New frontiers

This is my last post on Blogger, and my first post on my all new blog at Wordpress. Call me a follower, a copycat, a bandwagon-jumper--whatever you call me, please keep visiting, and if you link to my site, please adjust your site accordingly.

The truth about the change is that I don't like being forced into things. I have a hard enough time with change as it is, but when someone says, "You must! You have no choice!" I tend to resist. So that's why I'm moving. It's not just because lots of other cool people have moved. Well, not entirely. I do tend to like that bandwagon.

~~~

And speaking of moving, I may be buying another house. I say another house because I haven't sold the house I'm living in now. But I've stumbled upon a house that may be too good to pass up, and since it's unlikely that my house will sell in, like, a day, I may have two houses for a while. I'll send you my address at the institution, where I will no doubt end up if all of this comes to pass.

~~~

But now for the biggest news of all: I have a new principal. Yes, that's right. New. As in, Principal is on "extended medical leave" through the end of the year. If you believe that, please contact me as soon as possible so I can share with you the meaning of life and introduce you to my best friends, Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey.

No, the truth is, some higher-ups found out about this, plus all kinds of other unethical and borderline illegal things Principal has been up to, and since bad publicity is not allowed in my school system, they made up something to tell the public and then pretty much sent her packing. Honestly, though, knowing Principal, having someone find out she is not perfect is probably enough to send her to the looney bin--that's even worse than having your school burn down--so she may well be on actual medical leave. Who knows? What I know is that going back to work in two weeks will be just slightly more bearable because there is nowhere for my school to go but up at this point. Of course, that's not the case for my students, they who are running amuck in my tiny classroom, making huge messes, slacking on their assignments, and scanning their faces into my password protected computer (seriously, every teenager should be considered a dangerous hacker). No, my students are going down.

60 is the new 92.5

When I was a senior in high school I had a kick-ass English teacher who, to me, was an icon, a goddess among people. She was sharp-tongued and quick witted, and she worked our know-it-all asses off. Most of my classmates hated her. I wanted to be just like her.

One of her best-known quirks was her adamant refusal to "give" points. If you earned a B, you got a B, never mind that your B was the highest possible B, a mere half point from an A. You didn't earn an A, end of story. I never had a problem with this rule; I always made As in her class, as did my best friend Meredith (who is now reading this blog--hey Mer) and our friend Susan. We were the top three graduates in our class (I was 3) and we didn't need free half-points. Hell, our classmates probably hated us, too, but that is so not my point.

My point is points. Grade points, to be specific. I always admired teachers who gave the grades their students earned. I became one of those teachers. I used to begin the school year by giving my students a cut-out paper A. I explained that it was the only grade I'd ever give them--they would have to earn everything else, good and bad. When students ask me about extra credit I have to work hard to keep the sneer off my face, and I reply, "Let's try earning the regular credit first. If you don't turn in what I assign you in the first place, what makes you think you have time for 'extra'?" Don't get me wrong, I give kids chances to succeed. Lots and lots of chances. If it's clear to me that they don't understand something, we approach it another way. If the majority of a class bombs a test, we retest (with a different test, of course). I work with my kids to make sure they are learning. That's what teachers do. But I don't give grades.

At least I didn't until the fall of 2004. Can anyone guess what happened in the fall of 2004? Why yes, you there in the front, that's when Principal came to my school and we fell headfirst into the flaming pit of hell. Quite literally. Heh. (Ahem. Sorry. We joke about the fire now. What else can you do?) When Principal came to my school, she started changing grades. Occasionally a 92 became a 93, an A, but mostly lots of 68s and 69s became Ds*. I hated it, and after I ended up looking like a fool who told students one thing and then had to explain why the grade on their report card was higher, I upped their chances at success. I--gulp--even gave the occasional extra credit.

All of that is a preface to this story: On January 31 a teacher workday marked the end of the first semester and the beginning of the second. We are on the block schedule, which means new students and new classes for the rest of the year. Thank God. Because I am a nice person (read: because I didn't want the hassle of redoing what someone else would have done wrong) I spent a few hours at work that day finalizing first semester grades. It was much easier than I had anticipated, as my third sub in 4 weeks (did you catch that? THREE people could not handle my job! THREE!) did not record any of the grades she took in my gradebook, which I left for her, nor did she leave HER gradebook for me. I could have made up grades, but I've never been good at writing fiction, so my students got the grades they'd earned as of my last day (the day Christmas break started) plus their exam grade.

