, and there’s only so much fun to be had when you are spending all your time with all your blood relations. Plus, they’re on vacation, and I shouldn’t spoil their good times just because I’m having my regular life and am all pissed off about my internet connection problems or whatever.

I’d love to find out what freaks you out (and what you’re looking forward to) about your upcoming move.

I’ve got a long post on the freaking out part in Drafts, but what I’m looking forward to? Seeing what it’s like to be surrounded by family; the intellectual challenge of learning a new language and culture; making the house ours; hiking in the forest; not being in transition anymore, living in someone else’s home.

What’s your dream or passion? (career-wise or otherwise)

Oh man, I don’t know. I do like teaching English to non-native speakers. I feel it’s genuinely helpful to them in a nice, narrow way (as opposed to social work, when I was trying to fix every problem everyone had) and I’m good at it and enjoy it and I’m only slightly bothered by English language hegemony concerns. As for my dream, I’d love to travel a lot, but magically not have to worry about the logistics of it or be in airports.

What will you miss the most about living in the U.S.? What will you miss the least?

I’ll miss knowing how to get things done and being able to sound smart and competent when I speak. I won’t miss the extreme economic disparities and how willfully ignorant so many people can be. I will also miss the fried okra and I will not miss the pickled pigs’ feet in the stores.

Did Husband ever get over the hair debacle? :)

Ha, yes, pretty much, though he refused to let me tell his parents about it. :) His hair grows super-fast so the ponytail is fine now. I actually got a really stupid haircut so, while I made him look like 12-year-old girl, I now look like a 10-year-old skater boy, so I suppose we are even.

What’s your favorite music?

You know, I don’t listen to music a lot. In the car it’s usually books on CD from the library. Though (and this is something I will miss once in Sweden) occasionally it’s very fun to catch a series of songs on the radio you know and sing along, windows down, sun in your eyes. In the move, however, I did run into all these CDs of mp3s I had illegally downloaded back in college and I put them on my laptop, so now I’ll put on different things–80s pop, Caetano Veloso, Moby, Aqua, classical guitar, etc.–and Little Girl and I will dance around wearing my old clubbing clothes (and other, more child-appropriate items) from the dress-up box.

If you had $1 million, what would you do with it?

See if we could maybe live part-time here and part-time in Europe.

What’s your position on Obama’s health care plan?

I don’t understand the plan, though I have not really tried. I do think we need one–I want to live in a society where everyone has access to health care–and wish that experts, and not politicians, could hash out the details.

If you were a shoe what kind would you be?

Shoes are a huge problem for me, given my toe issues, so I have a hard time thinking of shoes without also thinking of pain. A sensible clog or something.

If you could be an expert at one thing what would it be?

Overcoming personal inertia. I am too apt to sit. But something useful to the world at large? I don’t know, quantum physics, so I could invent teleportation. That would be handy. And lucrative!

If your life was a million dollar movie what actress would be cast to play you?

I love Kate Winslet! Pick her!

To lower the tone: George Clooney or Brad Pitt?

George Clooney, only because whenever I think of Brad Pitt I get too distracted with trying to understand and imagine his personal/family life.

Where else apart from Sweden have you been in Europe?

My mom and I spent a summer in Ireland once, and I studied in Spain for a semester and visited Paris once for 36 highly memorable hours. Outside of Europe, I studied in Mexico and lived in China for several years as a small child. But while having traveled a bit makes moving abroad seem more possible, it, unfortunately, has also given me the knowledge that I can get really irritated by foreign ways. I’ll try to put that self-awareness to good use when we move and recognize when I need a dose of Americanity (by phone, video, internet, novel, or stomach) to even things out.

Termination

I was elected the one to fire the realtor, having the most experience in that area. Totally inappropriately, given my nonexistent relevant background, when I worked for a social services provider that contracted with the local Department of Family and Children Services, I did all the hiring and firing, of which there was a lot, as no competent people could or would stay in that job. I left after just five months or so myself.

I remember interviewing people when the electricity and phone had been shut off (due to nonpayment). And still people accepted the job. Right, if we couldn’t pay for the utilities, we’re definitely going to pay your cut, pocket change though it would be. The whole outfit was just ridiculously mismanaged; it operated out of the back of a super-shabby warehouse. The front half was the owner’s husband’s church, some sort of charismatic variety. The couple’s young kids ran around the office all day. The owner kept hiring people from her church who were just miserably unable to do the job, and I kept having to fire them. And too late I realized that the owner’s argument that I, with just a B.A. at the time, could perform psychological and drug/alcohol dependency assessments as I was being “supervised” by her, as she had a Psy.D. (later this turned out to be entirely not the case, when she told me to write her application to grad school), was flawed.

