The Egg and I, and I

I just finished reading The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, she of Miss Piggle-Wiggle fame.  (Reid has never heard of Miss Piggle-Wiggle, which makes me deeply sorry for him.)  The book was apparently a massive hit when it was published in the 1940s, proving that our culture's current romanticization of chicken raising and back-to-the-land adventures is actually pretty old news.*  But what is it about the telling of the hardships of farm life that, illogically, makes us long for the bad-old-days of planting and canning and hauling water?  As an long-time devotee of the Little House books, I can't quite explain my predilection, but I can say that this book scratches the vicarious farming itch quite well. 

As a 20-year-old Seattleite, MacDonald falls in love with an older, gainfully employed man, who, soon after their wedding, tells her of his dream to run a chicken ranch.  Trained by her mother to support a husband's whims, MacDonald shoulders the plow, more literally than she had hoped to do, and throws herself into the relentless work of a ranch in the remote mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

The book could probably described as a comic farce: city girl bumbling along in the wilderness, surrounded by eccentric, larger-than-life characters (so THIS is where Ma and Pa Kettle come from--I'd heard the reference, but never knew who they actually were).  But, at the same time, it is a meditation on loneliness and alienation, which simmer right below the comic surface:

Being lonely all of the time, I used to harbor the idea, as who has not, that I was one of the few very fortunate people who was absolutely self-sufficient and that if I could just find myself a little haunt far from the clawing hands of civilization with its telephones, electric appliances, artificial amusements and people--people more than anything--I would be contented for the rest of my life.  Well, someone called my bluff and I found that after nine months spent mostly in the stimulating company of the mountains, trees, the rain, Stove, and the chickens, I would have swooned with anticipation of a visit from a Mongolian idiot.  And if the clawing hands of civilization could only have run a few telephone and light wires in there they could have had my self-sufficient right arm to chop up for the insulators.

About nine months after she arrives on the farm, she finds herself with a baby as well as a barn full of chickens to look after, and it's hard not to conclude that "women's work" is often a good deal more strenuous, or at least more isolating, than "men's work."   I've been drawing inspiration from MacDonald these days, as I adjust to baby-minding and home-making as a full-time enterprise. When laundry starts to seem overwhelmingly onerous, I can at least feel grateful that I don't have to haul the water and stoke the fire in order to wash Eleanor's endless stream of dirty clothes.  At the same time, and this is maybe where the longing for our mythical agrarian past comes in, the sense of purpose and necessity that accompanies the farm chores could actually be comforting.  It's not that laundry is so bad, but it's the doubt about whether you should be doing something more worthwhile, or that justifies your student loans, that can really throw you into crisis. 

The other dark, but not-quite-spoken, undercurrent in the book is the conflict in Betty and Bob's marriage.  She doesn't mention it, but when I looked up some biographical details about her, I wasn't surprised to find out that she left the ranch and her husband soon after the events chronicled in the book.  Her references to him are generally amusing, but also frequently indignant about his lack of attention and ignorance of her needs. 

Perhaps I've painted an unfairly grim picture of the book.  It's fun, it really is.  And if I had to choose a guide to the wilderness, I'd go with Betty MacDonald over Ma Ingalls any day. 



*I'm sure you could do a fascinating analysis of this drive and how it relates to our current political and socioeconomic reality, but for now I'll be content with making some sweeping, completely anecdotal, claims.

Settling In

Wrapping up my first week home with the baby, I'm feeling completely sure about my decision to leave my job, but full of many swirling emotions.  Maybe that's a defining point of motherhood?  The highs!  the lows!  The doldrums!  It seems a rare day when you don't experience a mix of all three.  The highlight of my week?  Probably the twenty minutes I spent lying on the floor, laughing at the fan.  It's a strange, new world, but I think I like it. 

The Nap-Time Hustle

Something I did not fully appreciate for my first 28 years on earth was the luxury of free time.  Time that was truly free, whole days stretching out, malleable and unformed.  I could decide what I wanted to do with a day, and then, barring laziness or catastrophe, do it.  With a baby, time is a completely different beast.  Babies are demanding of time, but not of action.  In fact, babies seem to resent any action that does not directly relate to them.  (Perhaps we all do?  We just learn to live with it at some point?).  So, in a day full of baby minding, the nap is a very precious thing.  