I should tell you that in the three weeks before break, I gave my students so many chances to pass that I should be sainted. I didn't give them grades, mind you, but I did throw my beloved deadline rule out the window on their behalf, and many of them rose to the occasion. Many, sadly, did not. I should also tell you that I taught honors freshman English for 10 years, only to be handed three low level reading classes at the start of year 11. The curriculum for the reading course is canned and so, so easy, especially considering that in a class of 25, only 8-10 students really had reading problems. Thus, everyone should have aced this class, especially given the numerous opportunities I allowed them back in December. But because they are freshmen, which is Latin for "humanoids whose skulls are filled with donkey excrement," several of them failed. Eleven, to be exact. I know this so certainly because the day after the grades were submitted to the office, I received this email at home:

"We have 11 kids fail out of your Strategic Reading classes. Is this right? We had 4 that were in the 60s. I just want to be fair to them. Thanks."

Bet you can guess who it was from. I almost ignored it, but I couldn't help myself, I just had to know what she meant by "60s." So I asked her to send me the names of the students in question and their questionable grades. One of them had a 67, and she probably passed him. But the other three--they actually had 60s! Six-zero. That was their final grade. Please, somebody explain to me why it is not fair to a kid to give him a 60 when he earned a 60! It's not like they were a half, or even a tenth of a point from passing. We are talking 10 points. TEN! And she wants to know if that's fair. Damn right that's fair.

I did reply to that email. I could have authorized the grade changes and seemed "fair," but instead I told her I recorded the grades the students earned. I never got a response, but I know what happened. I know she changed those grades. I've seen her do it time and time again. I complain about my job, but in my teacher's heart, this is what's driving me away. What lesson does a child learn when he fails two quarters and the final exam and ends up with a D? It isn't that I'm a grade fanatic and care more about the number than I do the kid. Far from it. I care enough about the kid to have high expectations, and let's face it, no matter how many inspirational teacher movies tell you otherwise, there are some kids who will not meet those expectations. Not even when they get lots of chances. And not even when we lower our expectations.

Perhaps the worst thing about Principal is that in her mind, should Lifetime ever make a movie of her life starring Meredith Baxter Birney, she would be portrayed as a positive force who helped her students rise from the ashes (again with the fire jokes) and inspired them all to get good grades and go to college. And some kid who graduated under her rule would see it and say, "Hey, I know that lady, yo. She was so nice, and she helped me pass, and then I got to college and those professors were trippin', man, they won't give a brother a break. Talkin' 'bout how I can't write and shit, and how I was on academic probation. That's why I said 'Screw that, yo,' and I got me a job at Bojangles, 'cause I don't need nobody tellin' me what to do. Man, don't they know I was number 6 in my class?"



*We're on the 7 point grading scale.

Shout out to the Dixie Chicks

Actual words tomorrow. I swear.

Unsinkable

So long, Molly.

Friday Photo: Unique Body Parts

My most unique body parts are my ridiculously long toes. As I am currently in desperate need of a manicure and don't want to gross you out with photos of my feet, I'm posting Mia's feet. They are miniatures of my feet. I always hated my feet and toes, but now that I see them reproduced detail for detail on my daughter, I will never complain about them again. I'll start referring to them as "unique."

A la mia cara Mia: Month 1

I know this sounds prosaic, but I can hardly believe you are already a month old--that an entire month has passed since I first saw your face, just inches from mine, looking into my eyes for the first time. You've given me the once over many more times since then, and as best I can tell you're happy to be here with me. I'm certainly glad to have you.

It's been an eventful first month for you, relatively speaking. You have visited the library, the hospital where Nonna works, Ma Gayle's house, Jay's Deli, Moe's, Starbucks, the grocery store, and, on several occasions, Target. You slept through most of these trips. If I could figure out how to get you to sleep that way in the house, say, during the wee small hours of the morning, I wouldn't have this dazed expression on my face all the time. Lots of people have visited you as well--Cheryl, Caroline, Nancy, Janet, Erika, Joy. You slept through most of those, too. Again, if I could only get you to sleep that well for me....

Actually, I'm not giving you enough credit on the sleeping thing. Lately you've slept like a champ at night, drifting off between 10 and 11, waking to eat at 1 or 2 and again at 6, and then sleeping until 9 or 10. Napping during the day for longer than 20 minutes is another story entirely, but your new night hours more than make up for the short naps, as well as those nights two weeks ago when you didn't go to sleep until 1 or 2--or 6. I am still recovering from that night, and I can't promise you I won't remind you of it when you are older and wanting a favor from me.