Lots of things were flawed. Like when I couldn’t get the state to care about finding out whether/how a five-year-old girl had herpes. Or when no resources were available for a family whose kids couldn’t attend school due to lice from living in a home with a mother who was a textbook trash hoarder (if I ever feel attached to some object I need to get rid of, I just need to think of that hovel. Shudder.) I remember the first night I was sent into the field to, it turned out, provide therapy to a family with domestic violence/sexual spousal abuse problems—in Spanish. Boy did I come home crying then. And all the sad, sad kids in foster care I shuffled to and fro doctors’ visits, listening to how they felt about their parents’ rights being terminated, and back to the overstuffed foster homes with “mothers” who thought it was funny to slam the door in our faces when we came back, pretending not to know us, not to let the children in.

Compared to all that, firing the histrionic, deceptive realtor–that was easy.

My staff

You may recall my mother insisted, as part of letting us live here, that we employ a housekeeper. I did and do find this insulting, irritating, not to mention unnecessary, given that I am perfectly capable of keeping house and this one isn’t even that big and is relatively easy to maintain, especially as we aren’t allowed to let the dogs in it beyond the kitchen. But I didn’t have a choice and said I would find one.

First I put up a Craigslist ad and got several responses. I had one nice lady come to the house and, though she talked me into paying her nearly twice what I’d posted and didn’t have her own supplies and had scheduling difficulties, I felt so guilty and uncomfortable about the housekeeper thing (too much women’s studies at college?) I hired her anyway. And then thought better of it and told her I had to find someone else. I made interview appointments with two more applicants; one didn’t show, and the next canceled the hour before. Finally I took the recommendation of a neighbor to try her housekeeper, who, like the first lady, asked for 20 dollars an hour. Look, I don’t quite make 20 an hour! (At my research job it’s 19.77 now. I do, or did, make more teaching. Just, you know, FYI). 20 dollars an hour! Christ.

But by this point, it’d been two months here and I still only had a fictional maid when talking to my mother, so I asked her to come today. I was going to have her do things I technically can do but likely will not, like cleaning the window exteriors. And now it looks like she’s not showing up, either. Sheesh. Why is this so difficult? I guess I’d be more pissed if I actually wanted some household help, but I’d at least like people to keep their appointments. *

There’s also a yardman, one my grandparents originally hired. He speaks Gullah, which I am slowly learning to understand, and requires Cokes whenever he comes by. My mother, and now I, pay him really just excessive amounts of money to do very little, as my mother insists I clean up the yard, instructing that “no palm frond should be on the ground more than 24 hours.” And there’s also a handyman, and thank goodness I don’t have to pay him, as he is jovial and talented but OH SO SLOW. I haven’t asked him to come as Husband is up for all that kind of handyman stuff, anyway. (For that matter, he also mowed the lawn.)

In conclusion, good help is hard to find, even when you don’t actually want any help.

* Okay, now she showed up, and I feel compelled the clean the crap out of the rooms she is not in.

Out of work

It’s been years now since my dad was employed as a philosophy professor. But that’s what he is, and what he should be doing. (Really he’d be an excellent guru, and an even better cult leader, if he had the ambition and worked up a good shtick.) He was laid off about five years ago from his last university and though he applies, of his own volition and as part of receiving unemployment, to several jobs a week, it’s been nothing. For about a year and a half he worked in insurance in some paper-shuffling capacity, but he was, a year ago, laid off from that, too.

Every few months a job possibility that really excites him comes up, and it’ll be all he offers for his side of the conversation. He’ll talk about moving logistics, and tell me all about the program, and his hopes are always so high. And it never comes to anything. It pisses me off. What, they only want inexperienced, unintelligent candidates, is that it? There’s no one better than my dad at expounding on hermeneutics. No one! They are missing out! He oozes charisma and erudition. There’s a reason his grad students like to sleep with him. He is a captivating professor.

But I worry his teaching career may be over. He’s too old, he’s now been out of the game too long, his publications are not sexy enough. The possibility of just giving up and calling himself retired and trying to live on that pittance, though, well, I don’t know that his battered self-esteem can take it. He’s used to being master in the classroom, and he’s not ready to admit defeat and call it a day on a career he’d love to continue. Plus, he’d like health insurance.