I was thinking about this the other morning, when I was experiencing a violent cake-baking urge (it happens, from time to time).  E was due for a nap, and the moment she went down I RAN to the kitchen to begin mixing things up.  I had mulled over which recipe I would choose all morning, as I changed diapers and sang Baby Beluga for the seven-millionth time.  So I measured and stirred and poured with an urgency all out of proportion with the actual gravity of the task.  I stuck the batter in the oven, sat down, had a sip of coffee, and then heard E wake up. 


So that was one nap.  But I'm curious about how other people approach these glorious little windows of free time.  My mother-in-law (who raised 5 children) told me, a few weeks after E's birth, that she always tried to do all of her housework while the kids were awake, so that when they went down for naps she could take a few moments for herself, to read or drink a cup of tea.  I thought that was an excellent attitude, and promptly stopped doing any dishes during naps.  But then what?  Do you put your feet up and read People magazine?  Try to dash off twenty e-mails?  Do yoga?  Take your own nap? 

While it can all seem a bit hectic and stressful, I think the positive light to shine on this is an increased intentionality with time.  If you only have an hour to yourself, how do you really want to spend it?  What are your priorities?  While I was pregnant with E I felt like I was really ready to have a baby because I felt so sick of only having myself to think about.  Sure, the unfettered days were nice, and I now long for a day in which I could both run and go to the grocery store, but the new preciousness of time, the rush of the efficiently used hour, the huge smile greeting me when E does wake up...a worthy exchange. 

Curiosity

I remember one of my sister's friends describing some tenet of Buddhist philosophy that required  you to meet each apparent setback or bump in the road of life (even Lesotho-sized potholes) with a disciplined sense of curiosity.  When facing potential catastrophe, you were to sit back and muse, "I am so curious about how this will all turn out."  I have no idea if this is a legitimate element of Buddhism or not, but the idea has returned to me many times through the years as an ideal reaction to stressful changes.  Either that or massive numbers of chocolate chip cookies washed down with red wine, the whole concoction shaken up on the dance floor of Boatclub.  But alas, Boatclub is no longer with us and E's presence makes gallons of red wine a less viable option.

So yes, when I realized last week that it was either quit my job entirely or come back full time (an option neither desirable nor even advisable, given my paltry salary and the cost of childcare in DC), I took a deep breath and tried to be very CURIOUS about how this next stage in our life will unfold.  And lo, I am feeling very Zen about the whole thing.  The very next day, R was offered not one, but two, part-time positions--an immense relief.  And I feel enormous joy at the prospect of the days ahead with E.  There are little frissons of anxiety, too--what will we DO all day, will we never see R again, what about health insurance??--but what more can you do but go with what feels right and have some small confidence that it will turn out in the end?

Meanwhile, E is more delightful every day (though not, come to think of it, every night).  She goes through phases of determinedly practicing her rolling, then gives up the enterprise when she realizes that all it does is get her someplace she doesn't want to be.  She loves oatmeal, squash, and apples; adores bananas; and detests avocados and green beans.  She wriggles in excitement every time we open the dryer (why??).  She is, in my completely and utterly biased opinion, the cutest baby that ever rolled the earth.

She Doesn't Do It

Well, for the past 6 months (!) I've been consumed by a real-live illiterate peanut, so thinking that this blog might be expanded to include her in its nascent considerations.  Pre-baby, I was all about reading; post-baby, I am all about reading about babies. 

My sister-in-law recently loaned me a copy of I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson, a "chick-lit" book about Kate Reddy, a London-based hedge fund manager and mother of two.  The book was predictably (based on the hot pink cover) page-turnery, but it also still has me thinking, several weeks later.  This raises some questions about the fairness of the chick-lit designation, but we'll let that issue be hashed out elsewhere, for now.  Anyhow, Kate spins (and appears to have been spinning for some time) very close to out of control, trying to manage both what she perceives as fundamental motherly responsibilities and her demanding, testosterone-heavy, stimulating job. The titular question, asked many times throughout the book by various acquaintances and family members of Kate, is finally answered in the book's final chapter: How does she do it?  She doesn't.  She opts out.  She quits her job, sells her house, moves to the country. 