I certainly can't complain about the times when you're awake. You're starting to smile a little now, and make sweet little sounds that seem to surprise you when they escape your mouth, and you would win a staring contest hands down--when your eyes settle on something interesting you stare at it for a long time, like you're memorizing it, making a copy of it in your mind for later, because at the moment it's the most fantastic thing you've ever seen and you don't ever want to forget it. I hope someday you'll stare at the ocean that way, and the flowers in our yard, and the sunset, and the mountains on the way to Papa Mo's, and colors, and the faces of all the people you love most.

You've already got a head start on the colors. One of your favorite places to be right now is on the changing table, because right above the changing table are nine small blue, red, and yellow-colored canvasses that to me are an unfinished art project, but to you are some kind of baby LSD. You become positively transfixed when you realize you are within sight of those things, like you are communicating with the colors on some other plane that only babies and people who snort cocaine can reach. It's amusing to watch, but also kind of freaky, because I can't even focus on something for that long, and I have been practicing for 32 years.

You may be my ticket to transcendence, though, because I could gaze at your sweet face for eternity. You are so, so beautiful, and I'm not just saying that because I'm your mother. It's true, and here's how I know: in my experience, when someone sees a baby he or she will look at it and then say to its mother, "Oh, she's just beautiful," or "He is so adorable." It is, after all, the polite thing to do. That doesn't happen when you meet new people. When people see you for the first time, they do go on about how beautiful you are, but not to me, not for my benefit. They tell you, and they tell each other, and they email or call other people, who then email or call me and say things like, "So-and-so said you had the most beautiful child she's ever seen," and I have to think they are not just being polite. I believe they are seriously mesmerized by you--your big eyes and your long lashes and your hair.

Your hair. When the ultrasound tech told me back at Thanksgiving that you had a head full of hair, I imagined typical fuzzy baby hair that sticks straight up and falls out after a month. I was not prepared for your hair--dark and thick and fine, like mine, and full, not like a baby's hair, but like a person's hair. And the curls--just a little water and you look like one of the Jackson 5, and then it dries in soft waves and peaks all over your head. People keep telling me it will probably fall out, but I don't believe them. I am more inclined to think that soon I will have to take you to the salon and have my stylist shape up your sideburns and trim your mullet, lest I wake up in the middle of the night to find you partying it up with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and that Billy Ray Cyrus CD I can't seem to sell at the used record store.

You do love your music. You love mine, too--Emmylou and Joan Baez, Josh Ritter and The Weepies--but already you recognize the music from your mobile and the Baby Einstein CDs we bought you, and you don't know how happy it makes me that you are so soothed by music. You fit right in here, and how much easier will it be to take you places in the car knowing I can pop in a CD and you will listen right along with me. I've read that babies who like music are smart babies who turn into bright children who turn into intelligent adults. This does not surprise me at all--just look around you: everyone in your life loves music, and we are all brilliant, brilliant people. Just yesterday I tried to open the garage door with my phone. See what you have to look forward to?

You are already smart--I can see it in the way you study your surroundings--and also very talented. You can both spit and fling the pacifier great distances for someone so small. You can lift your head for long periods of time. You can hold your bowels and bladder until I have put a perfectly clean diaper on you, and then fill it up before a full minute has passed. You can even tell when the diaper is off and your tiny butt is resting on a clean surface--my hand, for instance, holding you against me because you've just made a puddle on the changing table--and then poop prolifically on that surface. You're also the best farter in the house, better than the dog, even, because you are loud and proud about your farting, and the dog always tries to pretend she has no idea what just happened, jumping and looking curiously behind her to see where that sound came from.

But I was completely unprepared to deal with your greatest talents: your ability to make me rethink everything I've ever believed to be true about the world, about life, about myself, the way you can change my entire state of being with a look or a sound, how you can take years off of my life in a matter of seconds. When you were two days old and I was dressing you for the first time, preparing to take you home from the hospital, the pediatrician on duty stopped by to visit, and he told me to brace myself, that the first 6 weeks of your life would be the worst 6 weeks of mine. He called you a "neurologically incomplete organism" and assured me that after 6 weeks, when you started acting like a little human with a personality, I would not be able to imagine my life without you. I have thought about his words many times during your brief fits of inconsolable screaming. But then last week Nonna and I were bathing you, pouring water over your head and in your face like always, because you seem to enjoy it, and just as the water ran over your nose you inhaled. Your eyes flew open and your face froze and you wouldn't inhale or exhale or cough or cry, and you started to turn red. I grabbed you up out of the water and held you in the air and shook you a little--and then I handed you to Nonna, because in that moment I glimpsed my life without you, and the mere thought of that life reduced me to helplessness. In a split second you cried out--apparently you'd just been holding your breath--and I took you in my arms and held you close and felt my world right itself, and I remembered what the pediatrician had told me, how it would be three more weeks before I could no longer imagine life without you, and I want you to know how wrong he was, Baby, how very, very wrong. I want you to know that in that first moment when you strained to lift your head and look into my eyes a month ago, you became my life.