There was a period of about six months when I was desperately trying to break into social work and nothing was happening. The combination of impotence and desire–not to mention need–I recall was a constant cloud, a shame and disappointment that was hard to shake. I’m so unhappy my dad has been stuck feeling like his life’s work, all his knowledge and consideration and talent for teaching, is now, for all practical purposes, worthless. Because he’s not.

Aboutface

Today was Little Girl’s first day of “school.” Not only did I send her to preschool way before I’d planned (by which I mean: at all), but it’s at a church. A Baptist church. A Southern Baptist church in South Carolina. And it’s a super-religious program, too. All their little library’s books are about Jesus. They teach the shapes thusly: The Trinity is a triangle! The Bible is a rectangle!

And that’s okay. Eight six-hour weeks of religion at age two isn’t going to ruin her for rationality. And you know what it will do? It will introduce her to new buddies, as she pines for her old ones. It will give me some time to do my work-from-home gig, as I’m getting tired of squeezing that in between her bedtime and mine. It will keep her more productively occupied than I’ve often been up for lately, as they don’t show videos (more on that later). And it’s biking-distance! Cheap! And the people are very nice. And if Little Girl starts wanting us to take a moment to consider our good fortune before meals I think that’s probably a very good idea.

I teared up walking her into the room, and felt very sad as she clung to me when I made to leave and told me she was “gonna be sad, Mama!” But when I left she was doing a puzzle, only a little morose. And when I picked her up–”Mama come back!”–she greeted me, then went back to the toys. She hasn’t been especially forthcoming about what she did today, but I did get “I like my buddies!” and that’s just great.

In an impressively skillful bit of scheduling, I interviewed for the university teaching position off-island during “school” (sorry, I can only use ironic quotation marks when using that word for a two-year-old), and it went very, very satisfactorily. And that’s great, too.

(I was all worked up about how I had to be off-island for her first day of “school”, so pinned to her backpack is a very complex note for the teacher involving neighbors’ numbers and schedules. I also interrogated the teacher afterwards about activities and emotions, which none of the other mothers did, so I hope I don’t come off as neurotic as I, uh, guess I evidently am.)

Life continues anon

–Happy 35th Birthday to Husband! He’s taking it rather better than his 30th, but really that’s not hard to do. I made him Moxie’s Bacon Brown-Sugar Coffee Cake and gave him new undergarments (this was fraught with symbolism, since evidently men’s underwear-buying habits improve with their sense of economic well-being) and a Thai cook book and a new but otherwise identical version of his favorite sneakers, which have disintegrated. Little Girl was quite thoughtful and gave him a pepper mill since our good one is in storage, awaiting Europe, and the man needs–deserves!–his fresh-ground pepper. She picked one out that’s got bunny ears and was on sale for seven dollars! Well done, Little Girl.

–Lowered price on house. It’s been shown rather a lot, actually, but those damn power lines freak people out. Look, Little Girl was gestated and reared in that house, and she is perfect in every way. What other evidence do you need of their harmlessness? They are not even that near the house! Really, the worst thing about power lines is that they make it harder to sell your house later.

–The university called me in for an interview. This is gratifying, even if I doubt the logistics will work out.

–Here in my glass-walled tree house (please, no throwing stones, ha ha) we have twice heard a THWUMP and then the dogs barking downstairs. Birds–first an Eastern Bluebird, then a Woodpecker–didn’t realize the walls were there and, well, thwumped. The first time Little Girl was with me when I had to take a shovel and bury it in the sand out under a palm at the edge of the property. She was absolutely appalled that I did not “give it medicine, make it all better!” The second time I managed to keep my layman’s gravedigging from her, to avoid further questions like “Where’d the baby bird go, Mama? It say tweet tweet?” I tried to explain about how it was dead, and it couldn’t fly anymore, and we couldn’t take it to the doctor, and it was sad, but she just looked at me, displeased with my bird-neglect, putting a baby bird in a hole in the ground. When we later went to visit my mother’s, which of course was the home of the, if not exactly adorable (she was scrappy), then fascinating, rabbit Inga, who just died, too, she likewise was dubious when I said Inga was dead, she couldn’t hop anymore, and we wouldn’t see her again, and it was sad. “Where’d Inga go, Mama? My wanna give her a carrot!” Ah, yes. That’s life.