What does this mean?  What does it mean that even narratively, in a friendly fictional place, we can't figure out how to reconcile these things?  Granted, Kate's situation is extreme.  My current 30-hours per week job can't really compare with the demands of a hedge fund.  I work with other women, many who have children.  I work at a university, which would seem to be the height of flexibility and family-friendliness.  If I had read this book before I had Eleanor, I think I would have dismissed many of Kate's concerns as monsters of her own making--she chose that super-stressful career path, and I didn't, so why would I experience similar conflicts?  But STILL, the work place is much less friendly than I had naively assumed it would be.  The thing is, no one else wants to pick up your slack, whether you work in a coffee shop, law firm, or hedge fund.  And there is suddenly a much-heightened awareness of your availability--sure, everyone takes off for an occasional doctor's appointment or has a sick day, but when you are a new mother all of the sudden these things start to seem a bit symbolic.  Like, oh, so this is how things are going to be now.  The slippery-slope phenomenon.  The fact that you have likely just come off of a several month maternity leave serves to make you appear even more unreliable. 

So what is the answer?  How do we do it?  The fact is, most women with new babies don't want to work as much as they did pre-baby.  Time is precious, development is fast, and life has a whole new element of chaos that is grossly magnified when trying to coordinate job responsibilities with mothering responsibilities.  And let me go back a sentence: the not wanting to work as many hours in your former position has absolutely nothing, lest you labor under a very rosy picture of motherhood, to do with the amount of work you suddenly find yourself doing everyday.  (More on this in another post).  But yes, in my anecdotal experience of my neighborhood mom's group, nearly every woman changed her expectations and plans about how much she wanted to work outside of the home once the baby arrived.  This, of course, is not always possible, either from the perspective of the family or the employer.  But why does it come as such a surprise?  Especially to the mothers themselves?  Is the problem that we don't quite understand what motherhood entails, us highly-educated women who perhaps haven't touched a baby since our middle school babysitting days?  Or that the system hasn't really changed much to accommodate women in the workplace?  It's a beaten horse, but since I am just newly experiencing it, it boggles my mind that women worked so hard to get equal rights, and the result is a system that allows us to do exactly what men do, as long as we also do what women do and don't ask for exceptions to be made. 

Ah well.  If you have any solutions, let me know.  I'll close with a gratuitous baby picture, just so it's not all doom and gloom here. 

All is well. 

Reading in Rondavels

I have a whole list of books that I want to discuss, but I thought it would be fun (and satisfyingly dilatory) to look back at the books I read while in Lesotho.  Sure, as a kid I had endless summers to read, checking out 10 books at a time from the library and discovering everything from Charlotte Brontë to Mary Higgins Clark, but what glory to have a year of unimpeded, unregulated reading time as as adult!  The only limit was the lack of access to bookstores, but the happy side-effect of that was picking up some books from the pile contributed by former volunteers and visitors that I probably would not have read otherwise.

So, here it is, my list from the year of magical reading:

September

True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl
The Little Book, James Selden
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

October

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
(Two books?  What happened in October?  I blame Ellen and Will's arrival and Charles Dickens's verbosity.)

November

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Sea, John Banville

December

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

January

People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Twilight, Stephanie Myers (one guilty 18 hour flight from D.C. to Jo'burg)
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon

February

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Unless, Carol Shields
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Moo, Jane Smiley
White Noise, DeLillo
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

March

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

April

The Ambassadors, Henry James
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Net of Jewels, Ellen Gilchrist
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

May

The White Lioness, Henning Mankel
The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camillieri
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenberger
Emma, Jane Austen
Written Lives, Javier Marías

June

A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos

And....then apparently I stopped keeping track.  So close to the end!  54 books, not counting whatever it was I read in June, July, and August.

Utterly subjective ratings:
Highly recommended (even if you're living somewhere a bit more hectic than a rondavel on the edge of Mokhotlong)
Fun (if you have close to unlimited reading time)
Skip it (would kind of resent having to read this again)
I suppose all of the others would fall somewhere in between.

Cutting for Stone: Brief Review

The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals.  Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training.  The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.

Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked.  The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother.  Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia.  And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little.  While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age,  Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child.  Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates.  Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations.  Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.

We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings.  Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable. 

Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period.  His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn.  The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book.  Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.

These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book.  More reviews to come soon!