Ti amo,
Mommy

And consumer whores all across the South rejoiced

Swedish retailer plans move to North Carolina

Breaking the epidural silence, and other random thoughts [*EDITED]

With all the thanks I've received for writing an epidural birth story, I'm starting to feel like I've broken some heavy silence we've all been afraid to crack. Seriously, are there people out there who are afraid to admit they want drugs during childbirth? Afraid of being criticized or ridiculed? Afraid we might think badly of them for not having a natural birth? Huh. Because now that I'm an authority on the matter (laugh all you want), I'm here to tell you that giving birth needs to be all about you (after all, nothing will ever be about you again). There are those who would chastise me for making this statement, who would remind me that it should be about the baby and the baby's safety*. To them I say that birth is traumatic for the baby no matter what, whether it's being squeezed through a passage the size of a roof gutter or being pulled suddenly through a sizeable incision. Being born is risky business, and the kid's biggest ally in the process is her mother. Mommy should be as physically and psychologically content as she can be in order to be the best ally she can be, and if that means drugs, or no drugs, or a pool of water, or a necessary C-section, then so be it.

And as for the phrase "natural childbirth," what, I ask you, is more natural than bringing forth life? Yeah, I know it's just terminology, but what is the flip side? Unnatural childbirth? Was what I did was "unnatural" because I couldn't feel pain? Hell. No.

[*Edited to Add: I want to make sure everyone understands that I understand that sometimes it's ALL about the baby's safety, and our preferences don't matter. I didn't want my doctor to use the vacuum, but he felt he had to because Mia was in distress. There are other situations even more serious than that. I'm not talking about those situations here; I'm just addressing those times when things are normal and we as mothers can choose the birth we want.]

***

I mentioned my "labor shirt" in the birth story, and after someone asked what exactly a labor shirt is, I thought I should elaborate.

In every single video and photo essay of birth I've ever seen, the laboring woman is always half (or completely) naked with her breasts bared for all to see. I decided after my childbirth class that I could handle my hair being messy, my composure going to hell, and my ladyparts all wide open for everyone to see, but I drew the line at bare boobies. So I bought a maternity cami/tank top just for the event so I could at least salvage a sliver of decorum. It wasn't to be, though--they made me strip down even before they admitted me. Thankfully, they gave me something else to wear, but there's just something about your own stuff. I made up for the shirt deficit in pillows--three of my own from home. It was a reasonable trade.

***

Those of you who have been reading about my pregnancy attempts from the very beginning might recall that I assigned names to my eggs and the sperm donors I used, as many of us do. You might remember the early days of Joey and Geena, which ended badly. There was a second donor after Joey; I never named him, and maybe that was the problem--he just never felt welcome. And then I sent Geena packing, because Donor #3, who was super-extra-crazy fertile, resembled George Clooney (so said the sperm bank) and was dubbed Dr. Ross (think "ER"), and the most logical next step was to name the girls Rachel. It took Ross and Rachel one try, so all that talk of signs and good omens worked for me, but I feel the need to clarify one tiny detail, lest you think I'm a complete and total lunatic.

My daughter's middle name is Ross. Had she been born a boy, her first name would have been Ross. This was decided long before I made up names for my reproductive matter and assigned real live faces to the sperm donors. That the real live face I assigned to the donor who would help me conceive Mia was actually Ross is a coincidence. You see, my grandfather's middle name was Ross, and even before the attempts at conception began in earnest, I knew I wanted my child to have that name. I wanted him to be a part of my child, not just in spirit and in my mind, but in my child's mind as well. Someday I will tell Mia about my Papa, her namesake, and she will know him through me, and this will make me happy. Only having him here in person, a real living presence in her life, would make me happier.

But then, a part of me believes this has already happened. That in some cosmic way, Mia was with him before she was with me. That the curl in her hair and the iron in her young will came from him. That now, when she cannot really communicate her experiences, she remembers him, and later, when she can communicate, she will have forgotten their meeting. And I will be there to fill in the gaps.